June 4, 2004 - there will be a break next week. There will be some new old cartoons as usual, but they may be not be uploaded until early in the week.

May 31, 2004 - Happy Memorial Day. Yes, Doctor Fun is back this week. And yes, Doctor Fun will be on break next week. And then Doctor Fun will be back until the next break. The book is still in the works - really. To keep you interested, here's the cover (which is not the same as the first cover, when the book was in tall format).

May 24, 2004 - As promised, see below, another break for a week, hopefully no longer than a week. Here's some more old cartoons.

May 17, 2004 - It looks likely I'll be taking a short break next week, but not without uploading some new old stuff, unlike the last break.

April 26, 2004 - Getting tired of that logo? I am, but I don't have a new one ready yet. The book is still in the works, and there might be another little surprise.

April 18, 2004 - Good news - the book is going to Plan Nine tomorrow for a test printing. Bad news - it took longer to put it together than I expected, so no work was done finishing up the Peeps special. It will run when it runs. Nobody expects ... the Peeps Special! In the meantime, regular cartoons resume.

April 7, 2004 - Doctor Fun Emergency Break! Peeps Week is Canceled! Well, sort of. Peeps Week is delayed, ok and the Doctor Fun studio has "gone dark" this week, to use tv talk. This is an unplanned break. The next planned break wasn't supposed to be until June, and a gigantic Peeps Bonus was to be ready to go by this Sunday. So what's going on? Good things, actually (no, I'm not having a baby). As you may have heard, there have been rumors of a Doctor Fun book, and the rumors are true. Unfortunately, through no particular fault of anyone, the Doctor Fun book has been drifting about in the Horse Latitudes for some time. But it's drifting no more, in fact, there's a bit of a typhoon, and the final, ready-to-go-to-press version of the book needs to be ready next week. After all this time, of course the book is all ready to go, right? Um, sort of. In a better, more organized world, the book would be ready, but it's not quite there, and I've got to get it done. Finishing the book does not involve drawing anything new - just a lot of tedious desktop publishing-type stuff, but stuff I need to do myself, although since we changed the format to landscape I will probably draw a new cover (maybe a bit punchier than the proposed one). So, that's the way it is. I will finish out the cartoons this week, but Doctor Fun will be off next week, and the Peeps Special will run after the book is ready and I can finish it, hopefully all by the end of next week, if not sooner. Unfortunately, I don't have a supply of old cartoons on standby ready to upload for these types of situations, so it's cold turkey this time around. On the other hand, the world is crying for a Doctor Fun book, right? Right. And lest you complain too much, may I remind you that I have a day job.

And when will the book actually be available? No firm date yet. Plan Nine Publishing is testing some new equipment and production methods. I would think if the test is successful, very soon.

April 5, 2004 - It's Peeps Week (again) with Doctor Fun! There will be a bonus (hopefully, again) at the end of the week.

March 29, 2004 - As I suspected, driving all over the country last week put me on a short deadline to get the cartoons ready for next week, so the break continues. But hey, I did put 100 up this time around.

March 15, 2004 - There will be a short break next week.

March 22, 2004 - As promised, Doctor Fun is on break, this time maybe for a week, or maybe two weeks, depending on my schedule. In the meantime, I've uploaded not 50, but 100 newly-scanned cartoons from 1990.

March 15, 2004 - There will be a short break next week.

March 8, 2004

• Today's cartoon about the guppy has been covered before, but you'll have to find the old one yourself. It was too late to change it - anyway, it's important to update the jokes to keep up with emerging penis enlargement technologies.
• Some things are getting smaller, though. Here's a picture of my new downsized computer setup. Here's the old setup.
• There will be a short break around the end of March.

March 1, 2004 - that Valentine's Day sucks. In non-celebration, I've put together a collection of 50 slightly raunchy Doctor Fun cartoons from days past. Slightly raunchy because this is still a PG-13 cartoon - the ibiblio merger with Vivid Video fell through. There are plenty more - a quick peek found more than 100 possibilities. Do I have a dirty mind? Probably not, since it was 100 out of a couple thousand - only a few know for sure. And finally, If I've accomplished anything in this life, it's that something actually comes back if you type "vagina squirrels" into google.

Also, the new Comics Museum in Groningen, The Netherlands is putting together an exhibit on net comics that will include something about Doctor Fun. This is happening sometime in April. I don't know much more than that. I've offered to come over (on my dime) and give a talk on Doctor Fun just for fun. Haven't heard anything back - stay tuned, and let me know if there is any interest.

February 2, 2004 - Doctor Fun is back. I apologize for the lack of old cartoon updates during the break; I had one more set and didn't have enough time to finish putting it together and get all the new cartoons ready at the same time. In fact, I didn't get to quite where I wanted to be, so I may make up for it by taking a one-week break in March sometime. We'll see. In the the meantime, the march to 520 weeks continues.

I still have hopes of seeing at least one Doctor Fun book, but haven't heard much back from Plan Nine Publishing. In any event, I plan to have the book assembled by March, and after that we'll see what happens. I still have all the favorites and requests you sent in ages ago - thanks for those - keep sending them if you like.

For those who are interested in such things, I've switched production of Doctor Fun and everything else off my Sony VAIO Pentablet (which developed all sorts of unfixable problems) and to my laptop (Fujitsu P5010), which is much nicer, although I'm now drawing on a separate Wacom tablet again.

January 5 - 50 more cartoons from 1990 have suddenly appeared on the collections page!

December 20 - alas, I have not had time to update the logo, and the computer I use to draw is packed up. I will fix this before Christmas. And the long break starts this week. New Doctor Funs will begin again February 2, 2004. In the meantime, there will be sporadic updates with more cartoons from 1990, starting with 50 more right now. Have a nice Christmas, or holiday of your choice.

December 15 - sorry the logo is late - there will be a new one before I start the break.

December 8 - we're back. No time to fix the logo yet, though. There is a good chance there will be an extended break starting Christmas week. I have been working on Doctor Fun week-by-week instead of working ahead a couple weeks. While this kind of working on a deadline is fun for awhile, it gets tedious, and tedious equals bad cartoons. I will probably take the month of January to work ahead so I'm a couple weeks out starting again February, which will be good for all involved. For those late to the party, Doctor Fun stops when the archive counter gets up to 520 weeks, meaning ten full years. It doesn't matter how many actual years it takes to get there. We're now at week 433, so it will be awhile yet, but not forever.

November 23 - Doctor Fun is on a two-week break. But you already knew that because you read the text in bold up there, and you read the announcement last week, because you're always checking the Doctor Fun page to see what's up, right? And now, instead of crappy old cartoons from 1989, I've got crappy old cartoons from 1990 for you to stare at. You might notice a radical change in format. What happened between 1989 and 1990? Two things - I was mostly concentrating on selling to magazines, and it was hard to show editors what the nice washes I used looked like without sending them the originals, which they mostly didn't want the responsibility for handling, and which I mostly didn't want to send them. So I switched to all black and white pen and ink. The first year of this change wasn't particularly good, but at the time I was trying to sell cartoons, and I was selling more cartoons than I'd ever had before, so it looked like a good move. I had also started fooling around with computers and scanners about this time, and the only scanning I could afford to do was black and white only, so that was the second, and not as important reason for the switch, since computers and cartoons didn't turn into much of anything interesting for another couple years. 1990 was a pretty busy year for reasons other than cartoons (among other things, I moved from New York to Chicago). From here on out there aren't as many cartoons from year-to-year leading up to when Doctor Fun started in 1993, and many of the cartoons from now to then were used as material for early Doctor Funs until I decided to stop recycling old stuff (in anticipation of doing this very thing). There are 100 on them in this round, and they start here. Some of these jokes are extremely dated, particularly the one about Spy Magazine (one of my customers until they folded). There are a couple funny ones - you'll have to find them yourself. Enjoy, and Happy Thanksgiving.

November 18 - There will be a two-week break, from November 24 through December 5. As usual, I'll have some old crud I scanned up for you to look at, but not as much as usual, we're all through the zillion cartoons from 1988-1989, and I have to ration out the rest. There will also be a two-week break at Christmas. And I moved the old news section to a separate page in order to speed up the loading of this page.

October 6, 2003, Ha! You thought there wasn't going to be a new logo. Fooled you!

September 24, 2003, I was going to write some kind of thoughtful meditation about Doctor Fun being ten years old, and all, but I ran out of time, so maybe tomorrow, or the next day, or maybe never.

September 22, 2003, Everything is back to normal. September 7, 2003, Doctor Fun is on break until September 22, but there's some new scanned cartoons from 1988-89 starting here. In fact, this batch finally finishes it up for those two years. There's more to come, my drawing style changed after 1989, and there aren't as many for any particular year leading up to Doctor Fun. But there's enough to take a couple more breaks, and there's some other stuff we haven't even got to yet. There are a couple cartoons that aren't particularly funny anymore, but I left them all in since this was more than ten years ago, and not presented as something brand new. These cartoons aren't in order that they were drawn. The ones with the pencil borders around the edges are the earliest ones. You'll notice a trend towards a single topic in the last two pages - those were drawn for some special project. There is one in there I don't understand at all - even a Google search didn't help. David

September 2, 2003, Best. Sobig. Ever.

Thanks, Strongbad!

Date: Mon, 1 Sep 2003 19:19:14 --0400
From: strongbad@homestarrunner.com
To: d-farley@metalab.unc.edu
Subject: Re: Your application
Parts/Attachments:

September 1, 2003, Doctor Fun will be on break for two (hopefully only two) weeks starting next week.

August 11, 2003 - All the stuff described below has been done.

July 24, 2003 - Hi everybody! In about two weeks, which would be about August 8, we will be moving things around a little, and putting all the Doctor Fun files into the /public/html directory tree on ibiblio. The name of the root directory will still be "/Dave" in order not to break a gazillion (I wish) bookmarks and links, but now the rest of the Doctor Fun files will actually hang off the /Dave directory and there will be no more wacky recursive symbolic links between the /Dave directory and the /ftp directories. Ftp access to Doctor Fun on ibiblio will be discontinued. At last look, we were getting about 90 ftp transactions per day compared to about 40K http transactions in the /Dr-Fun directory. If you are one of those 90 transactions, I apologize, and hope you will be able to get the file through http. Keep in mind some mirror sites may continue to run ftp, and there's nothing wrong with that - it just doesn't seem to be the right place for it at ibiblio anymore (ftp access at ibiblio is mostly geared to software distros and stuff like that). Also, if you are reading the pages through the recursive directory /Dave/Dr-Fun/html..., that particular "copy" of the html directory will disappear, but it was never really there to begin with.

If you have a mirror site, you will need to use rsync to get your daily updates. I don't know that much about this business myself, having never had to set up a mirror site (I rely so much on the kindness of strangers...), but I'm told it's pretty easy to do, and light on the bandwidth and all those good things, etc. A sample command for mirroring Doctor Fun would be:

$ rsync -av ibiblio.org::Dr-Fun/ /path/to/local/mirror/dir

The rsync man page is here.

I am hopeful that the mirror sites that are updating (some seem to be a little sporadic, but I appreciate the thought) will continue to mirror using rsync. There might be other ways to do it using http, but that is up to you.

If you are not mirroring Doctor Fun and are simply one of my cherished readers, you will not see any change at all.

Thanks ot Adrianne at ibiblio for helping me with this. Adrianne also set up a second area for some of the files on the /Dr-Fun tree. I will be moving some of the extraneous stuff, like the running pictures to this area so that mirror sites don't need to pick these things up if all they want is the cartoons. In fact, I might add more silly things that don't belong under the /Dr-Fun directory and everybody will be a winner.

July 21, 2003

• Stay tuned for an announcement about mirroring and Doctor Fun file locations. We are either going to move to using rsync, and put all the Doctor Fun files in the html branch of ibiblio (meaning ftp access goes away), or put the html files in the /Dave/Dr-Fun directory so that this hated recursive symbolic link that makes people think the files aren't updating goes away. If you have an opinion about this, let me know. Thanks.
• Tardy on the logo again.
• Happy Birthday, Mom!

July 9, 2003, I've eliminated the bizarro linkage between the /html file under /Dr-Fun/html and /Dr-Fun, which maybe used to be useful but now causes nothing but problems. If this has messed up your mirroring, contact me and I'll, um, do something, I'm not sure what.

July 1, 2003, for no particularly good reason other than to have a news item, and because I suppose it keeps me fit to draw more cartoons, I've updated the running pictures to include two more races, one recent, and one from last summer. Not much of an explanation for either of them, except you can follow the pictures from start to finish. If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you might like.

• 2003 Kettle Moraine 100-mile/100K Endurance Runs. I made it all the way through the 100-miler.
• 2002 Iceland Ultramarathon (55K).

June 16, 2003, haven't forgot the the logo - busy, busy - you're still getting the new cartoons.

June 9, 2003, due to a little scheduling problem, I didn't update the cartoon Monday, but there is no break this week. New logo soon.

June 6, 2003, next Monday's cartoon will be updated late, probably Monday afternoon my time, but there will be new cartoons next week - no break.

June 2, 2003, my as it turns out not-very-trusty Sony VAIO pen tablet computer suddenly crapped out on me due to an expensive and proprietary cable that breaks, however this should not interrupt production. Back to the old ways...

May 26, 2003 - we're back we're back we're back! That's a good thing, I think. No breaks for awhile.

May 19, 2003 - (same notice as above) - Since few people saw last week's break cartoons before ibiblio started having some problems, I'm continuing the break for another week. Normal operations will recommence on May 26th. At least there's a new logo. Also, many thanks to the ibiblio staff for putting everything back together.

May 12, 2003, Doctor Fun is still on break, but as promised, here's some "more stuff", meaning 100 more cartoons from 1988-89. How many of them can there possibly be? There are still some left, and then there are all the other years between then and 1993 when Doctor Fun started. New stuff next week. Sorry about the bunny logo - I had a fabulous Mother's Day logo planned, but only had time to get the old cartoons ready.

May 5, 2003, Doctor Fun is on break this week. As usual, there are some, meaning "100" freshly-scanned old cartoons for you to feast your peepers on. The fun starts here. Also, as an extra feature, I'm slipping some of these new cartoons in as the "latest" Doctor Fun in hopes that people like that better than the usual note that I'm on break. This batch of old cartoons seems to be a bit better than some of the other batches, in my humble opinion, but what do I know. More stuff next week.

April 28, 2003, ok, probably a two-week break starting next week, with some new/old stuff each week. I have two trips (not related to cartoons) coming up and I'm a little behind schedule.

April 21, 2003,

• Slashdot me two times baby - slashdot me twice today. Well, this past weekend, anyway. What were the chances of that. Stories are here and here.
• And that's not all the excitement. Just like last year but maybe not like next year (yeesh), I squeezed out thirty more Peeps cartoons, hastily written and sloppily drawn. It's Doctor Fun's Peeporama 2003! Also, check out last year's Peeporama, and other Doctor Fun peep cartoons from the past, including last week, 2002 and this one, 2001 and this one, not to mention this one from 2000.
• Most likely for sure I will be taking a one-week break May 5.

April 14, 2003,

• It's Peeps Week on Doctor Fun. For those of you listening in from other places who don't know what peeps are - imagine a small, delicious marshmallow chicken.
• Curiously, there is an article about Doctor Fun in this month's University of Chicago Magazine. And if you typed in that link at the end of the article, welcome Chicago Alumni! At no extra charge to you here's a special expanded list of links to things mentioned in the article:
  • A cartoon about squirrels with the Regenstein Library in the background
  • Another cartoon with the entrance of the Regenstein Library. This is the old entrance before the lobby was rebuilt.
  • The Paul Serano cartoon
  • The Manhattan Project Christmas cartoon
  • Me drawing at the Sony Vaio drawing tablet computer, and here's what the screen looks like.
  • My "corner office near the A-level stacks" in the Reg. I do have a day job.
  • The first comic on the Internet: Hans Bjordahl's "Where the Buffalo Roam"
  • The first home of Doctor Fun: Keith Waclena's computer "neuromancer". (Sorry, this is the best picture I have.)
  • The Bill Gates cake. This was actually the "screen" for a cake that was shaped like a computer monitor. I heard he didn't eat any of the cake but he kept the screen. (There's more to this than meets the eye; this was drawn when Microsoft Windows was still Windows 3.x. "Chicago" was the code name for Windows 95; the screen is Microsoft's within-Word web browser plug-in; the Doctor Fun pose is a reference to an Easter egg that was hidden in Windows 3.x.)
  • The book Amy mentioned that I was reading was "The Earth Dwellers: Adventures in the Land of Ants", by Erich Hoyt.
• Not only that, but there are some Doctor Fun cartoons on display in the John Crerar Library's Science & Humor Exhibit.

April 3, 2003, Jack Leblond, who has maintained a Doctor Fun search engine at Net Smart Incorporated, since way back when, has asked me to note that he is also maintaining the Support Your Troops page.

April 2, 2003, This cartoon is running in National Review this week.

March 31, 2003 - I did, in fact, forget to update the cartoon last Thursday, but everything's fixed now. Thanks to everyone keeping score. By amazing coincidence, this week happens to be archive page "404" of Doctor Fun.

March 17, 2003 - back, from a fabulous one-week break! There will be more.

News news! There was an article about ibiblio that mentioned Doctor Fun in the News Observer.

March 10, 2003 - As promised, a one-week break, and, as usual, some old scanned cartoons from 1988-89. The new ones start here. There may not be as many cartoons from those two years as I thought - I've caught some duplicates. You might also notice that some in this batch were re-used in early Doctor Funs. And, there's a whole bunch about guitars. I might give those their own page after the break. I deny knowing how to play the guitar or knowing anything about guitars anymore.

Not sure what the schedule is for the book. Keep sending me your favorites. Thanks.

March 6, 2003 - It seems nobody much liked having the thumbnail of the latest cartoon on this page, so I got rid of it.

March 4, 2003 - For sure I am taking a one-week break next week. For sure I will have some treat for you in place of new cartoons.

February 27, 2003 - Cock-a-doodle-doo! Today is either the 2000th or the 2001st Doctor Fun, if I counted them right. Why the confusion? It turns out I repeated myself. Honest mistake. Didn't catch it until recently. Never happen again. Right. The two culprits are

and

I'm keeping them both, because they are of historic interest. Now I can say there are thousands of Doctor Funs online. Why not read them all? Why not read them randomly?

Wait! That's not all. There is even more. Want to know when anything updates on the Doctor Fun pages? It's important to know this because hardly anybody ever looks at this page compared to the gazillions (slight exaggeration) of readers who just grab the cartoon. I could be giving free money away here and you'd never know. Thanks to Jonathan Ah Kit, you can now join the Doctor Fun Website Changes List. Thanks, Jonathan!

February 24, 2003 - stayed tuned for a Doctor Fun milestone later this week, but in the meantime, enjoy this old favorite.

February 17, 2003 - whenever I don't have any real news, I'm going to start posting some random page here in order to make it look like there's some news. For instance, this week check out Doctor Fun's Head Trip. Whoa.

February 10 - Ever wanted to color in Doctor Fun yourself? Try a Doctor Fun Segmation! What's a Segmation? Click on it and find out. From ... Segmation!

February 3, Coming real soon, Doctor Fun Paint-by-Numbers! (As soon as I hear back from them - think I'm not allowed to call it "Paint-by-Numbers" ... "Color-According-to-Digits"?)

January 22, Here's a Doctor Fun logo from many years ago.

January 20

• In case you didn't notice, there's now an RRS feed for the last 15 Doctor Funs, courtesy of Philip Newton. Thanks, Philip!
• I finally finished the Doctor Fun book cover. You can see it on the Doctor Fun Book FAQ page. Still looking for your favorite Doctor Funs. Mail me. Thanks.
• Coming real soon, Doctor Fun Paint-by-Numbers! (I think)

January 6 - back again. No breaks for awhile. The book cover will be available for you to peep at soon. Thanks to all of you who sent me their votes for favorite Doctor Fun cartoons. Looks like we'll be sorting them all out at the end of January, so you still have time to e-mail me . More news soon.

December 29, 2002

• Still on break, but there is new stuff (see above).
• A certain P. Wilkins is the only person so far to send me any favorite cartoons to consider for the book. And she wants this one.

December 10, 2002 At last, here's some news about the Doctor Fun book.

November 25, 2002 Hello to anybody who stopped by the Plan Nine Publishing booth at the Midwest Furfest and picked up some cards or stopped to chat. See? There really is going to be a Doctor Fun book and this proves it.

November 10, 2002 I've changed the main Doctor Fun page to put all the links back at the top. News on the book to follow, as promised. There will likely be a two-week break at Thanksgiving due to my driving all over the place. Fortunately I have about a zillion more old scanned cartoons to put online.

October 29, 2002 Trick-or-treat! We found another mirror site. This time it's Yale Medical School. Yay for Yale! Go Bulldogs! Actually it looks like they're mirroring most or all of ibiblio and Doctor Fun is just part of this mix. Never-the-less, you can get the latest Doctor Fun, or the Doctor Fun Page, from gnujake.med.yale.edu.

October 28, 2002 A slightly less confusing home page and some news on the book (yes, there is a book, no, it won't be here by Christmas) is coming. I'm posting this here to make me actually do it sometime soon.

September 23, 2002 Thanks to Nicholas Barnard, who runs the Doctor Fun mailing list, you can also subscribe to get the latest Doctor Fun logo whenever it updates.

September 16, 2002 - we're back. No breaks until maybe Thanksgiving (except for unexpected breaks) - yay!

Also, new mirror discovered! This one in Austria. They are mirroring the cartoons but not the pages, but that's ok. Get the latest Doctor Fun or browse the Doctor Fun files at the Vienna University of Technology.

August 13, 2002 Mirror News! I've been told the SUNET mirror for Doctor Fun in Sweden is active again, and I've corrected the links to the mirror at the Manchester University in Great Britain. Thanks to both these places for their continuing support.

May 20, 2002 The Doctor Fun book is still in the works, in color, and all that. I should have the cover art ready for you to look at soon, which will be at Plan Nine Publishing, but it is not ready yet.

May 3, 2002, Virus warning: My e-mail addresses from ibiblio, including old ones that I don't even use anymore, are cropping up on this Klez or Exploit-MIME virii that are going around. I have nothing to do with these messages, other than someone has hijacked my e-mail address as the return. Most likely, the people sending them are unaware that their computers are infected, so it's bad both ways. I've been receiving these things myself, supposedly from me! It is a continual aggravation.