Patrick D Ryall has been on the computers for as long as he can remember. Starting with gaming on a Commodore 64 in the 80s I was at the forefront of the technological progress all the way to the present day. I was never doing much at the front line. Just standing around. But I was there.

And so I was on the Internet back when it was still pretty small. Not like super-small, but pretty small. I can remember those days when it was actually hard to find information on a topic you were looking for. Last week I searched Google for “show about a kid in a coma” and I totally found what I was looking for! As easy as that! In the olden days it was not that easy. I feel like I spent years going through Yahoo categories.

But in the end I never used my connection to the Internet to its full potential. If I’d known ahead of time I’d end up trying to create a website with comics and crap, I would have started early and built a fanbase and stuff. Instead, my time on the Internet was spent just looking at stuff that interests me and interacting with people as little as possible. Much like life in general.

The first time I remember joining a forum and participating in conversations and stuff was a board devoted to Quest for Glory Five, while it was in development. Wikipedia tells me that the game came out in 1998, so I figure my time on those boards was 1997ish. When the game finally did come out (not as good as its predecessor it has to be said. QfG4 ruled!) I moved on and left that forum behind. But it was around that time that I was combining my interests in World War Two with Superheroes and I ended up finding a website about World War Two-era Superheroes. Though there I found a link to some comic book message boards where I participated in conversations and became a small part of an online community. To this day, though I don’t post often, I still make sure to check the boards regularly and keep in touch with several people there.

That held me for a few years. But eventually my desire to be online more grew! I teamed up with my peeps and we needed a website! I remember at some point we came into owning LittleChoy.com but I have no idea how. And we never did anything with it, really. Oh well. Then came the Adam West Batcave on Geocities. That lasted for a while, but it was not enough. On Tuesday June 4th 2002 Contains2.com was launched. The Official Nonsense Homepage. There we could write about whatever we wanted and make stupid drawings and all that stuff. And so that is what we did. For a couple years. Eventually Contains2 started to die and I couldn’t hold it together myself so I came to this site, the Book of PDR making my first post on Friday April 28th 2006. And since then I have been here. Very here.

I avoided the Myspace thing, and probably some other social networking things, but I did end up on Facebook around Wednesday, April 18th, 2007 where, for my profile, I described myself as follows: “I’m kind of a weird loser with an immature attitude and delusions of grandeur. I claim to hate humanity, but it’s only because I love them and want them to grow up. I have a high opinion of myself, but no self esteem. I’m a goody-two-shoes that refuses to play by the rules. And I’m also kinda dumb.” and I have not changed it since. While I don’t do that much with Facebook, I am still there and like it.

So what does it all show? Not much. I guess it just proves that my history on the Internet is not all that interesting. So… History Post Done!

A little known fact about PDR is that he was born and grew up. Here is some photographic evidence that this is so. I originally gathered this collection of photos on Contains2 and it seems that, with this being the PDR Museum and all, I should reintroduce it (In two cases I seem to have saved the thumbnails over the actual image, but until I stumble across the photos again, this will do).

So here it is, a roughly chronological photo history of PDR growing up:

Inevitably the curtain falls
and the actors leave the stage.
Less assured is that they all
will learn to act their age.

So, I just decided I should write a poem for my post today and that was what came out. Not very good, but perhaps it is a sign that deep down I consider anyone who works in the theatre to be childish and immature. A shocking look at my psyche. And since the poem suggests that I feel that way subconsciously, I might as well feel that way overtly now as well. With that in mind, I will now, being of sound mind (or at least as sound as usual) make this declaration: Hey actors! Yeah, all you stage-walkin’ make believers! You are all infantile! Why don’t you just grow up? Friggin’ babies.

Or maybe I just subconsciously noticed that “age” and “stage” rhyme and worked from there. Who can say? I am not a professional at this!

I will probably stick to haikus for a while. That said, I’m running out of old Contains2 prose stories to reintroduce to the new site, so I will likely start resurrecting old poetry before long. That’ll be something.

In other news, I just re-Googled myself and my site is still not in the first page of results for “Patrick D Ryall” even though pretty much a day has passed. Now admittedly I don’t know much about how Google works, but I would have hoped that a day would be more than enough time for them to correct their grievous Patrick D Ryall-related error.

Fact: I’m trying to break the record for most posts in one month, so expect several more essentially pointless things like this over the course of the week.

Even being called in unexpectedly to work last night can not prevent me from giving you a ton comics this week!

There are so many comics by PDR this week that yesterday I gave the bulk of it to you. That story stars myself as Agent Durning and the Honourable Kiiip Williams as Reg Lincoln, Hunter of Evil Monsters. What’s more, the pictures of Kiiip were taken like eight years ago for a photo story that I never ended up doing on Contains2. They have finally lived up to their destiny. This also means that those comics are in keeping this month’s unintentional theme of PDR Nostalgia.

And as I hinted at in that post about old PDR stories, here’s a comic strip I wrote when I was nine or ten that was redrawn yesterday:

It presupposes that you are familiar with that whole sword in the stone concept. Do kids today still know about that? I do like that even at that age I was amused by completely oblivious idiots.

Also in that post I mentioned Little Choy. I got to thinking “I’ve been meaning to do a new Little Choy” and so then I did.

Although I have had a color scheme in my head for Little Choy since the very beginning, I refuse to color him. It would probably be hideous.

And I also made this:

That is not technically any nostalgic PDR reference, but I did create it in the style of Photoshop-drawn comic that I used to do much more often in the Contains2 days.

Also, the Phone Guys are doing something too:

Can you handle how many comics there are?