heliopsis

I like to read the comics every morning with my breakfast, and I have subscribed to the Globe for twenty years for that privilege. When delivery became unreliable, I switched to a digital subscription (which confused them, poor dears. They kept pushing me to get a digital subscription, but when I finally said I wanted to switch my subscription from paper to digital, they got all flustered. Apparently they thought I would pay for *both* paper and digital, which is just—silly). So I've been reading my comics online for the past couple years, and mostly it works fine.

A minor annoyance is that certain links never worked on Sundays. Red & Rover, Bizarro, and a couple other strips were offered on the Sunday comics website, but the links always failed. Shoddy QA, but I learned to skip over those links and enjoy the rest. But when Richard Thompson ceased publication of Cul de Sac, which was the best comic strip of the past decade, it galled me to see the link on the comics page day after day with no strip to link to. So I wrote to complain. I told them that Richard Thompson's illness saddened me, and that the Globe's lack of attention to their comics page also saddened me. I told them that they should get rid of the link to the no-longer-published Cul de Sac, and they should also review their Sunday page which had many reliably broken links.

I got a reply, and the next day the Cul de Sac link was replaced with a blank spot on the comics page. A step forward, at least. But that Sunday, the comics page still had four broken links. So I catalogued the broken links and wrote another complaint, listed which ones did not work and asked them to please curate their pages better. I made the mistake, though, of starting this note with a reference to my recent communication re: Cul de Sac.

I got a reply telling me that Cul de Sac was no longer being published because the author was ill and giving me a link to a Globe article on the subject. Also, I was told that Big Nat had been added to the comics page, and wasn't that swell.

But there is no link to Big Nat from the comics page. And the response didn't mention the four other strips whose links never work. So I replied to ask them to please read the second paragraph of my note, and further to point out that the new strip was nowhere to be seen. Immediately, I got a reply:

Your recent incident update was from an email address not associated with the incident. [OK, I know how that happened.] In an effort to maintain the security of information, [security? Of my complaint about your comics page?] we cannot update the incident using this email address. [feh] If you are the incident owner and your email address has changed, or you want to be able to update the incident using this email account, please update your contact information using the following link, then resubmit your update.

and that's all. No link was provided.

To be clear, I'm not looking for a Solution to my comics problem. I can find comics online, and I tried reading my comics that way for a while; but the pages were cluttered and ugly and slow, and I had to look on several sites with a lot of distractors I didn't want. I suppose I could have written a script to extract the comics I wanted from their several sites and build a page, but really I would rather pay someone to do that for me. I thought I was paying the Globe to do that for me, but I guess they don't want my money anymore.