Few Favorites

I used to read comic strips in newspapers and was fond of quite a few of them because I thought they were funny or cool or nostalgic or something everyone ought to follow. All newspapers don't offer the same strips and when we changed newspapers I couldn't read the ones I used to follow. But I got accustomed to other comics and life went on.

Later I discovered that I can read comics on specific websites and that I could read any comic I wanted. And so, for about a year (2019-2020) I used to religiously, sort of, visit a number of websites (4 websites: Comics Kingdom, GoComics, Dilbert and xkcd, but 15 comics) and read the daily comic strips.

Of course, I am no machine, so I would visit them once or twice a week and catch up on the daily strips, but eventually this got a little too tedious. I mean, who in their right minds visits 15 websites every day!

So, I used my Python skills and so on and so forth and wrote a simple script that would visit these websites and download all the comics of interest and save them on my laptop. The whole operation usually took 15-30 seconds and then I would just have to look at 15 images at once; no need to search them up and wait for the pages to load and all that hassle. No ads too!

But laziness showed up. This too was a chore. I mean, clicking a program and waiting for half a minute and then reading all the comics? Come on, I can do better!

And so, around the last quarter of 2020 (I wrote the program around mid-2020 I suppose) I just stopped reading them. This took absolutely no time.

But then, after a little more than a year I decided to get back to this "hobby". But now I had a brilliant idea. I'd make a website where I can see all the comics I want to read in one place. One long scroll. I already had most of the script done, I just needed to find a way to make the website work. Github Pages only supports static sites, which means that I can't run my background scripts that go and fetch the daily strips, so I needed an alternative and that's where Heroku comes in. I don't understand the economics of their operation, but ultimately, they give me a server where I can run whatever scripts I want for free.

It took me about 1.5 weeks to understand some stuff, after which I made a website and it works fantastically. Now, I can just visit my website from wherever I want, whenever I want, and read the comics and call it a day. You too can do the same, visit this site. Buuut, this also feels like a chore sometimes, so I might just stop it altogether someday.

That being said, during the time I actually followed comics, I saved a few strips that I found to be funny or profound and in the end I collected 75 comic strips. Now this being my other site, I want to store these here so that I can come back to them whenever I want and so on and so forth.

This post is long enough as it is, so in my next post, I hope to populate this site with another post so as to give an impression of this being an active site. In my next post I present to ye my 75 favourite comic strips (in no particular order). The list is no longer maintained due to thermodynamics and I have put 7 comics per "page" (this may not work depending on your internet speed) so as to keep a momentum going but also to not stress any slow internet connections. The astute among you might notice a bias towards 'Calvin and Hobbes' and 'Peanuts'. Well, enjoy!