120,000

At the moment I am writing this, there are exactly 120,000 comments on Whatever.

Quick! Be 120,001! Hurry!

44 Comments on “120,000”

  1. The flaw in this, of course, is that people could have posted on other stories in the meantime…

  2. Sam @10: They _could have_, yes. But, according to the “blatherations of others” in the sidebar, they didn’t. (The most recent comment not on this thread was at 6:20, and John made the post at 6:32.)

  3. Nevertheless, Brooks, your comment (according to the link) is number 120,614. So I’m not sure what happened there, except that maybe deleted ones keep their numbers, but weren’t included in John’s total.

  4. Xopher:

    It counts the ones that are in the spam trap but not currently deleted. Since those don’t make it onto the actual comment thread, they don’t do toward the total of verified comments, even if they have a number.

  5. And this is when you need to re-order them without changing them and sell it in a book. I’m sure they can all be strung together in a coherent fashion to explain the meaning of life.

  6. The stylish thing, of course, would be to have made a substantive comment on another post, which would have both counted as the 120001st comment and rendered the first-posters here inconsequential and petty. Seems there was a six-minute gap in which to do it.

  7. The very first comments on the blog are here. Note that they were imported into this most recent blogging software install after others, so the numbers in its URL do not reflect this.

  8. Geez. You would think somebody would have honored Scalzi and Whatever by using the momentous milestone occasion of posting the 120,001st comment by posting the cure for cancer, or announcing first contact with an extraterrestrial species, or with a mathematical formula pointing to a cheap, new and boundless pollution-free source of usable energy. Or, if not that, then at least a graceful sonnet or maybe a link to a beautiful painting in Scalzi’s honor or a YouTube video of a moving inspirational dance performed to a symphonic piece written and worked up in honor of this blog. But no, instead it’s just a lot of scrambling up top to pile into the slot and shout the equivalent of “woo-hoo!”

    As if Scalzi’s blog doesn’t even rate a dirty limerick or cute online haiku in honor of the 120,000 previous comments. Not even something along the lines of:

    autumn’s trees are bare;
    one-hundred twenty thousand
    comments precede me

    Underachievers. That’s what we have here. We should all be ashamed of how we’ve failed John here today.

  9. Back in the olden days, we chiseled our comments on stone tablets that we hand-carried to show all the other people who read the Whatever.

    And we liked it.

  10. Yes DG Lewis,

    I remember well the drawing on the cave wall of the cured Mastodon meat adhering to the sabre-toothed tiger. I still have my comment tablet from that. It says, “Uaiuohueom, rrrrrrrrr!”

    Good times, good times.

  11. Dude. That’s a lot of comments. Congrats!

    Also, since I’ll be AFK for a couple of days doing the family tour thing, Happy Thanksgiving to you John and fam, and to the rest of my fellow Whateverians (whatevers? whateverites?).

  12. Good point, JustAnotherJohn. I, too will be afk for extended periods this weekend, and I wish to express my thanks to Mr. Scalzi for his many years of hard work and all of the visitors who keep the site interesting. Happy Thanksgiving, all.

    / Whateverers?

  13. I think that Whatever should be made into a multi-movie epic, like Lord of the Rings or Star Wars.

    The movie for this thread could be called 400 x 300 (giving 120,000). Sample Dialogue: “Madness? This is SCAAALZI!!!”

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