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Hi everyone, long time. This site has somehow become one of the oldest sites on the internet. I met Brian in 2004 and we launched the site on April 5, 2005.
Anyway, I've been wondering for a while about what to do with it. It was a WordPress site which is notoriously shitty for exploits and I don't trust that it will receive security updates forever. It was also running on an old-ass server using an OS from 2016, so without intervention it probably would have eventually been exploited again, or taken off the internet completely as the hosting company I was using would inevitably stop allowing old Ubuntu virtual machines to run in their environment. This site predated AWS, GCP, Azure, all the new-fangled Kubernetes microservice cloud shit and was just running in a tiny virtual machine with 1GB of memory and a small amount of compute for the last 10+ years.
Worried about all of this, I messaged Brian a couple years ago saying I needed to take the site down. He was disappointed and I lamented that there wasn't an easy conversion that I was aware of that would free me from the anxiety of being shackled to a platform as insecure as WordPress. He said some other stuff too and I forgot to respond, which sucks, but that's what ADHD does. I haven't heard from him since, but for anyone wondering, his real Facebook has recent updates, so he's alive and (presumably) enjoying life. Rather than take it down, which I couldn't really bear to do, I just left it running like the Opportunity rover, waiting for its time to die of natural causes or the relentless onslaught of malicious actors that infest the internet these days.
Cutting to the chase, in 2026, with the magic of AI code assistants, it has suddenly become very easy to do something about the WordPress problem. I've converted the site to plain static HTML. It now runs on a Raspberry Pi in my basement, with Cloudflare connecting it to the internet for basically free, and the source is backed up. I've set up a small build process as well, so updates are possible, albeit without the benefit of WordPress's CMS. This is both a blessing and a curse, but the site stays up, and likely can forever.
Regardless of how you feel about AI, it is what has enabled this to live on. It's been a long time since the site first launched. I've had a whole-ass career in this industry and love it or hate it, it is a useful tool and I'm glad I could use it to preserve the site. As for what happens next, I'm not really sure. It would be cool to preserve the site as-is, but archive.org kind of does that for us. Maybe Brian will want to post a few more comics, or has some already written, who knows (this isn't a teaser, I have no idea, don't get too excited).
The point is, the site is still here and it's still possible to make changes. We had 25k unique visitors last month, which is absurd to me when there haven't been any updates in 5 years. I hope you still enjoy reading this stuff as much as I have over the years, and here's to maybe one day getting the ending of Curious Urgency we've all been waiting for. Cheers, everyone, and thanks for reading.
This post was not written by AI
I am terrible at replying but I love getting messages, which makes me a terrible person. Nevertheless…
[email protected] (I know, hotmail.)
Everyone reading this is awesome and I can’t tell you how amazing it is that anyone reads anything I’ve made. If you’d also like to part with your hard-earned money to help support these otherwise free, sub-par comics then you can do so here:
https://www.patreon.com/akimbocomics
and know that I appreciate it more than I can ever express.
I also have a Facebook page here:
https://www.facebook.com/Akimbo-Comics-57109711467/
if you want to leave a comment (the comments here have to be kept disabled) then I would be overjoyed.
And as always: please write me: [email protected]
Looks like everything worked, Brian is going to be re-uploading the missing comics too, so we are officially back in action.
The latest malware review got approved. I had to revert to a backup from February 2016. Whoever messed with the site must have been thorough about hiding stuff all over the place in both the database and the php files. I have a better backup system in place now (like 95% foolproof)
Comments are disabled for now. I will probably re-enable them once the dust settles and I am confident that there isn’t any more weird shit going on. Feel free to discuss the comics on facebook or wherever else you want.
I am sending Brian the image files of the comics that are now missing, these files come with the dates for them so he can re-upload them easily. Comments made since February 2016 are lost. Sorry it took so long to fix, pretty busy with real life.
Last but not least, if your browser warns you a site is unsafe, it probably is. If that happens to us again, just let us know and stay off until we get it fixed. We won’t upload new comics if chrome or firefox are blocking us.