Day: October 16, 2010

Some part of my brain appears to believe that the success of Schlock Mercenary is somehow a fluke which is constantly teetering on the edge of disaster. When I poke this part of my brain and say “Really? After supporting us for four years?” It mutters at me and continues to sit there sullenly like a lumpish frog, ready to flood my mind with fearful thoughts whenever we come across a shift or a glitch. It is an odd quirk of belief that I am completely convinced that what Howard does is brilliant and amazing, but this frog piece of my brain continues to be fearful about money. I think the frog part of my brain must be best buds with the financial squirrel in my brain because the frog shuts up when the squirrel is fat and happy.

We swapped over to the new Schlock Mercenary site architecture today. The switch was long overdue. It was overdue last Fall when we decided to make it a priority. The old architecture had gotten to the point where our server guys had to wallop it with a virtual wrench on a regular basis. Unfortunately building the right architecture was a long learning process for both us and the fantastic development team we elected to work with. It took far longer than any of us wanted. A year later, today, we finally launched. The launch made today scattered. Howard and I monitored twitter, email, facebook, and blog comments for bug reports. There were bugs reported and bugs fixed. In the space between the reports and the fixes, the frog in my brain was quite loud. He has this neat trick of twisting the bottom out of my stomach so it feels as if I’m plummeting. I hate that part. We expected the bugs. We knew there would be things to fix. There always are with new systems. Yet my stomach kept reacting as if we were doomed. (Or rather DOOOMED, spoken with a deep resonant croak.)

The frog doesn’t always have his say. My life is filled with troubles and reverses that don’t trigger the croak of doom. The key difference is whether I know how to fix the problem. If I do, the the problem is merely a task. If I don’t, then “doom” croaks the frog. The frog was on a hair trigger all day because website coding is deep in the territory of things that I don’t know how to fix. Fortunately none of today’s problems were mine to solve. All I had to do was muffle the frog and wait for Howard and the development team to do their jobs. There are still things to fix, but they are mostly minor and cosmetic. The comic is there, the blog is there, the archive is there, and they are all updating. This is good. Even better is having this big shift behind us instead of ahead. Now in need to find that virtual wrench and go wallop an imaginary frog.