Hey friends! I haven’t posted here in many years, mostly because there hasn’t been any noteworthy news relevant to this comic. This will just be a housekeeping post to make sure everyone’s aware: The Orange Belt Forums, including the Zelda Comic forum, are being retired.

If you ever joined the forum, then you’re aware that basically no one (other than me) has posted in the forum for many years now. It’s a ghost town that’s been entirely supplanted by a Discord community server for any Orange Beltians who still keep in touch with each other. The Zelda Comic forum always had dedicated [discuss] posts linked at the bottom of each comic update (for awhile anyway), but obviously those haven’t gotten any love since the comic ended.

Even then, I’d generally be okay keeping those old posts around in a working state forever, but now I’m running into some severe technical debt. The Orange Belt host is no longer supporting the version of PHP we’re running for the server software, and that software (Vanilla) hasn’t received meaningful or supported updates in many years as they switched focus to a hosted-only commercial offering. As a result, I need to shut down our Vanilla install in the next few weeks.

There’s probably going to be a bigger post somewhere on The Orange Belt’s homepage about this, but long story short, I want to keep the forum around in a read-only archival form. This community is important to me, and I feel a sense of responsibility for capturing this narrow slice of Internet history for posterity. Lots of people (including me) lived some formative years in that space, learning how to interact online as they matured over the years. It wouldn’t feel right for that to just go away.

I’ve removed the forum link from this site’s page navigation. It should still work once we go read-only, but no posting will be possible, as the site will become purely a static collection of discussion posts. If you want to keep talking about Zelda Comic, the comment section on this blog will remain open as long as there’s a Zelda Comic site. If you’d like to join our Orange Belt Discord, you can request an invite link via Discord DM (wavebirddash) or email (mario at zeldacomic dot net; to filter out the spam bots, you need to tell me what one thing Link says in episode 252!).

Apologies if this woke up someone’s RSS reader and got them excited for some big comic reboot announcement (nope), but I figured it was important to keep everyone in the loop. Love you all.

Now that I’m actually curating the blog comment portion of this site again, I’m seeing that more people than I thought actually take the time to say things! So I thought I’d repay the favor and respond to some.

Mario, i have had time to read every single strip 100 times. Please come back. Your fans miss you, i miss you, and most of all I MISS YOU.

11p0

I miss you guys too! I do still stop by the forum semi-regularly; we recently had to turn off registration to curb an excess of spambots, but if you want to have accounts I’ll be happy to get you set up, just drop a line to my comic email (mario at zeldacomic dot net). We’ll hang out and chat, it’ll be pretty okay probably?

I love Zelda Comic and your Witch’s Brews but I really wish you’d uodate more often :(

Leeroy

I’ve been trying to kick Witch’s Brew in the pants a bit, but in some ways it’s even harder to get going than Zelda Comic because it’s dependent on so many participants coming together before updates happen. We talk about it on the forums too, if you want to see the latest update discussions, or even take part in one.

You on steam, bro?

Shadow514

I am on Steam, but hardly ever play games. My SteamID is wavebirddash. I don’t normally add people I don’t know, but hey, you might get lucky!

Ok, it’s almost been 2 years I say he’s dead.

1337F0X

Is He dead?!?

Xlax

Um, are you dead now? Hello-ooo? Your fans miss you. Like me.

Sock

As far as the “are you dead” questions go, please assume I’m alive until I say otherwise.

Happy New Year 2013!

…also Happy New Year 2012.

*cough*

[Just to get this out of the way: this post is not about the comic. When there’s a post about the comic, you’ll be the first to know (because you’re reading the post!).]

Awhile back, some readers asked me where they could find music I had written. A previous version of the Zelda Comic website had some ditties I’d created in MOD tracker software (and later, a Mac OS 9 version of Logic) over a decade ago, little covers of video game tunes mostly but also some original music. My response at the time was simply that I didn’t feel the songs were related to Zelda Comic, hadn’t found an appropriate new home for them, and for the most part was a little embarrassed of my lack of musical prowess demonstrated in most of those tracks. Almost every song I’ve ever composed (except for a track on OCReMix’s Hedgehog Heaven compilation album, but let’s not talk about that) was stricken from the Internet.

Since then, a few developments have occurred:

My SoundCloud account can be found here: https://soundcloud.com/mario-panighetti. Right now it only has a silly kazoo cover of an amazing web series theme song, but I’ll soon be uploading other tracks from days of yore, including a soundtrack I made for a for reals computer game! Maybe even new songs eventually?? We will see.

Well that’s one FAQ taken care of.

[I know this isn’t the post you might have been hoping for. That one is still forthcoming (I’ve got a lot to say on that subject, rest assured).]

Hey, me again. Just making sure you’re all caught up on Homestuck. You’ve had almost a year since I first mentioned it! We’ve started a discussion thread for it on the forum, if you want to talk about recent happenings.

Oh yeah, and new Zelda Comic on Monday. But mostly Homestuck yay.

Hey there humans! Comic’s going to be ever so slightly delayed due to general holiday weekend business and some quick script rewrites. Hope you all had a wonderful Independence Day weekend! If you didn’t spend at least part of it watching the RiffTrax of Independence Day, well, I don’t know what to tell you.

Next comic coming very soon!