New issue is out ! As usual, you'll find comics (fourt !), wallpapers, a review of Sonic Forces, some of our humes' top STCO stories and many more.
#275 is out and it's BIG. It's a HUGE story, and more has yet to come, and believe me, you'll be surprised
Just read through, and hah. StC's equivalent of Mobius: 25 Years Later? Spoiler Lesbians In Space became an actual thing, I see. Nice name for the kid, too. Cliffhangers though, aaargh =P
I don't know, I haven't seen part 2 yet. (this story was a surprise to the staff too, we only saw it earlier this week)
Absolutely sucks to hear, he was really nice when I met him at Summer of Sonic. I have a signed art print of Knuckles fighting Zachary he did that I've got as far as framing, I really must get around to putting that up.
That really blows. I met him as well at the Sheffield Film and Comic Con, and he drew me a cool picture of Sonic - which I've also got framed on my wall.
Heartbreaking to hear. 56 is far too young. I met Nigel at a couple of different conventions, and he went above and beyond for his fans, actively engaged with everyone there to see him. A very kind, warm and gentle man, sincere and humble. And an amazing artist. Here's a memoriam at DownTheTubes.net: https://downthetubes.net/?p=110547
https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/susan-antrobus-1 Nigel's family are raising money for a memorial bench. You can contribute at the link above.
I registered to edit the wiki back in 2012 (under this username), but was never successful in getting the account working on the forum at the time. The thing that's prompted me to try getting on the forum again was the news that Yahoo Groups will delete their mailing list message archives in December. This will mean the message archives of the sonicthecomic mailing list will be lost. Under a different username, I was a member of that group from quite early on (through the days of OneList and eGroups, then finally Yahoo Groups), and the email discussions contained a lot of things from early-2000s STC fandom that it'd be a shame to lose. Nigel Kitching was a regular contributor to the email threads: he posted some scripts there, and some of the comic's other writers and artists (Roberto Corona and Mark Eyles) posted bits of behind-the-scenes information on the comic's history. It was also where the first rumblings of the STC Online fan-continuation webcomic took place! So I wanted to let this community know, in the hope that there might be some way to preserve as much of it as possible. I'm not sure if, as a new member, the forum will block me from spamming too many links in one post. So here's a pastebin with URLs of interesting/relevant/amusing posts I've found so far. Some of the most notable ones are at the start, then a list of others in message number order, then some of the scripts Kitching posted at the end: https://pastebin.com/UqCbSn4S As for systematically preserving more of the list archives, beyond the odd individual post: I still have my old Outlook Express .dbx files from the time, which (unless they've corrupted) should have many of the messages and attachments saved (but now that OE is obsolete, I think I'd need to get some third-party converter to open them in a different email client). In early 2012, the STC group temporarily vanished due to an admin ownership technicality, and so I saved some of the posts I found memorable as .txt, .htm and .eml files. Some of the scripts that Nigel Kitching posted were in the email bodies, others as .rtf/.doc attachments. I've got some of them saved, but I'm not sure if I have all of them. The ones that were attachments (e.g. this post) aren't accessible via Yahoo's web interface. What would be the best way to share these? What would be the best way to get a more comprehensive, systematic archive scrape of the group's messages? Via Reddit's r/DataHoarder, The Archive Team has a page on their wiki about saving files from Yahoo Groups, and there is a consistent URL scheme for viewing the source of any individual message ( https://groups.yahoo.com/api/v1/groups/sonicthecomic/messages/10000/ ). But I don't have the technical knowledge to use any of their linked GitHub tools. However, I'm aware that privacy is a concern. People let Yahoo keep these posts, but they might not want anyone else drawing attention to posts they made online nearly 20 years ago! Presumably any publicly-accessible archive would need to strip out real names and email addresses?
eek. This is an awkward problem because I know virtually nothing about Yahoo Groups other than it existed once. I don't know how to archive it in a sensible way (and I can't guarantee I'll have come up with an answer by December). That last link of yours displays message 10,000 as a JSON file. If we could have every post saved as JSON, that's a good start (maybe that's what those tools are doing idk) - a big fat zip of every post ever made in that format would be a suitable archive. I'd probably stick that on the wiki somewhere as an emergency backup. I don't know if that would handle attachments. JSON is a standard format and I'm sure I (or someone else) could work up a tool to extract the important bits. From that we could probably make something pretty for the Sonic Retro wiki - don't know yet. And yeah we'd probably want everything. I don't want to start redacting stuff in case something gets lost, and if time is a factor, it's a headache that isn't worth dealing with. Those details have been online for 20 years and no doubt there'll be other means of obtaining them, if they're even relevant anymore.
Wow, yeah that is gold and definitely worth keeping. I'm not sure what the best way to archive things like this for the long-term would be though. Maybe a good option would be to just make sure everything's at least backed up and saved locally, then time wouldn't be a factor as information could then be curated bit by bit for online archive purposes. I haven't looked at the scope of it all though so maybe a bit more tricky to do in practice.. (also ignore if this is obvious base level stuff. my last endeavour in online preservation was saving countless miiverse posts so not quite the same as here...)
OK, I've manually saved the JSON versions of all of the individual messages I linked to in that pastebin, and a few others. I'll see if there are any more that might be noteworthy and then zip them together, so that at least those will be saved. But I hope some else will be able to automate a comprehensive scrape of all of them. For now, "STC scripts from Yahoo group.zip" contains all the scripts I've got. Several different file types: RTFs and DOCs that were the original attachments I saved at the time from Kitching's emails to the group; TXTs manually copied and pasted from the email bodies; EML files that I exported when I last opened those old Outlook Express files; and a couple of the JSON versions I saved today! I also attached a .cbr file (renamed to .zip so it would let me upload it as an attachment) containing a scanned physical copy of Lew Stringer's Tails script for "Fox on the Run". I have no idea how I acquired it but it contains a text file with the URL of this site: http://www.gue-network.com/stc/stc_scripts.htm A bit of title trivia from looking at those files again: Amy's introduction in STC21 and 22 was called "Sonic's Girlfriend" in the scripts but renamed "Girl Trouble" on publication. STC24 ("Slave Ship") and STC25 ("Secret of the North Cave") were retitled on publication to become parts 1 and 2 of the 5-part Sonic CD adaptation "The Sonic Terminator". Incomplete files: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/sonicthecomic/conversations/messages/6784 - The later pages of the .doc files for issues 18-19 were corrupted towards the end when Kitching originally sent them to the list. https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/sonicthecomic/conversations/messages/12536 - The Decap Attack story "The Legend of Mr Cuddle Bunny" (one of my favourite Decaps!) appears truncated on the Yahoo web interface as it's over 64 KB. But that was one of the files I exported to .eml years ago so all three parts are in the zip file, with font formatting! https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/sonicthecomic/conversations/messages/12695 - However, issues 24 and 25 were posted together, so the end of #25 is cut off too. In order to retrieve a complete version of that, I'll have to see if I can open those old Outlook Express .dbx files.
I'm glad you managed to save the messages from the mailing list. I just got into the Fleetway comics and I'm liking them very much
Afternoon, Code (Text): from urllib import * import json for i in range(13936): url = "https://groups.yahoo.com/api/v1/groups/sonicthecomic/messages/" + str(i) + "/" response = urlopen(url).read() if(response.find("ygError") == -1): file = open("output/message_" + str(i).rjust(7, "0") + ".json", "w+") file.write(response) file.close() else: print(i) Here's a Python script - it creates physical JSON files for every message ever posted in that "sonicthecomic" group (except the ones what were presumably removed). No doubt 95% of this isn't very useful, but hey, it's a full archive. Check it: File:SonictheComic YahooGroups Message Archive.7z (yes the whole thing does compress to 5MB) I am hoping someone who understands Yahoo Groups a bit better can amend this script to get anything useful that might be missing. This is an archive, but it's not easy wiki reference material. I would suggest, if you want to reference one of these messages that you 1) Find the message in this archive 2) Copy the entire contents of the JSON file 3) Paste into a new wiki page. Give that page a standard name (e.g. "SonictheComic YahooGroups Message 00001" or something). Don't format it - just paste as is. Save. 4) Use {{intref|SonictheComic YahooGroups Message 00001}} Someone at some point will write a Mediawiki JSON parser thing that'll format (and categorise) things nicely. Actually come to think of it we might want to do this with Twitter at some point too. Food for thought.
