Packed, but slightly longer

April 4, 2025 8:17 PM

If you took Shortpacked! (the webcomic) off your RSS feed after it ended in 2015, you may have missed its last seventeen updates, most of them on April 1st of each year. Examples under the cut.

The first, kind of disturbing but useful if you want to just click the Next arrow a lot
Private equity firms
Star Wars joke!
Covid-19
Mallard Filmore
Sexual hijinx
Pronouns
Blazing Saddles
This year's

posted by one for the books (6 comments total)

Why would anyone delete anything from their RSS feed just because it stopped updating? Isn't not doing that so you can read extremely sporadic webcomics and not be able to remember what was going on 2 months ago anyway the whole point of RSS?
posted by aubilenon at 9:18 PM on April 4 [7 favorites]

oh heck, I've seen the jesus one reworked into bad memes. I'd never heard of this and it's always fascinating to see something go from charming-if-hacky to self-aware and badass over a decade. I reread the run of Achewood from time to time and get similar feelings. Like you can see someone with good ideas and intentions develop better ideas and intentions thru their medium. Thank you for sharing this.
posted by es_de_bah at 9:37 PM on April 4

Why would anyone delete anything from their RSS feed just because it stopped updating?

Sometimes to declutter, sometimes to keep the weight of bygone days off your back.

There are feeds that I keep around for old time's sake and to remember people who are no longer with us, like the feed of Richard Thompson's blog, who passed away over a decade ago but still updates from time to time with news from his friends who keep the blog going with news of tributes to Thompson, or research on Parkinson's disease, which killed him. But I can't afford (in terms of time and effort spent) to do that with every feed I've ever followed.
posted by JHarris at 10:03 PM on April 4 [3 favorites]

For those who aren't familiar: David Willis's main project since Shortpacked! ended has been Dumbing of Age, where he more or less took many of the same characters he'd been drawing for years and put them in a slice-of-life comic about first-year students at Indiana University. It's really quite good, though I'll admit that the 14+ years (!) of archives might be a bit intimidating.
posted by Johnny Assay at 5:13 AM on April 5 [2 favorites]

I’ve been reading Willis since It’s Walky!, and, while he can hit tedious parts (with a cast of dozens, not every character will work for every reader), somehow he keeps me coming back. I like the way he reworks the main cast for each iteration, so they are recognizably the same characters, but with slightly different problems and motivations.
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:34 AM on April 5

"Blazing Saddles is woke garbage."

lol, yeah, I'm pretty sure the people who complain that "you couldn't make Blazing Saddles today" are like the Republicans who say they love Rage Against the Machine: They don't understand Blazing Saddles, but they do like it when black people are called the n-word.
posted by AlSweigart at 7:35 AM on April 5 [1 favorite]