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Welcome, Imgurians!
🕑 Added 2025-08-26 04:15:21 +0000 UTCImgur fired all of their staff a month ago, after being purchased, and the front page is currently all people trolling the new owners. I don't need to doompost about how bad the social internet fracturing even more is for creators like me (whoops I just did), but since I'm trying to guide people over here I just thought I would say hi and set some expectations about what Swords is aiming for over the next little while.
The Swords Annual Survey continues, have your say.
2025 Plans
August - Tying up some loose ends, including some work on the future of Swords: Cut the Deck and trying to find a new day job (because Swords money should be for growing Swords, not rent)
September - I'll be doing #swordtember. 30 comics in 30 days. I will also be receiving some growth coaching, which means I will be posting content on Patreon a bit more frequently.
October - Swordtember should take us to about Sword 975, with 978 being the next scheduled Time Knife episode (they always end in a -78). Then I intend to finish the Patreon Swor'nament arc, which has two epic fights left
Decemberish? - Swords will reach Episode 1000, the long-stated goal of the series. And we will party and eat cake and I really hope my family will finally be proud of me, but probably not? and maybe I'll finally evolve into a Aegislash.
2026 Plans
We've talked about all this at length before, but-
Beyond Swords M
I consider this a natural point where I can change the series, so I plan to make the following restructure, based on lots and lots and lots of community feedback:
Swords MI - Episode 1001 and beyond will become a once-a-week gag strip with more casual continuity. You asked for this. I will post them on Sunday, meaning you'll get them half a day early if you read the weekly Patreon newsletter I post (it will keep being on the free tier)
Swords: Reforged - I'll be redrawing the older story arcs in chronological order, in higher quality, in 24 page blocks and releasing them on Patreon as pdfs and in physical print. The first of these will cover Bread Knight's journey from Bread to Demon King, with some new content added.
Rapier Tapir, Harpe, Quest Sprout and Choplet will also get some of this hero treatment, but I don't think I need to prioritize any of them over Bread Knight. I will just work as hard as I can. If I can reforge one part of the series a month and have something I can sell at the end, and maybe pay someone to make a Cut the Deck module that pairs with each one, I'll consider that a great result.
Stars - I know that talking about a series having an ending gives readers a lot of anxiety and that Stars is fairly light on plot anyway, but I think I'll be aiming for the main story hook to be resolved by episode 500 and anything beyond that is just a nice victory lap. Or maybe the beginning of something new and strange. I think the series can thrive by shifting away from its strong The Next Generation influence and become a little more Red Dwarf x Farscape x Voyager. Let's just say I have thoughts.
Anyway, welcome! I hope you have fun here! Let's run some polls soon!
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Comments
Bim Match
imgur was bought by MediaLab.la on 27 September 2001, nearly four years ago. The firing of the last of the imgur staff that came with the brand a few weeks ago completed the enshittification of imgur, leaving MediaLab free to redirect the effort and content more towards the model used by thechive.com - user input and engagement minimal, content scraped and plain stolen from a myriad other sites, focus on driving curated feeds to paying subscribers like pubs, bowling alleys, and so on (although thechive.com has made its content so vanilla and bland to satisfy its advertisers that its barely worth the bandwidth opening it. MediaLab's latest imgur user engagement exercise - ignoring the odd 'The GIF' posting and nudity posts for an hour or so while the user base rageposts about 'business daddy' while ignoring the four year ownership of imgur by business daddy' is probably one of its most successful ever - huge amounts of publicity, coverage even in the mainstream media, a heap of signups to post The GIF and the business daddy stuff (so more verified email addresses), and long-time lurkers coming out of the shadows to post on imager how much they hate imgur. imgur (and World*Star, Genius, kik, datpiff, Amino and whisper, MediaLab's other brands) will survive or not, but the flattening across the board to a bland, uncontroversial, overly moderated (AI or outsourced mods) limits the interest from people who liked the character of the 16 year old platform, will change it forever.
Racheal
They did WHAT?! FFS this timeline keeps getting worse and worse
Matthew Wills
It's less that I want to take advantage of the chaos for monetary gain and more that I don't want to lose my connection to those readers forever, so they are most welcome to be here on a free subscription
Matthew Wills
The original Time Knife episode was made the same day as The Good Place time knife episode aired (it is a direct reference); and then I was going to make 278, 378, 478, etc. just the same episode again over and over; but because the art resolution jumped between 200 and 201, I would have had to redraw it anyway, and thus the Time Knife arc began instead
plant.mimic
Out of curiosity, is there a particular reason why Time Knife episodes end on a -78?
Ali Youngman
I paused my pre bedtime scrolling of Imgur to read your post. Hopefully you’ll get a bunch of new Patreon subs and Imgur won’t die. Thanks for making such a great comic!
