Sports Watcher for the Weekend of 6/28-29

All times PDT.

Saturday
9-12 PM: Tennis, Wimbledon, 3rd round action (NBC). The reason why the 3rd round gets this spot and the 4th round doesn't is because I actually have something to fill this spot tomorrow.

1-3:30 PM: Arena Football, Colorado @ Utah (ESPN). The playoffs are in full swing so the Arena League appears every week through ArenaBowl.

5-7 PM: IndyCar Racing, IndyCar 300 at Richmond (ESPN). Hey, NASCAR causes interference too often and this is the one sport I watch every time it's on. If you think NASCAR is just a bunch of cars going around in circles, maybe the real problem is it's too slow.

8-9 PM: US Olympic Trials, Track and Field (NBC). Same on both coasts so it interferes with the IndyCar on the East Coast.

9-2 AM: Boxing, Manny Pacquito v. David Diaz (PPV). Same on both coasts again, so it interferes with the IndyCar - just barely - on the East Coast.
Sunday
9-11 AM: MLS Soccer, Los Angeles @ DC United (ABC). "Soccer is so boring, it's just a bunch of passing a ball back and -- OMG IT'S BECKHAM OMG OMG OMG!!!!!!!!!!11!!11!111!1!!!!eleven!"

12-3 PM: LPGA Golf, US Women's Open, final round (NBC). It's the Annika Sorenstam farewell tour! Those other golfers expected to pick up the slack? Who cares about them? No one cares about the male golfers not named Tiger.

Honorable Mention: 11:30-1:30 PM: UEFA Soccer, Euro 2008, final (ABC). Because Dad will kill me if I don't mention this at least once. You could watch the soccer and switch to golf at 1:30, but then you only catch an hour and a half of golf. Wasn't Euro 2004 mostly on pay-per-view? Now the final is airing on broadcast television and the US doesn't even have a horse in the race anywhere! And last month the Champions League final was made into a fairly big deal on ESPN2!

(The really odd part? The only other game in the tournament on ABC was a quarterfinal last week. And ESPN2 showed one of the semifinals Thursday because of the US Women's Open, whereas all the non-ABC quarterfinals are on regular ESPN. Huh?)


5-8 PM: MLB Baseball, Chicago Cubs @ Chicago White Sox (ESPN). This is "ESPN Sunday Night Baseball presented by Taco Bell Part of AL/NL Showdown presented by State Farm". No further comment needed.

8-9 PM: US Olympic Trials, Swimming (NBC). Same on both coasts again, but ironically, that means the Track and Field trials the previous hour interferes with baseball on the West Coast but not on the East Coast!

One last thing... Sports Watcher just might continue past August. I'm starting to get into a bit more of a groove. Stay tuned.

Non-Random Internet Discovery of the Day

Here's a web site that allows you to look at some ideas people have to make life better and to propose any of your own.

If enough people knew of this site it might have some real positive benefits. Um... yeah.

More random collections of discoveries start Monday.

More quick hits

Last call. Here's Ctrl+Alt+Del, and here's User Friendly.

And the opinions expressed in this comic are not necessarily those of the author. I'm not familiar enough with CAD, and all I know about UF is I started reading it from the beginning in 2006, and had to pry myself away from it when I got to 2004 because it was taking up so much of my time that I should have been using studying.

And both strips work now. Honest. 'zojdf  ,.zdM/jivzk.lngdipioads

Keith Olbermann: Worst Person in the World!

Fast forward to 3:03:

"Obviously, those would have to be the kind of arms in use in 1791, when the Bill of Rights was passed; the musket, the wheelock, the flintlock, the 13th century Chinese hand cannon. Stuff like that!"

Yes, "stuff like that" all right. And when the First Amendment says that "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press", it's talking strictly about things like speaking, whispering, shouting, yelling, printing pamphlets and newspapers, and other things in use in 1791. The Internet, television, radio, motion pictures, even the telegraph? Fair game!

I'd like to think Keith doesn't really mean this, although it's doubtful since it seems to be making a case that it's okay to restrict guns today because today's guns are so much more advanced. It would be insane to interpret the Second Amendment as saying we can't keep people from obtaining nuclear weapons. But regardless of whether he means it, rest assured the Right will hammer him for it.

The question is, did the Founding Fathers intend the Second Amendment to prohibit restrictions on common ownership of guns, regardless of whether that was for the purpose of raising a militia? I hope to answer that question in Truth Court, if not this weekend, at some point in the future.

Da Blog's not moving in the near future, and other odds and ends

Blogger's Draft feature recently unleashed a deluge of new features for bloggers to try out. There's things like a star rating system, Google search info, that sort of thing. There's new functionality to put a comment form right there on the permalink page instead of in a popup or a separate page, which is probably going to be popular.

There is also a new editing window that promises to fix so many of the issues I had with Blogger that it could very well prevent me from deciding to move Da Blog to Wordpress at some point down the line.

Of course, I won't stop thinking tables are an afterthought around here unless there's a table button in the toolbar, but if that's my biggest issue it's a tremendous improvement. Expect to see some changes in the coming months, including the possibility of changing layouts to accomodate wider screens like mine.

Oh, and for the first time ever, I have an actual job interview scheduled for tomorrow.

Could you remind me in the future to mark down June 26, 2008 as a critical day in my life?

An expansion on Da Blog as a collection of sub-blogs

I mentioned yesterday that I had conceived of Da Blog as a series of sub-blogs that could also be read as one big blog. Well, if you're only interested in my thoughts on specific topics, you can subscribe to specific RSS/Atom feeds for each label, not just the whole-blog feed available at the bottom of the page.

The address is morganwick.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/(label name). Don't ask me why Blogger sticks that hyphen in there.

Here are some examples for some of my most common, or useful, labels:
web site news
nfl
blog news
about me
webcomic news
my comments on the news
snf flex scheduling watch
sports watcher

If a label you want to follow is not on that list, click on one and replace the label name with the label of your choice.

Quick hits

Here's the strip. Here's the xkcd. Here's the Dinosaur Comics.

It used to be that xkcd was full of obscure math jokes, though that seems to have transitioned, in some respects, to something called "human relationships". Either way, I can't get into it. Meanwhile, DC has shown that it's hard to really shake out of a routine with a gimmick like that DC has. That, and I don't think DC's sort of humor really appeals to me.

Post frequency is going to go down significantly at the end of the week and I don't know when it'll return. I'll make an effort to get the currently-suspended storyline some approximation of finished over the weekend, so I'll have a steady stream of strips for a while. My mom is REALLY on my case about finding a job and I need to get a real Internet connection anyway.

Gulp.

Duh... duh... duh...

David Morgan-Mar actually responded to my blog post on Irregular Webcomic!

I... I'm completely star-struck right now.

(And intensely frustrated with Microsoft at the same time. Would it have killed you to include some mechanism to either kick-start or terminate the stand by or hibernate process in case it got held up at any stage of the process, so I could have some recourse other than just holding the power button until the computer hard-turns off? The reason people stand by and hibernate as opposed to shutting down is because they have work open they don't want to lose or save just yet, you know.)

Is it sad that I actually waited until 3 in the morning so I could include today's strip in the write-up?

(From Irregular Webcomic! Click for full-sized cryptids! Man, I really am taking after Websnark, aren't I?)

I'd like to expand on the points made in today's strip on Irregular Webcomic!, but before I do, I want to talk about someone else.

Scott McCloud.



McCloud was a creator of comic books, mostly deconstructionist superhero stuff, but he was mostly concerned about the legitimization of comics as an art form. So in 1993, he wrote a book called Understanding Comics, in which he talked about the medium seriously, deconstructing its methods, exploring what is and isn't comics, and the like. And because he wanted to practice what he preached, he published it as a comic book.



In 2000, he wrote a follow-up, Reinventing Comics. Whereas before he was talking to people outside the comics industry, this time he talked to people inside it, outlining twelve "revolutions" that could help comics survive and thrive as an art form. He especially talked about the then-nascent medium of webcomics and how the Web had a number of advantages that allowed it to thrive as an art form on its own. The most famous of these is probably the idea of the "infinite canvas" - that, similar to the idea that, since Wikipedia is not a paper encyclopedia, it can talk about a lot more topics than Brittanica (and for the love of God please do not make this a battleground regarding whether it really takes full advantage of this), so too can webcomics extend over a much larger space than would ever be practical on a sheet of paper.

In practice, though, creating larger, more expansive comics taking up lengthy stretches of the page is rather impractical. It takes a lot of work to create a big comic, and as a result the infinite canvas is really only utilized as occasional novelty acts in more standard webcomics, or as one shots. It doesn't help that there really is a sort of limit on the amount of space you can devote to a comic, the size of the screen (people don't like scrolling, and they REALLY don't like LOTS of scrolling, especially horizontal scrolling which is harder to do with a mouse wheel), or that a lot of webcomic artists would rather prefer to be able to publish print publications of their work. After all, for most people, webcomicking is really more of a hobby.

The same goes for the other much-ballyhooed benefits of the Web for the comics medium, such as interactive or multimedia webcomics. (Especially when you consider that "multimedia webcomics" in particular can blur the lines in regards to exactly what is and isn't a webcomic. For example, is Homestar Runner a webcomic? If not, on what grounds?) There have been occasional experiments in all of them, but generally there haven't really been many, if any, ongoing webcomics that actually take full advantage of their medium in ways they can't do in print.

Which brings us to Irregular Webcomic!

IWC, despite the name, is anything but irregular. David Morgan-Mar has faithfully produced a strip a day for virtually the whole history of the strip. He likes to joke about how his strip has been "more regular than many webcomics that actually claim to be updated regularly".

The "irregular" part comes in the specifics. You see, Irregular Webcomic! is actually seventeen different webcomics, known as "themes", and those are updated semi-irregularly with each nightly update of IWC itself. There isn't always one a night, as the themes cross over rather often, often in combinations you would never think possible. Some (Fantasy, Cliffhangers, Steve and Terry) are updated more often than others (Supers, Imperial Rome), and a few (Martians, Nigerian Finance Minister) seem to be abandoned entirely. Some are also more like unifying elements than full-on webcomics, despite occasionally having non-crossovers (Me [yes, Morgan-Mar himself appears as a character], Death, Miscellaneous).

The original conceit was that all these different "themes" reflected different role-playing games (pseudo-board-game kind, not video game kind) Morgan-Mar (as "Me") was playing (if there's a third tradition in most webcomics, RPGs are it), although that seems to have fallen mostly by the wayside, especially in the newer themes. (Only Fantasy and Space really show any signs of being role-playing games anymore.) The older themes (Fantasy and Space again) were and continue to be played out by semi-realistic looking figures (well, as realistic-looking as figures of hobbits and aliens can be) but by and large, the vast majority of themes, which is to say the vast majority of strips, have been played out by LEGOs, which have become the strip's trademark. (Exceptions are Martians, although even that has key LEGO figures; Supers, which is hand-drawn by another artist; and Miscellaneous.)

It's important to note that, hand-in-hand with this structure, Morgan-Mar has a rather robust navigational engine that facilitates all of this. You could, conceivably, just read IWC right straight through, like a conventional webcomic, although, especially at this point, IWC shuttles between themes every day. (For example, yesterday's comic was in the Espionage theme. The day before that was Mythbusters (yes, based on the Discovery Channel show, and done with LEGOs too - and they're not alone; Jane Goodall, appearing above, is a character in Steve and Terry, which is itself a not-really-them-honest version of the late "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin from Morgan-Mar's native Australia; Shakespeare has a theme where he's transplanted in the modern day; Espionage is a takeoff on James Bond; Cliffhangers is a takeoff on Indiana Jones; there are actual themes named Harry Potter and Star Wars...), and the one before that was Space, and the one before that was Cliffhangers...) But you can also read each theme as an individual webcomic, following the strip as it follows one plot and completely ignoring any others. IWC has gone on for almost 2000 strips, but you don't need to read all of them to understand just one or two themes. And the ability to read it five days at a time is just gravy.

You can't do that in print. Well, at the least, you can't do that in print and expect much of a following. I've actually conceived of a similar structure for Da Blog, where each tag could conceivably be read as its own individual blog, so that, for example, you could decide to read just my "nba" or "my comments on the news" posts, and ignore my "webcomic" or "about me" posts, except where I tag an "about me" post as "my comments on the news". In webcomics, it actually opens up brave new worlds of storytelling possibilities. I envision a large, expansive world with several different webcomics weaving in and out of one another, perhaps even with different writers, which could be read individually but which forms a complete picture when read in total. Wait, that sounds like modern comic books. But one important difference would be the ability for strips to exist in multiple comics at once. There are other possibilities for the format as well that I probably have never even heard of. Scott McCloud, I would hope, would be proud.

The really funny part is, Irregular Webcomic! is one of those things that's a pioneer but doesn't really define its field; it sort of falls by the wayside, but what it pioneers is ripe to be overtaken by other, sharper minds. For example, IBM pioneered the germ of what became personal computing, including operating system writing, before Apple and Microsoft came along; now they barely even exist in the computer industry, now serving as mostly a consulting firm, near as I can tell. There are some themes I'm interested in - Mythbusters, Death and Shakespeare come to mind - but after certain current plot lines wrap up, or at least come to a stopping point, I'm probably going to stop following IWC every single day. (Of course, given the irregularity of the strip, I've been waiting six months for them to wrap up...) I would continue to follow just the ones I'm interested in, but Morgan-Mar doesn't offer individual RSS feeds for each theme; instead, his one RSS theme lists the strip number and any themes it's in. That makes it harder to follow individual themes instead of the whole comic. I kind of have to agree with Eric Burns that I actually find Morgan-Mar's side project, the group-produced Darths and Droids, a re-enactment of Star Wars as played by RPG players (thus taking off on ground previously trod, for Lord of the Rings, by the now-ended DM of the Rings), more consistently entertaining, even if it's hit a slow spell for the moment. In fact, D&D is one of only two webcomics that holds a place in Internet Explorer 7's built-in RSS reader.

Which is odd, because the other one of those two is also set in that role-playing game milieu, and it wasn't that long ago that I was barely even aware of RPGs' existence, certainly beyond the venerable Dungeons and Dragons.

But we'll talk more about Order of the Stick later in the week.

Should I hold a cigarette, snicker, and say "You fools! NO ONE can stop me now! MWA-HA-HA-HA-HAAAA!!!"

Okay. Yesterday's debacle is behind us.

But I've entered a new stage of my Evil Plan, and there are some people here who might not know of which I speak. And I should probably link to the strips in question to maximize the chances of my Evil Plan working.

So. Here's Penny Arcade, and here's Sluggy Freelance. I linked to Sluggy yesterday, but I'm mentioning it today, so I might as well link to it again.

One interesting aside? Remember yesterday when I talked about the two types of most webcomics? Well, Penny Arcade is probably the ur-nerdy, video game strip, while Sluggy is, as I mentioned then, an example of an unlimited wackiness strip.

What. The. BLEEP?

So I just got done writing the post below about Websnark and I'm heading over to my mail service to make sure its proprietor is checking the accompanying strip because my life is self-promotion. I suck.

So imagine my surprise when I see, on Yahoo Mail's list of headlines, this.

What the bleep?

What the bleep?

George Carlin died?

George f'ing Carlin died?

I mean... dude.

I'm really aping Websnark way too much right now.

This post rambles on for ages and ends up going nowhere. I think I need a biscuit.

Prelude: At one point, when I was very young, before I had an e-mail address, I would occasionally use my mom's e-mail account to give certain people a piece of my mind. Hey, I didn't have anything else to work with. I would end up lectured as much for their content as for the act of using her e-mail address to do it, and sometimes Mom would discover the message before I even sent it and dissuaded me from it, like the time, shortly after the TV rating system was introduced, when I started writing an e-mail to some random web site as a starting point for starting to assign a Web site rating system, but Mom found it and dissuaded me from it. Keep in mind, I WAS, LIKE, TEN YEARS OLD! And I'm acting like huge committees all by my lonesome.
Anyway, as this behavior progressed I started including entreaties not to reply to my e-mails, lest my mom found out about them. And lo and behold, they DID reply, and my mom DID find out about them, and I DID get lectured. Such as the time (bringing this to the topic for the rest of this post, which has nothing to do with the "about me" tag) when I made some comments about how some guy could improve his web site, complete with entreaty not to reply, and I got a Notepad file on the desktop saying, among other things, something like "PLEASE don't make comments on other people's sites, or you will have to be chaperoned while using the Internet!!!"

(Since 2000, I haven't had to share a computer with Mom while using the Internet, and I got my own e-mail address in 2002, minimizing the problem. And I finally started getting the hint as well.)

Anyway, the point of all this rambling is, I don't like making critical comments on another web site.

But this is a blog, not an e-mail. And a blog is different from a web site as well. And I do feel I should probably explain this strip, because to this point I haven't really done much to connect to the broader "webcomic community", and I may as well make some comment on the site of which I speak.

And it helps that I've met several blogs that precisely do make critical comments on other websites, including, especially, the one of which we speak today. (Nonetheless, I still feel somewhat queasy about the enterprise...)

Websnark was originally the final evolution of a series of blogs by Eric Burns (as I'll explain later, that's not quite accurate); in fact, before the blog's "official" birth date of August 20, 2004, one will find a number of posts dating back to January of that year, only much further spaced apart, longer form, and about more random topics - the remnants of Burns' attempt to revive his "online journal", ported to Websnark.

Specifically, Websnark was Burns' plan to clear the junk out of his still-running Livejournal and allow it to be refocused. I'm going to make a metaphor using the structures in place at this site: Burns wanted his Livejournal account to be composed mostly of the sort of posts I would tag "about me", but instead it was mostly the sorts of things I would tag "internet adventures". In his case, "internet adventures" usually meant whatever random memes were criscrossing the Internet and "pictures of dogs", which basically meant whatever webcomics struck his fancy, but in theory, Websnark was going to be specifically devoted to neither, just shuttling between the two. In practice, after the first post it would be another 11 posts until the next non-webcomic post. Websnark has had its fair share of non-webcomic posts - in fact, I would estimate that as it became more popular as many posts were not about webcomics as were (especially, circa early 2005, posts about itself) - but webcomics would be its bread and butter, the ticket that took it to the dance.

And as it turned out, it would deliver Eric Burns fame, fortune, and even, as made official just this past weekend, a wife.

The Internet has redefined the phrase "overnight sensation" but even by its standards Burns' ascent seems amazingly literal, both for the speed from which he went from being maybe as famous as me to one of the biggest names in webcomics, and how quickly that ascent came after his blog's foundation. No less than four days after starting Websnark, Burns wrote an unusually sarcastic and, well, snarky post (despite the name, Websnark does not particularly make fun of its subjects as it does neutrally, or even positively, comment on them with a funny tone) that started a chain of events that netted his little corner of the 'net thousands of readers. He ragged on popular webcomic PVP for how unpredictably it might update each day, his ragging was brought to the attention of PVP's creator, Burns was rapped by the PVP forum regulars, and went on his merry way.

Just two days after that, Burns returned to the topic of PVP, for substantive reasons this time, PVP's creator liked it enough to link to it on his front page, and the floodgates were opened.

There are a few more stops along the way, and Burns himself goes into plenty more detail on the rapid rise of Websnark here. Long story short, Websnark became as much of a go-to place as some of the webcomics it remarked upon, including with webcartoonists themselves. This despite the fact that Burns engaged in a form of advertising known as "none whatsoever".

Maybe it was the smartness of the criticism. Maybe it was the respect Burns paid to the medium. Maybe it was how constructive and neutral he could be with the criticism, coming from the perspective of a reader without a horse in the race. Or maybe it was that he was doing it at all.

...But a surprisingly large number of webcartoonists started regularly reading.
This surprised me. This surprised me a lot. And it made me realize that there
weren't that many people out there doing what I was doing -- offering up
critiques of the medium and discussions of the individual executions. [...]

The dialogue is all important in art. It's criticism -- in the truest sense of the word. The understanding and analysis of what is there. The placing of art within the cosm of its fellows. The distillation and discovery of new truths from interpretation. I'm not going to claim to be the first webcomics critic, nor anywhere near the best, but through luck and timing I managed to become one of the better known. It got me two gigs that mean the world to me -- writing for Comixpedia, and contributing to the Webcomics Examiner -- and it's spawned others trying to do the same thing. Tangents, by Robert Howard. I'm Just Saying, by Phil Khan. Journey Into History (and the HB Comic Blog) by Bob Stevenson. Webcomic Finds by Ping Teo. The Digital Strips Blog and Podcast, by Zampson and Daku. And many, many others.

I'm not saying I'm the reason those guys are doing what they're doing. I'm not saying Websnark by Burns and White was necessary for all those other voices. But we clearly had an impact. We clearly caused some folks to read what we wrote and say "wait a second -- I can do that!" And that's monumental. That's massive. That is good for comics in general. That is good for webcomics in particular. The dialogue improves everything. And if my making this blog a year ago helped that... well, that's about as fine a thing as I could hope for.

I advise you to read that whole post, if only to marvel at how prominent Burns became after only a year of posts. There are blogs that become insanely popular for a time, there are blogs that develop devoted followings for a time, but in all likelihood Burns and Websnark takes the cake.

And there are good reasons for that. By no means was Websnark the first place that commented on webcomics, nor am I in any place to say whether it's the best. But I can say with some degree of confidence that Websnark was probably the first place to treat webcomics like War and Peace, and certainly the first to do it in a humorous tone. And Websnark - this is important - could take webcomics seriously when webcomics didn't take themselves seriously.

At right is a 2005 strip from semi-popular webcomic Casey and Andy. Click on the thumbnail to see it in all its glory.

Probably the majority of webcomics fall into two categories: the video game comic, in which a cast of nerds sit around all day being nerds, including playing video games and making commentary about the world of video games. Sandsday falls into this category.

The comics that aren't video game comics tend to be strips where wacky adventures happen to ordinary people. Alien abduction? Getting turned into Bigfoot? Being made the bride of Satan? All par for the course, and in fact, child's play for some strips. Casey and Andy falls into this category, and this strip captures the mood perfectly. (And it's arguably tame compared to, say, Sluggy Freelance.) If a webcomic doesn't fall into one of those two categories it's probably some combination of the two, at times simultaneously. There are exceptions, but even the exceptions tend to be nerdy in some way.

That, by the way, is the sort of analysis Websnark foisted upon the world, and which is now far from unique to Websnark. And I haven't even gotten into the effect created by the way Andy Weir draws eyes. But I digress.

This strip was unleashed to the world during the closing stages of Websnark's golden age. You probably see a funny strip where wacky hijinks happen. I mean, she gets yoinked away, then returns after a few weeks of adventure and picks up the conversation as if nothing happened! And she's wearing a bikini warrior outfit! It's madness! MADNESS I TELL YOU!

Well, Eric Burns sees this:

Some time ago, in the course of snarking Casey and Andy, I mentioned that Jenn Brozek had become the strip's protagonist. My thesis was simple enough: Casey, Andy, Mary, Satan, Quantum Cop and all the rest were funny characters that funny things happened to, but Jenn was the strip's Mary Richards -- she was the (relatively) normal character who had insanity surround her. As a result, her reactions echoed the reactions of the reader. She might be Queen of the Hunkinites, but her reactions are those of a normal person. More or less.

And, as a result, the major plot arcs seem to center on her. Jenn gets kidnapped transdimensionally or temporally. Things happen. Other things result. Her air of normalcy lends itself to weird situations.

However, part of character development is growth. If Jenn remained aggressively normal, she'd become a one-note joke character, existing only to not be quite as weird as everyone else. Sooner or later, she has to take weirdness in stride.

Today's strip makes it official. Jenn getting kidnapped and going off on a several week jaunt which leads to her coming back in significantly different clothing doesn't make her bat an eye. She's ready to pick up her conversation.

Not to mention that even before she was kidnapped, she was casually burying a satchel in the yard.

Jenn may still be the protagonist of the strip, but she's not Mary Richards any more. She's gone full on Phyllis on us.

(Does anyone even remember Phyllis? I always liked her character.)

It's a psychoanalysis of Jenn's whole character spun out of a single strip! I haven't even chose a particularly representative example of the sort of madness Burns brought to his craft at his height. This is a fairly good example. I think.

But I have a few more thoughts on this. (Pardon me if this post sounds really random right now. I'm really tired and I spent way too long reading Websnark posts instead of writing about it. And now I'm aping parts of its style. I really need sleep.)

I've talked about the rise of Websnark. Now I want to talk about its fall. Which Burns totally saw coming. "I've maintained for a while that we've found the audience we're going to find, and readership is only going to decline from here," he writes in that first anniversary post. By 2007, he was barely posting at all, as he recognized in one of the rare actual posts:

[I]n 2006, Websnark was running somewhere close to the height of its popularity. I think the "glory year" was probably 2005, but 2006 was still doing darn nicely. At the same time, I was at that point a creature of habit. There are things that I did, and things I didn't do, and very little breaking up of them.

Which is the nature of a thing like Websnark. When you begin, you're throwing everything against the wall and seeing what sticks. Sooner or later, you get a sense of what sticks and then... well, you stick with it. You become formalized. You become ritualized. You become expected and perhaps complacent. And for a while, you run high on that formula, because it really is what people want to see, and you really are pretty good at it, and it's all pretty fun.

Eventually, of course, things run their course. There is shift, and breakdown. You lose your enthusiasm. Daily posting becomes weekly posting, and then monthly posting. People might still read, but things shift from water cooler talk to "oh yeah, he's on X again," to nodding and moving on. You become part of the landscape, and eventually you become yesterday.

That is not a complaint, mind. It's what we predicted from day one -- there is a life cycle to these kinds of things. And no, Websnark isn't going away. Er, more than it already has, what since it's at best getting handfuls of posts. Regardless, I'm always happy when people come back to see what's going on.

I honestly don't know what to make of this. Burns portrayed his decline as inevitable, as some sort of natural law of the Internet. Until I re-read this, I was going to talk about how Websnark is not a good test case. For one thing, it dropped down to posting on certain rare occasions; for upwards of a year, Burns posted every single day. I wrote before that when you update your site every day, people forgive missed updates easier than when you update less often but still consistently. Miss a heck of a lot of updates, however, and you can see the holy fury coming down on your ass. Actually, check that. You can see people acting as if you never even existed.

Had Websnark kept updating every single day, or even a few times a week, perhaps it could have stayed popular indefinitely. Certainly there are plenty of sites on the Internet that have maintained the same level of popularity for ages. But perhaps that's Eric's point: he didn't maintain the same level of enthusiasm for Websnark. Things change. Tastes change. What may seem like the thing you're intensely, obsessively proud of today may be something you go "meh" at tomorrow. Why, just earlier this year, I fancied myself a philosopher, making pithy, insightful comments on human nature. Now? Political activist. But more on that later in the summer and into the fall. And back in high school I fancied myself a novelist, and before that a famous musician, the MTV kind (you know, if MTV still did music videos and all)...

But there are other reasons for Websnark's decline. Nearly a full year ago, Burns explained how he was burning out on webcomics. But even at the height of Websnark's popularity, in 2005, Websnark was starting to drift away from webcomics and into other topics. A signifcant number of posts were about Websnark itself and its growing popularity.

Anyway, the point is: Did the people burn out on Websnark, or did Eric? And if it was Eric that burned out on Websnark, does that really give us any real insight into the working of the Internet, or just into the mind of one Eric Burns?

Well, Websnark may be on the rise again. Back in February it got back into hardcore webcomic commentary with "State of the Web(cartoonist)". Or maybe "State of the (Web)cartoonist" depending on the week. Anyway, each day Burns would take a look at one person with a webcomic and take a look at that webcartoonist's strengths and weaknesses and what Burns thought of that cartoonist's strip. And he posted every single day! For two weeks. Then his schedule started slipping and eventually posts became just as nonexistent as before. Recently it returned for a spell, remarked on three comics, and disappeared again.

He was going to do sixty-five webcomics. By my count, he's done fifteen cartoonists. And I was counting on getting this strip up the instant he was done with those sixty-five comics, dammit!

Well, it's not like he's going to notice it in time anyway.

Right?

Dear God I need to get to bed. It's one in the freaking morning as I finish this. It's taken me several days to write it.

And I'm probably going to regret every word of it.

For the record.

I've been trying to bring myself to write a post for a while now. Check that: several posts. On a couple different topics. And doing other things, like exerting some effort into finding a job at some point.

Every time I've tried, I've gotten sidetracked. The most work-free way I have to connect to the Internet has gotten really weak and inconsistent all of a sudden, but that's not the worst of it. For those and other reasons, I've gotten sleepy at certain points. I think I'm starting to become made of Dr. Pepper the way I'm going.

Tonight? I'm putting up the strip, and an associated post, and immediately hitting the hay. You have been warned that the post may not be as ideal as it could.

Tuesday? I'm getting every goddamned last inch of sleep out of my body.

And hopefully, right now, I don't fall asleep at my laptop.