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What are the haps my friends


September 2nd, 2004: Hey, turns comic this one DOES have a blog post! But this one is from the FUTURE. When it was first posted in 2004, this comic linked to a li'l narrative toy I'd built, called THE STORY ENGINE. It let you make your own choose-your-own-path stories in a browser by simply writing a node, adding some choices, and letting someone else do the next bit. Fun!

But also, with no way to rate submissions and no filters, not without its downsides. As I recall, I had to move the website rapidly to a new server after the old host shut me down, and the new website didn't support ASP, which is what The Story Engine was put together in. And that was the end of it! OR SO YOU THOUGHT, because years later Janek wrote code that uses the Wayback Machine archives to restore all that was saved, in his Story Engine Recreation Project!

And so now Ryan in 2026 has written a blog post here, so you can go check it out if you choose, and relive the heady days of 2004. Were we ever so young? It seems impossible.

One year ago today: the moving comic

– Ryan

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