Yes, it’s been very quiet at the Web-O-Blog, for reasons that should be obvious to those who’ve been reading it: I’m down to a very short list of things to do at the new Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site and I think that it’s shaping up awfully well.
At left is one of the images from the site’s Help page, where we see call-outs for:
A. The illustration. When you click on it, a larger version pops up in a draggable window (see the second picture);
B. The save/restore panel where you use bookmarks within the stories;
C. The character portrait for whichever character you’re currently following;
D. The menu of options for what you’d like to do next in the story;
E. The Inventory panel, where you can click on an object to learn more about it in another pop-up window. Those are draggable, reloadable, and can be layered with the illustration pop-up in a bevy of ways that are really cool for me, but probably less entertaining for anybody else.
As it stands, I’ve probably only got a couple of more days worth of work on the site itself. But it gets a little more complicated since I’m expecting the second – and probably final – proof of the book version, and it’s only when I approve that proof that the book can go on sale. So I won’t be able to hook up the purchasing links until that happens. The trailer has a similar dependency – I’ll need to re-export it and upload it to YouTube 
(and maybe elsewhere) and I can’t embed it or link to it until that’s done.
I also need to order some of the books myself, since one way I’m selling them is directly from me.
So there are a couple of possible bottlenecks and a few dependencies yet to resolve. Unless something unexpected happens I figure that the Thrilling Tales site should launch around April 23rd – and very possibly sooner.
Oh. And the IRS. I haven’t quite got around to my tax forms yet.
Anyway there’s as much stuff as I could shove into the site – desktop wallpapers, screensavers, a version of the random Title-O-Tron that you can install at your blog or web site, and… um, I forget what else. It’s neat, trust me.
And someday soon it’ll even be finished!
Update: the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site is now alive (alive, I tell you!) at thrilling-tales.webomator.com
Is that the Davey Crockett cap of the future I’m seeing?
I’ve yet to see a raccoon in Retropolis – but that could be evidence either way, when you think about it.