Std Dev: Origin

Before I start today’s entry, I’d like to ask for a moment of silence for the world of satire. Though he won’t be gone for quite a while, knowing that the end will come sooner than it otherwise would have makes life just that much more depressing. I would, however, like to thank Pterry for making me laugh about it, because he’s awesome like that.

Now, as promised, I will relate the story nobody cares about: The long, arduous journey of Standard Deviations.

The first seed for Standard Deviations was planted about four years ago, when I was a sophomore in high school. I had recently gotten into webcomics and started reading sprite comics like 8 Bit Theater and Bob and George (which, I am amazed to see, has ended, which means I’ll have to pick it up again sometime and read through to the end). I thought sprite comics were a really interesting concept, and since I can’t draw to save my life, I thought I’d try my hand. I had no ideas and no titles, so at the time it went nowhere.

Fast forward to junior year. I was looking at the grade sheet in my physics class and happened to notice something down the bottom where the class statistics were labeled “Standard deviation.” My immediate thought was that that was the most brilliant oxymoron I’d ever seen in my life, and filed it away for future use.

A little later in the year I returned to my sprite comic idea. I began a Final Fantasy V sprite comic called Standard Deviations, which got about four issues in before I had a hard drive crash. By the time I got my computer running again, the site it was hosted on had had a server crash, and I gave up on it for the time being.

A little later I thought I’d return to the sprite comic, but with the first issues lost to time, I set it aside for good. My next attempt to use the title came shortly after I got this Macbook last summer and realized it had comic-making software. I thought I’d try out an XKCD-style stick figure comic.

Oh god don't click on this it's massive and I forgot how big it was

And then I realized that I couldn’t even draw stick figures to save my life.

So then, a couple months ago, after reading Concerned, one of the most brilliant comics I’ve ever read in my life, I thought I’d try a Garry’s Mod comic.

While that came out somewhat okay, it’s a real pain in the ass to pose everything in Garry’s Mod without completely fucking everything up, so I gave up on that.

And then, after reading a feature on Cracked written by Chris Sims, I started reading the archives of his blog, The Invincible Super-Blog, and decided that I’d like to start my own blog. One Blogspot account setup process and twenty minutes in the Seashore image editing program later, I ended up with what you see before you. Unfortunately, the url I wanted, standarddeviations.blogspot.com, was already taken by someone who hasn’t updated since last year. So, because I’m paranoid about sniggering immature people making jokes about STDs, I ended up with stdeviations.

And here I am.