New Amazon Innovations: I 🖤 Searching

While checking a new magazine import for Mrs. Kwakk, I happened upon this:

*gasp*

It’s a book illustrated by Rick Geary, from 1992, that I don’t have! It’s called Cyberantics!

So I went to Amazon:

Yes, of course it just returns books that match “cybernetics”, because that’s a slightly more popular term. That’s pretty common these days.

But the innovation here is that when I go to the search box to type in “geary” after “cyberantics”, it changes the contents of the search box to “cybernetics”, too? After it’s reloaded the page! While I’m typing!

Amazon innovates again!

So you have to type “cyberantics geary” the first time around to find the book:

Comics Magazine Carousel

When I visit web sites, I often look for a date somewhere. That is, I want to know whether I’m looking at something that’s been dead for years, or that’s being actively maintained.

So I was reminded me that I hadn’t added that at all to kwakk.info, the site for comics research. So I was going to add one of those boring “last updated on” bla bla, but then I thought it might be more fun with one of those carousel things?

Now added.

And while I was futzing around with this yet again (even though I swore on everything that is unholy that I was going to take a break!), I also did a new audit. And:

Before: Look at all those missing issues!

After: Look at a bit fewer missing issues!

I wrote up some scripts to do semi-automatic searches for missing issues at various arr arr sites, which reminded me that I didn’t have a mechanism for keeping track of the “double issue” phenomenon. So that’s also taken care of:

#9-10 and #11-12 are really single issues, but that don’t bother the database no mo.

OK! Now I’m done! No more kwakking!

Miscellaneous Fanzines

To keep the number of separate titles down in the kwakk.info search engine, I’ve avoided adding (most) fanzines about comics that only had a couple of issues, or where I could only find a very small number of the issues.

But… why not stick them in a “misc” category? Why not indeed.

And:

Yes, there’s also a category for miscellaneous promotional material, but it’s very sparsely populated at the moment.

Now I’m kicking myself for not saving the various smaller fanzines/mags I’ve encountered while searching for stuff over the last couple years…

While doing another spelunking through things at Anna’s Archive this morning, I’m finding some pretty surprising things. Like:

“It Magazine & Comics”!? From 1994!?

Unfortunately, whoever scanned it was only interested in the Gaiman interview. *pout*

And the Internet hasn’t heard of the magazine at all.

And I’ve been doing extensive searches for 90s comics magazines, including using All The AI, and Arena Magazine never came up. (The first two issues were called “Comics Arena”, even.) It looks kinda interesting and had almost two dozen issues?

I guess the 90s really are a lost decade… I mean, to computers. I betcha this magazine had a web site dedicated to it in, say, 1999, but it’d be long gone and forgotten by now.

Oh well.