https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Songs_about_Genghis_Khan

I suppose in a continuation of my twitter thread, I could assault Cohost with my favorite strips from Irritability.

To catch people up to speed, Irritability was a strip I started reading in High School back when dinosaurs still roamed the earth. Its brand of weird, absurd humor was perfect for a 17 year old. I believe the creator once said most of its characters were born out of several different XCOM campaigns (as in, the DOS version), but Irritability never dealt with aliens or existed in that universe. It was just the author extrapolating personality traits from his commandos and then putting those characters in new stories packed with very deadpan, nonsensical, moderately violent humor that vaguely orbits around western computer game tropes.

High concept or stupid? You decide. But I kept up reading it, and it became one of those seminal things I quoted to my friends incessantly.

After a time, Irritability sort of ended, transitioning in to something called "Chappy's Dungeon." Chappy, the closest thing Irritability had to Homer Simpson, decided it was time to become a dungeon keeper. He became the comic's main character, and strips focused on him setting up his dungeon: interviewing monsters to work the dungeon, setting up and installing traps, workshopping hazards, office politics, and generally watching heroes try to solve the dungeon itself. The dungeon is both very deadly but also sort of treated like a mall where people just hang out.

Not long after launching "Chappy's Dungeon", the creator of the strip seemed to burn out and updates became few and far between. Irritability strips were often short and sweet affairs, maybe three or four panels long, like a newspaper strip. Sometimes you'd get story arcs that would last multiple strips, but mostly it was self-contained gags. Chappy's Dungeon strips evolved to become full page, full-color affairs, and the creator (Mike Woodson) made a big effort to clean up their art and make it look really nice. It was a lot of work, and he apparently had kids on top of it. No shame in getting too caught up to draw comics anymore.

As of a few years ago, updates resumed, as Mike started a series of what he calls "Bad Comics" back under the Irritability banner. These seem to resume the content of Chappy's Dungeon, but in Irritability's shorter, more gag-oriented format. The author also dumps an entire page of multiple strips all at once, but makes up for it by drawing them... I don't want to say poorly, but there's a lot less concern for things like straight panel boundaries or making sure to have enough room to write dialog inside of speech bubbles. It's faster and more loose, which as a side effect sometimes makes the absurdist humor genuinely incomprehensible. But that's also just the vibe this thing has always had, and is part of the reason I like it.

The only real problem is that it's... basically impossible to read nowadays? It's always been located on its own website (the author's personal site, The Maze of Death), and in the transition from Irritability, to Chappy's Dungeon, back to "Bad Comics" Irritability, the archive hasn't been maintained very well. Clicking to go "back one strip" will take you to the final Chappy's Dungeon page, which was probably drawn close to a decade ago. Clicking to go to the "first" page will drop you some ~400 pages deep in Irritability with a note from the author about hating the earliest strips.

If you click the button under the strips called "Bad" it will take you to a ramshackle page with the very first Bad Strips ever drawn, of which there are now more than 700.

This ended up being a lot more words than I intended, but for a 20+ year old webcomic, that's what you get, I guess. I'd actually even argue how many people even still read Irritability anymore, but as of writing this here on Cohost it looks like there's actually a twitter bot that posts new strips as they go live and it's got over 450 followers. Honestly, if you want to read the back catalog, it's probably easier to just scroll through the twitter.

ANYWAY I STILL LIKE IT, OKAY

Anyway here are a few of my favorite strips from the "Bad Comics" era

Finally had a nice clear shot of the moon so I could actually test out my new 300mm zoom lens. Didn't do any fine tuning of settings or anything, just wanted to see how clear it would turn out, and it looks pretty damn nice if you ask me heheh

If I fine tuned ISO and aperture a bit more and actually used my remote shutter control I could get way better shots but like I said I just wanted to see how it would turn out, can't wait to get out and do deep sky imaging with this thing.