This morn­ing, I was comb­ing through my inbox—like I do—when I ran across a mes­sage from Chronillogical’s very own Mr. Adven­ture (Greg). And you know what he said? I’ll tell you what he said! He said “I’m going to a jungle lodge for the next 4 days or so, so I prob­a­bly won’t have inter­net access until Friday.”

Which means what, exactly:

1. There is a strip ready for tomorrow!
2. But there is not one ready for Friday, so:
3. Filler again on Friday!

If you’re the patient type, then we’re eter­nally grate­ful for your patience! If you’re get­ting impa­tient … blame Greg! Alter­na­tively, you could blame Brazil and/or jun­gles. Because, really, what have jun­gles ever done for us? I’m going to guess that they pretty much have no eco­log­i­cal or soci­o­log­i­cal impor­tance to anyone, except for jaguars.

Sort of.

Instead of tor­tur­ing you all with another pun from Mr. Skele­ton, I fig­ured I’d instead indulge in some­thing that I haven’t done around here in a while: the fabled Sketch­dump. Obvi­ously, none of these are fin­ished yet, but I aim to ink and color ‘em when the time is right. (All except for the last, which I am unsure about. You’ll see!)

↓ Anyway, click here for the rest of the post, won’t you?

Let’s get the bad news out of the way: Brazil has once again con­spired against us.¹ There will not be a full comic on Friday! To dis­play the inten­sity of his anguish regard­ing the sit­u­a­tion, Greg sent me an email con­tain­ing no less than 601 frowny emoti­cons.² That, friends, is regret. I’ll do my duty to pro­duce some­thing humor­ous or inter­est­ing in the meantime.

Regard­ing public opin­ion, though, I’d fig­ured this is a good time to gauge peoples’ thoughts on a couple of things. Chronil­log­i­cal has run for more than 100 strips now, and while Greg and I have dis­cussed the strip’s future, it’s always worth­while to know what fans are think­ing. So, feel free to leave a com­ment or send me an email (john [at] chronil­log­i­cal [dot] com) regard­ing one or all of the following:

1. What do you like about the strip?
2. What about the strip is most non-​triumphant and/or not so great?
3. Are there any eras you’d want our trio to tackle in the future?³
4. Spe­cific merch ideas?

Of course, we may decide not to use anyone’s sug­ges­tions and have the gang fizzle out in the Pleis­tocene, a gaggle of Megath­erium their only com­pan­ions. Then again, we might use all sug­ges­tions simul­ta­ne­ously in a schiz­o­phrenic post-​modern bar­rage! Who knows? The only thing that will reveal the answers … is TIME.⁴

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¹ BRAZILLL!!! [shake-shake-shake-a-fist]
² The orig­i­nal plan was to repro­duce the email here for all to read, but that’s just too much gloom for one post to handle.
³ Hah … “future.” (Almost any time word becomes a pun in the con­text of this site. It’s ridicu­lous.)
⁴ Regard­less, thanks for your input and thanks for read­ing!

The inter­net café I’m at only seems to have IE 6 avail­able. Upon check­ing out the redesign, I’ve found that it doesn’t look too good on this browser. (I would have checked this ear­lier, but I don’t have IE 6 on any of my com­put­ers at home.)

My rec­om­men­da­tion: if you’re view­ing this on IE 6, you really really really REALLY need to get a new browser.

Today is the day! Today is the day that his­tory changes us all. Or … per­haps it isn’t that aus­pi­cious. But the site is dif­fer­ent! Snazzy, right? Couldn’t have done it with­out Greg, who may have offi­cially Left the Build­ing (or will do so within the next 12 hours, I’d imagine).

What you need to know: things aren’t 100% fin­ished, and I’ll most likely add some con­tent here and there over the next few days. Like Greg said, he’ll still have “intermittent” inter­net access, so send any tech­ni­cal prob­lems his way (I’d gladly take them, but am unfor­tu­nately code illit­er­ate). That’s greg [at] chronil­log­i­cal [dot] com.

So take a look around! Famil­iar­ize your­self with the face of the future. Chronillogical’s future, at any rate.

Okay, so: I have been work­ing on the site redesign. It is coming together! I think you will like it. I am hoping hoping hoping it will be up and run­ning some­time tomor­row night.

While work­ing on the Oh No Robot inte­gra­tion I real­ized that I hadn’t been get­ting email notices about pend­ing tran­scrip­tions. I had inter­preted the lack of noti­fi­ca­tions to mean that we just weren’t get­ting people transcribin’; instead, it turns out there were a whole slew of tran­scrip­tions wait­ing to be approved! Due to my crummy admin­is­tra­tive prac­tices, they lan­guished unused and unseen for far too long. Def­i­nitely my bad. I feel pretty bummed about it!

ANYWAY, I just approved them. And I promise to keep a much better eye on the Oh No Robot queue from now on. I can only hope our awe­some tran­scribers haven’t gotten too dis­cour­aged by my lameness!

In other news, I am going to be out of town for three or so weeks start­ing this Wednes­day. Where will I be? Swat­ting mos­qui­toes and out­run­ning jaguars in Brazil. Seri­ously! John will be tend­ing things while I’m away.

This means a few things for the site:

1. John and I are going to try to do the whole “distance collaboration” thing while I’m away. We’ve done this before (we were on oppo­site sites of the coun­try for most of the comic’s run) so we’re hoping it won’t affect updates too much. That said, don’t be sur­prised if you see one or two filler strips during the next few weeks.
2. In a clev­erly thought out scheme, I sched­uled our major site redesign to go live mere hours before I take my leave from the coun­try. Still, if some­thing goes wrong with the site (as it invari­ably will) please email me with your prob­lem. My net access will be some­what inter­mit­tent, but I’ll try to sort out the issue as quickly as pos­si­ble. In gen­eral, we ask for your patience if any­thing goes wrong with the site.
3. I won’t promise any blog posts while I’m away—but who knows! At the very least I’ll do a wrap-​up of the trip once I get back. In the mean­time, John’s in charge of the blog. What will he do with it? No one knows.

Although we do try to get the comic up before dawn breaks, occa­sion­ally we’ll take full advan­tage of the tech­ni­cal ambi­gu­i­ties involved in the “Tuesday/Friday” update sched­ule. Which is to say: the comic will be up today, but a little later than usual. Please check back later this afternoon!

If you’re look­ing for some­thing to do in the mean­time, might I sug­gest you check out Mr. Deity? It has noth­ing to do with time travel or web­comics, but it is a very funny web series I stum­bled upon recently. I enjoy it, and maybe you will enjoy it too!

Oof. I’ve been sufferin’ from a bout of writers’ block all week­end, and I still can’t think of nothin’ good to write about. On the upside, the site update is coming along, and I hope to roll it out before long. So while it may seem like I’m being a lazy non-​posting bum, that is in fact not entirely accu­rate! It is largely accu­rate, but not entirely so.

In the mean­time, stop on over by My First Dic­tio­nary if you are look­ing for good times. Mildly dis­turb­ing good times, but good times nonethe­less! Yeah woo good times!

My cousin got mar­ried this week­end (con­grat­u­la­tions Tasha!) which means that my whole family is in town and every­thing is crazy hectic. There­fore, tonight’s blog update is going to be short and sweet (and late).

1) First, I’d like to point your atten­tion to the fine folks at Dig­i­tal Strips, who have kindly done a pod­cast review of Chronil­log­i­cal. Take a listen if you have a moment! The pod­cast is really enter­tain­ing—they’ve got great banter, which is key—and of course it’s pretty spiffy that they’re talk­ing about our strip. So yeah. Listen to it! Or else!

2) John is going to be out of town this Wednes­day and Thurs­day, which unfor­tu­nately can only mean one thing: FRIDAY FILLER! Apolo­gies in advance.

3) I know I keep saying that I’ll be updat­ing the site—but seri­ously, you’re going to be seeing some changes this July. There really is a new site design in the works, and we’re also con­tem­plat­ing chang­ing our approach to the strip. We want to keep things fresh, both for you read­ers and for us as cre­ators. We’ll keep you posted as the sit­u­a­tion develops.

That’s all I got. Greg out.

“There are no two finer words in the Eng­lish lan­guage than ‘encased meats’, my friend.” — Secret Robbie

This Sat­ur­day, John and I hit up Hot Doug’s, a local Chicago insti­tu­tion spe­cial­iz­ing in the con­struc­tion and deploy­ment of dressed encased meats. In other words, a hot dog joint. We went with three friends of ours, and it was super-​fun times. Alas, I didn’t bring my camera with me—so instead I will paint a pic­ture for you in words.

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