Four Island

Through the popularity of my current comic (Pillowcase!), it's sometimes difficult to remember that I once had a different comic: Kirby's Fan Mail. Yeah, remember that? That was a.... weird little comic, wasn't it? Yes, anyway, I recently had it brought back to my attention when I was looking through my Google Analytics. I saw a referral to Four Island from something called badwebcomics.wikidot.com, and I though, "Hm, what could that be?" So I went to the page in question and found.... a review of Kirby's Fan Mail explaining how it fails and how I'm mentally challenged! YAY! :P

Seriously, I'm not being sarcastic. The article actually was about how stupid the comic was and I seriously find it VERY amusing. Read it here, plez. 'Tis awesome. Like how he points out that I can't draw or that I think word salads are comedic gold.

However true or funny the article may be, however, there are some points I would like to make in my defense:

• First of all, the author of the article spelled my last name incorrectly. It's Insigna, not Insignia.
• One of the author's favorite things to make fun of was a comic of mine called Shimi's Warning, which he described as incredibly stupid because it was just a picture with a link to an off-site comic. There are several reasons that I had to do this. First off, Shimi's Warning was done in Flash, which, due to a technical limitation of the comic hosting software, could not be hosted directly on the site. Second, the only thing you can post in the comic area on that site is comics. You cannot just post text. Yes, I probably should've provided a text version of the URL so people could just copy/paste it, which I eventually did. However, the comic itself has since gone down which is really not quite a shame because it was pretty bad.

And.... that's really all I can think of right now. It's not too easy to defend KFM :P. In fact, here are some things that I think the article lacks:

• Blatant copyright thievery - After writing a comic involving a cookbook, I posted a comic from the original Kirby manga because it had to do with the previous comic. Yeah.
• My total non-coolness - Yeah, four years ago, I didn't know what "emo" meant. So I probably embarrassed myself.
• The whole "world trip" debacle - For a few comics, I talked about having Kirby go on a trip to other people's comics and do stuff. Instead, I stopped posting comics for two months and simply had him write a letter of apology when I got back. Wow, my failness never fails to fail!
• Same with the "awesome" 50th Comic Party.
• Homophobia.
• There is clearly no food in this one, yet he claims he is eating it.
• The punch line of this one is the fact that the sender of the letter didn't leave a name. Ha-ha.
• I'm not going to pretend to know what I was on while writing this one.
• My total disregard for an update schedule. For a time, I would post like 10 comics a day, and then I wouldn't post for like a month. Then, I stopped doing the comic in 2007, only to pick it up for a month in 2009. I'm surprised people actually still read it.

Clearly, I could go on for much longer, but I don't feel like it. Instead, I'll let you, the reader, either read the article I linked to above or search through Kirby's Fan Mail for more of my failness. Oh yes, and check out my recently revived comic, Pillowcase! Thank you and good night! :P

I couldn't think of what I should do for Christmas. A story? A picture? A song? An extremely complicated article about how to implement something, such as the MetaWeblog API? No.

Then I thought of it. I could lie and attribute it to Gryphic's Christmas Stories prompts and say the line "We can't be the only ones to celebrate Christmas. How do aliens/fictional characters/animals celebrate?" inspired me to do this, but that's not exactly true as I did this two days before Gryphic wrote that post.

I've been wanting to bring KFM back for a while now and thought that while I'm pondering that situation, I'll post one more KFM comic. I give to you "'Twas The Night Before Kirbymas": And, because I feel like doing what Gryphic often does, I'm going to post a song. It's called Do They Know It's Christmas Time by Band Aid and it's featured in the previous KFM comic:

It's Christmas time, and there's no need to be afraid At Christmas time, we let in light and we banish shade And in our world of plenty, we can spread a smile of joy Throw your arms around the world at Christmas time

But say a prayer to pray for the other ones At Christmas time, it's hard, but when you're having fun There's a world outside your window And it's a world of dread and fear Where the only water flowing is the bitter sting of tears And the Christmas bells that ring there Are the clanging chimes of doom Well, tonight, thank God it's them instead of you

And there won't be snow in Africa this Christmas time The greatest gift they'll get this year is life Where nothing ever grows, no rain or rivers flow Do they know it's Christmas time at all?

Here's to you, raise a glass for everyone Here's to them underneath that burning sun Do they know it's Christmas time at all?

Feed the world Feed the world

Feed the world; let them know it's Christmas time And feed the world; let them know it's Christmas time And feed the world; let them know it's Christmas time And feed the world; let them know it's Christmas time

Band Aid

Merry Christmas!

Recently, I've (OMG. Seriously, that was a coincidence) been thinking about starting KFM again. I know I've said this many times, but I know some people actually really like it. I think I should re-start, but I'll have to get over the procrastination.

The thing is, I want to showcase KFM here on Four Island and I was thinking of having Wednesday's blog post be a KFM post and Saturday's weekly post include a KFM comic as well. The only problem is that there are already about 70 KFM comics that have been seen on the Internet before (Smackjeeves), so with the above standards, it would take about 35 weeks to get all of the currently existing KFM comics onto this blog.

If you KFM readers are OK with, I guess I could start again. The delay could even be useful, I could be writing new comics while the first season of KFM goes up. I'm sorry about the bad job I've been doing with KFM, but I'm a lazy lazy girl. Sorry about that.

If you still like KFM, and you would love for it to go back up, comment on this post! And remember to send all of your fanmail to fanmail@fourisland.com so Kirby can read it! Fanmail left anywhere else may not be noticed, so make sure it goes to fanmail@fourisland.com!

Wow! People apparently really like KFM! And I never knew! Well, I kind of guessed in Hello KFM, but.... wow.... Anyways, here are the results:

Yes - 7 vote(s)! No - 0 vote(s)! Huh? - 1 vote(s)! Indifferent - 3 vote(s)!

I think I may try to bring KFM back. I mean, I like that comic a lot. It's quite a lot of fun. And I don't think I deleted the original comics, they're still here on my computer, just not available to the world. The only problem I have is with motivation. I procrastinate way too much. I need to find out a way to get around the procrastination problem. Ideas? Please comment.

In other news, there's going to be some scheduled downtime on Monday. It should start around 7 o'clock AM and end around 4 o'clock PM. Sorry about this disruption, I know, Four Island downtimes makes people sad.

EDIT: Oh. My. Goodness. I just checked the referential ID for this post. This post.... it's the 100th post on Four Island!

YAY for the 100th post! 10 months of writing posts for Four Island has wielded this great result. (Though I only started recently writing a post a day) Thanks to all who read Four Island! And right now, that number is.... oh giant hairy balls of poop. I forgot to add the hitcounter to the new Four Island! Oh, I'll go fix that now!

A few days ago I read the entire archives of a discontinued comic called Hackles. I loved it. I was so sad when I got to the end and found that it hadn't been updated since 2004. It was a comic I enjoyed tremendously, but I never even got to experience the "wait-for-next-strip-to-come-out" fever that you get with a good comic.

After all of this, I realized, "Hey, wait! I'm making a webcomic! I haven't updated in ages!". I know quite a few people like KFM, and I don't want the same thing to happen to it as it did to Hackles.

So I recently re-did the entire KFM section. It looks a whole lot better, and it now has an RSS feed so you can subscribe to the comic! I hope you all enjoy KFM, because I've only just realized that it actually meant something to other people.

NOTE: Please send in your fanmail to fanmail AT fourisland DOT com

Oh, this is an important update! I have for you 3 very important announcements!

Number 1: I have started work on a homemade operating system! It's called Ohats, which stands for Operating Hat System! It is currently console-based, but that will change sooner or later! For more information, see the project page!

The next one is about KFM. Kirby's Fan Mail is a webcomic I've been writing since October 25'th 2006 and it currently has 67 comic-pages and should be extremly interesting. I'm going to port it over to my website here for everyone to read, and I'm going to update it more often.

And last but not least, we have The S Site. A friend of mine who only wishes to be known as Smiley told me he wanted to make a website. So I lent him my HTML 5 book, and gave him some free webspace. And now his website is up for viewing! Check out The S Site on the NavBar!

Well, that's my important 3 announcements! I hope you've enjoyed them, and this is Hatkirby, signing out.