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The Triumphant Return of On the Road with Chuck & Bernie

Around seven million years ago (starting in 2004), I had a webcomic called On the Road with Chuck & Bernie. It ran for a couple of years and generated more hits for this website than anything else, but nobody much noticed it and I retired it unceremoniously in 2007. Well, as of today, Chuck & Bernie are back, baby!

No, nobody asked. Nobody wanted it, either. But as long as I'm automating everything, it occurred to me that I could probably write a small shell script to add text to the Chuck & Bernie template that I was using years ago. Lo and behold, it was a pretty easy task. Put it together during an episode of What We Do in the Shadows without missing most of the jokes (I think).

Revisiting On the Road with Chuck & Bernie has been a series of surprises. I remembered occasionally breaking out of the usual format, but I didn't realize just how often I'd done it. I'd forgotten things like the copyright infringement, animated gifs, the Halloween costumes, the two month-long finding a sidekick arc, and the trip to Britain. In retrospect, it almost feels like I created the rigid format just so that I could contradict it. It's also both funnier than I remember (well, sometimes), and contains way too many inside jokes, directed sometimes at an audience of one.

I've also been misremembering that I gave it up because I was getting bored having to come up with material. The fact is that writing one (1) joke a week was a breeze; the nuissance was having to work that weekly update—a very manual process, thanks to the software I was using—into my dense schedule of procrastination.

Anyway, hopefully the new process sorts that out. Time will tell, but in the meantime, Chuck & Bernie are back on the road!