February 22nd, 2019
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Welcome to the new version of NerdByNorthwest.com! I’ve completed the site’s long-postponed transition to WordPress, which is going to enable a lot more functionality than the old website designer I previously used with my hosting provider. I will continue to update and tweak the site regularly over the next several weeks to streamline the site and add new functionality, but this is more or less the new look going forward. Yeah I should have migrated sooner, but time is finite and I had an existing contract I’d already paid for.
The new layout and navigation of the site should be fairly intuitive, but a quick summary is as follows:
- You can use the Navigation Toolbar below the logo and main menu bar to navigate through the comics (the most recent will always be displayed on the home page). Or you can also use the drop-down selector in the right sidebar titled “Comic List” to jump directly to a specific comic.
- Both ‘Nerd By Northwest’ and ‘XCOM-ic’ webcomics are assigned different “chapters” (titled ‘Nerd By Northwest’ and ‘XCOM-ic’, respectively) and are archived accordingly. You can access the separate comics in either the main menu bar (“NBNW Comic Archive” and “XCOM-ic Archive”) or from the drop-down selector titled “Select Chapter” in the navigation bar.
- Blog posts, movie reviews, travel posts, and most other non-webcomic content is shown in the blog section below the featured comic on the main page. The sidebar will also display the most recent posts, and all posts will be assigned a category (“Travel Posts” for example) to help find specific content.
Thanks go out to: 1) “Frumph” whom provided the extremely helpful ComicPress theme and ComicEasel Plugin that I’m using, 2) Nicole Sauce of Living Free in Tennessee who provided initial advice on WordPress options, and 3) all my regular readers who keep me interested in this crazy endeavor!
December 29th, 2018
Hey it’s the holidays… what do you expect? 🙂
November 28th, 2018
Good news! I have started posting the Nerd By Northwest comics up on the Steem-blockchain social networking site, Steemit. I’m putting them up in order of publication (mostly) every weekday until caught up to the present. Once caught up, I will probably be posting the current webcomics one or two days after being published here (so you faithful readers still get to see them here first!).
My comics are posted under the ‘webcomic’ Steemit tag, or you can find them by looking up my Steem username, ‘northwestnomad’. So if you’re already a Steemit user, look me up and give me some votes while you can relive the oldies but goodies! So far my webcomics have consistently made the ‘Trending’ and ‘Hot’ categories in the webcomic tag, and with your help I can grow this webcomic’s readership and just maybe help pay the rent! 😉
October 31st, 2018
Yes, the Halloween tradition is taking root in Mongolia of all places! In my first visits to Mongolia between 2010 and 2012 I rarely saw any Halloween costumes or decorations, but as of the past couple years that appears to have changed. I first noticed it in 2016 and 2017…
And this year is no exception, with the local E-mart having expanded their costume selection and adding more decorations…
Just off to the right edge of the photo above they even had a Halloween-themed photo cutout board where one can put their face through to take pictures. The irony is that E-mart (and most stores here in Ulaanbaatar I’ve been in) doesn’t like or allow customers to take photos inside the store… they wouldn’t even let me take a picture of a Christmas tree in the store last year (I had to be sneaky to take this and the first two pictures from last year, which is why the quality isn’t great). So given there’s no pictures allowed, who’s supposed to use the cutout boards?!? 😛
This year the Shangri-La Shopping Center in Ulaanbaatar even had some Halloween festivities last weekend for the kiddies, with decorations throughout the mall…
My daughter would have LOVED it if I could have taken one of these big boys home…
… as well as actors in full costume wandering through the mall, giving adults opportunities for photos and some younger kids a big fright.
Mongolia’s popular culture seems to be inundated with American pop culture and traditions, and Halloween seems to be just another example. Even my daughter’s kindergarten had a Halloween costume day! Interestingly enough, a few have adopted another time-honored American tradition… denouncing Halloween as a day of evil. Some government official in charge of the public schools made a statement telling Mongolian children not to celebrate Halloween because it’s a ‘day of ghosts’ or something like that (my Mongolian is terrible but I think that was the gist of it). The more things change, the more they stay the same, huh? 😉
July 10th, 2018
The cartoonist is on vacation!
I will be on vacation in the wilderness of Mongolia until July 17th, far away from the nearest cell tower and internet access (I can handle it better than Pete… maybe). So the next comic will be posted four days later on the 17th instead of the usual Friday. Hey, you want to get closer with nature, sometimes you gotta make some compromises 🙂
UPDATE, 7/17: Heck with it, I’m calling this a REAL vacation and pushing back the next comic for Friday the 20th instead. That’ll give me a couple days to get some stuff in order…. like cleaning out the back of our car where my wife’s big bottle of airag (fermented mare’s milk) exploded on the last day of our trip. (No amount of air fresheners in the world can put a dent in THAT funk…)
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