Now that Word Press has adjusted to occasional WEBP format images (and most of our browsers), we face a new challenge: AVIF files. Just in case it doesn’t show properly, I will follow it with a PNG conversion. But here’s hoping the AVIF will work in its given form and in future we needn’t bother producing conversions.
It’s the Final Four in college basketball, and the start of baseball season, so get ready for vicarious excitement!
But is there a Conservation of Vicarious Excitement?
Fact checking: Recent historical opinion tends to exculpate the bovine in question!
And as a gesture of public service, here is a corrected image for those who encountered it horizontal:
Comics I Don't Understand 
Sorry, some issue with the WP scheduler delayed the appearance of this post this morning.
And no, I don’t know why the standard browser page still says “Leave a comment” instead of “1 comment” but when you click the link does show my previous comment.
This should show as second comment.
Edit: OK, now it does say 2 comments.
Just to clarify, Nancy was an April Fool’s joke.
I wish there was a ‘no dreaming’ service.
With Replika, people are literally “making” new friends.
That monument makes me wonder what happened to the other 47 (or were those ten sacrificed to reduce the roster to the “magic” number?)
P.S. @ zbicyclist – It was a very good one, too. I lost interest in Nancy long before “Olivia Jaimes” took over, but I do enjoy “her” (?) talent for cracking the fourth wall more than any of the “standard” strips that have appeared in the last five decades (since Bushmiller died).
P.P.S. The clarification about the alleged origin of the Great Chicago Fire is hardly “recent”: “…in 1893, the reporter … retracted the ‘cow-and-lantern’ story, admitting it was fabricated…” and “… Chicago’s city council officially exonerated [the O’Learys] – and the cow – in 1997” (a mere 104 years later – I’m sure they were all elated).
P.P.P.S. AVIF images (just like WEBP) are superfluous innovations that provide no significant advantages and serve only to ensure the continuing planned obsolescence of otherwise perfectly serviceable hardware. Given the number of geezers that read CIDU, maintaining compatibility by preserving “standard” image formats would be a valuable public service.
P.P.P.P.S. All I can see immediately above the visible “Reply All” comic is an error message in graphic format, declaring that “replyall0-new-friends.avif: Sorry, you are not allowed to upload this file type.” Let’s hope that things stay that way.
Kilby, I join you in deprecating the invasion of new formats for simple, standard existing uses. (Though I’m sure the advocates of them can give reasons they consider these improvements.) However, it should be clear we are not looking to use WEBP or AVIF, or seeking them out. It’s just a matter of it being easier to post a comics image in the format and version that we find and download them; and it’s bad news that an item that comes in AVIF will need, for now, an extra step of generating an image converted to another format.
edited to add: But yes, the warning is not being produced by the system right now as you load the page. It was there when I tried to use the image I had downloaded; and I clipped a screenshot of the warning and then posted that, as a mix of informative/joke.
It’s good sense to be suspicious of “new and improved”, in computing just as in many other areas of life. Why do we need, for instance, super fast-acting sand? Wasn’t the old quick sand good enough?
While I enjoyed the satire of the Nancy strip, all I was thinking while reading was “This is too much text to plow through for a comic.”
🙂
As for “Conservation of Vicarious Excitement,” I’ve sometimes wondered about the football teams that ostentatiously gather on the field and pray to their gods to grant them victory. The other team is doing this too. Both teams typically pray to the same god. Do they really think it’s going to pick sides in such matters, or it is just a matter of “Look at us, folks, we’re doing the religious thing you like and admire”?
@ Grawlix – I agree it would have been better if there had been a little more humor in the final panel (as a reward for reading all the way to the end), but I’m sure that the sheer amount of text was part of the (April Fool’s) gag. The purported reason for the vertical layout was to make it easier to read on small screens, but if I were to shrink that strip down to the size required to fit it on my phone (even just the width, ignoring the height), then I would have really needed a magnifying glass to read it all. Luckily, the artist has provided a target to aid in aiming for that very reason.
P.S. @ Boise Ed – I’m sure it’s mostly for the “admiration” effect, but there’s no way to tell what the coach is saying. For all we know, it might be “Dear Lord, please grant these athletes’ parents the understanding to accept that we are about to get the $#!+ kicked out of us by that team of godless heathens on the other side of the field.“
P.P.S. Re: “layout” – There are a number of strips that occasionally turn the frame on its side when necessary (such as to show Mooch hanging from a tall tree in “Mutts”). Newspapers of course do not have the option of changing the orientation for a single strip, but there’s no reason that an online archive could not rotate the image. (As expected, GoComics did not bother to do so.)
P.P.P.S. @ Mitch – Thanks for the reassurance about the new file formats. I just can’t see where they would be coming from. All the online archives I know of (such as GoComics or Arcamax) use .JPG, .GIF, or possibly .PNG – I’ve never heard of .AVIF before, and the only time I’ve had to deal with .WEBP was for a couple of photos sent to me from Washington, but that wasn’t e-mail, they came as an attachement to a text message on my phone.
There was a comedian that had a bit about players thanking the lord for their wins. He wondered why they didn’t blame him for losses. “Yeah, we were winning, until Jesus made me fumble.”
I haven’t been a Nancy fan. I saw some people in other strip comments complaining, but it wasn’t clear if they understood it was a joke or not.
Generally, I find the athletes praying are praying not for wins or to beat the other team, but to perform well and to thank God for their talents and the opportunity to put them on display.
For an example of an athlete ascribing blame to God for failures, try Stevie Johnson: https://www.foxsports.com/stories/nfl/bills-wr-blames-god-for-dropped-pass
When I see a comic to pass along, in one of those ‘strange’ formats, I find it’s easiest to take a screen shot and use .GIF – no point in looking for a conversion app. GraphicConverter doesn’t recognize those two formats.
A wonderful parody of Tim Tebow (remember him?), a la David Bowie, by Jimmy Fallon; I can’t believe this video is 11 years old already (and still relevant/funny).
Andréa, thanks for the tip, but that wouldn’t be the practise I’d adopt for CIDU posts. First, because a screenshot is intervening another limit on resolution and accuracy, since it involves whatever process is displaying it on one’s screen and perhaps losing clarity from the underlying file. Second, despite my kvetching about the step of conversion, it honestly isn’t nearly as onerous as what you describe. There’s no hunting for a format-specific conversion app; I just open it in Paint and then do a save-as. There’s still a bit of tedium about names and storage locations, but not so much.
Anyone else have a Data-Lore meme moment with Nancy?
Center Your Glass, Magnifying Here!
Oh, I wasn’t recommending it for CIDU, just mentioning how I do it for my lists. I wouldn’t presume to make suggestions to the Editors; y’all know what you’re doin’.
Kilby, I don’t know what counts as archive for you, but this AVIF for “Reply All Lite” (the single panel version)came from current feed comics pages at WaPo ; I think the same combination might have been where we ran into WEBP in the past. (The four-panel strip version of “Reply All” I see at ArcaMax I think.)
Btw, I just now saw that The Daily Cartoonist also printed the Nancy rotated, and called it a good deed. Happy to be in such good company!
Sunday’s Mutts is a very good example of a “vertical” strip:
P.S. Saturday’s strip was “vertical” too, but neither the artwork nor the gag was that appealing.
@ Mitch – That diagnosis seems a little off the mark.
@ Mitch – Larson created two completely different takes on the same topic, but what is most interesting is the way his artistic talent had improved in the intervening eleven years.