Comic for Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Posted: 6:35 am, Wednesday, February 25th

Told you today would be a little different - I needed a little break from all the storyline. Don't worry, we're right back on Friday. So I was going for a watercolor effect here. For being an ex-graphic designer-ish, I never really had to create stuff from scratch in Photoshop very much, so it's going to take me a while to get it down. Look for this look to pop up every once in a while (I thought it would save me time, it did not), probably mostly over the summer. It's not for everyday usage, but there's a few aspects I really like about it.

Here is Joseph Ades, the deceased sidewak salesman that inspired today's strip in action:

RIP, Mr. Ades. This whole strip more or less happened to me and 2.0 on the way in to see the Sugimoto show on its last day. The drummers were fantastic and cheerful, and, needless to say, Ron should fear not about the city continuing to entertain. It's great that way. (Professor Seagull is a subject of Joseph Mitchell's excellent journalism from the 30s and 40s for the New Yorker. A brief excerpt is here, and some of Seagull's Oral History is here.)

This brings me one step closer to Star Control II on my Wii. I would pay $25 for that, nearly two decades after the game's release, without thinking twice.

KT sent me this the other day and because I'm an ignoramus, I forgot about it until today. James Iha and Hanson, unite!

I hate to disappoint my snarky overlords at the AV Club, but I actually like Aruba's new ad campaign, and I've never once thought about the kid who disappeared there.

Not fact-checking government officials; letting corruption go unnoticed; underreporting events of actual significance while breathlessly letting us know about Oscar dresses. There's a lot that newspapers do that should raise our ire, but, in my experience, nothing starts a letter campaign to the papers like the funny pages. The LA Times right now is getting yelled at for dropping Sally Forth. I'm not sure what it is about comic-readers that includes a genetic predisposition to defend their territory so vehemently, but the only time my Dad ever wrote the Times-Union was when they'd futz with the comics page (or not report an Irish score - Dad's kind of intense sometimes).

Magic goats!

And I'm gone!

bullfrog

Bullfrog -- Wednesday, February 25 2009, 06:36 am

Slate asks what people did on the web in '96. I remember ESPNsportszone.com (you had to type the entire thing), Luna (a great Smashing Pumpkins site), and porn. Am I missing anything? Oh, NESticle, that was up by late '96, I think.

Link would help:

http://www.slate.com/id/2212108/www.slate.com/id/2212108/

I for one really like the new look, though it reminds me more of those fancy blending markers I used to use.

Did anyone watch Barack last night? I just watched it on the Time website. How great is it to have a President with a brain in his head!

Slate's article reminded me of the wonder that was Winamp. I would load three songs to download before going to work in the morning, and then come by at lunch to find that only two had successfully downloaded and one turned out to be incorrectly named. My father bought me that computer for graduation (1998), and I was so excited because the computer's screen was COLOR and there were speakers, and it ran windows.

Mostly I remember downloading a lot of fonts, and desktop themes.

I actually had that computer up until I went to graduate school...in 2003!

Hey look at panel 3. You're really working this style there. Such much life in it. And 4 too, in a very different way. They both come out of the page.

1996? Geez, my oldest pages started in 1993, Slate. I've got a set of pages with pictures from early 1996 that is still online UNCHANGED. That and a Metrocard gets me into the subway!

2.0, yeah, what is this with a president you feel like listening to.

1996 web...main thing I remember were personal home pages...Think Grafer in particular had some fun with those...Guess that's the precursor to Facebook and all, but you actually had to know how to write HTML code to get them up there and with colors and everything. good times.

1. My web days go back to 1990 at RPI when some nerd in one of the computer labs showed me how to look up porn. Actually, it probably wasn't even www back then. Around 1995/96, I still didn't have a computer but I used a friend's to look up song lyrics Netscape.

2. I kind of liked the Tinted Windows songs. Are the 80's back? I want to hear more of this.

3. I liked Barack's speech too. However, with his millions of promises he reminded me that he's still a politician, regardless of how sweet he is.

I had a homepage freshman year that was basically me writing weird-ass journal entries and pasting up animated .gifs of Beavis and Butt-head head-banging.

My interweb days go back to 1991 and Prodigy. I wrote this ... geez, I guess it's basically a fanfic of the first Quest for Glory game for some "club" I hung out on the gaming BBS that they had. I know I have a print-out of that thing at home - it is fantastically dorky.

A friend of mine had Prodigy and I remember us chatting with some boy in a chat room and getting booted off for illicit behavior. This wasn't "cyber sex" (do people still use that term?), I think we may have used improper language...I'm not sure. The take away from this is someone was actually monitoring our activity. I can't imagine such a thing happening today.

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My name and those of my friends were on the web as soon as 1997, when we were posted on nhl.com as the 17-and-under division winners of the NHL Breakout 1997 roller hockey tournament in Pittsburgh. That was a proud moment, so most of our web time in computer science class was spent re-reading the names to make sure they were still there. I recently went on a deep Google dive looking for it again, but sadly it was long gone.

Other big sites back then were ESPN and other sports stuff I don't remember. Webcrawler, anyone?

My buddy Jeffers got me in trouble with Prodigy for flame-baiting people and signing his name as "Seymour Heiney." He thought this was incredibly hilarious. He has not matured a day in fifteen years.

One day while working at Time I noticed a directory titled "1996" and started going through it. Some hilariously ghetto-looking stuff in there!

Vanity the clothing store Clothing optional galleries Clothing Makah clothing

I remember reading The Sporting News and STATS.com on AOL in about '96. It took me a decent while to learn how to get onto the broader web in my early days of AOL. Aahh.. those innocent days!