Fun fact, I was in the audience in New York City when This American Life recorded Birthdays, Anniversaries, and Milestones¹ (episode #174, celebrating their fifth anniversary), which was also my introduction to the sick, tight dance moves of OK Go. Not quite anything so momentous today, but still worth noting them.

• First and foremost, let us acknowledge that today marks ten years of Erfworld², by Rob Balder and (to date) three artists: Jamie Noguchi, Xin Ye, and David Hahn (with Ye the current and most prolific of the contributing artists). Balder’s written more than 725 pages of comics since — sometimes literally, since a significant number of those updates are not comics pages, but pages of text with inset illustrations, which take a lot more words than a comic script.

  Along the way, he’s built perhaps the deepest, world-buildiest, detail-richest, backstory and lore of any comics work (not just webcomics) of similar age. Certainly, the entirety of the DC or Marvel multiverse has more nerdly details (or even better, Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder, which at least has an intentional mythology around it, instead of being the side-effect of hundreds of conflicting writers retconning into what’s supposed to be a cohesive whole), but they’ve taken many decades to get there. Along the way, he also pioneered a patronage support model that (if my memory serves me correctly) predated Patreon. It’s quite an achievement for only ten years.

• Regarding yesterday’s reports on Anthony Clark and a mediocre pizza chain, the latest news is that Little Caesar’s have removed the thieved content but have not offered any compensation to Clark. Confidential to Little Caesar’s — the offense didn’t end because you stopped using something stolen from an artist, and you still owe him money.
• Still on the unhappy end of things, Colorist Supreme Steve Hamaker reports that his webcomic, PLOX, is currently down. Really down, as his hosting company managed to lose the entire site. I can think of webcomics sites that have been taken down for various durations by scammers, hackers, and griefers — Bad Gods, Anders Loves Maria, Hark! A Vagrant, The Abominable Charles Christopher off the top of my head — but this is the first time I can think of because of sheer incompetence on the part of a host. Then again, it was apparently GoDaddy.

  Hamaker’s not a web admin, and when your host says Uh we deleted your database k thanks bye even web admins may not have a lot to go on; PLOX will come back, but there will be delays as prior commitments take up his time. Fortunately, Hamaker’s got a Patreon that he can use to push out new updates, and I suspect that supporting him there will help to speed along the restoration of the archives and the design/implementation/launch of the new site (hopefully far, far away from GoDaddy).

• MoCCA Fest 2017, y’all. Saturday and Sunday, 1st & 2nd of April 2017 at Metropolitan West, programming at the local Kimpton Hotel, guests of honor to include Official MacArthur Genius Gene Luen Yang.
• Wonder what Gene Ambaum is up to when he’s not writing Library Comic? How about risking his own personal sanity for your education and edification? Read, if you dare, his review of Sweet Bro And Hella Jeff.

Spam of the day:

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Booze? I’m going with booze.

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¹ I met Ira Glass, and Sarah Vowell, and Russell Banks, and Ira’s dad, and Dan Savage, and David Rakoff (who told me he hated me, then decided he didn’t when it turned out we shared a birthday). Earlier that year I was on Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me (but the archive doesn’t go back that far) and as a result I have Carl Kasell’s voice on my home answering machine, where he reads a haiku of my own invention. It was a good year for me with respect to public media.

² I possibly should have titled today’s post Welcome to Erf, but honestly that was the stupidest line in Independence Day.