Not a task for mortal men

So, I realize that my last post may have ended up sounding a bit commercial. But I assure you, I'm not getting any kickbacks from any webcomics artists or anything, and please ignore the recent deposit in my Paypal account by Kristopher Straub for an unrelated business transaction. *cough*

Anyways, this is a thinly veiled "Updates" post before I go to work, but I'm hoping to get a more lengthy post on archiving up later tonight. But I must at least say something of great importance. Let this line of wisdom forever stand as a monument to those of future generations who may become interested in this phenomenon that we have come to term "webcomics": Tackling the Daily Dinosaur Comics archives is not a task meant for mortal men.

I mean, seriously. When I first decided to read through the archives, I took a look at what strip number he was on (thank the heavens for people who number their comics. I'll go into that more either tonight or tomorrow) and it was around 650. Not a short archive by any means, but I've read through much longer ones. Heck, I was just coming off HOUSD, which is sitting at just over 900. So I said to myself "This'll take me a week, maybe a week and a half."

And here I sit, maybe a month and countless hours of reading later, and I'm still not quite done (Darn close though. I hope to finish tonight. But there's still a good couple of hours of reading left). See, what I forgot to account for was the amount of time it takes to read each individual strip. With something like HOUSD, or an even longer archive such as PvP, I can typically read one strip every 15 seconds (I've got a cable modem, if you're curious on download times). That means that a 900 strip archive at 15 seconds per strip will take a good 3 hours and 45 minutes of solid reading time. I generally break that up into half hour chunks to prevent "super-saturation", which is my term for if I read through a huge amount of strips and then remember basically nothing from them a week later.

However, the average Daily Dinosaur comic takes me about 1-2 minutes to read, because there's usually a lot of text to go through. And often I find myself having to look up things he's referencing in the comic in either the dictionary or the Wikipedia in order to get the joke, and that takes a lot longer. So on average each comic probably takes 2 minutes to read. That means reading the whole archive of 650 will take a little less than 22 HOURS. And that's why I've been on it for so long.

Which isn't to say I haven't enjoyed it. I've laughed out loud more times than I can count. I've shared a lot of the comics with my friends, which is something I rarely do with my non-webcomic obsessed friends. Callipygian has become a daily part of my speech. And I'm definitely going to keep reading. It's just taking me forever to get all caught up.

So yeah, Daily Dinosaur Comics is going to get added to my "Webcomics I Read" list when I finally finish the archive, possibly this evening. And this super-long archive reading experience has had at least one positive side-effect. It's given me the opportunity to build up a nice stock in my "To Be Read" list. For those of you keeping score, here's what's coming up on my "To Be Read" list, in no particular order:

• Dominic Deegan, Oracle for Hire
• No Need for Bushido
• Zap!
• Candi
• Girl Genius
• Shortpacked!
• The Big Three-Oh

I think I'll start with The Big Three-Oh, since it looks like Philippe Gaboury's got a pretty short archive and each strip is short, so I should be able to get up to speed quickly. Which is good, because I'm jonesing for a quick read after Daily Dinosaur. From there, we'll just see how things play out.