December 18, 2015 - News Post

Today is the anniversary of a very special day.

Once upon a time, I made other online comics. In early 2000, I co-created a comic called Dr. Lobster with some guy named Michael Buonauro. Much like DHS, the comic was moderately funny, low in quality, and incredibly fun to do.

15 years ago today, Dr. Lobster began "Insane Week". For this event, we released a comic every hour on the hour for 5 days straight, 120 comics in all.

We wrote 70ish scripts together in advance, and assigned the tasks of writing another 25 a piece. We only started with about 20 comics ready to publish, and spent the entire week scrambling like idiots to get each comic ready while the clock ticked away.

The hardest part had nothing to do with the comics, but updating the website. We were only familiar with basic html, so each comic had its own page that was uploaded around the clock by hand. Since Michael was out of town for 3 days, this meant we each had VERY long grueling shifts, and I got to take the first one.

I don't know why we decided to do this. It was one of the most exhausting periods of my life. We nearly murdered each other in the process, but it was worth it. We enjoyed some of the website traffic, a few of our best comics came out at that time, and most importantly, I got so frustrated with our update process that I decided it was time to change my whole approach to our website.

Editing and uploading HTML was so bad, I learned PHP and MySQL in order to never have to do anything like that ever again. This is the exact reason I became a programmer. I found out I liked writing code more than drawing pictures. If not for insane week, I might never have forced myself to learn how to code, never entered into the world of software development, and never would have done Don't Hit Save.

It's insane how things work sometimes. Happy insane weekiversary!

-Jeff