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No. 929: Strip #1000 (Is Not This One)

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Strip #1000 (Is Not This One)

First | Previous | 2024-03-22 | Next | Latest

Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/owls/?comic=929

Strip by: Wibi

{Samantha and Meridien are talking.}
Samantha: So which do you think will reach strip #1000 first, iToons or Lightning Made of Owls? LMoO is closer, but iToons is way more active.
Meridien: It's funny you ask. I've been crunching the numbers on it.

Right now, LMoO has 927 strips, and iToons has 784 strips. I'm ignoring any strips that are still in the buffer or yet to be sorted. Both iToons and LMoO update a maximum of 3 times a week.

Let's assume iToons becomes all the rage. The buffer is consistently full, and it puts out exactly 3 strips a week. Then it would take 72 weeks from today for it to reach strip #1000.

Meanwhile, let's assume LMoO is just hanging on. Let's say it averages 1 strip per week. It would take LMoO 73 weeks to reach strip #1000. They're neck-to-neck.

Samantha: I see. So are you suggesting we pay a freelancer to write weekly LMoO strips for a year-and-a-third, or blackmail a hobbyist?
{Meridien is annoyed.}
Meridien: Neither. My blackmail days are over, thank you very much.

Besides: even in our current lackluster pace, we're doing fine. I wrote a script that takes a list of dates when strips were aired, then lists how many comics aired on each week, and calculates the average number of strips per week.

Over the course of the last year (starting 3/19/2023, ending at 3/18/2024), there were about 0.962 strips per week.
If we change the start date to 7/2/2023, when activity really started to pick up, we get 1.236 strips per week.
And for the entirety of 2024 so far, we've managed 1.25 strips per week. If that pace continues, strip #1000 will be about 58 weeks away. That's about a year and two months.

{Samantha is smug.}
Samantha: And has your statistics course taught you a more continuous way to present that data, that's more resilient to cherry-picking?
Meridien: I'm not taking statistics, actually.
Samantha: I never would've guessed. *snicker*

Meridien: My argument isn't purely mathematical, though. If we keep this up - roughly 1 comic per week, even with some missed weeks, but with occasional bursts of inspiration and multiple authors submitting on the same week - we can get to strip #1000 before iToons does. And that's assuming iToons manages to update 3 times a week the whole time, which it often doesn't.

And every extra author to submit a comic brings us 1 strip closer.

Samantha: Interesting.

{Beat.}

{Samantha is concerned.}
Samantha: Do you think the rest of the comics from here to #1000 will also be amateur infographics with screenshots of the Windows 10 calculator?
Meridien: Well, you take what you can get.

The author writes: