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Occasionally The BAT Cave
receives inquiries that fall into some common categories, so I've created
The BAT Cave FAQ to answer the most frequently asked questions: Q) Why is there a picture of a Bat Boy on the home page? A) That character was drawn for me by a most excellent artist named Enrique Piña in Houston, Texas. He penciled it on his lunch breaks and then at my request colored it for web use. I liked it so much I made Bat Boy the official BAT Cave mascot. Tricky Ricky, you rule! Q) Can I yoink Bat Boy for my own site? A) No. Q) Why is your site called The BAT Cave but the URL is wingedmammal.com? A) When I registered my URL in 1997, every combination of "bat" and "cave" were already taken, probably by speculators who hoped to sell them for profit. The holy grail URL of bat.com is actually held by British American Tobacco, which seems like such a waste. Q) Why do the Action Photos stop every once in a while, getting stuck on the last photo posted? A) Occasionally I lose inspiration and run out of decent photos to run, and the algorithm just shows the last picture I ran until I start updating it again. Q) Why can't I see Action Photos from the home page? A) The home page uses JavaScript to present one photo per day, if your browser blocks JavaScript, you have no way to reach the Today's Action Photo pages. Q) Are you a professional photographer? A) No, I am a computer programmer who does photography as a hobby. Taking pictures is the only way I can come up with enough interesting content to keep my site updated frequently. Q) I could swear I've read articles on your site that are no longer there, what happened to them? A) I used to have a section called "Pop Culture Spotlight" where I reviewed movies, games, and songs, but in hindsight they made me look like a twit so I killed off that part of the site. Q) Why do you like bats so much? A) Well, my full name is Brent Allen Thale, so my initials should give a little hint about that one. Q) Since you do like bats so much, why are there so few bat photos on your site? A) Bats are small, fast, and they only come out at night, so they are amazingly hard to photograph. Most good bat photos involve trained, captive bats and strobe lighting systems, I've never really been in a position to get that type of bat photo. Q) How are the photos on your site organized? A) Each Today's Action Photo has a link to the previous day's Action Photo. They also link to "Action Photos of Old" which contains text links to every Action Photo ever shown on the site since The BAT Cave opened in January, 1998. There is also a "My Photo Album" section that contains really old, lower quality photos from my time in Panama from 1971 to the early 1990's. Q) I want to post comments on your site, why is there no comment system? A) Ugh, I had to choose between my head exploding or not exploding. I prefer my head not to explode. Q) You seem so youthful and virile, yet tempered with a wisdom usually imparted by a lifetime of difficult years. How exactly old are you? A) As of November 2013, I am 45 years old. Wait a minute, that can't be right. What I meant to say is that I must be thirtysomething. Q) What is the background tile you are currently using on the site? A) As of November 2013, I have mostly switched over to "Stressed Linen" colored dark blue, licensed under Creative Commons: |