joshmillard dot com

Larp Trek - Resurrection

I'm in the process of restoring my old comic Larp Trek to the web, here on my new static site blog thing. It lives here. I originally wrote it in the stretch from November 2012 to early 2014; it ran for 198 episodes.

And it's very weird to be looking back so closely at Larp Trek a decade after it ended. I really enjoyed writing this comic, and never expected to make as much of it as I did -- I remember going in thinking once I got rolling that I could probably get 20, 30 strips out of it, exhaust the X-as-Y character jokes I'd been sitting on for a while. And then it just kept going, and I loved making it and riffing with my readers, and then I burnt waaaaaay out making it.

And the frustrating reality there -- for me, and for the small but supportive cohort of loyal readers I had built up by the end -- was that I didn't get tired of the idea, I just got tired of the everything else. I still had a bunch of broad strokes for where I wanted to go in the next several dozen strips; I still wanted to push far enough into the plot of DS9 that I could have Worf rejoin the game to play as, naturally, Worf; I had what felt like a heaping handful of little "oh, and then I can..." ideas that have since rotted away in my memory. There was lots of places to go, still!

But Sustained creative writing is hard, and this was the longest I'd ever done creative writing on a steady cadence, going three days a week for much of the strip's run, and I did not have a good sense of how to keep myself at a good balance there. And a couple-hundred episodes is enough to create a pretty big pile of potentialy continuity problems and character commitments to keep track of -- there were lots of places to go with the strip but I didn't feel like I had much room to move at any given time by the end.

And physically hacking the strip together was tedious -- screenshots are far easier than drawing, but there's also not much creative joy in collecting and trimming and wrangling them. Shuffling files around, updating wordpress, limping along in my aging copy of Photoshop Elements, dealing with the technical debt of my invented workflows, yadda yadda: there was a lot of process cruft and not much spare energy left over to streamline any of that.

So the strip ended mid-arc, and after a long period of meaning to go back but not doing so and feeling terrible about that, I eventually increasingly accepted that I wasn't going back at al, and felt a softer kind of terrible-sadness about that instead. Losing doing something you otherwise love to just sheer crushing friction is always a difficult feeling.

Eventually the actual site itself went down, along with a lot of my other web stuff, under the weight of lack of Wordpress maintenance and spam-injecting exploits -- and I wasn't up to fixing all that, and so it stayed down. I let the domain lapse -- do not go to larptrek.com, is my recommendation! -- and so for years now the only way to get at it was either the skeleton of an archive on tumblr or via Wayback Machine.

But, dammit, I loved this thing and so did a bunch of other people, and I want it to have a stable, long-term home on the web again. So I'm restoring the archives by hand, bit by bit. I may or may not polish up the pages it lives on over time, but I'm gonna slowly get all the strips back up, along with whatever of the surrounding context makes sense -- my original post notes, script transcripts for searchability, some latter-day "director's commentary" on the strips, and some select comments from out of the archives where appropriate.

This has been one of my "one of these days..." projects for a very long time now. I'm glad to be getting to it finally.