=============
watering_hole
=============

07/18/2024

From 2007 to 2011, O'Reilly Media kept up a little webcomic starring cartoon
versions of the animals from their famous books, such as Pearl the Camel
(Perl, get it?), Ruby the Jackal (from "Ruby Cookbook"), the horse from
"Linux in a Nutshell," and more. It was called "The Watering Hole." They
primarily satirized current events in technology and politics. 

As far as I can tell, these comics have been completely nuked from O'Reilly
Media's website. The shortcut to the comics themselves,
wateringholecomic.com, is definitely offline. I suspect they might have
disappeared at around the same time as O'Reilly rebranded Safari Books
Online to O'Reilly Online Learning. Or maybe when Tim O'Reilly himself
stepped down from his day-to-day duties at the company in 2011. Just
spitballing here, I haven't dug too deep yet.

The Wayback Machine has captured the original blog posts on O'Reilly's old
website, but it seems that the PNGs of the comics themselves were tucked
away behind some JavaScript? My point is that I am not able to see the
actual comic even though the URLs for them seem straightforward. A bug in
the Wayback Machine's crawlers at the time? Unclear.

I was rather fond of the comic while a college student (2008-2012). I saved
some of my favorite strips to my laptop, and miraculously I've managed to
hold onto them this entire time. Because an easily accessible archive of
"The Watering Hole" does not currently exist to the best of my knowledge
(and I've looked!) I've decided to upload my modest little collection.
Hence, this website.

---------- ---------- ----------

Valuable source of information: Silverman's resume on his LinkedIn profile
(accessed 7/18/24)

    https://www.linkedin.com/in/randallsilverman/details/experience/

Additional information and context from Wikipedia:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O'Reilly_Media