The Heirotus timetable is set. This probably isn’t the first time company policy or security doctrine has hinged on the boss’s high-octane flavor of remote viewing. James is a lot more accurate than local efforts – so much so that systems derived from his DNA form key components of the Heirotus FTL communications system.
In panel two James refers to the events of Reentry -11-, a page that was retooled a couple of times after its debut on February 28, 2004 – a page of what is now Chapter Three of The Dualist.
Greg targeted critical points on the Sabrosa hull after getting creeped out by Grij. That happened fairly recently in the story – a timeline, it turns out, that progresses at a rather slower pace than the one we’re familiar with.
This is the last appearance of the Sabrosa sickbay in Transitional Voices. For the next leg it’s back to familiar environments – mostly aboard the Daedalus.
When I mentioned last week that the website had developed a habit of being here, I spoke prematurely. On Thursday October 29th around 12:15 the webhost started serving an “Account Moved” page instead of the website. After 72 hours without a notification or an explanation I took matters into my own hands and finally relocated Among the Chosen to a new hosting service.
It’s been a long time coming. In the dank bowels of depression I insisted to myself that ATC had to pull its own weight and I wasn’t going to pay for hosting out of pocket again – at least, not anytime soon. I was resigned to that being a far future thing until Chris Smith got back to me about the use of the Hemera on an album cover. I pulled the ripcord the second my accounts and schedule could handle the strain.
The comic has been migrated. Shared hosting again; the admin overhead of a VPS isn’t something I’m up for at this point. Everything works, or at least seems to work. Mail forwarding works. Things that haven’t worked well or at all since I moved off of a friend’s linode account in April are now functioning smoothly. There was an anomaly this afternoon that cleared itself up as I was investigating it – a hopefully transient quirk, one almost certainly related to the site, the theme, plugins, or some kink of WordPress as opposed to the rotten corpus of PHP libraries referenced in over 700 megs of error logs on my former webhost.
The site made it through DNS transfer and a thorough shakedown cruise yesterday. As soon as it looked like everything was working and was going to stay working I filed a billing ticket to pull the plug on my old hosting account. Much to my surprise my now former webhost’s billing department is prompt and competent – traits their support staff lack in abundance.
I had no idea how much of a strain having a barely functional website was putting on me. For the last six months ATC has frequently failed to load – it’s sent 502s or “bad gateway” messages instead of comic pages more times than I can count. It’s failed to render almost every time I’ve reached for it and that really put the zap on me. Now it’s here, it’s smooth, and the one problem I’ve had with it so far seems to be the sort of thing that can eventually be brought to heel if it crops up again. I’m feeling good about the comic for the first time in months, and while I’m going to be busy as heck working on other stuff over the next couple of weeks I’m confident that ATC’s restored availability will eventually be reflected in the update cycle.
