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!

Hey! I did the Google-my-name thing again when I got home from work and lo and behold, I win at Google! My Book of PDR is now the third result in Google for “Patrick D Ryall”. Now that may seem like a pretty weak win what with basically nobody ever going to search for my name on the Google except for me, but hey, at least when I do I get top billing.

And this brings me to a topic that I was thinking about at work tonight: Patrick D Ryall. Somehow this January has been a big month for PDR-related talk here on this website. This should come as no surprise because this is a website that has come into existence for, essentially, the sold purpose of being about me, PDR. But really, I hate talking about myself. Mostly, I bore me. I try to make this website be more by PDR than about PDR. I mean sure, there are plenty of posts about PDR up here because, hey, I gotta post something and sometimes thinking stuff up is hard, but it feels somehow like this last month has been more inward gazing than most. Early in the month I decided to document my grocery-buying of the day in all its glory. Then around the middle of the month I, quite unexpectedly, somehow stumbled into a sort of reminiscence of PDR times gone by. And then after that I began fighting for position on search engine results for my own name, more from boredom than anything, but it all adds up. Somehow January 2011 has become the most PDR-centric month on the most PDR-centric website ever!

In the cybernetic world of the Internet time and space seem even more linked than in our normal world. Though January 2011 will soon have rolled away down the hill that is linear time, all my posts from January 2011 will still be on the same spot in the Cyber-World. And so I shall take this little stop on the Internet Highway and build upon it the Museum of Patrick D Ryall.

If ever someone asks me, “What is Patrick D Ryall really all about?” I will be able to reply “Check out January 2011 on his website and you’ll know.” Probably I won’t reply that way, but I’ll be able to.

But just to make sure that the month really does offer all the information needed, I’m going to use up the rest of this post to link to a few older posts that are about PDR.

• PDR’s First Post on This Website
• Some of PDR’s Complaints About Currency-Based Society
• Several Statements PDR Stated
• A Look At Times PDR Has Been In Hospitals
• Some Thoughts On PDR’s Travels In China That One Time
• Some Names PDR Goes By
• PDR’s Thoughts On His Schooling.
• Random PDR Facts

Okay sure, I admit it, this is essentially just a ploy to find something I can post about so I can, as stated, break my previous posting record of 22 posts in May 2006. But it can also be a glorious celebration of myself! Why not? It can be two things! Besides, having an actual topic legitimately does make it easier to post. I should try that more often.

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.

I’m not bothering to update you on my groceries this week. There’s still some left, but I’ve lost interest enough that it is too much work to take it out of its various places and put it on my counter to take a picture. You’ll all get over it, I am sure.

But this month, I have brought you a random comic strip I wrote at work one night that would have been forgotten if I’d not bothered to put it online, as well as one of the very first comedical stories I ever wrote for the Internet. That one predates Contains2 by a bit. I think I first did it up as an email to Marq when I was bored one time.

It got me thinking about other stories I’ve made over the years that aren’t as lucky to have made it online. I don’t mean what’s left of the Contains2 stories that I’ve just not got around to bringing here yet, I mean the stuff that is well and truly gone and I don’t even have notes to salvage it. Granted most of these stories I, obviously, can’t remember, but there are a few that I do have faint traces of in my brain and I figure I should note them before I lose even that.

The earliest I recall was, I believe, in grade 2. We were assigned to make little illustrated books with a story in them and I can remember that my story combined Egyptian elements with cat people. Basically, what I am saying is that it was a Thundercats ripoff. Apart from that I can’t remember anything. I do know that my report card that year made an oblique reference to it saying that I didn’t adequately explain things in my stories, that I took for granted that people would know what I was talking about if I knew it. Stupid little me. Similarly I wrote a prose story in grade 5 that borrowed liberally from the plot of King’s Quest V. Plagiarism. It’s the easiest way for kids to write stories.

Also during my elementary years I remember a desire to make a Christmas movie and that I wanted a sort of Advent Calendar motif to open and close scenes. I was apparently deep. It was meant to end with a snowball fight, I think, and I remember getting in trouble when we started throwing snowballs to “practice”. Stupid little me. We also wrote a skit about bullying once and performed it at a school assembly. I’d love to find out someone got that on film, but I doubt it.

Around grade five and six, I guess, was about when I started getting into comics as well and it is no surprise that that is when I started making comics as well. I did a lot of the old fold-a-bunch-of-sheets-in-half-and-you-have-a-book style comics, including one about a superhero called Zappo which I don’t still have, but I do remember enough about the character that someday I hope to give him a home. Perhaps my other biggest comic effort was a couple sheets full of different comic strips with different themes, as if I were trying to create a whole Comics Page in a newspaper. I remember only two of the strips and one of them, I think, I will recreate for this site sometime. The other was a two panel bit with a Native American man sitting crosslegged on the floor/ground. The first panel he said “How” and in the second panel he said “ya doing?”

Sometime in either late elementary or early junior high I wrote just a couple of pages, pure description no story, about a family living in a house that was so empty people kept assuming nobody lived there and putting up for sale signs. I never did finish it, I don’t think, but I remember it impressing the parents and teacher types who read it.

In grade 7, I think, for an art class project I created a comic strip about a superhero called Dog-Thing. I got an excellent grade on that thing, the teacher wasn’t even willing to write my grade on the thing because he didn’t want to ruin it. Naturally I lost it at some point. Stupid little me. For years I assumed I would never see Dog-Thing again, but while the strip is indubitably gone I did eventually find a sketch of the main character. That means I can use him again! I haven’t got around to revealing it yet, but Dog-Thing is a retired founding member of the Team of Superheroes.

Around the junior high years I also created Little Choy. Now I can hardly call these “stories” but innumerable images of Little Choy insulting anyone willing to speak near him have been drawn on school desks and in text books over the years that I will never see again. Luckily every one of them is pretty much exactly the same.

For a grade 11 English class we had to write something and as I recall I did. I wrote something about an office being shot up by criminals or terrorists or something. Nowadays that might raise some alarm bells or something, but this was at least a year before the Columbine thing, so all I got was a comment from the teacher about how I use way more paragraph breaks than necessary and the teacher mused that usually he had to tell people the opposite. I’ve always bucked trends, I guess. I still tend to like smaller paragraphs better. And I guess part of the reason that writing that story didn’t make me look insane was because, as I recall, it was about a guy who encounters one of the criminal terrorists and while they can hear shooting coming from other parts of the building he actually talked the criminal terrorist into stopping.

Grade 12, I don’t even remember for sure which class it was, but this was after the point where I’d stopped actively trying in school, so on some exam I was taking I did what I could and then turned it over and wrote a story about a squirrel detective on the back. As I recall it involved some sort of mystery in a casino tree. I think there was a rabbit bouncer possibly? I really wish I still had this one. It sounds messed up.

Anyway, as I said, that’s just the stories I remember enough to know I don’t remember or have notes about. Who knows how many stories I’ve written that have faded into nothingness? I guess we’ll never know.

Unless Time Travel!

I successfully managed to forget my keys at work! The ironic downside to this awesome occurrence is that I simultaneously managed to fail to remember to bring my keys home from work. Some would say that that is a more important fact than the first one, but they are Too Negative.

Seriously though, I just spent the last four hours locked out of my apartment. Mostly this was okay because I spent those four hours eating a burger, going for a walk while listening to music, reading in the lobby of my building and then buying donuts before finally I was rescued by a guy who works in my building. Super? Custodian? Some other thing? I have no idea who does what in this building, but whoever that guy is, my thanks go to him.

Haiku!

Doors are made of wood.
Lasers are made of pure light.
They are different.

It has been a long time since I’ve locked myself out. The last time I remember was like five or six years ago. And it was for a longer amount of time that time, but then I had somewhere else to go.

Sadly, my time off of work is now drawing to a close. I can’t say I accomplished many great noteworthy, thanks a lot Nintendo Entertainment System, but I am pleased with the time as it was spent…

I used up all the gift certificates I’d had since Christmas for DVDs. I got Zombieland, Stand By Me, Tropic Thunder, Dial M For Murder and A Serious Man. Not a bad haul to add to my collection.

Haiku!

This is a haiku.
I wrote it on my website.
This is how it ends.

I seem to have fixed the problems my computer has been experiencing. This is because I am a master hacker. I hack computers and make them become hacked. Yep. I’m a hacker. Hackedy Hack. Hacker. Well, anyway, after an whole afternoon spent playing with various things that were supposed to help, one of them apparently did.

Also, since I am sure my nonexistent readership has tired of my plain-looking website, I have gone through things like my About page and my FAQ and added some pictures and stuff. Try to make things a bit more visually interesting. Every little bit helps.

Unrelated to my time off, I have noticed that according to the side of the carton, the grapefruit that I regularly drink gives me way more than the required daily dosage of fruits and vegetables. I am sure this is a good things, but finding that out really just highlights how much I don’t get of the other food groups. Oh, food groups, why are you so hard to maintain?

For the record, I am much better at Operation: Wolf than I was as a child, but I still can’t beat it.

Can’t really think of anything good to say, so instead I will proved status updates on PDR for everyone who follows his life:

Hey, remember how I was fighting a particularly tenacious wart on my left index finger? Well, as of January I have been able to say that I have won that battle. I suspect that I could have had that wart beaten at least six months earlier. I suspect that what I was dousing with Compound W for the last few months was not the wart but just callouses left by the constant warfare. Go figure.

I doubt I ever got around to mentioning it on this site, but another battle I have been waging for a few years was this melody I had a slight memory of but I couldn’t figure out what song it was from. Well, I finally figured it out. It was “You Won’t Dance With Me” by April Wine. Probably the reason I couldn’t find it sooner was that I was certain the song I was looking for was from the 50s. Oh well. I know better now.

Haiku!

You can’t break an egg
Until you tell it some lies.
That’s just how it works.

Final PDR update. I am pretty sure I am a werewolf. Hairy shoulders. Mammal. Sometimes I see the full moon. It all adds up.

And that’s that.

So, last week I totally got an extra half of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup in my pack of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

See?

Do you see?

As you probably know, since Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are awesome and everyone should know how they work by now, the average pack of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups comes with three individual Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. The pack of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups I bought last week had the normal three Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and an addition half of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup! You can kinda see how the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup on the right was a little bit damaged by the extra half of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup which was smushed into the package with it.

Now it is unfortunate that sudden and unprecedented confusion for me on how to get the pictures from my camera to my computer delayed me a week in sharing this amazing news to the loyal public, but sure I couldn’t make such a claim without photographic evidence. People would assume I was just making it up for the fame. But I feel the announcement is not so abated because nothing else of interest has happened to me in the interim to mitigate its importance.

I got an extra half of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup everybody!

Usually Patrick D Ryall does not make New Year’s Resolutions. This year, he is going to go against that trend. This year: Patrick D Ryall is making a New Year’s Resolution! Alert the newsmedia! Do it quick!

Are you prepared?

You had better be, because here it is:

This year, Patrick D Ryall is not going to buy ANY nails! None! At all!!!

THIS YEAR, I WILL NOT BUY ANY NAILS!

You may be in shock. Probably you are. Just take a deep breath and sit down for a while. Remain calm.