Share a little joke with the world

[austin_dern]

comics.com has, it appears, decided that its readership is too stable and comfortable going on reading the comics like they've been doing for years and is attempting to install some new scheme. I can't predict what the ultimate objective of this is, except that it probably involves, first, the imposition of Flash or some other unsustainable technology to make the pages slower and more likely to crash, and second, the destruction of the links everyone set up so that they can go about forgetting what comics they actually had been reading. Of course that isn't everything: I'm confident that they're going to cut off yet another Li'l Abner story mid-adventure.

At the moment the servers imploded Li'l Abner was running a Fearless Fosdick strip-in-the-strip, in which the Dick Tracy parody is machine-gunning the city's supply of chippendale chairs. There are at least as good reasons for this as what's going on in the actual Dick Tracy, which is inconsistently-drawn robots trash-talking each other without vowels. I don't want to sound curmudgeonly about the change, but it's being handled with the usual ``we changed over a third of the servers, another third serve up the old, usable, pages, and the thing just doesn't load the other third of the time'' catastrophe the past two days.

On a happier note, congratulations to Norman Muller of Bloomington, Indiana, the designated Voter of the Year for the United States! Let's not be seeing a repeat of the MacComber vote of 1988, all right?

Trivia: Director Frank Capra spent ``many an hour'' watching cartoonist George Herriman, of Krazy Kat fame, while Herriman was working in a bungalow at the Hal Roach studio. Source: Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman, Patrick McDonnell, Karen O'Connell, Georgia Riley de Havenon.

Currently Reading: To Rule The Waves: How The British Navy Shaped The Modern World, Arthur Herman.

Comments

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

This is sorta sad news, yeah.... Contrary to what they believe, I am one of the many who used to read it, but it's a drag already... so sure I say to 'em, make it more difficult... and keep me away longer... bleah... ;/

goofballs..

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm going to give it a reasonable time to straighten out. Often these new designs get pretty swiftly scaled back to the usable once they discover that nobody can use their blasted overcomplicated things. And apparently Google or Yahoo has some scheme that works better for just getting the comics.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Ohh yes, is is that year all ready from that Asimov story?

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It is indeed! Hardly seems soon enough for it, does it?

At least we've still got till 2066 until that time it turns out there's no qualified people to be president so they have to fool the computer into thinking a team is someone.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

.. hmm. I don;t remember that latter part...

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's a completely different story, and by a different author. I forget who the author was, but I do remember that when Asimov anthologized it in something or other he sniffed in the introduction that a presidential election in 2066 was either a continuity error or a reflection that something tragic had happened to the clockwork reliability of election scheduling. You could tell he was very slightly annoyed that an otherwise entertaining story had to have that glitch in it.