I was browsing the comics as per the "Rate and move on" method, and I all of a sudden came upon a comic that has little red xs for all the characters, has no author, no title, and was written on December 31st, 1969!

What's going on here?

Or maybe it's the spirit of a comic to come in 2069?

Oh yeah, the little red X is supposed to be the same picture in every frame, because attempts to view one make all of them try to read.

There are actually several comics like that on the site. #3 may be the earliest. I'm pretty sure it means a comic has been deleted for some reason. On UNIX systems, time is measured as a number of seconds since January 1st, 1970, so I assume that that date means the time has been set to -1.

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...all of a sudden came upon a comic that has little red xs for all the characters, has no author, no title, and was written on December 31st, 1969!

What's going on here?

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Why has nobody made the suggestion that there WAS NO INTERNET IN 1969. It's obviously some kind of mixed up deal that has been eating all my tinfoil. Oh wait...

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Why has nobody made the suggestion that there WAS NO INTERNET IN 1969. It's obviously some kind of mixed up deal that has been eating all my tinfoil. Oh wait...

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I sure hope you aren't older than 30.

http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/Internet.html

Gabe is, after a fashion, correct. The internet was around in 1969, though they called it ARPANET at the time, and only the cool people got to use it, assuming you define "cool" as "being a U.S. Department of Defense employee".

And the reason nobody else had a flash of insight like you, josh, is because (a) we're all well aware that the Strip Creator itself has only been around since January 2001, and (b) those of us who have some clue as to what's going on already explained the phenomenon, which you would know if you had bothered to read the responses.

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I sure hope you aren't older than 30.

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And the reason nobody else had a flash of insight like you, josh, is because (a) we're all well aware that the Strip Creator itself has only been around since January 2001, and (b) those of us who have some clue as to what's going on already explained the phenomenon, which you would know if you had bothered to read the responses.

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Don't pick on Josh

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Is it just me, or has everyone been shovelling down double handfuls of grumpy pills lately? I include myself in that - observe my sustained attack on NastyPope. *sigh* It's been a bad coupla weeks...

I've been trying very hard not to respond to bait that, at another time or in another place, I would jump at. Like the religion discussion. I'm hoping that all this unpleasantness is a phase. As recently as two weeks ago, it was almost entirely unheard of on this site. I don't know why everyone's been so touchy -- well, I guess it's a combination of factors -- but I'm hoping it'll go away if I ignore it.

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I've been trying very hard not to respond to bait that, at another time or in another place, I would jump at. Like the religion discussion. I'm hoping that all this unpleasantness is a phase. As recently as two weeks ago, it was almost entirely unheard of on this site. I don't know why everyone's been so touchy -- well, I guess it's a combination of factors -- but I'm hoping it'll go away if I ignore it.

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What would you know, dicknose?

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The one time I tried to bust a bottle like they do in the movies it wouldn't break. I beat it against a cinder block about six or seven times. Finally I got pissed off and really fucking whanged it, at which point the entire thing exploded and sliced up my hand.

I'm not as dumb as i sound. Here is the story of the internet, in essay form.

The internet had its beginnings about 30 years ago, not for the purpose of chat, but for defence. In 1969 the United States military had computers at several bases across the country. They were linked in a chain, one computer to another to the next. The problem was, the military realized, was that if one computer was disabled because of an attack, the others would be affected too. With the chain of communication broke, one base would not be allowed to communicate with another, and vital information might be lost. This was a serious security risk. What if, they reasoned, the computers were networked not in a chain, but in a web, with each in touch with all other computers. That way, if one computer failed, others in the web could still communicate. So the department of defense created ARPANET(ARPA stands for Advanced Research Projects Administration), a network of computer links, three in California and one in Utah. The designers of ARPANET figured the system had limited uses, but ARPANET was a wild success. People at Universities figured that networking was a perfect way to share research and information, so they started their own system. Large companies realized the advantages and got on board to create other systems. Each network interlinked with the others, making the large global system we now call the internet.

That was pointless, but the internet was not used commercially until about ten years after this took place, in 1980

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Large companies realized the advantages and got on board to create other systems.

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Not if you think about it this way. Large companies are dumb, so it took them a while to catch on. About ten years, like i said.

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I'm not as dumb as i sound. Here is the story of the internet, in essay form.

The internet had its beginnings about 30 years ago, not for the purpose of chat, but for defence. In 1969 the United States military had computers at several bases across the country. They were linked in a chain, one computer to another to the next. The problem was, the military realized, was that if one computer was disabled because of an attack, the others would be affected too. With the chain of communication broke, one base would not be allowed to communicate with another, and vital information might be lost. This was a serious security risk. What if, they reasoned, the computers were networked not in a chain, but in a web, with each in touch with all other computers. That way, if one computer failed, others in the web could still communicate. So the department of defense created ARPANET(ARPA stands for Advanced Research Projects Administration), a network of computer links, three in California and one in Utah. The designers of ARPANET figured the system had limited uses, but ARPANET was a wild success. People at Universities figured that networking was a perfect way to share research and information, so they started their own system. Large companies realized the advantages and got on board to create other systems. Each network interlinked with the others, making the large global system we now call the internet.

That was pointless, but the internet was not used commercially until about ten years after this took place, in 1980

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Who do you think you are, my sixth grade teacher?

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Not if you think about it this way. Large companies are dumb, so it took them a while to catch on. About ten years, like i said.

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Who do you think you are, my sixth grade teacher?

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You slept with Mr. Straightwick? No, wait, that was my 6th grade teacher.

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It's obviously some kind of mixed up deal that has been eating all my tinfoil.

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Interesting fact: "Mr. Straightwick" is my porno name.

I know, i've seen the movies. I still think Mr. Crys-Afterward-and-Asks-Not-to-be-Looked-At would be more accurate.

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Interesting fact: "Mr. Straightwick" is my porno name.

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Spike Trail.

Very, very porn... actually, it sounds disturbingly gay porn...

My porn name is "Mother_Billings." At least, that's what Gabe calls me when we make our little "films."

You bunch of fucking dumbasses. It's not that the system time was set to -1. It's that in PHP, any function that is supposed to return a Unix-style timestamp (e.g., filemtime) returns undefined on failure (as when you try to get filestats from an OS that doesn't support it), which the system interprets as -1 seconds when it tries to convert it to a date. As others pointed out, time begins at 00:00:00 on January 1st, 1970, so -1 seconds comes out 11:59:59 31 December 1969. GOD YOU ARE ALL MORONS.

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It's not that the system time was set to -1.

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Maybe it's all part of an elaborate game I designed for you all while I was writing the site.

Holy shit. Brad is God.

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Are you suggesting that we're suggesting that the computer that hosts stripcreator.com has its system clock permanently set at -1?

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No, but evil_d suggested it might have been set at -1 at the time of that posting.

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No, but evil_d suggested it might have been set at -1 at the time of that posting.

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Actually I meant that the act of deleting the comic might have set its associated date to -1, as opposed to removing it from the database entirely. At least I think that's what I meant. It was a long time ago. And Brad may have reprogrammed my mind since then.

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At least I'm not posting as Dr. Pedantic.

My sixth grade teacher was a 6'5, overweight male with a texas style mustache.