META: On Blogsy

And now, a message from me, about someone who is not a sponsor.  I just want to take a moment to express appreciation for Blogsy, the iOS app I  mostly use to maintain Roasted Peanuts.  It's the best blogging app I've seen for the platform.  Really nice!  It's had its ups and downs, but it's really evolved into an indispensable part of my blogging workflow.

This is a spontaneous message of appreciation, because I use their program every time I post, it makes my life a lot easier, and if I can drive another customer or two their way it makes it more likely to be maintained longer and get new features.  So you see?  Completely selfish motivation.  Anyway, back to Peanuts!

META: Hiatus continues

Just letting you guys know I'm at DragonCon. There isn't much Peanuts content here, other than the odd person with wearing a Charlie Brown shirt. The con ends Monday, probably regular updates will resume Tuesday. (I already have most of a new post written out, I might finish it sometime today if I can find the time.)

Four Years

I overshot it by a few days, but it's true: we've now reviewed four years of Peanuts. Only 45 to go!

In the upcoming year, 1954-55:

• We meet the second minor character, and the first really temporary character. You can tell just from the name that Charlotte Braun isn't going to stick around for long.
• Lucy grows into her role as cast bully, gaining useful practice by terrorizing her brother Linus.
• We catch a fleeting glimpse of an adult's hand! Gasp!
• The long-running strip template of Lucy pining away after Schroeder the aloof musician really gets established.
• Snoopy begins imagining things, which marks the real beginning of the character we're familiar with today.
• We get the first letter that a character writes that's depicted as words hanging in the air.
• Lucy doesn't believe what Charlie Brown tells her some more times, and Charlie Brown develops an epic series of stomaches in response.

META: "This comic is currently unavailable"

Dammit gocomics and Google.




Concerning gocomics:

It seems that a number of strips, including the ones I was just coming up on, currently display graphics stating "This comic is currently unavailable check back soon."  At this time this includes comics for Fabruary 9-12, 1954, as well as the 14th, the 18th, the 20th and the 22nd.  There may be others too.


In fact, the paragraph I just gave you us slightly out of date.  That was yesterday, which I couldn't post because Blogger was down.  Now the strips in question don't even show the error image.  Just navigation elements.  See for yourself.

I think I know why.  When I was looking through these strips before, I noticed that a few of them had been poorly cropped.  Specifically, there were three or four strips in the same image,  I seem to remember noticing they were like that back at comics.com.

I was all set to remark upon the problem when I got up to it, but what do you know, they seem to have found it just about the moment I got up to them.  I wonder if anyone at Universal reads this blog?  A pleasing, and yet unsettling, thought.

I'm going to hold off on discussing those strips to see how quickly gocomics fixes the problem.  (I could get them from Other Sources, but let's give them a week to fix it themselves, it's not like it should be a particularly hard thing to correct.)  There are some interesting strips affected so I'm loathe to skip them for long.

Concerning Blogger:

You'd think that Google themselves would know something about site reliability, but geez.  Blogger was down all of yesterday, and there was a worry that some posts would be lost.  That doesn't seem to have happened, at least in my case, but the outtage is the reason there was no post yesterday.

January 2, 1954: Charlie Brown is not a good cartoonist

Read this comic at gocomics.com.

Have we seen enough about Charlie Brown's failings as a cartoonist yet?  They're entertainingly meta, but still, we've seen the joke before.

META: Blogger Dynamic Views and Three

1.  As found on Metafilter, Tumblr blog 3eanuts presents four-panel Peanuts comic strips without the final panel.  The result is bleak and unrelenting, although I can't help but think what would happen if you did that with some other strips.  I think Dilbert would come out fairly well, since it often supplies subjokes along the way to the main joke, or uses the last panel to punctuate a joke that actually happened in panel 3.

2. Blogger has rolled out a new feature, called Dynamic Views.  Because I love you all, it is enabled on this blog.  (Also, it was on by default.)  Have a look!  The sidebar look is most useful I think, and I think that it could very easily become someone's "default" way of reading this blog.

I notice the add comment and rating features are missing from that view; you'd have to go to the main view pages to see those options.  I notice also that ads are not shown in that view, but that's okay.  I'll manage.  Somehow.... 

META: Uh-oh

"Peanuts no longer appears on Comics.com."

This is a problem guys. Not only does it mean I can't use my normal procedure to update the blog while in-lining strips, it also means there is a chance that all the links on the previous strips are going to suddenly break again like they did some time back. At over 700 strips up now, that would be a large amount of time to fix, even if I could find a drop-in replacement for the links. I don't know if my mad Python skillz could fix such a problem again, and even if it did all the "funny/cool/depressing/weird/etc." votes that have accumulated since the last time this happened would get reset again too. (That's a fairly minor thing, true, but I pay attention to those.)

I am quite peeved at comics.com now. To think they had finally gotten that loathsome "TV Pigs" link off of every damn page on the entire site, then they do this. I can only assume they lost the rights to Peanuts, but a little advance warning wouldn't have hurt.

Peanuts seems to be hosted at gocomics.com now, and I don't yet see in-lining instructions. I'll keep you posted as to what this means for the blog.

November 10, 1952: Charlie Brown is easy to convince

Last strip featured some strife between CB and the girls, here things seem to have been patched up fairly well. Well, at least that's what the girls want him to think.

Note the look on Charlie Brown's face in the first panel! That slanted, straight-mouthed expression. It hasn't been used much up to here, but it'll start getting fairly common in upcoming strips.

November 5, 1952: Charlie Brown is a budding cartoonist

The most interesting thing about this, beside the metahumor and Schulz playfully mocking his own pretensions, is that Charlie Brown's work on the comic is rather large. Of course, most cartoonists work at a scale we would consider to be very large, and artists for realistic strips are known to work larger still. But unless Charlie Brown were a serious comics groupie, he wouldn't know that. (Schulz may have been such a groupie himself; he might have known as a kid.)

META: More on the Image Break

I have figured out a way to fix all the links in one fell swoop. However, it is fairly drastic mojo. It will likely remove any flags (funny, cool, interesting, etc) that have been set on posts. Trial runs have indicated that it probably will not erase comments, but it might result in some strange feed behavior. I am not doing it immediately, but will probably do it in the next few days.

For those of you interested in what this entails....

A quick Google search didn't turn up many promising avenues. An Ask Metafilter thread from 2005 said it might require hacking the Blogger API to implement changes of this magnitude.

It turns out that it doesn't require going quite that far. It is possible to export all of the posts of a Blogger blog into an XML file, and then import it later either to the same blog or a different one. While it is on the local machine passing it through a quickie Python script easily fixes the links, once I get the old URL format solidly recognized (for the record, Comics.com's new URL system is rather simpler than the old one). It turns out that even comments get exported to the archive file.

The problems arise from the fact that, while I can restore the blog posts to a new blog then change its address to match the old one, not all of the old blog's settings get restored. The kinds of issues this produces ranges from minor (having to reupload the banner) to somewhat harsh (anyone following the blog will have to refollow).

The alternative is to delete all of the posts on the current blog and reimport them from the hacked backup. This should be safe since I have the blog backed up. It will keep all of the settings and followers, but I don't know if it will do something nutty like resend all of the pages as new RSS entries.

Will probably take action on this in a day or two.

January 23, 1952: Schroeder’s first multiword utterance is in German

Schroeder gets way into his playing in this one. His holding out his arms in the last panel is hilarious.

Also, I laughed out loud when I noticed how Schulz signed this one.

Shout out: Weapon Brown

Weapon Brown (some images potentially NSFW) is an parody indie comic that places the Peanuts characters as grown-ups. Oh, and after the apocalypse.

I ran into Jason Yungbluth, the guy who draws this, at DragonCon last year. He's cool. And he linked to the site, so the least I could do is link back.

Site news: Metafilter link, other things

Metafilter linked to the blog yesterday. Thanks for the promotion from Projects, KokuRyu!

Peter From Japan (from comments): I've switched the feed over to Full.

Issac (from comments): I think I will add a "depressing" category, thanks for the idea. Such a flag seems uniquely suited to Peanuts, although not so much in the early strips we're in now.

About this Blog

This blog is devoted to reading through every Peanuts strip, from the first to the last, pointing out the most interesting and funniest ones.  I'm not linking to every strip, but a good proportion.

Whether I make it or not I can't say, but there are thousands of awesome strips to come.  It'll be a while yet.  I already have 104 more posts scheduled to go, which takes me through about eight months of the strip.  And the strip is so frequently modern, even in the 50s, and good that it's been a breeze so far.

For following along, I don't, for the moment, inline any strips, instead linking to the appropriate page at comics.com.  It's not an optimal solution I realize, especially since they have popups and flash ads, but it's the best I can legally come up with.  If you own a copy of the Fantagraphics Complete Peanuts (lucky dog), you can follow along that way.  If you'd like one of those, might I direct you to the Amazon Store in the sidebar?

If you're forced to follow along by linking back and forth, the best way to do it, under most tabbed web browsers, is to middle-click (press "in" on the mouse wheel) on the link.  This will open the page in a new tab.

According to comics.com, eventually the Peanuts archive is going to be moving to the site snoopy.com.  I'm unsure if I'll be able to link to strips directly once the archive moves.

EDIT: I'm inlining them now, and I've edited all the prior posts to include the strips themselves.