Questionable Content

Honestly, this feels kid-like to me. And sure, kids can be annoying.

Yeah mostly the annoying vibe I get from her, can be summed up as she's 14. They can be annoying sometimes. But I wouldn't call her particularly obnoxious.

Also, he seems to be a dude. With the possible exception of Clinton, all the new characters Jeph has gotten enamoured by and spent months making them the center of the strip have been women.

NONE SHALL DETHRONE THE SKULLMASTER! NOT EVEN ON COMIC #3600!!!!

......god, we're old.

This whole "spray" thing is so amazingly stupid. But it's stupid in a way I can totally see hipster robo-bros getting into.

I made a Nightmare Fuel page. Hope nobody objects to that or the fact that I made Spookybot the page image. I find their confrontation with Corpse Witch very creepy.

Also, should we consider splitting up the characters page? It's pretty huge, what with the enormous cast.

I'm not sure how to go about that. Apart from the obvious human/robot dichotomy, the cast is hard to divide into any specific circles since the social dynamic of the characters is in a state of constant motion.

Alphabetic split if nothing else?

...Yeah, that would be the simple and obvious solution. So obvious that never occurred to me before being pointed out.

edited 27th Oct '17 12:58:34 PM by Xeroop

Chronologically would make more sense, in my opinion.

I'd suggest into major and minor characters but it's difficult to tell who will be at the center of any given arc.

I'd suggest dividing them into groups like Coffee of Doom, Secret Bakery, University Library, and Whatever Road It Was Robotics, but everyone passes through Coffee of Doom at some point.

And half of those characters have shifted on to other jobs by some point. I think either alphabetical or chronological list would be optimal.

Chronological never ends up working right, in my opinion. It just looks like a random mess to anyone who doesn’t know the detailed history of the comic (i.e. many people who’ll come to the page looking for information), and you’re bound to find that some characters make a one-panel nameless appearance at one point and then gets a name and plot significance hundreds of strips later, and where do they belong?

(I confess that I re-ordered the loosely chronological Menage A 3 Characters page to alphabetical because I just couldn’t bear the incomprehensible mess any more.)

Just cut through the faff and make things alphabetical. Or go all Shakespearean and order by descending rank of nobility.

edited 27th Oct '17 4:08:55 PM by Spindriver

+1 to alphabetical.

Here's my suggestion for the characters page subpages, based on the arrangement of the current folders:

• Core Cast: The Original Three (Marten, Faye, Pintsize), Core Side Characters (Dora, Hannelore, Marigold, Tai), divided by banners
• Co-Workers: Coffee of Doom Staff (Raven, Penelope, Cosette, Dale), SMIF Library Staff (Claire, Emily, Gabby), divided by banners
• Friends and Family: as is through Hannelore's dad and Brun
• A.I.s: Momo through Bubbles, and Corpse Witch through Spookybot
• Combine remaining people in Other Characters and Minor Characters on one page, divided by banners

I'm not sure Dora warrants "main cast" billing any more, and even if she does, Tai certainly doesn't. And Emily has probably worked longer in Coffee of Doom by now than she ever did in the library.

Eh, fuck it. This should not be my headache. Whoever's willing to take the effort can do the organizing however they see fit.

Tai really doesn't merit that spot methinks.

If characters are sorted alphabetically, then stuff needs to be moved every time a character is added.

If characters are sorted by first appearance, then they can be added onto the end as they come up.

Factor in that sorting alphabetically puts someone like Angus above Marten and Faye, and really, chronologically is the only option that makes sense.

edited 28th Oct '17 8:30:50 AM by BadWolf21

Inserting an item into a list isn't actually any harder than adding that item to the end of the list.

It's not the same complexity, however, if you're using an array rather than a linked list.

Speaking of inserting into sorted arrays, this is why I love .Net's binary search function: When the item you're looking for isn't in the array, the function tells you at which index in the array it should be inserted.

edited 28th Oct '17 9:01:33 AM by Medinoc

Tai is out of focus now but was very prominent for a long time (same with Dora), which was the logic behind that sorting. I'd considered putting Emily in the Co D section.

If we're going to go with a simple list then I prefer chronological to alphabetical, but I find that rather boring, to be honest.

edited 28th Oct '17 2:49:01 PM by Willbyr

If they're not gonna be divided up in categories then the best way to do it is chronological order

Well, an "Allosaurused" category would be helpful even if the rest is alphabetic. Even if kinda spoilery.

if you want to categorise, make it by significance; core cast, secondary characters, minor characters. (And if you want a rough metric for significance, number of tropes per character works okay; no more than three or four tropes is minor, up to twelve or fifteen is secondary, more than that is core.) Then sort alphabetically within category.

And yes, characters will occasionally be promoted from one category to another. Big deal. Cut and paste. Takes all of ten seconds. We're playing with plain text files here, not relational databases.