New to AC?
Greetings, and welcome to Archive Crawl! My name is Catalyst, and I will be your tour guide on this trip through the imaaaagination.
AC is basically a site (“Blog” sounds like something that you pick up from loose women) in which I review webcomics that I find while trawling the internet, as well as my opinions on social trends, games, whatever.
I started off with just the comics, but doing three a week with nothing else to write about was degrading the quality of everything as a whole. Thus, it was boring. Thusly, I started to do opinion pieces somewhere down the line. Thusooth, if you’re just here for the comics then you should probably just use the menus in the top bar. Some of the older ones are not as good as the more recent stuff, I’ll admit, but I’m working on fixing them up. Kinda.
My posting schedule is simple. Mondays and Wednesdays are opinion pieces, reviews of games, random thoughts, whatever. Fridays are comics days, in which I review whatever comic I found that week. I sometimes do pieces on books or games, if I feel that they really need to be done, but most people come here for the comics. The pieces are sometimes up in the morning, but mostly in the afternoon/at night. It depends on my schedule. Lately the entire idea of a schedule has been hit over the head with a shovel and buried in the back yard, however, so take this with a grain of salt.
I do have a few rules for my reviews
- I’m generally a reviewer by omission. That is, if I don’t mention it then it was passably good. The reason for this is that I’ve always held that the worst thing that you can do for a person is coddle them, it doesn’t allow them to grow at all. If it seem like I’m just a cynical critic, well, that’s what the box says. However, take what I write with a grain of salt; I typically only review comics with some kind of worth, otherwise I simply let the natural flow of the internet bury it into obscurity and destruction. Thus, every comic on here can be considered decent unless I explicitly tell you so.
- I tend to coddle (Ignore point one here) “newer” comics, as they tend to simply be someone’s idle hobby and shouldn’t be too harshly criticized. I can sympathize, you see, as AC is still pretty much my hobby, the ads are just there for profit to break even to subsidize my hosting costs. However, I define the “hump” at 50 comics; the gloves are off past that.
- My artistic skills are limited to writing in every way, so I don’t criticize mediocre art. If it’s really bad or really good, then yes, I’ll put something in, but most of the pieces will be on the writing.
- Unlike so many sites, I only use pictures from the comic if the creator gives me permission. The reason for this lies in my strong belief in intellectual copyright, a practice that has almost gone extinct on the web.
- I moderate all comments on my pieces, but that’s only to make sure that it’s not spam. If you’re not a robot, you comment goes through, no matter how bad it is. That’s not to say that I won’t tear you a new one in the response, but I’m certainly not going to censor you. That being said, I’m not very tolerant of the dredges of “forum speak”. You know exactly what I refer to. Thus, while I don’t censor criticism, I probably won’t let something through that’s downright abusive or trolling. “Fuck this fucking piece of shit you motherfucker” won’t get through. Suck it up, let’s be civil. (Note: If it’s something like “I liked the post” or “What the hell?” then it usually gets deleted by my spam-filter. If you’re one of the super-creative saps that makes one of those five-word comments and it gets lost, well, it sucks to be you).
- I do accept guest reviews, if you contact me first. Posts will include all the credit that you can stomach.
- Since a few people have asked about it over the year, yes, you can quote my work as long as you give proper credit.
- I realize that some people, namely the authors whose coattails I ride, might take offense to something that I put in a review. It’s okay, call me out on it, I don’t mind. I get that you might be afraid of me changing the piece out of vindictive rage, but let’s call my promise to do no such thing my last bastion of journalistic integrity. I might not be a professional, but I’m also not a dick. Well, not really.
That should be all of them, I’ll add more if I think of them.
I have a main Twitter account, @Archivecrawl, and one that’s more for my gaming adventures, @GamerCatalyst. Email is Archivecrawl@yahoo.com
Other than that, enjoy Archive Crawl! Feel free to comment or shoot me an email if you have any questions/comments.
Just found your site, looked around a bit, bookmarked, got to this page, read your rules, wanted to make a point about #4:
“Unlike so many sites, I only use pictures from the comic if the creator gives me permission. The reason for this lies in my strong belief in intellectual copyright, a practice that has almost gone extinct on the web.”
OK, that’s very nice of you, but there is such a thing as Fair Use, where critics and reviewers may freely and without explicit permission or notice include exerpts of the work being reviewed. Creators have, or should, come to expect it. The trick is to not use too much, but as a teacher I can include an entire chapter from a book for classroom use, so I’m sure a handful of representative pictures from a webcomic would qualfy as fair use as well, especially when you crop them down to single panels.
Thanks for reading!
I know that I’m legally covered under fair use in terms of number four, but it’s more of a issue of respect than anything else. My little hobby here is parasitic by nature, so I tend to shy away from pulling too much material off the sites themselves without permission, including frames. The reviews themselves are my own thoughts and therefore my own material (relatively speaking), so I’m comfortable putting that up scott-free. But the rest… eh, it’s just a quirk of mine. Besides, usually the end goal is to have you read the comic, so it’s a bit redundant.
Plus, I figure the people on the sites are sick of people taking their material/mirroring their comics already, no need to add to that slag heap.