In the early spring, with the popularity of Web comics growing slowly yet steadily and the content on his zine site Hierarchy of the Zucchini People having slowed to a trickle, Nicholas "Al-Azif" Yu began drawing The Bad Boys of Computer Science. It was initially intended to amuse his friends, so the sudden boom in popularity seemed something of a shock.

Nick's comics espoused a simple tenet, one that so many writers fail to understand: There is more to life than computers, even to a computer geek. It immediately appealed to exactly the types of people that were looking for a comic strip on the Web. Many read it, enjoyed a chuckle, and moved on. Several entered the forums to discuss not just the comics, but games, hardware, movies, and music, among our many other interests. Over time, we became a tightly-knit group, many of us considering our forum friendships closer than anything we had in real life.

But unfortunately, all good things must come to an end. Near the end of 2001, the forum became divided. And Nick, being a man of many responsibilities, had to end the strip in mid-2002. For most of the fans, that was the end of it.

We were too close, too dedicated, to let our friendships die. For several months, we kept in touch via LiveJournal, but it just wasn't the same. We all felt the strain of trying to stay tight without the forum helping to hold us together.

In October 2002, Kris-chan began discussing a resurrection of the forum with The Lazarus. It didn't take long for the two of them to register a domain, obtain hosting, and implement a PHP board. Of course we were elated to see our forum return, and we quickly jumped aboard and commenced posting madly.

But again, disaster struck. Namely, posting began to slow. The simple fact was that we didn't have enough regular posters to spark new conversations, and we certainly weren't recruiting any new ones. So we decided to go back to our roots.

The foundation was to allow all the forumites to write about ourselves, to tell funny stories about our roleplay, our chats, and our games. Thanks to the HTML skills of Endymion, this page slowly came to life, first through static pages and manually-updated comics, then using a server-side client to keep our topics fresh and dynamic. And for those of you who love a happy ending, Nick has returned with a brand new (as-of-yet untitled) comic, which resides right alongside our missives and rants.

We hope you enjoy our little slice of online craziness. Of course, what we're really looking for is more contributors, so don't be shy! Go post!