Thing 1: This is awesome, despite having taken years and despite the half of the suggestions for warming back up not having gotten the limelight (hey, we can't all have our off-the-wall ideas come to anything... although, if DarkerDark ever needs to warm up again he could just go back to those suggestions and do more of them without asking for any more and flooding with suggestions again).
Thind 2: This really needs some kind of notification system to let us know when an actual update has occured, since it happens so rarely compared to the bumpiness. Maybe a second thread and story and discussion can be split between the two respectively. Or maybe a separate thread just to post "Hey, actual story (or at least something with DD drawing) in main thread updated!" Niether of those seems ideal, but it would automate the process of getting notification on the actual updates. The alternative is somebody keeps an email list; to quote GLaDOS, "I think we both know that isn't going to happen." The big question with multiple threads or anything is, basically... what could be done within the rules of the (sub)forum (after all, it wouldn't do for the titan to break out of its cage over the matter).
(If I ever develop a web-based forum from scratch or something that lets me edit deep down in the mechanics itself, remind me to give it a mechanic whereby people can follow a thread in a particular way that receives notifications only when the OP specifically triggers this special following mechanic -- basically, allow all the normal list-of-posts-since-your-last and email-every-post mechanics, but add an additional option to, without those, put yourself on a list that gets pinged not merely when anybody wants, not merely when the OP happens to post, but when the OP specifically pings the sleeping lurker list -- hey, maybe that's a good name for it.)
Not that I don't find the in-between stuff by my fellow commenters hilarious (most of the time anyway, ehem), mind you, but I'd like to come back and catch up in a burst when there's more story, rather than following along every few posts for months, get the picture (no pun intended)?