Hagenart comic 09/30/19

Hagenart comic 09/24/19

Hagentarot, the Ultimate vision

I’ve performed some thought experiments in preparation for the new hagenart website, developing a vision for the future site - not the new site, but the ultimate hagenart site. I should make it clear that the new site and the future, ultimate site, are not the same. The new site is a rapidly approaching reality, whereas the future site, the ultimate site, exists only in my mind and now, for one page on the new website, hagentarot, in spine tingling verbal form on this blog.  Hagentarot is a virtual tarot card reading that uses the hagenart value card deck

Ultimate vision for hagentarot intro: 

The game begins as first person: you begin in the middle of a foresty, looking into a glade, or a glen, or a fen. A nondescript hoofed animal wanders across your field of view. It stops to gambol. Suddenly crosshairs appear over the animal’s head. You see the words “target acquired” flash on the screen in the red scoreboard font. If you press any button, a white flash appears on the animal’s head where the crosshairs were, and blood spurts from the wound. The animal drops to the grass, while horrible jangly music plays. It turns into bad 80s guitar riffs. You find yourself able to move around, and if you move toward the animal, at a certain point a silver proboscus extrudes from the bottom of the screen, as if it’s your nose or your tongue, and stabs the animal’s corpse. The corpse changes colors, to silvery colors, and then the animal reanimates and gets back up. It makes a horrible screeching sound and then bounds off into the shrubbery with disquieting speed. 

You move through crashing, snapping bushes and undergrowth. There doesn’t seem to be a path, when you suddenly come across a pavilion in the middle of the wilderness. There is a shadowy figure sitting at one of the tables. If you approach the figure, it makes a movement and deals a card onto the small tablecloth spread on the filthy metal park table. There are numerous old and overlapping stains, of disturbing colors, covering the table. 

If you don’t approach the dark figure at the table, you can wander around the pavilion and the other tables, or go crashing through the shrubbery. Nothing more happens until you approach the figure and take the card. 

Wow. Yes, no question, the implementation could never live up to that verbal description. What a testament to the power of words, that even the author of the paragraph gives up on the reality!

Hagenart comic 09/19/19

If you’re looking under the hood, you’re not driving the car

We’ve moved to a completely graphic format in the blog recently. I’d intermittently threatened to do this many times in the past, due to the incredibly tight time constraints on my writing time nowadays, but I don’t know if anyone took those threats seriously because I don’t know if anyone actually read them besides myself and I know I didn’t take them seriously until I actually began to do it. And I still don’t really take them seriously. 

So the move to a graphic comic book format seems to have cut the blog readership by about 50%; a metric which, if viewed from the standpoint of a businessman assessing the blog as a business venture would definitely indicate that the sole proprietor of the blog, myself, had made a serious mistake. On the upside, if we look at our cash conversion rate per customer, which is zero, and multiply by that by the lost readership, we find that we actually haven’t experienced any decline in blog income. Heartening news! 

But I’ve decided to compromise on the blog format somewhat, in order to lure my mother or other random family members back to the customer base. So from this post on we will be providing written content as a supplement to the comics. 

This week’s Comic:

Written supplement to this week’s comic:

Not my best comic, and I say that with deepest respect and appreciation for the artistic struggles that accompanied this comic from conception to its moment of publication on the World Wide Web. I actually produced three versions of this comic in an effort to find some kind of punchline, and if I haven’t deleted those versions I will insert them at some inappropriate or ill-timed juncture of this post, so the reader can view and appreciate the difficulty of joke making. Actually I think the previous sentence, that I just wrote down mere moments before, illustrates my difficulties better than the actual mis-fires could. No one with a running joke engine in their head could write “the difficulty of joke making”. If you’re looking under the hood, you’re not driving the car.   

I will use that sentence as the title of this post, and perhaps as the epitaph of this blog. We have reached the solipsistic wind down of the blog, after the failed surge to comic greatness has washed back into the dirty sea of the internets 

Hagenart comic Labor Day