Irregular Webcomic! #1

Hi, and welcome to Irregular Webcomic! This is the first strip with an annotation, which you are currently reading, and by a strange coincidence also the first strip I ever made.

In these annotations, I sometimes talk about what inspired particular strips, or technical details of the strip production, or the script writing process, or even explain the more obscure jokes. If you'd rather not see these sorts of comments, you can disable them by clicking the link in the navigation box. I know you could just not read them, but hey, if you don't want to read them, why even load them? So I offer this configurability. You don't need to use it, but it's there if you want it. Nice, huh?

2011-10-31 Rerun commentary: Welcome to the rerun of Irregular Webcomic! Bear with me a day or two while I get the site code sorted and working to rerun all of the comic strips from day 1. When I announced that the comics had come to an end and that updates would now be simply annotations and occur only on Sundays, several people wrote to suggest that in the intervening Mondays to Saturdays I rerun the comics from strip #1. I wish I'd thought of this myself, because then I'd have the site code already modified to handle this, tested, and working!

Instead, I've hurriedly had to recode my scripts in a mad scramble to get this update done on time, while being unable to sit and nurse it through the normal scheduled update time and intervene manually if anything goes horribly wrong (which it may well do). The reason is that as this first strip goes live in the rerun series, I will be sitting at Quay Restaurant, one of the (if not the) fanciest restaurants in Sydney, enjoying a milestone wedding anniversary dinner with my wife.

(No, we didn't get married on Halloween. We got married on 1 November. We decided to take Tuesday, 1 November, off work this year and have a fancy lunch. Several months ago, we both booked leave from work for the day and I called Quay to make the booking, which they accepted. The next day Quay called back and apologised profusely. They should have realised when taking the booking that that day was Melbourne Cup Day. Hearing this over the phone, I smacked myself in the forehead with an appropriately Homer-esque, "D'oh!!" For non-Australians, Melbourne Cup Day is the one day of the year when you do not want to try to book a quiet romantic lunch at a fancy restaurant. Every venue across the country is dedicated to an extravagant and often raucous party atmosphere. Quay were extremely apologetic and said that even though the place was going to host a major Cup lunch event, because they'd accepted our booking they would honour it, however the menu for lunch that day was going to be extra special, and would cost approximately twice as much as the regular lunch menu. Faced with this, plus the thought of sharing our little anniversary lunch with a hundred or more screaming horse-race-mad party-goers, I decided to change our booking to Monday night.)

Anyway, if the site looks a little weird (I'm particularly worried about how the navigation for this rerun thing is going to work) today, rest assured I'll be fixing it up over the next few days. I expect the RSS feeds to be somewhat broken until I can recode them, sorry about that - I just didn't have time to do it in time for today. I'll make new feeds: one with just the new Sunday annotations, one with just the Monday to Saturday comic reruns, and a combined feed with both in one stream.

Now with the administrative bit over, I can comment on the comic! Being the first comic I made, this is rather crude, of course. The photography in particular is nasty. I was using a tiny webcam, which I got in the LEGO Studios MovieMaker set. It was my first digital camera, and the resolution and picture quality were, as you can see, pretty poor. That LEGO set, by the way, is also the set that gave us the minifigure later used for Ophelia. Yep, she started life as an actress! Kind of appropriate given how she ended up in the comic.

Wow, computer monitors were bulky back then. What's on the monitor is actually a recursive shot of me and the monitor, since to take photos with the webcam I had to display what it was seeing in a window on the screen, and click a button to capture the image.

And is that an empty shelf on the bookcase behind me?! That bookcase is now full to overflowing. I want that empty shelf back!

Reader Taneb has kindly translated this strip into Latin, for the benefit of any native Latin speakers out there:

1 Me: Ecce, fumetti in interretum sunt!
2 Me: {ad spexita computatri specit}
3 Me: Ha, ha, ha!
4 Me: Hic tempum mortit.