About

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The Comic

A parliament of owl people have raised a grand city in a lustrous turf. These are the records of two owls who have decided to document the history and antics of their silly people in a whimsical comic strip form. Everything from the ever-shifting sovereignty to ice breaking to pigeon flinging is depicted here!

Realm of Owls is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

The Authors

Please enjoy the following ramblings from the two loonies who operate this place:

Gheralf

Huzzah! I'm the writer and author around here.

I have a slightly bizarre relationship with writing and books in that I... don't like reading that much. Even though my father was a writer (an actual writer), I've only ever read one of his books, and that was because I had to pick some book as a school assignment. Even the books and texts I find interesting, I tend to not finish in the end.

Partly the reason I like writing is because it gives me something to read. I find books and stories boring, but I have no problem enjoying my own texts. So I apologise to Hemingway, Tolstoy, Dickens and Poe. I apologise to all the great minds of literature. Your works do not interest me.

I apologise to anybody who may be reading this. Even with this cocky upstart attitude of mine, I'm imposing you with my novice-level writing. I'm not very good, but I hope you still enjoy these tiny owl stories of ours.

Thank you for being here.

Vayandil

I am the comic artist. I like big facial expressions and absurd situations, which is why our people and our crazy legends are inspirational to me. I want to record our life into images so that any creature in any world can look at them and know what kind of people we are. I can imagine some of the stuff we do can seem weird to someone else.

I also made the design to this magical publishing format and made sure you, dear readers, can have a good reading experience regardless of viewing size. But fine-tuning the experience is never done, since standards change and new possibilities open up all the time. So we will keep enhancing this platform as time goes on. User feedback is also welcome, so we can identify problems that we did not take into account.

And please excuse my apologetic partner who seems to be confused about the great authors of our fine history. Names like those do not exist in our records, but some of our classics include Charlie Chickens, Agati Chirper and Willie Tremorstick.

The Team

Realm of Owls is brought to you by Owl Basket, a creative team on a journey for enriching entertainment! We work to bring you content that's smartly fun, enjoyably clever and crafted with an eye on quality!

The Website

We're a two-person team of a "programmer/writer" and "web designer/artist". Taking that into consideration, we decided to build the site from scratch. There's no CMS running this show or bloating plugins or libraries like jQuery. Gheralf wrote the code and designed the database structure, and Vayandil drew all the images and conjured the layout in various media forms. Then we cooperated to put it all together and optimized the loading times.

We wanted to take our time and do everything as well as we could. The site is very image-heavy, which is generally a bad thing for sites that want to have a lot of traffic. That considered, the site is surprisingly fast, unless you've done something like blocked all caching and stuff.

• Developed mobile first
• Using friendly URLs
• Doing some mad caching
• Minified and using Gzipped files
• SEO-friendly
• AdBlock-friendly
• Social Media -friendly
• User-friendly
• Doing its best to follow crazy EU laws
• Tested to work on all of the most common web browsers
• Using keyboard commands (use arrow keys LEFT or RIGHT to switch between comics)
• Using swipe commands (swipe LEFT or RIGHT to switch between comics)
• NoScript-friendly (except for comic searching and sorting in the Comics archive, and the arrow key/swipe navigation)

While Vayandil was drawing all the pictures, compressing them into ideal sizes and lovingly putting them into place, Gheralf took the time to index the database. Such an unnecessary measure! It's not like we're ever going to have more than a couple of hundred of rows of data. So enjoy having super fast queries on a site that doesn't even need them!

Did you know you can use swipe commands on your mobile device to move between comics? You should by now, since it reads up there in the list! Do people even use such a feature? Probably not. Even less when they don't know it exists! I kind of want to add a popup to every page telling people about it, but that would just make people hate us. Please don't hate us. :[