Well, I guess it’s been a while hasn’t it? The last year has been… let’s say “significantly not great” on the home front, leaving little time to focus on keeping E-merl properly working and updated. At last though I have managed to carve out the time to fix all the things that have fallen over on the site and write a little news update to bring folks up to speed.

So welcome to… I guess I’m going to designate it E-merl 8.5. The whole site fell over in a major way back in August of last year, forcing me to rebuild big chunks of the back end WordPress stuff. This has resulted in a spiffier looking site, but also knocked out all the old webcomic archives which each needed to be rebuilt, one strip at a time. A year later and I’ve finally finished doing all of that, although sadly The Nile Journals could not be restored due to their Flash-based nature. I’ll have a think about finding some other way to get them back online at a later date.

Another causality of the crash was the old Brain Fist archive which stopped working for reasons I don’t really understand. However, this was a problem I could at least turn in to an opportunity, and I’m now re-running all of Brain Fist with a new strip appearing every Thursday at E-merl and in a smartphone friendly scrolling format over at Webtoon. Ghosts of the Great Mistake, which I’ve somehow managed to keep updating without interruption throughout the last year, is also now reaching a new audience at Webtoon.

Finishing out this news post are some updates to my Theory and Consulting pages which have details of some of my recent achievements on both fronts. Oh, and I guess I should mention that in the last year I did talks at Comics|Games, Transitions 8 and Wandering Games. Going forward I’m going to try and get these news posts out a little more regularly, if only so I can manage to mention when I’m talking at an event before the event actually takes place.