The Wongery

December 21, 2013: What? A year, it's been?

Well... it's been exactly one year now since the Wongery publicly launched. (Rounded to the nearest day, anyway; technically it was exactly one year about eight hours ago.)

And, alas, it's been nearly nine months (well, okay, closer to eight and a half) since the last post. Which, somewhat ironically, was dedicated to assuring (nonexistent) readers that the Wongery was not dead, and would continue to grow in the coming year.

That remains true. Think of the recent eight and a half months as a... hiatus, of sorts. I'm not sure whether that helps. Anyway, we're going to try not to let it happen again. I could make excuses for why all of the Grandmaster Wongers fell silent at once (or really, why I fell silent for so long, because frankly I'm the one in charge and if I don't post no one else is likely to), but you probably don't want to read excuses, and I definitely don't want to write them. So... uh, yeah. Sorry.

Of course, we didn't really have any readers at the time the Wongery went silent, so it's not like anyone was missing us. (The spammers have been busy, though. There are 6070 members, and 24,785 topics the Grandmaster Wongers didn't start, and I'm pretty sure every last one of those topics will turn out to be spam. I don't even know how many spam posts there are without going into the moderator control panel, and I don't feel like doing that right now. Okay, fine. 25,475 posts, as it turns out. So, yeah, apparently almost all those topics just have one post each. Anyway, we have a lot of work ahead of us when we get around to doing some housecleaning... it's nice the forum software is catching the spam posts and holding them for moderation, but there's got to be a better way to stop spammers from registering in the first place...)

Kind of got sidetracked in a very long parenthetical there, so for the sake of better flow let me start that paragraph over. Of course, we didn't really have any readers at the time the Wongery went silent, so it's not like anyone was missing us. We do expect that to change someday, though. It's not that we intend to advertise the Wongery, overtly; that's never been part of our plan, even if we had the money for it (which, right now, we don't). But we do expect links to make their way to the Wongery eventually. It's always possible that someday someone will happen across the Wongery by a web search, and will make a post about it somewhere. But it's also possible, of course, that they won't. But even if they don't, it will come out in other ways. For instance, when we have money, we do plan to commission some artists to create illustrations for the articles. Those artists will no doubt mention where their work is posted, which is likely to lead people to the Wongery. I hasten to add that's not why we plan to commission artists to create illustrations for the articles; we plan to do that because we want the articles to be illustrated. But it's a foreseeable side benefit.

Oh, wow. Just discovered through a quick Google search that somebody did find it and post about it on the 4chan /x/ imageboard, back in October. Huh. They characterized it as "a fairly sizable blog/wiki that seems to have collected tons of information on fantasy worlds from various pasta stories, books, games, etc." It's kind of them to refer to the site as "fairly sizable"—I don't think I'd characterize it as such yet, though I certainly hope it'll get there—and of course they err in saying the information is collected from other sources; aside from the Worlds of the Week, all Wongery content is original. Still, I'm glad for the mention, even if nothing came of it and no one replied to the post.

The /x/ post continues: "The thing that I found odd was that not a single person has commented on anything, posted to the blog, or interacted with the twitter account."

Yes, well. It'll get there. For now, the Wongery is a force operating in the shadows, accessible but unseen by the masses crawling the web. But one day, it will be brought into the light. You, intrepid Anonymous from /x/, were (as far as I know) the first to find it. You will not be the last. If it was found once, it will be found again.

And we've really got to be ready for when it is, so we've got to work on getting this site presentable. Making more posts. Catching up on the Worlds of the Week. And for God's sake, finally creating that Title graphic that we've claimed has been "coming soon" for the last year.