Boise Ed sends in this one:
Dan Sachs sends this in as a partial CIDU, wondering “Is that an asterisk? Where is the footnote?”
So, another upgrade on the GoComics website. It’s a bit mean to post this as an LOL, but it seems like every time GoComics “upgrades” there are problems. I remember after one “upgrade” Comic Sherpa (a showcase for new comic authors) was promised to return “soon”, but never did and was eventually abandoned. In recent weeks, some Barney and Clyde comics have been missing dialogue, even though they show up fine on Arcamax. But we can hope this “upgrade” will be less glitchy.
That email to subscribers mentions that the cost will be going up to $35/yr, although they are holding the price for 1 year for existing subscribers at $20.
UPDATE: As if on cue, GoComics does it again today (Feb 16):
At the same time, Arcamax has the entire comic:
Comics I Don't Understand 
I got a laugh out of Insanity Streak but then Arlo and Janis made me sad. I get the vibe but I think it’s off-target. Most money only exists digitally, encrypted on corporate computers. That isn’t the problem with crypto. There are a lot of real problems with crypto to choose from! (It also isn’t particularly funny.)
Perhaps a funnier crypto joke is this one: in 2013, a man accidentally threw away a drive containing his bitcoin password info, and it went to the town dump. That bitcoin is now worth $800 million. He wants to buy the dump. The obvious question, though, is what money he’s going to use to buy the dump, since there’s no guarantee he’d find the drive, and it would be in working order.
Hard to fit that into a 4 panel comic, though, or even a Sunday one.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/technology/man-who-lost-800-million-bitcoin-in-landfill-wants-to-buy-the-garbage-dump/ar-AA1z439K?ocid=BingNewsSerp
As for me, when I hear bitcoin, I hear tulips. [referring to Tulipmania in the 17th century]. But then, I’m an index fund kind of guy.
Yes, I’ve been hearing about that $800M-loss guy. Sometimes the story has included the point that he is busily recruiting investors, to fund excavating and sorting the dump.
My only experience with such hunts is a minor one: my daughter, then maybe 11, discovered she’d lost her retainer so we went back to Taco Bell, where we’d eaten lunch some hours before. We had to dig through 9 large trash bags before we found the retainer in the soda-soaked food and paper mess. It’s a memory from her childhood we still vividly remember, decades later.
All that trash was from the same day and hadn’t decomposed. I can’t imagine the mess of excavating a dump like this one, or the fun of living downwind.
And I’ve seen a suggestion that if you have a dead hard drive to dispose of, you write “BITCOIN” on it in Sharpie before sending it to e-waste…
Re: the asterisk in B.C: I’ve seen that asterisk before, possibly only in B.C. though. It indicates a sudden interruption in speaking.
It makes me wonder if Mort Walker had a funny name for it in “The Lexicon of Comicana” like grawlix.
Yeah, not looking forward to the GoComics “upgrade.” It seems (to me) that every upgrade on a website makes things worse.
Bumblebee did actually use a cane in the comics for a few years in the 2010s, due to knee injuries that could not be easily repaired. https://news.tfw2005.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2011/07/transformers213_1309887323.jpg
@phsiii: I don’t understand. If you wrote “BITCOIN” on a hard drive before disposing of it, I assume someone would search all the files on the drive to take control of the (supposed) money. But why would you want a stranger to look at your files? I would be more inclined to write “MALWARE” on the drive to deter strangers from searching it. What am I missing here?
Joshua K.: DEAD hard drive. So they get excited, waste time trying to read it. It’s, like, a joke.
I still think the GoComics upgrade should have been on its own. Anyway, like others, I’m rather dubious about the whole thing. I saw what the Comics Kingdom revamp was like, and didn’t really like it. The price increase will eventually be a decision point. In my case, I recently renewed, so my $19.99 change won’t be until 2/23/26, and the full price another year later.
To paraphrase Mel Brooks: Tragedy is when I drop a quarter and it falls into a storm drain. Comedy is when you lose $800 million in bitcoin.
Agree change is rarely good.
(Had tried to post longer comment, but would not post.)
Meryl — and anyone — another oddity of the system is sometimes a comment will actually publish, yet the user’s view will not refresh to the page showing the success, and then may treat it as abandoned. This happens to me when using the regular web interface, and when not already signed in, so that a sign-in step was needed.
General advice, then, could include (1) before final click to submit comment, use your capture tools to selects your typing and then to copy to clipboard (so that if it fails, a retry can be done using paste and not requiring rewriting from scratch), and (2) if after submitting, the browser does not load and show you the original thread with your comment added at the end, it may be there anyway. Instead of using browser Back arrow, do a fresh navigation to cidu.info and then to the thread in question,and see if your comment is there after all.
Thank you Mitch 4!!