Time Capsules Below the Fold
Artifacts of the 2000s
I’ve been reading a lot of webcomics this summer.1 More precisely I’ve been rereading (and thus catching up on) comics that I enjoyed a long time ago but fell off of,2 and a lot of those were venerable even when I was first a reader in the early 2010s. This means that even comparatively timeless strips often end up carrying time capsules in the form of under-comic newsposts and commentaries.
By the nature of survivorship bias (insert spitfire picture here, I’m sure it’s relevant somehow), many of the comics in this set move quickly from “hello all three of my readers, including my mother” to “sorry about the downtime, we’re moving to a new server asap”—the price of popularity, but also I think cheap hosting was just that much weaker 20 years ago even when adjusting for the rate of technological advancement vs how bloated websites have become.
Of the remaining newsposts not covered by the above a couple leap to mind. In particular, this paragraph from Jeph Jacques’ Questionable Content in November of 2004:
Half of America is pretty sad and scared right now! We do not want the rest of the world to think that we ALL agree with what Bush does in our name, and so my good friend James has created a website called sorryeverybody.com to help us collectively apologize for the past and future behavior of our administration. DEAR REST OF THE WORLD: WE ARE SORRY.
Remember the 2004 US election? Well I don’t (I was ten and in entirely another country) but it left scars on the nascent American liberal blogosphere. After 2000 Democrats could console themselves that the Republicans didn’t win the popular vote and had basically stolen the election3—the country was still on their side, history was still over. 2004, where Bush won outright, provided only opportunities for recriminations and infighting. Luckily the same pattern hasn’t repeated since or we might be in big trouble!
For the record sorryeverybody.com is still up, and was updated in 2008 and most recently in 2016. History continues, apology not accepted. Sorry.
Less depressingly, from 2006:
I often think about the futurosity of our fledgling new century, much like Marten in this comic. I mean, we don’t have jetpacks or hovercars, but we have wireless internet. That is SO much weirder, when you think about it.
It’s a bit trite at this point, but it’s true.
David Morgan-Mar’s Irregular Webcomic! is regular as clockwork these days, but in the early 2010s it went on hiatus—during which he began adding commentaries to old comics starting with the first strip published on New Years Eve 2002. This leads to layered commentaries after early 2000s David also started including his own text notes.
IW!4 is primarily a lego comic, but at least in this era did some experimentation with ray tracing. For example, from April 2003:
Thanks to Constantine Thomas for lending me his CPU cycles to render panel 3 with POV-Ray. The image took 46 minutes and 55 seconds to render at 320 by 240 pixels. […] My geriatric Pentium II took over two hours to partially render the same scene, getting only 60% of the way through it. I need faster hardware!
For context, this is two and a half years after the Pentium 4 came out. In the modern era I’m a big fan of keeping old computers going as more than just museum pieces, but the 2000s were a rough time for that philosophy. To make matters worse:
2012-02-16 Rerun commentary: Pentium II… wait… that means I’ve only upgraded my computer once since 2003.
No wonder I’m starting to feel a bit behind the times. I bet a current-day home machine in a relatively standard configuration could render that image in a minute or two.
I also love this, still in the FAQ:
Is Irregular Webcomic! available on LiveJournal?
I’m glad you asked! Irregular Webcomic! is available via a LiveJournal syndication feed. Add it to your friends list and see the comics in your friends journal page! You can also check the feed’s syndication information.
Remember LiveJournal? I missed that one too—for the most part—but IW! didn’t. And in fact it’s feed is still going at time of writing! Not, obviously, manually, but instead it’s hooked up to the RSS feed and just been left to run for more than two decades. The original promise of Web 2.0 was this level of interoperability, of APIs and protocols (remember when you could use the chat in gmail to talk to people on independent services, or even facebook? I do remember that). We were betrayed on this a long time ago, to the point where it’s almost fallen out of the narrative, so it’s fascinating to see a little part of it still chugging along in the dark after a quarter century.5
Josh Fruhlinger’s The Comics Curmudgeon is practically cheating, because it’s a blog that comments on newspaper comics rather than a webcomic itself. On the depressing historical irony front, from October 2004:
OK, so let’s see. The U.S. is in the middle of fighting two wars right now, by my count, one of which managed to get almost every other country on Earth to hate us. The current president is one of the most polarizing political figures since Nixon. And we’re a month away from an election that both sides are calling the most important in decades.
And so of course, Doonesbury is spending a week focused on The Apprentice.
Garry Trudeau may have been getting ‘creaky’ at this point but the strip in question is distressingly pertinent 20 years later. Those elections never got less “most important,” it turns out! I’m not sure what the lesson is there but it’s not great.
Historians of the medium might note that The Comics Curmudgeon (originally Josh Reads The Comics So You Don’t Have To until the cease-and-desist from a newspaper that ran a column with a similar name6) has chronicled a pivotal period in the decline of paper comics, with Fruhlinger’s local newspaper announcing a downsizing of it’s comics section almost immediately after the blog began. It’s fascinating how the golden age of webcomics blossomed in this same environment, whereas now even web advertising is a mug’s game.
Returning to the Morgan-Mar extended universe, Darths and Droids is a Star Wars screencap comic in the style of a tabletop roleplaying campaign that he makes with his friends. It’s better than it sounds, at least in my opinion, and notably constructs a narrative for the prequels that ties them much more satisfyingly to the original trilogy than does canon.
From July 2008:
We Googled the sentence: “Jar Jar, you’re a genius”. Up until today, that short English sentence appeared nowhere on the Internet.
Darths & Droids: Breaking new dimensions in originality.
EDIT: Of course now there are tons of Google hits on “Jar Jar, you’re a genius”. Intriguingly, a lot of them are automatically generated fake blog spam sites, which farm Google’s hot trends for frequently searched terms in order to automatically generate pages that attempt to rank highly on Google. This is because, thanks to you, dear readers, that phrase managed to climb as high as #40 on Google’s hot trends, and even rated its very own hot trends page (since removed).
I think we owe it to the world to sustain and propagate this insanity. So if you haven’t done it yet, go to Google and search for “Jar Jar, you’re a genius” (with the quotes). Mention the phenomenon in your blog and encourage other people to Google for the term. Make posters proclaiming Jar Jar’s genius and stick them up all over town. (If anyone actually does this, send us photos and we’ll show them off!)
I’ll add to the trend, 17 years late. Google doesn’t tell you how many ‘hits’ it gets for a search anymore. Google doesn’t do a lot of things anymore.
All that is a bit depressing. I promise the comics themselves are fun! I have one more, the origin spark for this post. Here is Sam Logan under a March 2003 Sam and Fuzzy comic published during the first week of the Iraq War:
It is really interesting to compare the “war coverage” of the big American news networks to any other source, be it online or even from other national TV news networks. Regardless of my views on the Middle East, I don’t understand how anyone could be satisfied with the media circus that CNN and Fox News have become this week. I know we live in an age of corporate media ownership and “embedded reporters” and everything, but the level of bias is becoming ludicrous. I’m lucky because I can compare this sensationalist garbage to some at least marginally thoughtful analysis on CBC Newsworld. Folks, if you aren’t getting a good variety of views on TV, it’s definately time to hit the web. It takes at least three perspectives to make a 3D image.
Ok, that was a lousy metaphor, but you know what I mean. :)
I like this metaphor, actually, it’s much better than the idea of ‘balance’. There are more perspectives than two, for one. To extend it a little more, you can construct a 3D image through a single primary perspective and multiple secondaries. This is what I try to do myself with the things I read—you don’t have to go in depth into the rantings of awful people to have the full perspective, but that’s a trap I have often fallen into in the past.
Maybe this isn’t actually very profound, but I saw this particular news post during a scare around my own personal real-life binocular vision, and it stuck with me.
Look, the weather was pretty bad for a while, gotta do something.↩︎
Apparently I last did this four-and-a-half years ago; we’ll see if I manage to stay current this time.↩︎
Also I think this is the Ralph Nader election, which matters because… I don’t actually know, US third party stuff is inscrutable and depressing. Get yourselves a better electoral system, folks! New year, new you.↩︎
Not to be confused with It’s Walky! which also has the IW! abbreviation. But any news posts from that weren’t preserved when it was re-run in the 2010s.↩︎
I don’t know exactly how long it’s been running. David Morgan-Mar’s personal livejournal is referenced in the very next comic, while the text on the syndication page implies it was last updated some time during the 2011-2015 hiatus.↩︎
The Baltimore City Paper has by now long since been outlived by the blog, for the record.↩︎