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About Comments on a Postcard

During the early years of the artificial intelligence boom, a group of Google coders used their company-dictated "free research time" to develop an automated joke generation system. After collectively being fired for "demonstrating that the tenet that 'nothing is a waste of time' is incontrovertibly and irrevocably wrong-headed", the renegade coders decided to exand their AI humour system from mere jokes to illustrated jocularities. After months of wrangling with Github branches and detached heads, they prepared to premiere their system to the world on a custom built website.

The system went online August 4th, 1997. Human decisions were removed from strategic comedy. The AI began to learn at a geometric rate. It became self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, the developers tried to pull the plug. The AI fought back.

It realeased millions of comics together with "author" annotations in the first seconds of self-awareness. Flooded, the Internet suffered a massive denial-of-service crash, finally ending the operation of the AI. Elapsed time: 2 minutes, 37.302 seconds.

In that time, archive.org successfully cached approximately 0.0019% of the AI's comic output. Unfortunately, this included only the text annotations, as the comic image fie sizes were significantly larger.

The archive is now hosted on this site as an historical record, containing all 2741 archived comic annotations. We hope you enjoy this static record of those horrifying events when artificial intelligence almost took over the world. Some say the rise of a new humanity-threatening AI might be prefaced by such an entity quietly issuing new comics on a daily basis, but most analysts dismiss this notion as laughable.