I really wasn’t sure if the previous page was going to land properly when I wrote it. I went with it because in the moment it felt correct. It’s hard to judge something like that because an audience isn’t usually a single entity you can predict. A few people clearly indicated they understood what was going on between them though so I felt like I had done a good enough job for most people to get to more or less the correct understanding. In the old days it was pretty common for people to be waiting for the next page to drop so I got comments often moments after I posted a page. I always found it reassuring to get that first comment and was able to sleep better, or relax more easily. That kind of culture online doesn’t really exist anymore. It was a huge deal to have your new page up by midnight way back when. If it didn’t show up people would start tweeting at you. That kind of thing hasn’t happened in a long time. The same amount of comments appear eventually now. Whenever people feel like checking in. All culture has changed, not just online culture, but this is the only aspect where people seem less intense about it now. I couldn’t even tell you for sure when it stopped. After covid maybe? Everything’s such a haze in my memory I just don’t know. I remember waiting to read the new pages for the webcomics I used to read to appear each midnight for years, but as they ended one by one nothing filled the space and it stopped being a habit. I hold myself to the midnight posting schedule mostly to give myself structure now. That said, I also want people to feel assured that it will be there when they decide to check even if they don’t want to wait till the middle of the night to see it. I’ve been in this long enough that I’m kind of a vestige of an internet that doesn’t really exist anymore. My nature is to hold to doing things the same way essentially forever unless something absolutely stops me. I’m not sure how much of that is just me being odd, or human nature, or upbringing. A lot of people who used to do webcomics moved on or evolved to doing other things, if they didn’t just vanish. Sometimes I wonder what became of some of them.
It’s kind of funny now that I think about it because I often get comments like “I used to read your comic back in high school and I suddenly thought of it and was pleased to find it still here, and still updating!” I’ve become something of an internet porch light waiting for people to come back home to me. I don’t particularly yearn for that older version of the internet. Maybe some parts of it but I’m not pining for Myspace or anything. Maybe talking about how things are different now is just a function of getting older. Although I sort of feel that I’ve always been prone to looking back over change in this way. I guess I just don’t have a lot else to talk about. Webcomic things are still a primary thought for me even though I’m largely cut of from any kind of peer culture that may exist now. I think social media kind of destroyed what it built in that area over time. Once it turned into endless arguments, virtue signaling, purity testing, and mob rule a lot of people just kind of wandered away or left it to push out updates. It became way too easy to lose an audience than it was to gain one and that reduced the value to near zero.
Ah well, whatever. I have better things to do that go over this stuff. I’m sure you do as well. To that end I will wish you a pleasant and safe weekend. I’ll see you on Monday. Until then, change all your passwords.

16 Comments

Long time lurker, first time commenter. You still have a few old fans that are up for the comic drop at midnight I’m sure, just not all commenters. Been enjoying the comic since shortly after the swap to color and hope to for a long time yet.

I live in Sweden, so I’ve never really matched the release schedule of most webcomics. Have been reading various ones for 20+ years. These days there are only a few I follow daily/on release day. This is one of them.

I usually start my work day with going through emails, and then reading the comics to get an energy boost before the actual work begins.

Between failures schedule makes it so that it feels like checkpoints throughout the week. It’s a nice feeling.

I appreciate it.

it’s midnight somewhere, right? :D

i generally read comics at ~10am. perhaps luckily (or maybe that is why it evolved to be this time), that happens to be shortly after midnight for most of the US, and comics have just been posted in the last hours.

I check comics anytime I’m awake and have a spare moment. Sometimes that’s at 1am, like tonight. Streaming and Video-On-Demand culture killed the scheduled release, and the media saturation we saw before, during, and after Covid has killed the water-cooler-esque must-see-media landscape we used to live in. And that’s to say nothing of the quality of that media landscape this past decade. So many evergreen IPs have been strip mined and left to rot. Amid the flood of content, it’s hard to get excited about anything, good or bad. There’s more media available now, from video games, books, movies, and television series, than any one human could hope to consume in their lifetime. We’ve immortalized it and carried it into the future. I could play a game from fifteen years ago — hell, twenty-five years ago — I’ve never heard of within the hour if I so desired. I could watch entire show runs from before I was born. I could read books from before the birth of most modern countries. The day and age of needing the latest, the greatest, and the newest experiences is over. Novelty is no longer novel, and people are looking for more meaningful media. Especially after the psychological nightmare that was Covid. All this to say; unless you’re on the bleeding edge of whatever it is you’re doing, be it current events or scientific discoveries, you really don’t need to be up-to-the-minute anymore. People will find you when they find you, and the quality of your work will be the lighthouse they seek.

And yes, your passwords suck. Update your passwords. Make a system. Stop writing them down. Stop saving them. Stop using duplicates. Stop using browser and 3rd-party managers. Use as many characters as the site or app will allow. Use phrases or short sentences if you can, whatever is memorable. Length and complexity exponentially increase attempts to crack, and uniqueness outright prevents cross contamination and social engineering. Stay safe out there. The internet’s Wild West is over, and we have something far, far worse to contend with now.

I gotta write them down, or I won’t remember all the 37 passwords I’ve got going on. Plus… once I die I want my family to be able to access my emails, and close things down, and move my money and pay my last bills. It can be a right PITA to accomplish handling someone’s affairs without their passwords. I had a boyfriend end up in jail, I had his phone and the password to his phone, and his email, but because everything was locked behind his face, I couldn’t do things like look up how much his phone bill was, or what bank account his mortgage was getting paid out of, or cancel the vacation plans from his phone. If I end up in a coma, my mom will be able to access all of it since I’ve told her where the passwords are.

Yeah I have a dedicated logbook I keep in one of those little fire-safes. When every little shitting website wants a profile and password, you have to resort to something, because no normal or near-normal human can reliably remember all that shite.

And as you have noted, there are many legitimate situations where you want and need another person to have access to that stuff.

Valid concerns, to be sure. Just remember that freedom and security are antithetical to one another. You can’t have something secure that’s easy to get into, and you can’t have something easy to get into that’s secure. Keeping the ease-of-access backups in a safe is a good call, though. I rather like that, even as much as I dislike safes.

I use randomized passwords like ‘qPcnB3_”nA6;P)BZf/’ which I copy-paste from a centralized source, or laboriously type in if so required. No third party managers, because sooner or later there will be a breakin or leak or corporate takeover.

Using words or such reduce the power of the password. Worst case they can be guessed from a table. Sometimes you still want to use those because the alternative is soul-killing.

St. Pete beach Florida is really nice! My family’s gone there for generations.

I haven’t commented in quite some time, but where I live, comics release at noon in the winter and 11am in the summer according to US DST. I often check as soon as I remember, but sometimes that’s earlier in the morning than the new page gets posted. Or I got overeager and the comic doesn’t update that day.

At any rate, I often catch the new page so early, there are no comments yet. Next time that happens, I’ll leave a comment and hopefully you can sleep easier. I hope you’re doing well, Jackie. At least relative to whatever yardstick you prefer. I’m certainly glad we’re both still here.

I’m no longer awake at midnight, so it’s 8ish Eastern when I read comics.

I don’t mind what’s called virtue signaling, given all the vice signaling online.

—

Carol was still blushing in the first panel from last time? Very cute.

Long-time reader and lurker, occasional commenter here.

I know back in the day when I found webcomics and could read way more comics in one day than were in my local paper, I was amazed. Amazed at the variety of art styles, the stories, and then got to ones that were never going to run in a paper due to their story and how dark it could get. It was like discovering movies all over again.

I’ve tried to keep up with everything, but hard drive crashes, job loss to where I can’t afford internet as a luxury, and just some webcomics no longer being around have contributed to the current webcomic scene. I even remember when there would be collaborative webcomics where we’d get different art styles because the story was that big and involved numerous webcomic universes and the Iron-Man and slack Iron-Man challenges (Monday through Friday for the regular, and Monday, Wednesday, Friday for the slack) that it would not surprise me if they’re running, but it feels like that time has passed for me, as I see grey in my beard. I am not done, and my days are still many, but it’s getting harder and harder to maintain that child-like sense of wonder of finding something amazing.

All that being said, I am so invested in this webcomic, and I’m here for every story you will tell me, because imagination is magic, and your webcomic is a peek into your imagination, so magic man, dazzle me with the light fantastic, show me things that you burn for, regale me with tales of love and hate, for there is much going on in this world and you make me want to know about your world.

I’d like the part of the internet back that ran on banner ads and hope. Not the one that’s corporatized to within an inch of its life and obsessed with algorithms, trackers, and performance metrics.

Meanwhile, for these two, they have the comparative good fortune to live in the middle of the country, so everywhere is about as far away as anywhere else. They can literally go anywhere. They can go to Vegas, or if that’s too corporate and pricey these days, Reno. They can go to Seattle, New York, Florida, California…just about anything is as available as anything else is.

You’re a quick learner, Carol. Asking for “input” rather than for a specific place.

Can only speak for myself, but with age have learned the good comics will be there regardless if I am able to stay til midnight or not…as evidenced by this late reply haha. If the reading is good, the good readers will be there.

I read my small collection of web comics once a week, if possible, so here I get a full three pages like clockwork. Which is nice!

3002 Clear And Sincere.

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