I also suspect it’s a good day for grog, if you’re into that sort of thing.

It’s also a great deal to oficially launch a project I’ve been working on for quite some time now: Robot Rum.

No, it’s not a site devoted to robot-brewed alcohol. It’s an experimental webcomic (which happens to be about malfunctioning robot pirates) that is generated daily by a ‘robot’ (actually, a small web application) named Pete-O-Tron. Being non-sentient, and having approximately five-hundred lines of code, Ol’ Petey isn’t capable of actually drawing or forming its own dialogue. However, it is perfectly capable of smashing together vector art I’ve created with ad-libbed text from Internet memes, 19th and early 20th century nautical adventure novels, and various other sources.

Initially, I expect the comics produced by Pete-O-Tron to be vaguely horrible, with any humor an accidental product. However, I’m going to be incorporating various feedback systems so that viewers can rate a comic in different ways. Pete will store this info and use it to create a sort of humor ‘DNA’ for each comic, and ideally through enough feedback I’ll be able to modify Pete-O-Tron to learn what things are funny and which aren’t.

Gee, it sounds really ambitious and pretentious when I say it like that.

Here’s the short version: I’m lazy. It’s a daily webcomic that I don’t have to update because a robot is doing it for me.

I’m not halting any other projects I’m on (like CSSquirrel), but this one took a bit of startup time, hence the infrequent updates over here.

Arrr!