Christopher B. Wright's Blog, page 15

The Points Between: Chapter Three

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CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 License.

The Picnic and the Garden

She leads him across the gazebo’s bridge, onto a wide brick path set along the manor’s west wing. The music starts again, and as the dancing begins anew Matthew can feel the pull of the pattern he’d sensed earlier. He can almost see the dancers moving, feel the energy build up as they trace and retrace their steps across the floor. Part of him wants to go back. He wants to dance with Alice, to recapture...

Curveball Status: Still Writing, with One Minor Complication

His eyes keep following me.

Every now and again I get an email or a post asking if Curveball is a “dead web serial,” and the answer is always “no.” I’m currently writing Issue 36. I’m about halfway through issue 36. It’s a slow, painful process — and I’m pretty sure that when I’m done, I’ll look back at what I did to get there, and wonder why it took all that trouble.

But progress is being made. The ball is being moved forward. That said, there is an extra item of note that has entered my lif...

0011 0000

Image from Pixabay

When I was in my twenties and I wondered what my forties were going to be like, I assumed that by then my career would have peaked. Today I turn 48, and I really hope younger me was an idiot.

…yeah, that’s pretty much sums it all up. I’m hoping that I suffered from temporal nearsightedness, and didn’t realize that as I grew older I would continue to remain in possession of my faculties and want to do things, and that I would have the werewithal (and good fortune) to make t...

Bona Fides

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CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 License. Comic Transcript

FIRST MAN: What’re you doing here, Mr. Nero?

JAKE NERO: Sitting in a chair, waiting for your fellow traveller to bring me my hat.

FIRST MAN: Funny guy. You a cop?

JAKE NERO: You read my card.

FIRST MAN: Cards are just words, Mr. Nero. You could have had that printed up special.

JAKE NERO: I did get it printed up special. I had to. It has my name on it.

FIRST MAN: Anyone ever tell you that mouth of yours will get...

Getting to Know You

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CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 License. Comic Transcript

(JAKE NERO is sitting in a chair, surrounded by three men.)

JAKE NERO: Any of you jokers seen my hat?

FIRST MAN: Well?

THIRD MAN: We left it outside.

FIRST MAN: Well go get it. I want to talk with our new detective friend, here.

THIRD MAN: All right, all right. I’m going.

JAKE NERO: Dn’t suppose I can find a way to get the big guy to leave the room, too?

FIRST MAN: No, I don’t suppose you can.

JAKE NERO: Just ch...

Drastic Measures Were Taken

Image taken from PixaBay.

(Updated, see below)

In short: I know moving from Drupal to WordPress would increase the amount of spam I was attracting, but I didn’t know-know it. Now I know. Holy cow, that was a lot of spam.

Y’all probably didn’t see any of it, because Akismet was doing what it was supposed to do and kept it out of the comments. But Akismet doesn’t stop spam accounts from registering, and in the short time I’ve been up my database has grown significantly just from storing all tho...

Make Yourself Comfortable

This work is distributed under a
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 License. Comic Transcript

(Everything is dark.)

FIRST VOICE: Who’s this?

SECOND VOICE: We caught him snooping around outside. He was shouting something about Lenny.

FIRST VOICE: Well, which was it?

SECOND VOICE: Which was what?

FIRST VOICE: Snooping, or shouting? It can’t be both.

SECOND VOICE: Says you. I found this in his jacket.

FIRST VOICE: That’s an independent license, fat-head. That means he ain’t a Pinkerton.

SECOND VOICE: Maybe...

Introductions Are In Order

This work is distributed under a
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 License. Comic Transcript

NARRATOR: I had to be careful. the Great North Union was a success story, and that meant it had enemies… and it knew it had enemies. Just my luck, one of those enemies was the largest Private Detective Agency in the Union. That was going to make it hard to win them over.

NARRATOR: There was no good way to handle it. If I tried to lie my way in, they’d figure it out soon enough and I’d get nowhere fast. I decided...

Measure Once, Cut many

Photo by JESHOOTS.COM from Pexels

All in all the transition went pretty smoothly compared to migrations that I’ve done in the past, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things that need fixing. Here’s a list of issues I’m still trying to resolve:

RSS Feed Issues. At first I thought the problem was “hey my RSS subscribers are going to see their RSS feeds go away,” but it turns out I was able to use a redirect plugin for WordPress redirect the old feed URLs to the new ones. (With caveats: I may n...

Everything is going well

Progress: Help Desk archives started, complete through 1997. Archive pages for the webcomics completed. First/Last comic navigation implemented… after a fashion. Cool floaty navigation bar installed. It mostly works, though it sort of gets pushed out of the way on mobile devices.

Nobody’s tried to create an account yet, though? Curious.

Progress: working through the site template, fixing theming issues as I find them. Not sure how I feel about the red links. Maybe a little less red. Still, o...