Blondie Watch

Something I came across when looking through early Blondie strips that I found kind of amusing is this short-lived feature called the Husbands’ Back Fence Club where readers were invited to send in their complaints about their spouses. Just a few months after Blondie and Dagwood’s big wedding and already the comic has pivoted to Battle of the Sexes, ball-and-chain type stuff. Here’s the first two strips in full:

06/24/1933

07/01/1933

And the rest of them, cropped:

07/08/1933

07/15/1933

07/22/1933

08/05/1933

I’m gonna keep posting on Twitter until I can’t, which by the looks of things might be sooner rather than later. Who knows how long Bluesky will last, but I’m on there now as well. As always, check out this page for all the places I’m at on the computer.

Today is the 20th anniversary of the first post I made here on rubbercat.net. I was a kid back then and it’s a little crazy to think that I’ve had this website for more than half my life. I’ve never mentioned this before, but the main impetus for creating it was that I’d been using the name Rubber Cat Productions in my zine and I feared all the URLS would be taken by the time I became an adult, so in addition to having a creative outlet I’d have some future insurance against that. Who knew they would just add new TLDs? As the internet continues to collapse, it is nice to have a space that I can control, free of the whims of social media and pressures of capital. Thank you for reading.

Spending most of my free time playing the new Zelda game, which has been an incredible experience. I love exploring caves and the underground depths. I am keeping a diary of my progress on my game blog.

Blondie Watch

Before she married Dagwood Bumstead, Blondie’s name was Blondie Boopadoop. That’s what Wikipedia says, that’s what King Features Syndicate says, that’s what the Library of Congress says. But… was it? Out of curiosity, I looked into it, and while “Boopadoop” had been used in official promotional material dating back to 1930, I have yet to find it used in an actual comic strip. A few caveats: my search was by no means exhaustive (it would be nice to have the collection IDW put out) the OCR might have missed something, or maybe there are some gaps in the archive. I would assume “Boopadoop” came from creator Chic Young, or at least had his approval, but it’s odd that he apparently never put it into the strip, so while it’s offical enough, it’s not 100% Comic Strip Canon. Not that the strip was necessarily super-strict about continuity, mind you, just ask the Woodleys’ missing children.

Below are some of my findings; it’s interesting that some of the comic strip’s storylines would also play out in the letters section.

Belleville Daily News Democrat, August 18, 1930

Santa Fe New Mexican, August 23, 1930

Lebanon Daily News, October 8, 1930

The Windsor Star, March 12, 1932

Tampa Bay Times, December 20, 1942

Steel #1 (1977), via 13th Dimension

Maybe things were different in 1977, but in most Batman stuff I’ve read or seen it’s implied but never outright stated that the commish knows a secret identity or two, so I laughed at how blunt this answer is.

I watched the announcement that HBO Max is rebranding as just “Max.” I get it, on a basic level people don’t associate HBO with kids and family stuff, and they might reasonably assume HBO Max is just HBO and not all the other stuff they also have. I’m not sure renaming it “Max” fixes those issues, and dropping HBO – the 50-year old brand people already associate with “TV you have to pay for” – from the name of your streaming service seems like corporate malpractice. The most inexplicable decision to me is ditching the color purple in favor of blue. Everyone uses blue. Purple was fairly unique, it was key to the service’s identity, and it’d create continuity with the old service so millions of subscribers don’t go “wha happen?”

When they were talking about family shows they showed a graphic of Cartoon Network’s Summer Camp Island in the background, kind of a dick move considering they unceremoniously purged it from the service last year.

Presumably Payne would’ve made a cartoon based on whatever movie won Best Picture, so I’m going to take a stab at the other nominees:

All Quiet on the Biden Front: Biden napping while a tank labeled Inflation crushes taxpayers

Top Gun Malarkey: Biden about to crash a fighter jet labeled The Economy into a mountain

EPAtar: The Regulation of Water: Na’vi versions of Biden and AOC standing on a beach, talking about the need to protect the environment with burdensome regulation, unaware that a massive tidal wave labeled Red Wave is about to wipe them out

The Failmans: Biden sitting on a couch saying “Great movie, son!” as Hunter shows him a pornographic home video

The Banshees of Bidensherin: Biden looking distraught as he cradles a dead donkey labeled Democrat Party in his arms

Wokeness Talking: Biden dressed as a Mennonite woman saying things like “there are more than 2 genders”

DisasTár: Biden conducting an orchestra with the various instruments labeled Debt, Crime, Critical Race Theory, Wokeness, etc.

Triangulation of Badness: People on a cruise ship vomiting after seeing a Biden 2024 poster

Evilness: Biden dressed as Elvis during his comeback special saying he’s bringing back inflation

Mallard Fillmore Watch

3/5/2023

Mallard Fillmore voluntarily giving a generous handout to someone less fortunate??? Has the world gone topsy-turvy?!?

02/16/2023

Some surprising continuity in today’s Blondie… they did indeed wed on February 17:

02/17/1933

Another important date in Blondie lore…Baby Dumpling’s birthday is April 15th, fitting for a kid named after Alexander Hamilton:

11/07/1934

I didn’t intend to become a Blondie blogger, but I’ve accumulated too much knowledge from doing research and I need to share my findings. Fair warning, expect more in the future.

Made the New York Times today, no big deal.

Very funny to me that Pepsi’s answer to Sprite has to keep changing its name every 20 years, from Teem to Slice to Sierra Mist and now to Starry. Also funny that “Sierra Mist” is just synonyms for Mountain Dew, very Poochiesque.

RIP to Tweetbot, my most-used app. It made looking at Twitter bearable and even quite pleasant. I liked it so much I got a shirt with the company logo on it, and because the material is so nice and soft it became my favorite shirt (my second favorite shirt that I own, by the way, is Empty Taco by Ryan Dell). Whenever people complained about some new godawful Twitter feature, I could be content in the knowledge that I wouldn’t have to experience it, but now those days are over.

Tweetbot, along with other third-party apps, was unceremoniously killed in the middle of the night, which Twitter did not publicly acknowledge until five days later, citing “long-standing” rules that were added two days later.

Among its features:

• A non-algorithmic chronological timeline that let you read oldest-to-newest and kept your place, with an inline search that only searches your timeline. This also applied to lists.
• Being able to mute someone for a certain period of time, useful if someone’s being annoying. I didn’t even realize this was a Tweetbot feature and was dismayed to see it’s not in the official app.
• Ability to hide everyone’s display names so you can actually tell who people are instead of trying to remember who’s behind some stupid, truncated jokey name that they change every 3 days.
• Better support for multiple accounts. If you held down the retweet button, you could easily retweet something from another account. I see something cool and Simpsons-related, I could instantly retweet it from my rubbercat.net/simpsons account without switching. As opposed to… saving the tweet somehow, switching profiles, finding the tweet again, and then retweeting it.

There are probably more I’m forgetting. Now that I’ve been using the official Twitter app for an extended period of time it’s a bitter reminder of how much shittier the internet gets every day and the total contempt social media companies have for their users.

As for Mastodon/the Fediverse… I think things are getting better. Prior to Musk buying Twitter, whenever I looked at the “Federated” tab it was usually hentai, edgy chan-style humor, and tech people talking about how they self-programmed their toaster or whatever. Then post-Musk it was posts encouraging the use of content warnings for pictures of people making eye contact and scoldy posts about how it’s too white. It seems to have gotten relatively normal as things have died down. I came across some Fediverse drama recently and now it finally feels like an actual internet forum to me.