#8.30 commentary

2024 is proving to be a much more complicated year for me than I expected, so unfortunately I still have no ETA on when I'll be able to continue this story. But I do miss the squad.

(Author here - apologies for the lack of updates!

Unfortunately, life circumstances have made it difficult for me to consistently find time for personal projects. I'm going to be unavailable for good chunk of March so I'm afraid I can't even promise silly side-sketches right now.

Perturbed Hat by @cameoappearance (via Art Fight.Net)

(I'm sick again. Yes, really. For the third time in as many months. And for unrelated reasons. This week's ailment is a perpetual, very sore throat. Not exhausting so much as very annoying so we'll see how my concentration levels hold up.

My work/life balance is getting shifted around next week. That sounds more dramatic than it actually is lol. Point is, I'll either have way more or way less free time soon. Won't know 'til it happens so we'll see how the ol' update schedule goes. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Tumblr is trying very hard to be pre-Musk twitter, and that's messing up the story's archives. Okay, this is the big one. So as you've probably noticed, Tumblr has been going hard on copying Twitter's layout this past year. Some of them - like adding polls - are great news for us! And then you get the changes to the app layout and the toolbar and this tumblr live shit and good lord just stop. What worries me most is the website trying very, very hard to pivot away from custom blog themes. Most links redirect to the in-dash browser, asks can no longer be sent from people who are logged out, and if you try to read a blog without an account it eventually cuts you off and tells you to sign up. For a webcomic - even a silly, informal one like 8.30 Poll - this is very bad. It's impossible to view the story chronologically when on mobile, and posts with polls in them are set in stone so I can't even manually go back and add in links to each update. If custom themes really are getting removed then these problems will extend to desktop as well. In short, I need to find a way to back up or mirror this story. We're not moving sites because we can't. There isn't another platform out there that has all the features necessary to run a story like this (besides maybe /tg/, but I'm not prepared to run this there lol). So instead I ask how I should go about backing this up. A plain .pdf with the text and images? The animations wouldn't work but it'd be easy and accessible. A HTML5 archive (similar to the Ruby Quest ones) would be more time consuming to put together and would be incompatible with screen readers, but would improve the pacing and allow for animations. Either way, we're almost at a hundred updates so if ever there were a time to start thinking about it, it's now. 'Cause the longer I wait the more of a pain it's going to be to maintain if/when tumblr shits itself.

...And that's about it!

Thank you as always for reading, and for your patience. Can you believe this thing's been going for six months now? Wild.

That said, I’m wondering what else I can do with the time. Show off some unused panels? Concept sketches (yes I do those sometimes despite this being an ms paint nightmare)? Something else? I do like running worldbuilding intermissions but right now I’m too burned to think of interesting questions and answers. And it might be nice to have something on these Saturday posts than just “still busy lol sorry”.

Health update: all is well! Work/life balance update: bloody hell. I haven't had a chance to sit down and think, so next week is going to be the proper intermission poll week.

Hate putting story content on pause for two weeks in a row, but I do need to sit down and wrangle my plot threads a bit. Far better to do that during a break than try and squeeze it in between updates.

In the meantime, I got you guys a box of lego!)