It’s that time of year when Americans give thanks that the smallpox virus and small arms fire cleared a continent for Europeans and their livestock. In that healthy spirit of aggressive annexation, I am imposing my provincial holiday on our international contributors and closing shop for a few days. Happy turkey eating, if turkey is what you’re eating, and we’ll be back as usual on Sunday.

Hey all. It’s been 10 months since we moved over to out new home at tcj.com. I think that’s hopefully enough time for everybody to know we’re there rather than here, so I’m going to stop doing updates on this blog. If you’d like to see what HU is up to, please click thorugh the link. We continue to post every day on comics, culture and more. Hope to see you there!

The powers that be are going to be doing some work on the site this evening. It shouldn’t be too disruptive, but comments may be disabled for a little bit, and you may notice other oddities. Everything should be back in place by early tomorrow. Sorry for the inconvenience, and thank you for your patience.

I think the work on the site is done for the moment. TCJ has managed to restore all our comments and post labels. I think there are probably a few blips here and there — most notably poor VM’s post from earlier in the day seems to have gotten torched (though I think it will be restored shortly). But considering what it looked like we were going to lose over the last couple of days, we’ve survived pretty well it looks like.

Many thanks to Tom, the tcj tech point man, who has worked very hard to restore the site and get our comments back. Also thanks to Dirk, Gary, and Michael for resolving this situation and taking many steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again. I was somewhat down on everybody earlier, out of what I hope was understandable panic and despair. So apologies for doubting, and my thanks again for everyone’s hard work. I’m very, very grateful to have our content back, and the site restored to working order.

Thanks too to all our readers for your patience with this, and to everyone who offered advice or sympathy. I’m very grateful Derik Badman didn’t have to do all the work he volunteered to do to get our comments back…but I still owe you, Derik.

As you may have noticed, we seem to be experiencing some problems with comments. Hopefully they’ll be fixed shortly; my apologies in the meantime.

In an effort to stem the rabid tide of spam flowing into the blog, we’re going to try to fiddle with the comment protocol a little. My understanding is, if you aren’t logged into the site, you will now have to type a word (captcha) to show that you’re human. Hopefully this will not be too big a pain. Please feel free to try test comments on this post, and to tell me how it’s going. Thanks.

Update: Incidentally, creating an account just takes a second, so if you comment somewhat regularly, you might want to take a second to do that rather than filling in the captcha every time.

I’m pleased to announce that next month HU will be adding four (count ’em, four!) new monthly columnists to our regular roster of bloggers. Our new columnists are:

Erica Friedman of Okazu.

Matthias Wivel of the Metabunker.

Domingos Isabelinho of The Crib Sheet.

And our own kinukitty who will be moving from blogger to columnist.

All of these folks should be familiar if you’ve bounced around the blogosphere. Matthias and Domingos have written for TCJ at various points I believe, and Erica is the founder and organizer of Yuricon and ALC publishing. And of course, kinukitty has written on and off for HU. They’re all great writers and thoughtful people, and I’m thrilled to have them writing here.

For the moment we’re planning to have columns appear on Sunday, and the first should go up on May 3, if I’ve got my sundial calibrated correctly. (Update: I didn’t have it calibrated correctly! It’s May 2.) So please welcome them aboard, comment copiously, show them where we keep the snack food, etc.
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And as long as I’m announcing things — I thought I’d mention that, if you have an idea for a post or an article that you’d like to write for HU, please don’t hesitate to contact me. We do have other writers pop up here occasionally, as you’ve probably noticed, and I would like to do more of that as well. You can contact me at noahberlatsky on gmail.

Also, do let me know, either in comments or by email, if you have ideas for improving the site, or features you’d like to see added. One reader pointed out that we should have a comments feed, and as you can see we have now added that up at the right. Suggestions would be especially welcome as I think there is a redesign coming down the pike at some point in the mid-future, which would be a good time to implement some changes.

So thanks for your feedback, and thanks again to our new columnists…who you will be hearing from in person shortly!