This commentary was written in December 2024.

This comic was NOT in the original run of Wholesome Coolness. Instead, I posted it on my Flickr a few years later. Check out the foreword for more context, or this earlier post.

This comic was a down and dirty "diary comic". Diary comics were a whole genre of webcomics, usually by older writers who didn't want to post jokes. When I had a very eventful hike, I decided to take inspiration. This one's done in pencils and the scan is real rough, but I also didn't expect anyone but my friends to see it.

Believe it or not, this is all based on a true story - the anecdote with the Lost Boys is 100% true, including the quotes, I shit you not.

This comic features an old college friend of mine, who went by the handle substack in the early Node.js days and wrote half of the classic libraries. You may remember substack! Our lives diverged pretty significantly over the years, and they famously nuked all their public accounts a couple of years ago. But this comic always brought back fond memories of us hanging out together and me eventually learning how to write server-side javascript. I hope subb rubb's doing well.

--Josh