Hat Shrapnel

Hatshrapnel Has Jumped the Shark

 

Hatshrapnelonians! Lend me your ears.

It has been a long time since Mark’s last post.

Yes, there have been posts by others. But none of them have been what you have grown to know and love over these long years!

Why has Mark abandoned us? What have we done to bring down such wrath and neglect? Why do bad things happen to good people.

We make a little offering of cookie crumbs and Arbys sauce to the burners on the toaster oven, sending smoke to the skies in the hopes he will return and set things right for us all. Others may chose to go back to his earlier work, more than three and a half years, to the days of Pantsshrapnel. Yes, it was hard to type and resounded vaguely of porn, but there you go.

In the long twilight days without a zombie paintshop cartoon or a picture of Mark’s phase superimposed upon a man wearing a fairy outfit, what do we do to make life worth living?

Lets start by looking at the numbers.

For the first year and a half, there were no comments. Pantsshrapnel was a one man band and your feedback was not wanted. Since then he transitioned them to Hatshrapnel and someone even commented on old posts a few times.  They now no longer have working pictures, although the text is still great.  There were as many as 75 comments per month. The trend went up and down with the months that Mark posted versus when he didn’t. Since March, the average number of comments per month, and indeed, per post, has dropped dramatically.  Clearly reader participation is in a waning phase following a solid run of interest. 

The number of posts that Mark has made over the years is truly amazing. There are more than 130 posts, each one an average of one page of text and a picture. The time between posts is an average of ten days, or three posts per month. Some months Mark was very consistent and managed to write once a week, but many months he let slide and waited as long as 55 days between posts. I am proud to point out that during my debut, we managed to put posts up as quickly as twice per week, the fastest since July 2006.

Right now we are in one of these long, dark waiting periods, where Mark slumbers in intellectual hibernation. He is at the cusp of the creative cycle, the critical juncture between doing something and not. The creative juices are flowing and, no doubt, churning deep inside him. It is merely a matter of time before they burst forth in a stain of masterful crayon-based cartoonery.

I have been truly impressed at Mark’s dedication and enthusiasm. No where else can I give an example of someone giving their time and creative efforts to building a website that serves absolutely no practical purpose except to make me laugh or groan on occasion. It is an amazing effort and he has done a fantastic job and asked for nothing in return. For this, Mark deserves our gratitude and loving attention in his future endeavors. I think I speak for the crowd when I hope he comes back soon.

 Thanks for letting me play.

-John