Da Blog

The Real Constitution: Preamble

2011-05-25T06:00:00.000-07:00

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

On this day 223 years ago, the Constitutional Convention was called to order.

Few documents in American history provoke as many debates as our Constitution. (With all due respect to any non-American readers I may have.) As much as some freaks may wish otherwise, not even the Bible is as central to our political discourse as the Constitution. Virtually every single debate we have, from how we should use our military, to how we should take care of the economy, to whether gays should marry, and everything in between - it all comes back to the Constitution in some way. Democrats think it allows a variety of social programs and doesn't allow the Bush administration's interrogation techniques. Republicans think it allows broad latitude in defending our homeland and doesn't protect a woman's right to an abortion. Libertarians think it restricts just about everything; too many politicians think it should allow just about everything.

How are we to interpret this document? Is it a sacrosanct document that should be adhered to in every inch of the Founders' intentions, because if circumstances change they'd want us to pass an amendment? Is it a living document whose interpretation should be allowed to shift to match the present circumstances? Are we betraying the Founders by taking this action or that action, or should we even worry about what the Founders would say, because they intended for us to interpret every line of the Constitution as we see fit? And what the hell did the Founders intend, anyway? Are the Constitution's safeguards working or are our politicians exploiting fatal flaws in it, or do we just need to excersize those safeguards more? Or was the Constitution itself a perversion of the Revolution towards the goals of the elite? All these are questions that have vexed our society since before the ink was dry on the parchment.

In this series, I'll take a look at the real Constitution, trying to uncover just what the Founders really did intend, and how relevant those intentions are to modern society. I will be relying primarily on two sources, so I'll be eliding a big chunk of the scholarship on the matter, and you will likely complain to me and bring a host of other sources to my attention, no matter what side of the political divide you stand on. The first source will be James Madison's original notes on the convention, which open the door on the behind-the-scenes backroom dealing under which the Constitution took shape, and unveil why this or that clause was included in the way that it was. The second source will be "The Federalist Papers", written by Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay. Though "The Federalist" was written as pro-Constitution propaganda, and so is more intended as a reassurance that the new government wouldn't become the same as the king people just overthrew than an actual expose of the Founders' intentions, it's still worth finding out exactly what people were led to expect from the Constitution, and the theory on which the new government was to operate as far as the people were concerned.

I will move through the Constitution a section at a time. Each post will open with the text of the section in question. That will be followed by my presentation of relevant discussion from Madison's notes or "The Federalist", accompanied by my analysis for what that means for our society. By the end, I hope all sides of the political debate have undergone some sobering realizations. Let's determine what this all-important document really is, once and for all.

The Convention was originally called merely to reform the Articles of Confederation. After some procedural matters, on May 29 Edmund Randolph of Virginia moved that "the Articles of Confederation ought to be so corrected & enlarged as to accomplish the objects proposed by their institution", which were to advance the states' "common defense, the security of their liberties, and their mutual and general welfare". Randolph's plan was a rather radical restructuring of the government, but regardless, the following day, Governeur Morris of Pennsylvania went further by raising three counter-motions, two of which were "that a Union of the States merely federal will not accomplish the objects proposed by the articles of Confederation, namely common defence, security of liberty, & genl. welfare" and "that no treaty or treaties among the whole or part of the States, as individual Sovereignties, would be sufficient." He defended the plan on the grounds that "in all Communities there must be one supreme power, and one only" (Madison's words).

The Real Constitution: Fifth Amendment (Right to a Jury Trial, from Double Jeopardy, from Self-Incrimination, and from Unjust Deprivation)

2010-07-31T06:00:00.000-07:00

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

The Real Constitution: Fourth Amendment (Freedom from Unreasonable Searches and Seizures)

2010-07-29T06:00:00.000-07:00

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The Real Constitution: Third Amendment (Freedom from Quartering Soldiers)

2010-07-27T06:00:00.000-07:00

No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

The Real Constitution: Second Amendment (Right to Keep and Bear Arms)

2010-07-24T06:00:00.000-07:00

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Does the Second Amendment protect private gun ownership by just about anyone, or does it only protect the existence of "a well regulated Militia"?

The Real Constitution: First Amendment (Freedom of Religion, Speech, the Press, Assembly, and Petition)

2010-07-22T06:00:00.000-07:00

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The Real Constitution: Bill of Rights: Prelude

2010-07-21T06:00:00.000-07:00

Congress of the United States
begun and held at the City of New-York, on
Wednesday the fourth of March, one thousand seven hundred and eighty nine.

THE Conventions of a number of the States, having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution.

RESOLVED by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, two thirds of both Houses concurring, that the following Articles be proposed to the Legislatures of the several States, as amendments to the Constitution of the United States, all, or any of which Articles, when ratified by three fourths of the said Legislatures, to be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of the said Constitution; viz.

ARTICLES in addition to, and Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, proposed by Congress, and ratified by the Legislatures of the several States, pursuant to the fifth Article of the original Constitution.

Yes, the Bill of Rights has its own preamble.

The Real Constitution: Article VII (Ratification)

2010-07-20T06:00:00.000-07:00

The Ratification of the Conventions of nine States, shall be sufficient for the Establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the Same.

The Articles of Confederation had required unanimous consent between all the states for any amendment to be passed. The Constitution attempted to get around that, near as I could tell before checking my sources, by essentially saying "Well, if you don't want to party with us, we'll get started without you!"

Edmund Randolph's Virginia Plan, which still saw itself as mere "amendments" to the Articles of Confederation, would, after being approved by the Congress of the Confederation, be submitted to "an assembly or assemblies of Representatives, recommended by the several Legislatures to be expressly chosen by the people, to consider & decide thereon."

The Real Constitution: Article VI (Supremacy and Authority of the Constitution)

2010-07-17T06:00:00.000-07:00

All Debts contracted and Engagements entered into, before the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution, as under the Confederation.

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

As obvious as it may seem to make the United States Constitution supreme to the state constitutions, Edmund Randolph didn't think the Articles of Confederation were, "ratified, as it was in many of the states."

Randolph also proposed that all three branches of government be asked to take an oath to support the Constitution as part of the Virginia Plan.

The Real Constitution: Article V (Amendment Process)

2010-07-15T06:00:00.000-07:00

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

The Articles of Confederation required any "alteration" to be agreed to by Congress and every single state Legislature. Edmund Randolph proposed as part of the Virginia Plan "that provision ought to be made for the amendment of the Articles of Union whensoever it shall seem necessary, and that the assent of the National Legislature ought not to be required thereto."

The Real Constitution: Article IV, Section IV (Pledge of the United States to the Individual States)

2010-07-13T06:00:00.000-07:00

The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened), against domestic Violence.

A lot of this section has its roots in Edmund Randolph's Virginia Plan; the Articles of Confederation did not explicitly guarantee "a Republican Form of Government" to the states, perhaps because it was really subordinate to the states and not the other way around. Randolph also worried that the confederation "produced no security against foreign invasion" and "could not check... a rebellion in any [state]".

The Real Constitution: Article IV, Section III (Addition of New States; Governance of US Territories)

2010-07-10T06:00:00.000-07:00

New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.

The Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States; and nothing in this Constitution shall be so construed as to Prejudice any Claims of the United States, or of any particular State.

The Articles of Confederation allowed Canada to join the Union just by asking and allowed any other state to join with the consent of nine states. Edmund Randolph's Virginia Plan allowed for "admission of States lawfully arising within the limits of the United States...with the consent of a number of voices in the National legislature less than the whole."

The Real Constitution: Article IV, Section II (Implications of Full Faith and Credit)

2010-07-08T06:00:00.000-07:00

The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.

A Person charged in any State with Treason, Felony, or other Crime, who shall flee from Justice, and be found in another State, shall on Demand of the executive Authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having Jurisdiction of the Crime.

No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.

The Real Constitution: Article IV, Section I (Full Faith and Credit)

2010-07-06T06:00:00.000-07:00

Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.

The Real Constitution: Article III, Section III (Definition and Penalty of Treason)

2010-07-03T06:00:00.000-07:00

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.

It seems odd for the Constitution to cross over into lawmaking like this.

The Real Constitution: Article III, Section II (Jurisdiction of the Federal Courts)

2010-07-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority;--to all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls;--to all Cases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction;--to Controversies to which the United States shall be a Party;--to Controversies between two or more States;-- between a State and Citizens of another State,--between Citizens of different States,--between Citizens of the same State claiming Lands under Grants of different States, and between a State, or the Citizens thereof, and foreign States, Citizens or Subjects.

In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.

The Trial of all Crimes, except in Cases of Impeachment, shall be by Jury; and such Trial shall be held in the State where the said Crimes shall have been committed; but when not committed within any State, the Trial shall be at such Place or Places as the Congress may by Law have directed.

This also answers one of Edmund Randolph's problems with the Articles of Confederation, "that the foederal government could not check the quarrels between states".

The flip side to the Supreme Court being the bastard stepchild of the three branches of government was the seeming inability for the Constitution to be enforced if the Congress and President happened to pass something that violated it. Edmund Randolph's Virginia Plan would have called for the Congress to veto any state laws that violated the Constitution, and coming on the heels of Madison's speech calling for national unity (link: AISX), originally passed without a hitch. (Benjamin Franklin added a proviso also allowing Congress to veto any state laws contradicting treaties the US had signed.) But what about the national Congress?

The Real Constitution: Article III, Section I (Basic Structure of the Federal Courts)

2010-06-29T06:00:00.000-07:00

The judicial Power of the United States shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office.

It's Judicial Week in the Real Constitution series as we take a look at the bastard stepchild of the checks and balances system.

In the Virginia Plan, the Judiciary would have worked like this:

Resd. that a National Judiciary be established to consist of one or more supreme tribunals, and of inferior tribunals to be chosen by the National Legislature, to hold their offices during good behaviour; and to receive punctually at stated times fixed compensation for their services, in which no increase or diminution shall be made so as to affect the persons actually in office at the time of such increase or diminution. that the jurisdiction of the inferior tribunals shall be to hear & determine in the first instance, and of the supreme tribunal to hear and determine in the dernier resort, all piracies & felonies on the high seas, captures from an enemy; cases in which foreigners or citizens of other States applying to such jurisdictions may be interested, or which respect the collection of the National revenue; impeachments of any National officers, and questions which may involve the national peace and harmony.

"A convenient number" of the Judiciary would also meet with the Executive to form a committee to review the decisions of the Legislature.

The Real Constitution: Article II, Section IV (Penalty of Impeachment)

2010-06-26T06:00:00.000-07:00

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

The Real Constitution: Article II, Section III (Other Powers of the President)

2010-06-24T06:00:00.000-07:00

He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper; he shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers; he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States.

The Real Constitution: Article II, Section II (Powers of the President)

2010-06-22T06:00:00.000-07:00

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.

He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.

The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.

The Real Constitution: Article II, Section I (The President)

2010-06-19T06:00:00.000-07:00

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, and, together with the Vice President, chosen for the same Term, be elected, as follows:

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.

The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves. And they shall make a List of all the Persons voted for, and of the Number of Votes for each; which List they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the Seat of the Government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted. The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President, if such Number be a Majority of the whole Number of Electors appointed; and if there be more than one who have such Majority, and have an equal Number of Votes, then the House of Representatives shall immediately chuse by Ballot one of them for President; and if no Person have a Majority, then from the five highest on the List the said House shall in like Manner chuse the President. But in chusing the President, the Votes shall be taken by States, the Representation from each State having one Vote; A quorum for this purpose shall consist of a Member or Members from two thirds of the States, and a Majority of all the States shall be necessary to a Choice. In every Case, after the Choice of the President, the Person having the greatest Number of Votes of the Electors shall be the Vice President. But if there should remain two or more who have equal Votes, the Senate shall chuse from them by Ballot the Vice President.

The Congress may determine the Time of chusing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States.

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the Same shall devolve on the Vice President, and the Congress may by Law provide for the Case of Removal, Death, Resignation or Inability, both of the President and Vice President, declaring what Officer shall then act as President, and such Officer shall act accordingly, until the Disability be removed, or a President shall be elected.

The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation, which shall neither be increased nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.

Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:--"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

That this section is so long (covering most of Article II), and covers so many different topics (I could easily break this up into a minimum of three, and a maximum of six, different sections by the standards of Article I), should tell you a lot. Indeed, the opening sentence is of weighty importance: according to Garrett Epps, writing for the Atlantic last year, the fact that it does not appear to expressly limit the President's power to that enumerated in the Constitution in the same way as Article I's "all legislative Powers herein granted" has arguably opened the door for the executive to reach out and claim kingly power time and time again throughout American history, from Washington to Lincoln to Wilson to Roosevelt to Nixon to Bush.

But perhaps we should blame the excesses of George W. Bush on George Washington.

First things first. Under the Virginia Plan, the Executive would have been chosen by the National Legislature:

Resd. that a National Executive be instituted; to be chosen by the National Legislature for the term of ----- years, to receive punctually at stated times, a fixed compensation for the services rendered, in which no increase or diminution shall be made so as to affect the Magistracy, existing at the time of increase or diminution, and to be ineligible a second time; and that besides a general authority to execute the National laws, it ought to enjoy the Executive rights vested in Congress by the Confederation.

The Real Constitution: Article I, Section X (Prohibitions on the States)

2010-06-17T06:00:00.000-07:00

No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.

No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it's inspection Laws: and the net Produce of all Duties and Imposts, laid by any State on Imports or Exports, shall be for the Use of the Treasury of the United States; and all such Laws shall be subject to the Revision and Controul of the Congress.

No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.

Partly continued from the discussion on Section VIII:

The first debate that broke out in terms of how much power to give Congress was a proposal in Edmund Randolph's original resolutions to give power to the Congress "in all cases to which the State Legislatures were individually incompetent". Some people felt that this phrasing was too vague, and could be used to take away just about any power from the States. Randolph again denied that was his intention. Madison for his part, remarked that

he had brought with him into the Convention a strong bias in favor of an enumeration and definition of the powers necessary to be exercised by the national Legislature; but had also brought doubts concerning its practicability....But he should shrink from nothing which should be found essential to such a form of Govt. as would provide for the safety, liberty and happiness of the community. This being the end of all our deliberations, all the necessary means for attaining it must, however reluctantly, be submitted to.

This was sufficient to convince the room; only Connecticut had any meaningful doubt over the provision. Meanwhile, although the original Virginia Plan contained a provision allowing the use of force against a "delinquent State", Madison, a key shaper of the plan, expressed his own doubts over the proviso and "hoped that such a system would be framed as might render this recourse unnecessary, and moved that the clause be postponed," which it was.

The Real Constitution: Article I, Section IX (Prohibitions on the Congress)

2010-06-15T06:00:00.000-07:00

The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.

The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.

No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.

No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken.

No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.

No Preference shall be given by any Regulation of Commerce or Revenue to the Ports of one State over those of another; nor shall Vessels bound to, or from, one State, be obliged to enter, clear, or pay Duties in another.

No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

The Real Constitution: Article I, Section VIII (Powers of the Congress)

2010-06-12T06:00:00.000-07:00

The Congress shall have Power: To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;

To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States;

To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;

To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;

To establish Post Offices and post Roads;

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court;

To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations;

To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

To provide and maintain a Navy;

To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings;--And

To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

This section is at the heart of any debate over just how much the Federal Government really can do.

The first defect Edmund Randolph observed in the Articles of Confederation, as James Madison recounted them, was that

the confederation produced no security against foreign invasion; congress not being permitted to prevent a war nor to support it by their own authority-Of this he cited many examples; most of which tended to shew, that they could not cause infractions of treaties or of the law of nations, to be punished: that particular states might by their conduct provoke war without controul; and that neither militia nor draughts being fit for defence on such occasions, inlistments only could be successful, and these could not be executed without money.

The Real Constitution: Article I, Section VII (Passage of a Bill to a Law)

2010-06-10T06:00:00.000-07:00

All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.

Every Bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, shall, before it become a Law, be presented to the President of the United States: If he approve he shall sign it, but if not he shall return it, with his Objections to that House in which it shall have originated, who shall enter the Objections at large on their Journal, and proceed to reconsider it. If after such Reconsideration two thirds of that House shall agree to pass the Bill, it shall be sent, together with the Objections, to the other House, by which it shall likewise be reconsidered, and if approved by two thirds of that House, it shall become a Law. But in all such Cases the Votes of both Houses shall be determined by yeas and Nays, and the Names of the Persons voting for and against the Bill shall be entered on the Journal of each House respectively. If any Bill shall not be returned by the President within ten Days (Sundays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the Same shall be a Law, in like Manner as if he had signed it, unless the Congress by their Adjournment prevent its Return, in which Case it shall not be a Law.

Every Order, Resolution, or Vote to which the Concurrence of the Senate and House of Representatives may be necessary (except on a question of Adjournment) shall be presented to the President of the United States; and before the Same shall take Effect, shall be approved by him, or being disapproved by him, shall be repassed by two thirds of the Senate and House of Representatives, according to the Rules and Limitations prescribed in the Case of a Bill.

Baby boomers will recognize most of this from the Schoolhouse Rock "Bill" segment. (For being only 21, I'm sure dating myself, aren't I?)

The Real Constitution: Article I, Section VI (Privileges and Prohibitions)

2010-06-08T06:00:00.000-07:00

The Senators and Representatives shall receive a Compensation for their Services, to be ascertained by Law, and paid out of the Treasury of the United States. They shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.

No Senator or Representative shall, during the Time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil Office under the Authority of the United States, which shall have been created, or the Emoluments whereof shall have been encreased during such time; and no Person holding any Office under the United States, shall be a Member of either House during his Continuance in Office.

The Real Constitution: Article I, Section V (Duties and Procedures of each House)

2010-06-05T06:00:00.000-07:00

Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members, and a Majority of each shall constitute a Quorum to do Business; but a smaller Number may adjourn from day to day, and may be authorized to compel the Attendance of absent Members, in such Manner, and under such Penalties as each House may provide.

Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behaviour, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a Member.

Each House shall keep a Journal of its Proceedings, and from time to time publish the same, excepting such Parts as may in their Judgment require Secrecy; and the Yeas and Nays of the Members of either House on any question shall, at the Desire of one fifth of those Present, be entered on the Journal.

Neither House, during the Session of Congress, shall, without the Consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days, nor to any other Place than that in which the two Houses shall be sitting.

The Real Constitution: Article I, Section IV (Election and Assembly of Congress)

2010-06-03T06:00:00.000-07:00

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.

The Congress shall assemble at least once in every Year, and such Meeting shall be on the first Monday in December, unless they shall by Law appoint a different Day.

The Real Constitution: Article I, Section III (Structure of the Senate)

2010-06-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof for six Years; and each Senator shall have one Vote.

Immediately after they shall be assembled in Consequence of the first Election, they shall be divided as equally as may be into three Classes. The Seats of the Senators of the first Class shall be vacated at the Expiration of the second Year, of the second Class at the Expiration of the fourth Year, and of the third Class at the Expiration of the sixth Year, so that one third may be chosen every second Year; and if Vacancies happen by Resignation, or otherwise, during the Recess of the Legislature of any State, the Executive thereof may make temporary Appointments until the next Meeting of the Legislature, which shall then fill such Vacancies.

No Person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty Years, and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen.

The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.

The Senate shall chuse their other Officers, and also a President pro tempore, in the Absence of the Vice President, or when he shall exercise the Office of President of the United States.

The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.

Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.

Recall that even those members of the Convention that supported direct election of Representatives (as opposed to election by state legislatures) were comfortable with the idea of "successive filtration" for the Senate and Executive. Under Edmund Randolph's original Virginia Plan, Senators would be elected by the House of Representatives from nomination by state legislatures. Richard Spaight of North Carolina, concerned about the withdrawal of power from the states, was the first to propose that the state legislatures elect Senators directly; but since the convention was at the time thought to be likely to pass a system of assigning representatives according to state populations, and Randolph believed that the Senate should be "so small as to be exempt from the passionate proceedings to which numberous assemblies are liable", and Rufus King pointed out that under proportional representation "there must be 80 or 100 members to entitle Delaware to the choice of one of them", the motion was laid aside for the time being.

James Wilson, who had defended direct election of Representatives, believed the Senate should be independent of both the House and the state legislators and called for direct election of Senators, perhaps by uniting several different districts, which Madison opposed on the grounds that if a large and small state voted as a group, all its senators would be chosen from the large state even if someone from the small state was more qualified. Even at this early point, Roger Sherman proposed electing one member from each state legislature. Ultimately Randolph's scheme was effectively rejected, with only Massachusetts, Virginia, and South Carolina being happy with it.

The Real Constitution: Article I, Section II (Structure of the House)

2010-05-29T06:00:00.000-07:00

The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.

No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct. The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative; and until such enumeration shall be made, the State of New Hampshire shall be entitled to chuse three, Massachusetts eight, Rhode-Island and Providence Plantations one, Connecticut five, New-York six, New Jersey four, Pennsylvania eight, Delaware one, Maryland six, Virginia ten, North Carolina five, South Carolina five, and Georgia three.

When vacancies happen in the Representation from any State, the Executive Authority thereof shall issue Writs of Election to fill such Vacancies.

The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers; and shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.

Under the Articles of Confederation, members of Congress were picked by state legislatures. When Edmund Randolph moved, as part of his original Virginia Plan, "that the members of the first branch of the National Legislature ought to be elected by the people of the several States", it touched off a firestorm among the more aristocratic members of the room. All words are Madison's: Roger Sherman: "The people...immediately should have as little to do as may be about the Government. They want information and are constantly liable to be misled." Elbridge Gerry: "The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots. In Massts. it had been fully confirmed by experience that they are daily misled into the most baneful measures and opinions by the false reports circulated by designing men, and which no one on the spot can refute." (It was in Massachusetts that Shays' Rebellion took place.)

George Mason provided the first coherent defense of the direct election of Representatives:

It was to be the grand depository of the democratic principle of the Govtt. It was, so to speak, to be our House of Commons-It ought to know & sympathise with every part of the community; and ought therefore to be taken not only from different parts of the whole republic, but also from different districts of the larger members of it, which had in several instances particularly in Virga., different interests and views arising from difference of produce, of habits &c &c. He admitted that we had been too democratic but was afraid we sd. incautiously run into the opposite extreme. We ought to attend to the rights of every class of the people.

"He had often wondered at the indifference of the superior classes of society to this dictate of humanity & policy," Madison continued, considering that in a few generations, given the economy of the day, some of their descendents would almost certainly join the lower classes, so "every selfish motive...every family attachment, ought to recommend such a system of policy as would provide no less carefully for the rights and happiness of the lowest than of the highest orders of Citizens." Mason was no poor man; he was a slaveowner born on a Virginia plantation, and arguably was far less of a self-made man than Sherman, whose "education did not extend beyond his father's library and grammar school and his early career was spent as a shoe designer" according to Wikipedia. But Sherman and Gerry were New Englanders intimately familiar with Shays' Rebellion, and the others that defended popular election of representatives were not.

Pennsylvania's James Wilson concurred that "no government could long subsist without the confidence of the people" (echoing the Declaration of Independence's "consent of the governed" clause) and "in a republican Government this confidence was peculiarly essential.

He also thought it wrong to increase the weight of the State Legislatures by making them the electors of the national Legislature. All interference between the general and local Governmts. should be obviated as much as possible. On examination it would be found that the opposition of States to federal measures had proceded much more from the officers of the States, than from the people at large.

Madison himself sided with Mason and Wilson, seeing popular election of Representatives as "essential to every plan of free Government". Some states, he noted, did not even have popular election of their upper houses; if the lower house were to be elected by state legislatures, the upper by the lower, the executive by the two together, and other offices by the executive, "the people would be lost sight of altogether; and the necessary sympathy between them and their rulers and officers, too little felt." Madison was okay with imposing "successive filtrations" as long as they didn't apply to the lower house, and felt that "the great fabric to be raised would be more stable and durable, if it should rest on the solid foundation of the people themselves, than if it should stand merely on the pillars of the Legislatures."

Gerry rebutted that the comparison with the House of Commons was fallacious and "that the State legislatures drawn immediately from the people did not always possess their confidence." He would be okay with direct election of representatives "if it were so qualified that men of honor & character might not be unwilling to be joined in the appointments." Madison thought Gerry supported a system where the people would only nominate some candidates for the legislatures to elect - a primary without a general election. When the general motion came to a vote, only New Jersey and South Carolina outright dissented.

In considering the "small state-big state" debate that broke out regarding representation in the new Congress, understand that before the Convention, the United States was much more like the European Union than it is today. To understand the change being considered, imagine if the UN voted by majority vote instead of consensus, and decided tomorrow that instead of giving each nation one vote, each nation would have a number of votes proportional to their population. A state like, say, New York really was a state, in the traditional sense as the government of a nation, rather than what it's become today, what most countries would call a "province". There might never be a conflict explicitly between the interests of "large states" as a group and "small states" as a group, but the individual small states certainly didn't want to see their power reduced more than their larger brethren, as one might reasonably expect them to.

Randolph proposed replacing the "one state one vote" principle of the Articles of Confederation with a system of proportional voting power to either the free population or the "Quotas of contribution" (tax revenue). Madison wanted to reject the "number of free inhabitants" approach out of hand, not because it was a bad idea per se, but because it "might occasion debates which would divert the Committee from the general question whether the principle of representation should be changed". Rufus King pointed out that the government might collect taxes in such a way that determining which state contributed how much might be impossible, Madison agreed, and the question was postponed on that first day of debating Randolph's scheme. The room wasn't yet ready to open the slavery debate.

Since one approach wasn't going to work and the other was going to touch off a firestorm in the specifics, Madison moved "that the equality of suffrage established by the articles of Confederation ought not to prevail in the national Legislature, and that an equitable ratio of representation ought to be substituted." Madison observed that, being "generally relished, [the motion] would have been agreed to" before Delaware, whose deputies had been forbidden from changing the equality of representation between the states in Congress, threatened to leave the Convention.

Madison pointed out "that whatever reason might have existed for the equality of suffrage when the Union was a federal one among sovereign States, it must cease when a national Govermt. should be put into the place." The state legislatures were most important under the Confederation; it made sense that they be treated as equals. With a new, supreme, national government in the works, it made more sense for the population of the entire nation to be represented more or less equitably. Still, the matter remained postponed after that first day, and Madison believed the room was confident that "the proposed change of representation would certainly be agreed to, no objection or difficulty being started from any other quarter than from Delaware."

The Real Constitution: Article I, Section I (Creation of Congress)

2010-05-27T06:00:00.000-07:00

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

The very first order of business of the Constitutional Convention, after procedural matters such as electing George Washington its president and passing rules to govern the proceedings, was a speech by Edmund Randolph in which he proposed what came to be known as the Virginia Plan.

The Articles of Confederation had allocated one vote to each state in a single house of Congress. The Virginia Plan created a two-house legislature, the lower house to be elected by the people and the upper house to be elected by the lower house from a pool of people nominated by state legislatures. The two-house Congress would have power to "legislate in all cases to which the separate States are incompetent, or in which the harmony of the United States may be interrupted by the exercise of individual Legislation", veto laws passed by individual states they deemed to contradict the Constitution (referred to as the "articles of Union"), and use force against any state they deemed to be "failing to fulfill its duty under the [Constitution]". An executive would be chosen by the legislature, who - besides normal executive duties - would, along with "a convenient number" of the "National Judiciary... compose a Council of revision" that would review every national law and every vetoed state law, with their own veto power that could be overridden. So powerful was this plan that the following day, Charles Pinckney of South Carolina asked whether Randolph wanted to completely abolish the state governments.

The two-branch structure of Congress would be agreed to without a peep except from Pennsylvania, which Madison attributed to Benjamin Franklin "who was understood to be partial to a single House of Legislation."

Bracket Watch: A new approach to bracketology

2010-01-18T10:00:00.000-08:00

One of the most common arguments against a playoff in college football is that it would turn college football into college basketball, where - allegedly - the regular season is completely meaningless.

This is complete bullshit. If you're going to use the "meaningless regular season" line, college basketball is not the place to use it. (That would be the NBA and NHL, which push more than half their teams into the postseason.)

There are about 347 teams in Division I college basketball. Only 65 get to play in the NCAA Tournament, or 18.7%. By contrast, major league baseball puts 26 2/3% of its teams in its postseason - even counting the NIT, college basketball is nearly as selective, putting 27.95% of its teams in the postseason. But college basketball's regular season is far more meaningful than baseball's because its teams only play 30 or so games. We can get a rough estimate of how meaningful the regular season is by taking the reciprocal of the selectiveness percentage and dividing it by the number of games. By that measure, college basketball's regular season is more meaningful than that of the NFL.

(Incidentially, college football, if it adopted a 11/5 playoff, would still only put 13 1/3% of its teams in the playoffs and have a far more meaningful regular season than any other major sport. Right now, its meaningfullness index number is 5, which means it's too meaningful because its number is over 1.)

So why does this perception of the meaningless college basketball regular season persist? Undoubtedly, a lot of it has to do with the subjectivity of the process, and its cousin, the unbalanced schedules played by college basketball conferences. In the pros, you know exactly the impact a given game will have on a given team's chances to make the playoffs. You can't know that for certain in college basketball. What's at stake for North Carolina entering today's game? Are they already locked into a #1 seed? Are they in trouble of sinking to a #2 or #3? Are they going to get an ideally situated region, or can they? We don't know.

The fast-growing field of "bracketology" (a neologism invented out of whole cloth by ESPN) could help answer these questions and help us know exactly what to expect out of a given game. Unfortunately, most bracketologists post little more than their reckoning of where the field stands right now, not how close all the teams are to each other. So we know that North Carolina is (for example, since I'm writing this during last year's March Madness!) the second #1 seed. Could they rise up to the overall #1? Could they fall? How far could they fall, and how soon? We don't know. The closest most bracketologists come, if you're lucky, is a "bubble watch" feature tracking only whether teams are in or out of the field, not how high they are if they're in. Often, even that only contains vague descriptions. Say what you will about Joe Lunardi and his tendency to get way more play than his accuracy would indicate, but if you're willing to pay for ESPN Insider, he'll give you percentage chances for every possibility you could care about. That's way more than most bracketologists.

If. You're willing to pay for ESPN Insider. (And the subscription to ESPN the Magazine Insider requires.)

Over the next two months, leading up to Selection Sunday, I'm thinking I'm going to run my own bracketology project, showing the information college basketball fans really want to know: what's at stake. I'll tell you exactly who has a shot at the overall #1 seed, the range of seeds a team could get, whether a team's in or could still be out or if they're on the bubble or if they're out but could still be in, using color-coded bars and all the information you could ever need.

I'm going to make an effort to use the same information the selection committee uses, but the NCAA seems to be more tight-lipped about what info the selection committee uses than I recall them being in the past. (Is the committee really using game scores now?) So I'm going to use the same information I use for my Golden Bowl selection process: record, RPI, strength of schedule, out-of-conference record, road/neutral record, record in the last 12 games, record against other teams in consideration, quality of wins and losses. (I'm okay with using injury info and the like.) However, this is not an effort to attempt to predict what the selection committee will do, because the purpose is to demonstrate the format. Rather, this is a record of what I would do if I were on (or rather, were) the selection committee.

I'm spending today going through each team's resume and forming an initial ranking. I hope to have a first, rough sketch of where I see the field by the end of the day. And we'll see where we go from there.

The most important day in the history of the Morgan Wick Online Universe since the launch of Da Blog, and a day never to be matched in importance again.

2009-08-17T19:36:00.000-07:00

The day has arrived that I knew would come ever since I launched the web site.

I have moved the web site from morganwick.freehostia.com to morganwick.com.

Morganwick.com will be the new home for all aspects of the Morgan Wick Online Universe, from the seemingly-stalled comic strip Sandsday to the 100 Greatest Movies Project to the street sign gallery to my sports projects. That includes Da Blog. Effective immediately, all blog posts will be hosted at morganwick.com, and the Blogspot account will stop updating. (Some dummy posts may start appearing next year.) Please update your bookmarks and RSS feeds to point to morganwick.com.

I've made my frustration with Blogger and Freehostia clear over the past several months. Blogger was clunky and prone to problems. Freehostia had a clunky file manager in IE, a frustrating FTP, and only one MySQL database on the free plan. Both of them, however, should be commended for getting me a head start in building the content that will now make the move to Morganwick.com. In fact, the problems with Freehostia have been sufficiently mitigated that I might be tempted to continue housing the new web site on Freehostia, especially since my ads pay for my domain but not my hosting.

However, that's only possible in the short term, and it's not really possible. I'm only allowed one MySQL database on Freehostia and it pretty much has to be used by my blogging platform; while the blogging platform is robust enough to handle a lot, I kinda need to at least have the freedom to create a second database for certain purposes. And as long as I'm moving to my own domain and moving up to paying for the hosting, I should get the best domain, hosting, and blogging services there are out there, and get the most bang for the buck for them.

For me, and for those particular fields, that means moving to Namecheap, Hostmonster, and Wordpress.

For most people, GoDaddy is the only domain registrar they've ever heard of. I decided very early on in the process of finding a domain registrar that I would not use GoDaddy. By all accounts, they're all T&A (literally), no substance (or customer service), and possibly the worst domain registrar on the Internet, used only by amateurs who watch TV to find an Internet domain registrar and don't really know what they're doing. Namecheap was one of the most commonly cited and praised names that came up in a search for good domain registrars. I found Hostmonster the same way I found Freehostia - by looking at sites that would compare hosting services side-by-side for me based on other people's reviews. Hostmonster came out on top on multiple such comparison sites despite some tight competition, especially since Wordpress didn't include a link to Hostmonster that I could use to support Wordpress, but did contain a link to Hostmonster's sister service Bluehost.

That might be the last time I mention either service. You don't need to know who I paid for the domain or who's hosting the site. It's my very own domain now. I mention them in case I ever have problems with either service, or in case I ever move from either and have to shut down the site while the move processes. If there's a quibble with Hostmonster, it's that they've been known to shut down sites without warning for violations of Terms of Service, which basically comes down to backing up the site and not getting the domain and hosting from the same place lest you become unable to leave.

Chances are if you've ever heard of any of the three services, you've heard of Wordpress. Even in the unlikely scenario you haven't heard of it, you've seen it. Adherents to Movable Type would proclaim its superiority, but by many accounts Wordpress is the best blogging platform on the Internet, and certainly the best free one. It's fitting that there are three major blogging platforms and they all appeal to different people. Blogger is the quickest, dirtiest way to start a blog if you don't want to pay any money and don't know anything about the Internet, especially if you want to start building something big. (Both Wordpress and Movable Type have hosting services using their infrastructure but Wordpress' functionality is extremely limited - ads aren't even allowed. Typepad is a pay service, which makes me wonder why anyone who could afford it wouldn't just start their own Movable Type site.)

Wordpress is the best service if you have your own hosting and don't want to pay, and Movable Type is best if you believe "you get what you pay for" and can afford to pay the price to get better than a volunteer effort - though depending on your philosophy on the Internet and your exact needs, Wordpress may still be best. (No less than the government of Great Britain uses Wordpress to host its site.) It may be ideal to take the path I took - build an audience on Blogger and take it to a self-hosted Wordpress site when it gets big enough.

Honestly, not only did I grow frustrated with Blogger over the years, I've started to distrust it a little; use of Blogger has started to throw up a red flag of amateurism for me, especially the use of variants of the default Minima template, which is used by some of my favorite blogs. The effect is mitigated with the use of templates that at least look original, and when people have their own domain it reminds me less that it's a Blogspot blog, but there's still that niggling feeling in the back of my mind that I can't shake while reading something like Awful Announcing: why aren't they at least using Wordpress?

I saw why Wordpress is so beloved shortly after starting experimenting with it. It was loaded with so many features that I could use. It wasn't so clunky as to eat the code I tried to feed into it (see: my first attempt at Da Countdown). Some of the problems surrounding draft posts, such as the matter of finding them if I stopped working on them and wanted to come back to them later (something that led me to start scheduling unfinished posts), as well as some of the patches Blogger tried to put on, such as the inaccurate post time for all unscheduled posts that led Blogger to tweak the posting settings, as well as some of the quirks of scheduled posts, aren't an issue with Wordpress, which has a "last saved draft" field allowing you to schedule a post without making it leave draft mode. And Wordpress' "pages" allows me to create my own, custom, "about me" page.

More important to you, Wordpress doesn't make it complicated to post a comment - you won't be tempted to post as "Anonymous" anymore when you wouldn't normally do so. Just fill out your name, e-mail, and if you have a web site a link to it, and you're all set. And because of the Akismet spam protection system you don't have to fill out a CAPTCHA anymore either, which is really more trouble than it's worth since it only protects against automated, not human, spam, and automated systems can easily crack it. (If your comment doesn't show up, don't panic; wait 24 hours to see if it shows up. After that, contact me with a copy of your comment; there is some anecdotal evidence of Akismet eating comments without the capability of accessing them, but if so it's so rare that on the thread I looked at, WordPress couldn't even reproduce it.) Tomorrow I'll launch the new MorganWick.com forums to complement the site and the comments, which I'll have more detail on then.

And perhaps most of all, Wordpress has a robust system of "categories", including the ability to make subcategories. Wordpress also has "tags" and my initial instinct was to make all of my labels tags, since that was what they seemed to resemble, and only make those labels that bore the most resemblance to subsites into categories, so I was a bit frustrated when Wordpress wanted to convert them all to categories by default without giving me a choice. But after reading up on the distinction between the two (it seeems tags are mostly a search engine helper) I decided that the way I use labels, it made the most sense to convert all labels into categories.

Because of my various interests, I always intended to create various subsites once I moved to morganwick.com to house my various projects in various fields. Because of that, because of the presence of subcategories, because of the decision to make Da Blog the front page of morganwick.com, and because of the intricities of the move itself, I have made several changes to the category structure, with virtually all categories affected:

All categories are now properly capitalized.
The "100 Greatest Movies Project" label is now a subcategory of "movies".
"About Me" remains as-is but may, in the future, be split into multiple categories.
"Advertising" is now a subcategory of "Web Site News". As I've said before, most important information about ads will now come via Twitter.
"Astronomy" is now a subcategory of "Science".
"Blog News" is now a subcategory of "Web Site News". The exact role of both "Blog News" and "Web Site News" given the merger of the two, the further splitting of the blog into subsites, and the role of Twitter, is undetermined at this point.
Because not all formatting was preserved when importing all the old posts from Da Blog, and because comments will not be associated with any other comments you make going forward, the "Classic Da Blog" category will be extended to include all posts before last week, and will no longer be just a quick way to get Technorati to update correctly. (By the way, 5vjhdtuzmg.)
"College Football Lineal Title", "College Football Schedule", and "College Football Rankings" are all now subcategories of "College Football".
The just-launched new category "Constitution" is now a subcategory of "Politics", as are both the Democratic and Republican Platform Reviews.
"Election 2008" is also now a subcategory of "Politics", and "Election 2008 Live Blog" is in turn a subcategory of "Election 2008".
"Education Policy", "Foreign Affairs", and "Health Care", all categories used solely in the platform reviews, are now subcategories of "Politics".
"General TV Business" is now just "TV Business". See below.
"Human Nature" is now a subcategory of "Philosophy", two categories neither of which with very many posts.
There is a new "Random Internet Discovery" subcategory of "Internet Adventures".
"IRL" and "NASCAR" are now subcategories of "Auto racing".
"Microsoft" is now a subcategory of "Computer geekery", two categories that may never be used again.
"MLS" is now a subcategory of "Soccer".
"News You Can Use" is now a subcategory of "My Comments on the News"; both its posts were members of that category already.
"NFL Lineal Title" is now a subcategory of "NFL". "NFL Superpower Rankings" has been deleted, and all the posts it contained moved to "Superpower Rankings" which has been made a subcategory of "NFL".
"Non-UFC MMA" has been renamed "MMA" and "UFC" has been made a subcategory of it.
"Fantasy Football" is now a subcategory of "NFL".
"Simulated CFB Playoff" is now "Golden Bowl Simulated CFB Playoff" and a subcategory of "College Football".
"SNF Flex Scheduling Watch" is now a subcategory of "NFL".
"Sports in general" is now simply "Sports" and all sports categories have been made subcategories of it, as have "Sports TV Business", "Sports TV Graphics" and "Sports Watcher". "NFL" and "College football" are now subcategories of a new "Football" category, and "NBA", "College basketball" and "WNBA" are now subcategories of a new "Basketball" category. All my sports posts are available at sports.morganwick.com, as are the old Morgan Wick Sports features.
"TV Upfronts" is now a subcategory of "TV Business".
"Webcomic news" is now "Sandsday", a subcategory of itself, and a subcategory of "Web site news". (To clarify: "Web site news" now contains a subcategory "Webcomic news", which contains a subcategory "Sandsday", which contains all the old "Webcomic news" posts.)
"Webcomics" is now hosted at webcomics.morganwick.com and is loaded with new features, including an index to reviews, tags for each webcomic mentioned in a post, new categories for full-fledged reviews and reviews of webcomics blogs, a new "Webcomics' Identity Crisis" category for both the series itself and the ongoing blog thereof, and an index to said series, with potentially more features to come.

In addition, all web site features have new addresses, and may not be immediately accessible:

morganwick.freehostia.com/greatestmovies (the Greatest Movies Project) is now at greatestmovies.morganwick.com.
morganwick.freehostia.com/sports (Morgan Wick Sports) is now at sports.morganwick.com. It may be a while before this section of the site returns to full functionality, and when it does everything will be at a new URL. Watch the Twitter feed to find out when everything is restored, and where to find it.
morganwick.freehostia.com/streetsigns (the Street Sign Gallery) is now at www.morganwick.com/streetsigns.
morganwick.freehostia.com/webcomic (Sandsday) is now at sandsday.morganwick.com. I'm still trying to translate the PHP from PHP 4 to PHP 5, so it won't be linked to there until then.

For the time being, the Premier ad is being shut down, as it doesn't translate easily to the new site. morganwick.blogspot.com and morganwick.freehostia.com will remain up, but not maintained; in a year my Freehostia account will lapse and that site will no longer work.

It's a new day on MorganWick.com. Let's go boldly forward into the future.

OOTS 672: Not a montage, but the next best thing.

2009-08-13T12:00:00.000-07:00

(From The Order of the Stick. Click for full-sized metaplanets. Despite the title, this is part of the "monthly" OOTS post series.)

Important note: Comments are turned off for this post until the site reboot goes through. You'll have plenty of time to leave your comments after that.

I already had only a vague idea where OOTS would go entering the next book.

The one thing that seemed certain was that the OOTS was headed for its next showdown with Team Evil at Girard's Gate, and the OOTS is certainly headed there. Team Evil is busy at the moment tracking down Xykon's phylactery, and opinions are divided as to whether it's to hasten their departure (as suggested by Xykon's "as soon as we find it we're leaving!" rhetoric), or delay it (as suggested by the fact that from Team Evil's perspective, the phylactery could be "who the hell knows where!"). I'm in the "hasten" camp (though I don't have that many allies on the forums), especially since the OOTS is already ahead of Team Evil on the road to Girard's Gate by a good margin, and would only get further ahead by any delays to Team Evil. For Team Evil to need to be delayed, we'd need the OOTS to be delayed as well.

If anything delays the OOTS it's dramatic considerations: it makes the most sense for the showdown for Girard's Gate to be the big climactic showdown at the end of the book. That means any other adventures the OOTS might have on the Western continent - presumably, ones performed en route to Girard's Gate - must in any case occur before reaching the gate (unless getting off the Western continent in the book after next is an issue... more on that later). Clearly something is likely to happen to delay the OOTS, and even if they spend some siesta time in Sandsedge (and Books 2 and 3 have both opened with slow periods in towns, and Book 4 opened with a slow period in Heaven) that's not likely to actually be very long in in-comic time. That means one of two things: something happens to them in the desert that delays them, probably substantially, like more bandits, or something happens to sidetrack them entirely, something that at least seems more important than outracing Team Evil to Girard's Gate.

What would be more important than making it to Girard's Gate as fast as possible? A visit to the Western continent means a potential trek through Elven lands, so Vaarsuvius might want to catch back up with his people, but there is no evidence that V wants to return there, that she'd be accepted there, or that the plot would have any reason for her to return there. (Unless Pompey is waiting there...) If anything of that sort happens, it might be during the march off the continent in the next book.

More likely would be Haley's quest to free her father, floating in the background of her character since we first learned of his capture (134?) This book has seen confirmation of the fact that Ian Starshine's captor is indeed on the Western continent, and while the greedy side of Haley's character had already been weakened by her Resistance experience, Celia's "deal" with the Thieves Guild would completely ruin any hope she might normally have of collecting enough money to free her father. What's more, Haley just told Elan the whole story. Plots for one book are usually well-laid-down in the background of the previous book; even in Book 3, which mostly tied up most of the plots from all the previous books, there was still plenty of foreshadowing of the Kubota subplot, if not for its larger irrelevance. Haley terminated Celia's deal on her way out of the Thieves Guild HQ, but as it had paid off absolutely zilch at that point, if you don't think it's coming back to haunt her later you haven't been reading stories very long (or at least you don't visit TV Tropes). A likely scenario would involve the Thieves Guild tracking down Haley in the desert and battling the OOTS, which could leave Haley with a problem only she and Elan can solve.

That problem, though, could really stress-test their relationship (and not just their joint one with the OOTS). It's almost taken as given on the OOTS forums that "Lord Tyrinar", the man holding Haley's father captive, is in fact himself the tyrannical father of Elan and Nale (watch that crest!). What sorts of hilarity might ensue from the complex interplay between Haley, Ian, Tyrinar, Elan, and Nale? One suggestion comes in this comic, which seems to imply that Elan did not exactly tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about Therkla to Haley. We do know Haley knows that there was a "ninja chick who had a crush on him, then died", but it's clear that Elan didn't entirely hold to his commitment to honesty he gives in flashback in the same strip. Did Haley not quite succeed in making sure Elan didn't "hate" her for her secret backstory (parts of which are, it's clear to me, being hidden from us for a reason), or had Elan already decided to go ahead and set up future "entertaining dramatic conflict", only in a sneaky way? (These two are perfect for each other!)

(It's only on later re-reading that I realize Elan could have just as easily been referring to Crystal, not Therkla. That could STILL lead to dramatic tension later, though, as it's not clear exactly how relevant Haley found the personal aspect of her rivalry with Crystal, meaning it could be Elan's turn to learn an incomplete version for dramatic purposes.)

Team Evil is more likely to be delayed by Hinjo's elven allies than by Xykon's phylactery. Xykon and Redcloak are under attack seemingly on all fronts: there's the unified Resistance Haley left behind, there's the elves that are meeting with them, and there's the prisoners O-Chul inspired. Between that and Xykon's demand to leave the instant his phylactery is recovered, Redcloak's planned goblin state is teetering on the edge of the abyss. And yet there's also plenty of potential for conflict between these various groups and with the Sapphire Guard once they make their return. In the absence of Team Evil there may only be a power vacuum and civil war in Azure City. And what if Xykon, kept in town by the phylactery, is forced to leave prematurely by the forces allied against him, meaning the elves made the situation worse instead of better?

Which brings us to what will happen at the gate itself. Roy is doing a lot of on-panel plotting here of exactly how the battle is going to go, and anyone with an understanding of dramatic conventions must realize those plans are almost bound to get thrown out the window the instant the battle begins. Xykon will already be at the gate, or something else will happen to muck up the waterworks in a way that renders Roy's planning almost null and void. Not that we won't see his disrupting attack he learned from his grandfather, but we probably won't even see much of an opportunity for pre-battle preparations, and Belkar's much-prophesied demise will happen in a much different way than Roy envisions.

The most likely candidate for that to happen would come from the IFCC, and their various designs on the gate. Although it's intentionally vague, the IFCC seem to be setting the Linear Guild in position ahead of everyone else at the gate itself, beating both the OOTS and Team Evil there in the process. That seems to jive with Nale's original plan, but that would mean Nale would miss out on the whole Tyrinar business, implying maybe there's not a familial relation involved there after all. Unless the Tyrinar business comes after the battle for Girard's Gate, in the sixth book before the OOTS leaves the Western continent... But the IFCC also want "conflict. Destructive unnecessary conflict", and they could decide that "moving their pawns into position" means creating conflict that prevents the OOTS from reaching Girard's Gate too soon, and that could mean an alliance with Nale's father. Besides, the IFCC's real focal point for their plotting as far as the gate is concerned, it's fairly heavily implied, centers on V, and the 45 minutes of V's soul they have.

Which brings us to the absolute bombshell towards the end of this strip that pretty much completely destroys any ideas the people on the forum had regarding the future course of the entire rest of the strip. It turns out that no one - not Redcloak, not Xykon, not the IFCC, not the Linear Guild, not the OOTS, not the Sapphire Guard - may have any idea what the gates are really protecting, that there are some things that the gods may have held back even from the Order of the Scribble (or, alternately, that they held back), things that, at this point, only Vaarsuvius knows. Once again, I preface this by saying I haven't read the prequel books and whatever implications they may have on all this, but it's possible that, if the whole notion of the Snarl is so completely different from what we have been led to believe, Redcloak's plan is horribly flawed at its core (and it's entirely possible for it to be a complete success as far as what he and the Dark One need to do, and still totally backfire) and virtually the entirety of the main plot of OOTS is, as the IFCC would put it, "destructive unnecessary conflict", this time semi-unintentionally engineered by the gods. And what is this planet within the planet, anyway? Please don't spring a Planet of the Apes ending on us and tell us "it's our earth!"

(It's doubtful the Order of the Scribble didn't know this, incidentally, because they would have had at least as much contact with the rifts as Blackwing did, and at the very least, if they never did know it leaves open the question of what exactly happened to Mijung. In fact this could be fodder for another entire OOTS post in itself, reinterpreting the Crayons of Time series and pretty much everything I wrote in my post on the non-interference clause, which may have been adopted for very different reasons than we'd been led to believe. And suddenly the "MitD is an aspect of the Snarl" theory becomes a lot more plausible... because it doesn't become incompatible with any other theories. Also note that I've only offered one theory; others include the notion that the Snarl has somehow "de-snarled", that the Snarl didn't destroy everything it touched as suggested but instead incorporated it into this new world, that the gates actually changed the Snarl's nature, and even that the world Blackwing saw was the OOTS world itself. Considering the popularity of these, not even V may fully grasp the implications, but what will it mean when the IFCC cashes in?)

Congratulations, Rich Burlew. You've done what, when it came to your strip, might have seemed impossible. You've rendered us totally clueless. We may need this three-week break between books as much as you do. And given how many other groups are in different situations at the end of this book, it's either telling of how tight-lipped you're getting about future plot turns, or just surprising, that you didn't end this book with a full-scale montage like the others.

Random Internet Discovery of the Week and a prelude to a series of posts a year away

2009-08-12T18:45:00.000-07:00

See, now, this was the sort of thing I had in mind when StumbleUpon allowed me to bring more specific criteria to the RID! I may have to refer back to this when it comes time to run a related series next year. And that series is hinted at in the new label.

Important notice: Any comments left between now and the launch of the new site will not survive the launch of the new site. We are that close to launching the new site.

How LeBron salvaged Kobe's reputation

2009-08-08T16:01:00.000-07:00

I was originally saving this post for the big relaunch of the site, when I would have a week of exciting, interesting posts. Various factors have been continually pushing that back much further than I ever intended. But the relaunch should go through next weekend, sometime between the 15th and 17th, as I'm very close to taking care of both those factors and the last few tweaks needed before relaunching the site.

In the interim, in our 24/7, hypermedia world, we've already forgotten and moved on from the LeBron dunk story. The word came out that Nike suppressed the tape of LeBron being dunked on by a college journeyman, we all laid shame on Nike and LeBron, crappy, Zapruder-like tape came out and we all ridiculed Nike and LeBron some more, saying we would have seen the footage and forgotten about it if LeBron had just let the tape go... and then we forgot about it.

But I think that, in the big picture, LeBron James, in the space of a few months, has done more to salvage the reputation of Kobe Bryant than anything Bryant himself could have ever done.

LeBron was supposed to be the good guy. He was supposed to be the guy who helped his teammates, didn't get into legal trouble, came from Akron and helped the local small-market team to an NBA title. He was supposed to be everything big-market, me-me-me Kobe wasn't. Kobe was a petulant individualist who was accused of sexual assault in Colorado and was poison to team chemistry, ultimately driving out Shaq and demanding to have the Lakers to himself, to carry a team on his own shoulders. The hopes of NBA purists rested on LeBron to give Kobe what for.

But three things have happened to completely reverse the roles. In reverse order: One, the LeBron dunk controversy. Two, Kobe DID carry a championship team by himself. And three, LeBron's reaction to losing the Eastern Conference Finals, refusing to shake hands or address the media.

Bracketing Kobe's title win were two events that create a new narrative of LeBron James. The dunk controversy in particular makes LeBron come off as a carefully crafted persona, too perfect, a fake, a creation of Nike. (After a shorter career with fewer titles, LeBron is more visible in Nike ad campaigns than Kobe.) Getting dunked on may have seemed harmless, but it didn't fit the Nike storyline of perfection, so Nike tried to erase it from the narrative and in the process exposed the true LeBron. Kobe Bryant, by contrast, is human, and (unlike LeBron) lets his human foibles come through. Kobe is one of us, what we would be like if we had Kobe's talent. According to this narrative, LeBron couldn't handle losing the Eastern Conference Finals because it didn't fit into The Plan as laid out by Nike, which says that LeBron must always find success.

We may end up seeing Kobe's career from 2004 to 2008 very differently than we did at the time. We may see it as the struggles of a tortured man to find his individuality and find fulfillment, struggling to balance the demands of NBA stardom with his own needs and desires. Finally he managed to find the magical combination that could lead him to the title he could claim as his own. As for LeBron, probably the only way he can even hope to kill the narrative, the only way he can go back to being Michael Jordan instead of Tim Tebow, is to stay in Cleveland, or at least move to another mid-sized market. If he moves to New York, the Clippers, or even Portland (capital of the Nike empire), all moves that would be driven by Nike's marketability needs more than anything else, I'm going to start calling him LeNike or LeSwoosh.

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

2009-08-05T17:09:00.000-07:00

Now this is why I was optimistic about the changes in StumbleUpon getting me better RIDs! I think this is the second time in RID history I've been delivered to something I was already familiar with. This version is more current, but if only the poses weren't so generic...

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

2009-07-31T14:38:00.000-07:00

Okay, this is a little creepy. Are you absolutely desperate to talk to a real person, you absolutely can't stand going through automated menus, even if it means having to talk in Spanish? This list is for you! If there are people so desperate that this list is useful to them, it makes me wonder why ANYone would have an automated menu...

Baseball's image problem

2009-07-25T00:07:00.001-07:00

Maury Brown is one of the most trusted online sports journalists - it seems demeaning to call him a "blogger" - for his Business of Sports Network, especially The Biz of Baseball. I felt moved to comment on a recent post examining 10 problems baseball faces in marketing its stars, mostly ones out of its control. I wouldn't ordinarily put it here, but I apparently ran up against a mysterious, unadvertised character limit, so here it is. This reads significantly different from a normal blog post because it originated as a comment, but nonetheless touches on residual racism, Doonesbury, ESPN (and the problems thereof), Jackie Robinson, Ball Four, Black Power, the Simpson trial, Barack Obama (race comes up a lot here doesn't it?), and just about everything surrounding the game of baseball today, big and small. I mostly wanted to get up my responses to Brown's second, third, and eighth concerns.

Now You See Me, Now You Don’t –. One of baseball’s biggest problems isn’t about efforts by the league or the MLBPA to market its players, but rather how the players move on and off camera. Consider: with the exception of pitchers, players are shown during their at bats (3-6 times a game), on the base paths, or when a ball is hit to them on defense. There is no sustained face time. Whereas in the NBA, a player may be on the court for most, if not all of an entire game, baseball’s stars are only seen in a limited fashion. Baseball’s dynamic makes showing star players on camera continually nearly impossible.

The whole "athlete face time" argument makes less sense in a post-ESPN era. Also, this is a problem that has always affected baseball and always will affect baseball, and it didn't seem to negatively affect the players of the past.

Lack of College Baseball Coverage – One of the biggest reasons the NFL and NBA does well in marketing their players has to do with young talent being covered on television while being part of NCAA Football or Basketball. For example, ESPN alone will show 300 college football games across their various platforms during the 2009 football season. Given that the transition from college to the pros for NFL and NBA players is a far shorter trek than most college baseball players that often times find themselves in development systems before ever making it to the majors, fans have been following many college football and basketball players for years before they enter the NFL or NBA. When you throw in that college baseball has only the College World Series as its national television platform, it’s difficult for MLB to market its young stars on the level that the NFL and NBA do

This has been a problem since cable TV and ESPN caught on, providing more college football and basketball coverage than ever before (that by far the biggest basketball stars to that point in the 80s were the two star players in the famous 1979 game that started the rise of March Madness is probably no accident), and didn't seem to hurt the 90s stars too much, but it may be changing. The ratings for the College World Series Finals were comparable to the Women's Final Four, suggesting ESPN should give it coverage comparable to women's basketball. Sure enough, the SEC conference championships will be shown on an ESPN network as part of the new SEC-ESPN agreement. Still, a lot of people jump straight from high school to the pros, and unlike in basketball, always have and in very large numbers, so more college baseball alone isn't enough.

But you point to what may be the real answer, which is that the minor leagues (especially AAA) really need (or at least deserve) a LOT more coverage. Basically, the extent of minor league coverage right now is the World-vs.-US game, the AAA all-star game, and the IL-vs.-PCL championship (not, to my knowledge, the individual league championships), all on ESPN2. Minor league teams tend to be in smaller markets but the smallest AAA market (Colorado Springs) is still top 100; the bigger problem is that players jump to MLB the instant they get good enough. College football and basketball have the fandom aspect as well as the "before they were pros" aspect, which the two problems I just mentioned make difficult; the best approach may be for major league teams' fans to also become fans of their AAA teams, which is made easier by the close proximity many of those teams have to their parent teams.

I think MLB Network is really dropping the ball on this one; the metaphor with the former NFL Europe and NBDL isn't really appropriate because of the different role each plays, but even NFL Network and NBATV respectively either had or have shown regular games from each, which MLBN isn't doing to my knowledge, and minor league baseball has a lot more tradition and a lot more central role!

Wall St. Ad Execs Yet to Tap Minority Stars – Baseball can rightfully say that it has the most player diversity starting in games than any other US pro sports league. Some of MLB’s biggest stars are Latinos or from the Far East. The problem is television ad execs have yet to see the full potential of such players. A good example is Albert Pujols, someone that should translate well to the camera, but has not been used as a pitchman. Others include Ichiro Suzuki and David Ortiz. In terms of Far East athletes, maybe ad execs figure Yao Ming is enough. As for the Latin players, it seems a vast demographic isn’t being fully tapped.

THIS IS COMPLETELY INDEFENSIBLE. Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods (I don't count Ali because he probably became too controversial after changing his name and especially dodging the draft) have shown black athletes can have crossover appeal to whites; I see no reason Latinos and Asians should be any different. Asians are especially mystifying to me since they're the richest non-white racial group.

What it'll probably take to change that is the Latino or Asian Jordan or Woods; on the Asian front, both Ichiro and Yao have suffered by being on mediocre teams instead of even contending for championships (Ichiro in 2001 aside, but even he didn't make the World Series). Pujols SHOULD be the Latino Jordan or Woods; he's dominant enough (and I think if he wins the Triple Crown and businesses don't leap all over him I'm just going to throw up my hands and give up) and has the rings (well, ring... well, he's won the NL, I forget how far he's really gotten). It's even less defensible because Oscar De La Hoya might actually be close to, if not a Latino Jordan or Woods, at least a Latino Shaq or Brady. Brown's fourth point is that baseball hasn't had a transcendent player like Jordan or Woods in this decade, with only Derek Jeter coming close and Barry Bonds derailed by steroids allegations. I'd hate to think the only reason Pujols isn't that player is latent racism. Fortunately, it probably isn't. See below.

“Tradition” vs “Flash” – From a younger demo perspective, baseball has lost its luster, in large part due to the ascension of Michael Jordan. Baseball is touted as having a “long and prestigious tradition” which doesn’t exactly compete well with the high-energy tempo of the NBA, NFL, and NHL. As one scribe wrote, baseball is a game of calm, punctuated by extreme action. That sounds great… if you’re older. In an era where kids are looking for ultra-stimulus, baseball’s pace is lost in translation. When 18-34s have the lion’s share of discretionary income, baseball isn’t the first stop for some corporations with a young demo appeal when looking to advertise.

Complaints about the game's pace are as old as the game itself; in fact there's an old Doonesbury from the 70s that makes that joke. This always ends up coming around in circles ("Well, football has short bursts of action too!"). I personally don't find balls and strikes boring, in part because you never know when it's going to result in action (and until I wrote this comment I hadn't thought to look here for the source of baseball's-too-slow complaints and found them completely mystifying). There is the new aspect here that today's youth has lower attention spans than ever before. (By the way, I'm only 21.)

Waiting For Barkley – In terms of studio shows surrounding games, baseball lags woefully behind most of its Big-4 counterparts. There is no “Howie” or “Terry”, or “Barkley”. FOX has dropped their pre-game show, which leaves TBS. And while Cal Ripken and Dennis Eckersley have made a go of it, they haven’t been able to exude the personality that other pre and post-game shows have had to offer. The solution, or at least an attempt at it? TBS has brought in David Wells.

This is the problem with ESPN in a nutshell. Sunday Night Baseball should feel really special each week and it really doesn't. ESPN should really think about getting a special crew for Baseball Tonight on Sunday nights and try and get some splash and dash there. (John Kruk? Please.) If it's needed to increase their motivation, maybe they should give up either the Monday/Wednesday games, or the Sunday night games, to another network like TBS. If the Sunday night games are the only games its network has, like with TNT and the NBA, they'll feel more special and there will be more motivation to put on an "Inside the NBA" type show.

TBS' Sunday Afternoon games are a joke and INCREDIBLY buried against NASCAR and golf, not to mention their own inconsistency of start time (really bad on the West Coast), picking behind ESPN, and TBS' lack of punctuality in announcing the games during the season. (I've gotten the impression TBS doesn't announce the game for flex weeks until the FRIDAY BEFORE IT'S PLAYED!) Don't look to that package to be a savior. As far as most baseball fans are concerned, it's Fox and ESPN all season and TBS comes out of nowhere during the postseason. When the contract comes up for renewal, either TBS will steal a package from ESPN or ESPN will take the postseason back from TBS.

Just Let Me Know When It Begins and Ends – Baseball finally got with the picture and realized that by putting World Series games on late Eastern Time, they were potentially losing a generation of baseball fans as kids hit the sack long before games would end. But, baseball’s a game that ends when it ends, as opposed to being controlled by the clock, that makes it difficult for fringe fans to get into when there are competing interests in hundreds of channels to switch to, and video games to play. Another issue that baseball faces – and only NASCAR seems to butt up against – has to due with delay of game due to weather. When a game starts, nothing kills your captive fan base off like a rain delay. Worse are games that are scheduled and postponed due to rain or snow. With families becoming intensely schedule driven, they want to know when the game is on, and when it ends.

How many games that don't go extra innings or are rain delayed last more than four hours? Again, this is a problem that always has and always will afflict baseball. While there are more demands on people's time than ever before, and extra-inning baseball games go longer than OT games in any sport save hockey, in order for this to be a marketability issue it would have to show up in the ratings.

MLB’s Image Problem – There’s the obvious (PED culture) and, the not so obvious (chewing tobacco) when it comes to baseball’s image. Would Manny Ramirez be more marketable if he hadn’t been suspended for PEDs? There’s a case to be made there. And, while it’s legal, few, if any, find a close up of a player with a mouthful of chaw spitting a stream of black tobacco drool appealing. Think Gillette would keep a player like Jeter in their ad campaigns if he chewed?

This is probably the big one. No one thinks Pujols is using steroids... but then, we said the same thing about Alex Rodriguez. MLB's only hope here is for other leagues (especially the NFL) to be similarly chastized for PEDs, but it's a bigger issue in purity-obsessed baseball than in musclebound, depraved, violence-driven football. The alternative? Well, the younger generation of fans (such as they are) don't seem as concerned about the whole thing... I doubt most people even notice baseball players chewing, and it's dumb enough that if baseball players basically refuse to stop chewing it points to deeper baseball-cultural issues that Brown doesn't go into here dating back to Ball Four.

Brown's ninth point is the idea that baseball is for old fogies, and I didn't have much to say about it. His last point ties back into the point of the white eyes in the halls of big business. Remember when I said that it's now proven that blacks can appeal to whites? This is why baseball isn't benefiting from that.

The Declining Interest By African-Americans in Baseball – Whether it has been the rise in the NBA’s popularity due to the Jordan factor; the continued diversity growth in international players; the fact that on average, players can jump to the professional ranks faster in the NBA and NFL, or other factors, there has been a steady decline in the number of African-Americans playing baseball. MLB, late in proactively dealing with this issue, has been pushing the Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities (RBI) program, and working to highlight players such as Curtis Granderson in the latest This is Beyond Baseball ad campaign. But, the damage has been done, and now baseball is digging out from the hole.

Jackie Robinson was a big deal because baseball essentially ruled the sports landscape. But then the 60s and 70s happened, and by the 90s I don't know if black interest in basketball was caused by Jordan or created him - the biggest white superstar after Larry Bird and Bill Laimbeer, who won all their titles before Jordan's first, was John Stockton. (Certainly I don't see many blacks jumping to golf because of Tiger Woods. The stench of whiteness and richness still follows it.) Basketball has really colonized urban playgrounds, especially since it takes up less space than a baseball field.

And then you see what's happening in the South where great young black athletes in more rural areas are seeing college football as a better test of their skills than baseball, probably thanks in part to the tradition of the SEC compared to a lack of real stars (of any kind) created by the Braves during their TBS/AL East-winning heyday. Most black stars, like Ken Griffey Jr., Barry Bonds, or Ryan Howard, tend to go to northern, big markets (it's too bad Griffey was injury-plagued in Cincinatti; Seattle and Pittsburgh may not be that big, or exactly surrounded by urbanity, but they're far from the South where the rural blacks are). Even one of the Big Three markets with their large black populations wouldn't drag rural blacks away from football. (Another reason blacks aren't being drawn to golf after Tiger Woods: golf courses are best suited to rural areas, and the skill set of southern, rural blacks tends to involve speed and athleticism, while the only physical skill golf uses is strength.)

I suspect - though I doubt it's really been studied or floated that much by others - that during the Black Power movement baseball became associated with The Man, especially as the other major human sport of the time, boxing, saw a black icon (and a Black Power icon to boot) emerge in Muhammad Ali that insulated it from being overly associated with whites. (Football was similarly insulated by stars like Jim Brown and OJ Simpson. Basketball wasn't yet a major sport but it was already being colonized by blacks like Bill Russell, which I suspect led to it being claimed by, for lack of a better word, blackkind as their own. Baseball still had some black stars, but most of them were old fogies with Negro League experience, which probably netted them the Uncle Tom label; Frank Robinson is the only black star of the 70s that comes to mind. Spillover popularity from Ali gave rise to such dominant black fighters as Tyson and Holyfield during the 80s and 90s but boxing retreated to PPV, split into gazillions of different organizations, saw the dominant Tyson go batshit insane, and started dying a slow, painful death.)

Another problem might be that blacks don't just blindly support their own the way whites got to thinking during the Simpson trial, and decided to distance themselves from the way Bonds handled the steroid allegations. (I'm sure some, perhaps many if not most, supported him, but was it really inspiring new people to enter that quagmire?) Which really brings us back to the whole steroids issue.

In my view, baseball's problems have less to do with the structural issues that haven't really gone away, and MUCH more to do with the steroids scandal. It may be a problem mostly with the old fogies, but it's the old fogies in charge on Madison Avenue. If they won't get with the program, and the image problem caused by PEDs is as hard to shake with them as it appears, baseball's only hope for becoming "hip" again may lie in Barack Obama's White Sox fandom... pray for a White Sox-Cardinals World Series?

My (belated) thoughts on the Erin Andrews Peep Show

2009-07-23T20:37:00.000-07:00

I hate the sports blogosphere's obsession with Erin Andrews. I think it's cheap and trashy and shows an objectification of women and that Andrews doesn't even look that great.

But guys, stand firm on your principles.

I've heard that several sports bloggers have called out the rest of the blogosphere for hypocrisy for criticizing the "EAPS" while making much of their traffic off pictures of Andrews.

I don't have a problem with making a distinction between an "acceptable" form of leering and "unacceptable" forms. That's probably going to be the second thing in a month that makes me run the risk of being flamed by feminists, but the fact is that men leering at hot chicks is as old as time, as is limits on it. That distinction, really, is everywhere in our society. As far as I'm concerned you can do whatever you want on the "right" side of the line as long as you stay on the "right" side of the line.

In fact, I'm going to go further. If I were in the position of a sports blogger who liked posting pictures of Erin Andrews, I would not have come to the sudden, shocking (SHOCKING) realization that this is WRONG and pulled back on the EA exploitation like, say, Fang's Bites did. No, I'd keep up the EA parade at the same pace I always did.

If you're going to decide it's wrong to exploit male lust for hot chicks for hits, regardless of whether or not the object is okay with it as Andrews has been, then be consistent with it and maintain the policy all along. (As I do. I prefer my site to be porn for the mind. Hey, maybe that'll be my tagline when the site relaunches: "Porn for the Mind". I'll get more hits than I otherwise would, certainly. Eh, maybe I'll stick with "Ideas every day". Even though I don't post every day.) But you can object to Andrews being exploited in the wrong way and still continue to exploit her in the right way if you feel it's okay. (Not that I'm precluding a legitimate change of heart here, of course.) All you have to do is make clear that you and your readers know where the line is and not to cross it.

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

2009-07-23T14:36:00.000-07:00

In what may be my last (real) post before the reboot, I bring you... South Park.

@trent_reznor's plan for turning indie music into webcomics!

2009-07-21T21:06:00.000-07:00

New label time. I once had fantasies of becoming a musician, but I can't come up with an original beat to save my life, my voice sounds horrible recorded, and, like most of my fantasies, I liked the fame and impact more than I liked the actual, you know, work. Certainly I might have never had a chance to break out within a year of recording a short demo tape like I fantasized, at least not without getting a gig on American Idol, and I'd probably be the guy you laughed at on the audition shows anyway.

But that fantasy is at least a little closer to the reach of musicians today, thanks to that great invention that will define the next millennium or at least the next century, the Internet. Which brings me to Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor's thoughts on how aspiring musicians can take advantage of the Internet to break in to at least a limited extent.

Trent's advice in a nutshell: Forget about making any money off your records. Give it all away for free. Put your music on iTunes just to get the iTunes audience, but base your revenue model off selling tchotshkes like T-shirts and other premium content. Basically, the typical webcomics model.

Huh? Evidently Reznor needs to be introduced to Scott McCloud's 2001 theory that all the music industry needed to do was lower prices to the point that it would become too inconvenient to pirate to justify the savings. In other words, it's not strictly necessary to give everything away for free, just really, really cheap. "Ah, but that was just McCloud's attempt to justify his micropayments obsession..." Really? Then why did Xaviar Xerexes recently espouse essentially the same philosophy without noticing it even when I pointed it out to him? Besides, while micropayments have by and large been a complete failure, music in the form of iTunes has been one of the few places where it's worked.

Look, I know a lot of people don't like iTunes for loading down its music with DRM, but that just means there's an opening in the market for someone to come along and try and create an iTunes killer that sells music at iTunes prices or maybe even slightly higher but without DRM. Take a YouTube-like zeal to wiping out pirated music and you just might create a service that, eventually, one of the big boys decides they should move to to reach out to the people who have run away from iTunes to get a DRM-free experience. In the meantime it becomes the hub for music that hasn't sold out to The Man - and those musicians get to make at least a trickle of money off the music itself. Is the lower exposure worth it? I don't know, but I'm sure it is for some.

I don't like the notion of webcomiceers as glorified T-shirt salesmen and I'm not any more happy with the same notion as applied to indie rockers. The difference is, in the latter case, it's not necessary.

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

2009-07-18T19:43:00.000-07:00

I'm late on this RID and I didn't get any votes on the Da Blog Poll anyway, so I'm extending the poll another week. Here are the topics I'm currently subscribed to, and which I would tentatively remain subscribed to if the poll decides I should pick the topics myself (I don't know what a lot of these entail). I tried to pick as broad a cross-section as possible while also appealing to my own interests and trying to stick to the topic poll on the front page of the web site.

Arts/History:

American History
Arts
Classical Studies
Dancing
Ethics
Fine Arts
History
Humanities
Live Theatre
Logic
Performing Arts
Philosophy

Commerce:

Business
Capitalism
Consumer Info

Computers:

Computer Hardware
Computers
Cyberculture
Internet
Internet Tools
Multimedia
Online Games
Software
StumbleUpon
Video Games
Web Development
Weblogs

Health:

Health/Fitness
Medical Science
Self Improvement

Hobbies:

Board Games
Card Games
Chess
Collecting
Humor
Poker
Roleplaying Games
Satire

Home/Living:

Family
Food/Cooking
Kids
Married Life
Parenting
Pregnancy/Birth
Teen Life

Media:

Alternative News
Animation
Books
Comic Books
Fantasy Books
Journalism
Poetry
Radio Broadcasts
Science Fiction
Shakespeare
Television
Writing

Music/Movies:

Classic Films
Music
Movies

Outdoors:

Agriculture
Animals
Nature
Outdoors

Regional:

Religion:

Athiest-Agnostic
Religion
Spirituality

Sci/Tech:

Alternative Energy
Anthropology
Astronomy
Aviation/Aerospace
Biology
Chemistry
Civil Engineering
Cognitive Science
Ecology
Economics
Environment
Gadgets
Geography
Geoscience
Linguistics
Mathematics
Meteorology
Physics
Physiology
Political Science
Psychology
Science/Tech
Sociology
Space Exploration
Trains/Railroads
Transportation

Society:

Activism
Anarchism
Biographies
Career Planning
Communism
Conservative Politics
Counterculture
Culture/Ethnicity
Dating Tips
Feminism
Government
Hedonism
Int'l Development
Law
Liberal Politics
Liberties/Rights
Men's Issues
Military
News (General)
Personal Sites
Politics
Socialism
University/College

Sports:

American Football
Baseball
Basketball
Golf
Hockey
Martial Arts
Motor Sports
Soccer
Sports (General)
Tennis

This excludes a pretty significant number of topics that had been on before, despite the overall increase in topics, and most of them were not even considered for the new list. Just so you know how dire the situation was.

Of course, if the alternative is an ad-overloaded page trying to further or start an internet meme, I'm not sure it's much of an improvement...

Why Title IX is hopelessly broken in brief: the post that will get me flamed by (some) feminists forever

2009-07-11T21:03:00.001-07:00

Title IX was never intended to be the protector of women's sports. It was intended to ensure women's access to all education and educational services. But thanks in part to myopic administrators, its identity has become entirely consumed with college sports, and a misreading of the law (not only did the law not refer to athletics it begins with "no person...") has led to even well-meaning regulators becoming misguided - the modern interpretation of the law obsesses over how much sports schools offer in proportion to the student population, and - in part to schools today having a gender imbalance in favor of females, and the lack of female football programs when football teams are massive compared to other sports - actually calls for, if one gender must have more sports than the other, that gender being the female.

This is totally bass-ackwards.

If a girl wants to play lacrosse, let her play lacrosse, assuming she can find enough other girls to field a team. But bringing bureaucracy into the mix and enforcing insane hard limits and reverse discrimination not only misses the point of the law, it misses the point of sports.

Sports is rooted in the spirit of competition: in beating the other guy to achieve dominance. It's a modern expression of our ancestors fighting each other to woo the women. It's an inherently male institution; in some sense, there are not only cultural but biological reasons for women to have less interest in sports. Women are, generally, more interested in cooperation than competition; when women do turn against one another, it tends to take more subtle, less physical forms. (It is shocking to me that two of the three most popular female sports in this country, golf and tennis, are individual rather than team sports. Then again, golf doesn't involve direct competition and the appeal of women's tennis isn't in the game.)

Part of the problem is deeper, of course, and points at the bureaucratization of society...

Truly, the end of an era. Hopefully, not of the earth.

2009-07-11T16:21:00.001-07:00

If I'm going to give my critical thinking skills a workout, I need to give my critical thinking skills a workout. And since I hope to do a lot of thinking over the course of my life, this should be an important and positive excersize for me. So you know what? I don't care anymore that no one's pitching in at the Global Warming Open Thread, or e-mailing me with their arguments. It's going to be a bit more work for me, but it's work I probably should do. ... It'll be a more fulfilling experience for me, building skills I'll need to do more of these series in the future, perhaps even skills that will prove useful for snagging a real job or at least doing well in college. ... If there's a downside, I might not have as much information as I'd like if it doesn't pop up right away in Google, and I want as complete a picture as possible for this heady issue. But I think it's worth the risk from a personal growth point of view, and I hope you're all along for the ride.
-Me, in April

Do me a favor: Next time I say something like this, give me a good smack upside the head.

Seriously, I actually thought this would be a "personal growth" experience instead of my own personal hell?

I've been in a bit of a schedule crunch for the past few months, with a lot of stuff on my plate and some of my school studies starting to suffer a bit. The worst part, and the part that I think has been dragging me slowly insane, has been the global warming series. You may have gleaned some evidence of this from the increasing lateness of the strip (seriously, I posted the strip at 7 PM PT yesterday?) and from some of my Twitter posts, but I haven't been in the mood to do research for the series as much as I've needed since entering the second phase. Research for the series started out as not too bad if time-consuming and sometimes shied away from, but it has since become an obligation I really haven't wanted to do, a job I tack on as an afterthought after doing everything else, especially since starting my recent summer class. I told myself, as was hinted in a recent strip, I had to maintain a daily schedule to finish the series as fast as possible, but for most of the second phase I've rarely worked more than one strip in advance.

What's more, the sheer weight of the research required has started to wear on my brain. You've seen me start to give a more pro-global-warming bias than I ever intended to give, failing to properly explore arguments, and breaking them off prematurely - or over-relying on waiting strips that move the argument precisely zilch, often essentially repeating prior arguments. This series hasn't "given my critical thinking skills a workout", it's worn them down to nothing.

All that might be excusable if I had touched off the open debate I hoped to start, or attracted the people I hoped to attract to Sandsday to explore the debate for themselves as I present it. But not only has none of that happened, readership has actually gone down compared to the preceding video game strips. Previously the strip, according to Project Wonderful stats, averaged about five page views a day; right now I'm lucky to get two. The Sandsday ad box has actually been delisted, something that never happened before - suspended for no one loading the box, but not out-and-out delisted for poor performance.

So all that leads to the development at least hinted at in today's strip: I am suspending - not aborting - the global warming series for about three weeks, maybe four. During that time we'll go back to the sort of strips that characterized Sandsday before the series began, that is to say, video game strips. Afterwards, the series will start up again. However, once the series starts up again I will not hold myself to a daily schedule, but will instead do research when I feel like it and release strips accordingly. There may be long swathes without any strips at all, or periods where a lot of strips are released, one a day for weeks. I will allow the series to play out more organically and naturally from here on out until it reaches a conclusion. Once the series reaches an end I will end Sandsday right then and there with my final verdict. I've considered ending the strip before - at one point I was considering ending it at #500 - but the inability of the global warming series to increase readership and its increasing job-like nature have convinced me that I probably will never get the readership I'd hoped for and probably will never find the strip as enjoyable as I would need to to continue with it.

Sandsday will not be the last comic I do, not even the last webcomic; I have at least two other ideas I'd like to bring down the pipeline, although they almost certainly won't be ready before the site relaunch. I still stand by the basic gimmick of the strip even if I was not able to utilize its potential in the way I had hoped for, and I feel like I've tarnished the gimmick in some way by working on it myself instead of leaving it for other, more talented writers to pick up. I would like Sandsday to go down as an experiment that I used to help build my writing abilities by getting in over 500 reps over a period of nearly (if not over) two years. I've gotten some appreciative comments about the strip; I have also gotten some comments that have told me to, essentially, get some art lessons and abandon this hopeless carcass. Through it all, I maintained a streak of consecutive days with a strip that will run to over 550 by the time I start dropping strips. I don't take the decision to end the strip lightly, but I trust that with the time I'm freeing up by ending the strip, there will be more and better stuff to come into the Morgan Wick Online Universe that will make up for the loss.

I'm sure the only reason the pigs aren't airborne is because it's heavy overcast.

2009-07-08T21:00:00.000-07:00

Day 94 of the BottomLine watch. Over three months since an ESPN spokesperson told Sports Media Watch the new BottomLine would be back "soon". I'm starting to think it may not come back at all, or at the very least it'll probably be another six months...

...what's that? What's that thing at the bottom of the screen? The... the new BottomLine is back! I knew it was only a matter of time! Naturally I have some thoughts:

When the BottomLine first disappeared I gave a list of some things that maybe they were adjusting it for. It certainly appears it now has "SCORE ALERT" functionality, but it also has a bunch of graphic spiffiness involving the divider between the score and stats - which, while I liked the shrinking of the score, if adopting that functionality is part of the reason the return of the BottomLine took so long, they need to take another look at their priorities.
Looks like ESPN2 isn't losing the last vestiges of its identity after all, as the ESPN2 BottomLine still says "ESPN2", albeit because my SD TV has problems with centering (or that could just be my cable box) it's partly cut off. They're clearly locating both logos differently vis-a-vis the right side of the screen (and each other) compared to the old BottomLine.
It appears that, regardless of program, it's simply "ESPN BottomLine" except on SportsCenter. Granted, I only noticed the change on Jim Rome Is Burning, Around The Horn, and PTI, not on studio shows like NFL Live and Baseball Tonight.
Why is it, say, "RANGERS VS ORIOLES" for baseball when a game hasn't started yet, but for, say, the Gold Cup, it's "USA" and "HONDURAS" in separate boxes as though showing the score, as in the old BottomLine? If it's to condense the display to show when a game is on an ESPN network and 360, why is it condensed for the other baseball games, and why isn't it condensed for soccer? Personally I prefer the separate-boxes approach, the other way is just gimmicky...

While we're here, let's take a look at other developments in the world of sports graphics:

Remember when Versus introduced a new banner at the NHL Conference Semifinals? Well, for the Conference Finals, and continuing through its Stanley Cup Finals games, Versus changed its banner. Again. So, which was the banner they originally intended to adopt for the long haul? Was the change a response to people's criticism of the old banner, or was the old banner always a placeholder until the new one was ready and they were too embarrassed about the previous banner to wait?

Or is this the placeholder while Versus updates the other graphics? Because if there's one thing that marks this graphic, it's the return of the old fonts. Beyond that, the main features are the addition of black-on-white boxes for the period number and time left in the period.

Meanwhile, it's official: the gray, two-line box is becoming a trend. Fox adopted it not only for FSN, but for its own baseball broadcasts as well, and ESPN turned it into a strip; now TBS has joined in on the fun. But TBS seems to be insanely protective of its video; not only can't I find any video of the new TBS box online that I can embed, ESPN and other outlets (even MLB.com!) use local feeds for their highlights of TBS games (which means there aren't even any highlights I can't embed). But they can't shake this forever, and you will see a full analysis of the TBS box come this October.

In tennis, ESPN moved the banner it introduced at the Australian Open to the top of the screen at the French for some reason. Somehow I think that wasn't the only change; the strip seems bigger for some reason. Whatever it is, it seems more amateur.

At Wimbledon, however, perhaps as a result of realizing that the banner was potentially confusing and maybe even in preparation of transitioning tennis onto the new MNF-styled banner, ESPN rolled out a small, compact box, but kept the "scoreboard" aspect of, among other things, showing deuce as 40-40 by placing the points alongside the game count and abandoning server-first order entirely (again). It's a big improvement over the Australian/French banner in my opinion, one of the better tennis graphics ESPN has yet tried that isn't a carbon copy of the norm in this country.

It appears ESPN took one lesson from the world feed, but not the one I suggested last year upon seeing their abomination of a Wimbledon graphic - the points display here is similar to that used by the world feed. All that's left is showing number of sets instead of score of sets and abbreviating last names! Okay, not so much...

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

2009-07-08T12:27:00.000-07:00

I'm linking to this even though I'm not sure how useful it would be (I use an Excel spreadsheet as a "checkbook" of sorts) and I'm announcing right now that this will be the last RID under the status quo. That sort of violates the Da Blog Poll, on which the only vote I received was the one I was least a fan of - "leave it as is" - but that's no longer an option.

StumbleUpon has either radically broadened the choice of categories to the point that it now requires categorization of the categories, or has merely broadened the choice of categories available to me. There is a cap of 127 categories, and there are far more categories than that to choose from. The previous thesis of the Random Internet Discovery was that I was opening your horizons to stuff from every category.

If the RID is to continue, it will have to involve some sort of cap on topics, some form of selectiveness. I'd really rather not have my topics determined by the fact I was subscribed to them before getting a broadening of my options. That's practically the same as having them determined at random. So I'm reopening the Da Blog Poll I conducted when the RID was just beginning. Selecting all the topics is not an option, so the question simply asks whether I should select the topics myself, poll you, discontinue the RID, or something else. (If I was scared at a potential 78-topic poll a year ago, imagine the chaos that would ensue with hundreds of topics! That may have to be a comment thread, not a poll!) The poll will run for two weeks and the topics will be self-selected next week, along with a list of the topics I would select.

Hilarity in cereal tie-ins.

2009-07-03T17:09:00.000-07:00

So today I finish off a box of Frosted Mini-Wheats and I happen to notice the giveaway on the back of the box.

As a tie-in for the Star Trek movie, it allows you to send in for a "Starfleet T-shirt" so you can look like you're on the Starship Enterprise. The shirts are available in blue or red.

"For just nine tokens, or one token plus $9.99, you can own the original red shirt! Wait, where are you going? How come we're selling out in blue but haven't sold a single one in red?"

Draft Image Upload seems to be back in proper working order, at least in Chrome, not that it'll help Blogger that much.

2009-07-02T17:14:00.000-07:00

(From The Order of the Stick. Click for full-sized harmless moments.)

This post is really an excuse to talk about the two prior strips. After all, I've been sorely remiss in not posting on #665, which at long last returned Roy to the land of the living. Not only did Roy originally die in #443, meaning the ostensible main character was dead for a third of the strip's entire existence, but as someone on the forum pointed out, Roy originally died over two years ago, when Da Blog only had a score of posts and I was only recently removed from the residence halls at school. That's only a little more than six months after my original User Friendly archive binge.

Not only that, but with Roy's resurrection and the deus ex machina that returned de-spliced-V to the OOTS, we have reached a state some people probably thought we'd never reach again: the entire OOTS is in one piece and unencumbered by any sort of weird temporary effects, whether negative (Belkar's Mark of Justice, Roy's death) or positive (spliced V). The last time we could say that about the OOTS was right before Haley started speaking in cryptograms, and the incident that caused that was back in #245, meaning a good 63.2% of the strip's existence to this point (nearly two thirds) has been spent with the OOTS dealing with some issue of some sort. It seems almost inevitable that another such issue will crop up soon (albeit in the next book and probably not until the next gate), and the chances are it'll be something fairly permanent (especially given all the death prophecies floating around out there), meaning this brief respite of a whole OOTS changed only in character development from the dungeon crawling group (well, and the presence of Celia) almost seems to be something of a plot hole.

Speaking of death prophecies, re-reading some of my original comments on Belkar's faux-character-development has given me something of a new perspective on strip #666, and an incident in there that tells me I wasn't far off in my reading of the situation: Haley's skepticism about Belkar's new "team spirit". Recall what I said in my original post:

Nudge die rolls, palm cards, "forget" penalties... but you have to sit down to play first. As long as the people at the table see a fellow player across from them, they'll tolerate you. A crooked player is a pain in the ass, but someone who refuses to play at all makes them start questioning their own lives - and people HATE to think. They'd rather lose to a cheater than dwell too long on why they're playing in the first place.
The apparent implication of this speech is that it doesn't even matter if the other players know Belkar is cheating, so long as he plays at all. It's entirely possible that Belkar could continue to be the same stabby, backstabbing jerk he's always been, so long as he gives a rat's ass about what everyone else is doing, and doesn't display a willful ignorance of the rules.

However, I also said that Belkar didn't seem to interpret it this way: he seems to interpret it as meaning that he needs to follow the same moral framework as the rest of the OOTS, whereas I felt he only needed to know what it was. He could be a "team player" without sacrificing one ounce of his personality. Regardless, the effect is the same in more ways than one: sure enough, Haley and Roy know damn well what Belkar is doing (if not the details of it)... but the reason they're not doing anything about it isn't the same reason that Shojo provided. Sure, they appreciate having a "team player" Belkar, but if it were as simple as that they'd probably still keep Belkar on a short leash; they know that Belkar can't do much given the short amount of time he has left.

As for Vaarsuvius... as it turns out, she learns two lessons in one in this strip (which practically begs for Belkar to call out its weepy sentimentality regardless of whether or not it deserves it). The one she's already learned is the lesson regarding blunt force; but while she's already learned about doing small things, Durkon now teaches her about accomplishing small things, regardless of whether they were done in anger (teleporting the fleet) or desperation (saving O-Chul). The first lesson involves a potential future change in strategy for V; the second means she might whine less when confronted by a sidequest or a seeming failure (or at least might decide to do something different when confronted with a situation as hopeless as this).

(Hmm. One: for some reason, the Heal removed the bags around V's eyes that have been present, except during the splice, for the entire book. Okay, I can chalk that up to the "rejuvenating effects of the splice", but I still wonder about long-term implications. Two: did V just use her tiara or head-ring or whatever it is to put her hair into a ponytail instead of supporting her old style without explanation? Huh? Well, it makes me more convinced than ever V's a she at least...)

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

2009-07-02T15:52:00.000-07:00

Okay, right as I'm moved to ditch the RID entirely, I finally find something worth commenting on. Because this is pretty much pseudoscience.

First of all, I kind of doubt the underlying idea that cravings for certain types of food are really cravings for the things those foods contain. Especially when one of the claims is that if you've got a hankering for alcohol or drugs, it's not because you have an addiction to the drugs themselves; you just need to find alternate sources of protein, calcium, and potassium! (Similarly, if you've got a hankering for tobacco, it's not nicotine you're craving, but silicon and tyrosine!) Second, that's just one example of these people providing one thing and then a laundry list of things you might really be craving instead to the extent you wonder "Wouldn't it be easier to give in to the craving and not have to pick one thing from column A and one from column B?"

Oh, and "bread" or "toast"? These people really believe in the Atkins diet and other low-carb diets, don't they? Then again, they think "cool drinks" are a sign you need manganese and should gorge on things like walnuts instead of a sign you need, oh I don't know, hydration or, say, to cool off...

Speaking of hydration, if you have a preference for liquids rather than solids, what you need is water (and you should get it from flavored water? WTF?). On the other hand, if you have a preference for solids rather than liquids, you also need water because you're so dehydrated you've lost your thirst!

Then again, it's all coming from a naturopathy site preaching one guy's back-to-nature New Age crap, so maybe I shouldn't be surprised at the misinformation... (No, wait, it's the mainstream that's peddling misinformation! It all makes sense now!)

This isn't about the past. This is about the future.

2009-07-02T14:48:00.000-07:00

One year ago last week, I began doing webcomic reviews on Da Blog.

Recently, I've been having a crisis of confidence about the whole enterprise.

This should be obvious enough to anyone who read my 8-Bit Theater review. Quite frankly, I completely stalled while writing it. I found myself trapped in a place where I couldn't say much more than "It's a webcomic, and it's not Order of the Stick. Um... it loves non-sequitur. Um... it... structures its updates well. Um... I got nothin'." Roger Ebert (or even Eric Burns(-White)) I'm not.

Now, maybe that's just a symptom of how dull and repetitive 8BT is. But 8BT really just put into focus a trend that's been dogging me for some time. Quite frankly, I'm not entirely sure what my audience is or what it should be. Am I writing for the average person to let them know what's good in webcomics? Or am I writing for Aspiring Webcomickers Everywhere to identify what certain webcomics get right and wrong?

It shouldn't be that difficult to do the former - is a webcomic entertaining and captivating? But not only is the answer to that question dependent on each person's tastes, it's actually a lower bar than a lot of people give it credit for. People in English courses and otherwise preoccupied with deconstructing every layer of meaning out of a story will find things to object to in strips like Ctrl+Alt+Del by nitpicking every ounce of it. But to be honest, most people don't care about all that. All they care about is that it's funny. As long as a comic meets the relatively low bar that it be entertaining (for a humor strip) or addictive (for a strip with continuity), it's probably going to attract an audience. I really don't need to say much more than answer those two questions for you to know whether or not you'll want to follow a given strip. (This is where I keep trying to condense the size of my reviews, yet I keep feeling they're too short.) This may explain some of the popularity of Twilight despite geeks hating it with a passion: it's really a romance novel and no better or worse than any other romance novel, but because it happens to have vampires it attracted geeks who expected a sci-fi story and held it to a standard it should never have been expected to be held to.

(Note that Ctrl+Alt+Del, at the moment, is starting to turn even me off. Yes, of course it's a good idea to give Zeke a mate! It's not like that's a hokey, boring stock plot for man-made life going back to the original novel of Frankenstein! What's that? Why aren't you making a she-Zeke (only now you are)? Of course, it's because Zeke owes his sentience to a myste-e-e-e-erious X-factor that can't be easily duplicated! Because that's completely original and not at all hokey and boring itself, and certainly not a lame attempt to jack up the melodrama you'll probably bust through and give us a she-Zeke anyway! On the plus side, at least we have the beginnings of an explanation for why Zeke could be created by freakin' Ethan...)

A lot of my reviews have been written with an eye towards teasing out the differences between webcomics and other art forms, and with no small eye towards what lessons I myself can learn as an aspiring webcomicker. My reviews have typically been written with this as a base: am I continuing to read this comic going forward, and why or why not? But answering the latter question tends to lead me to present the answers as things that other webcomics can follow.

I don't do a lot of saying, "This webcomic is good and here's why you should read it". I honestly can't answer the latter question. I can only say, "Just read it, I found it good." (CAD is a good example; I started reading it because I found it entertaining - and you can't really explain what makes a joke funny - and addictive, which basically translates to, "I want to find out where it goes from here," regardless of what "it" is.) What I teased out as the reasons why tends to be technical stuff that would bore the average reader and says little about the content of the comic, and is more suited towards Aspiring Webcomickers Everywhere, so I end up saying, "This webcomic is good and here's what they're doing that you should be too." At least one other webcomic review blog embraced this whole-hog and frames its reviews as the answer to a question: "What did I learn?" I'm not convinced, though, that this is the best way to review webcomics, or anything.

I think I need to go back to my heady early days when David Morgan-Mar was praising me for my review of Darths and Droids, and even six months ago when Robert A. Howard was praising me for my review of Tangents. If you read my Darths and Droids or original OOTS reviews, you see that a key element of the former is a deconstruction of the key elements of the strip, attempting to tease out exactly what it is that makes it tick (a similar element to what made my Tangents review stand out, in fact - I think my review of the Floating Lightbulb might be my best review in a while for this same reason). It's almost a "just the facts, ma'am" approach to reviewing webcomics, as long as it's also balanced with an attempt to find out whether or not I like it, and if it's popular, trying to find out why that is (indeed my original OOTS review is little more than straight description). I took my original inspiration from Websnark and it's the Websnark model I need to at least try to return to.

I think my real problem comes when I try to review something I don't like. I've said this in the past, but I don't like making an impact on anything, and whenever people seem to think I want them to change their sites they often belligerently respond with variants of "it's MY site and I can do what I want". (This is one reason why my Tangents review seemed to go horribly wrong after Robert A. Howard himself showed up - even when he took me seriously it freaked me out a little bit.) One of, in my opinion, my better reviews is my Dresden Codak review (which I think did a better job than the similarly negative, but more disconnected, 8BT review - I probably should have re-read my DC review once I decided to make my 8BT one negative), which broke down everything that I saw as going wrong with the strip. Does that mean I want Aaron Diaz to change any of it? Not necessarily. If that's the way he wants to take the strip that's the way he wants to take the strip. I'm merely reporting on what I see as wrong with it, for the benefit of shoppers who are considering adding to their webcomic plate (or starting one). But even in that review, there's an element of "what did I learn?" in there, trying to take lessons from Dresden Codak and apply them to webcomics in general.

Part of the difference is that originally, and lasting all the way through my post on art in webcomics, the general statements I was making were directed towards the webcomic community. But as I had run-ins with Robert A. Howard, and (in February) with David Morgan-Mar over a slow patch in Darths and Droids (the latter of which I'm not sure will subside until Attack of the Clones does), I needed to defend the negative statements I was making towards webcomics that I didn't actually expect any action on, and I decided I was really writing for Aspiring Webcomickers Everywhere to help them avoid the pitfalls. If I'd reread my Dresden Codak review I'd have seen that sometimes the problems are just too endemic to fix, and I wasn't always making negative statements to help anyone "avoid pitfalls" at all. I need to restate my mission: I'm writing reviews to deconstruct a webcomic's elements to determine whether or not I like a given webcomic and why, with an eye to observe a webcomic in motion and with an audience of potential webcomic readers first and the webcomic community second, with maybe a tertiary audience of Aspiring Webcomickers Everywhere.

But first I need to rest my brain from the heavy work I've been putting it through, especially given the class I'm in at the moment and the paucity of work I've done for it. So it's likely that - with the exception of a post when the current book of OOTS ends - there will be no more webcomic posts until late July at the earliest. I'm hopeful that with this re-examination I can return to my roots and create webcomic reviews more on par with what I've written in the past. I may even re-review some comics I've given subpar reviews to, though that's likely more of a long-term project. (For me to give a more meaty review of Girl Genius than the one I originally gave, for example, I'd probably need to go on a fairly lengthy archive binge.)

By the time I do return to webcomic posts, though, it will be a rebirth of sorts in more ways than one, because in all likelihood I should have completed a relaunch of Da Blog and the web site, which could be perhaps the most major development to come to either before or since, finally taking Da Blog and the website off of Blogger and Freehostia. (Not that my new file manager completely fixes all the problems I had with Freehostia's.) One development that will result from this will be the merger of Da Blog with the web site, allowing all my major online presence (outside Twitter) to be housed under one address and one banner title, instead of awkward names like the Morgan Wick Online Universe or the Morgan Wick Sites.

I don't intend to give away too much right now, but one reason this relaunch hasn't occurred already is because I intend to blow up some of my more common labels into full-fledged sub-sites (and the software I'd need for that isn't as up-to-date as I'd like). For example, my sports posts should be merged with the Morgan Wick Sports section of the site. As a result, my webcomics posts will become an entire site of their own (still connected to Da Blog though), with the potential for a comparable level of support material you might not necessarily expect from a blog alone. So I'd like to ask you: what would you like from a webcomics review site? I definitely hope to include an index to my reviews to aid in finding them, and maybe links to better organize access to the Webcomics' Identity Crisis series, but what else might I include to take advantage of having an entire site devoted to webcomics as opposed to a blog, even a glorified one?

By way of analogy, I could look at the web site of a movie reviewer, such as Roger Ebert's site. That site contains reviews (obviously); the Answer Man column, answering people's questions about the movies, which might not be terribly portable to webcomics, which I wouldn't be qualified for because I don't read that many webcomics consistently, and which would be more of a blog feature anyway; the Great Movies columns, which might manifest into a list of links to the good webcomics and webcomic blogs; the Movie Glossary, but we already have TV Tropes, though a guide to some of the terms I use might still be useful, akin to Eric Burns(-White)'s own glossary; "people", a home to some biographical vignettes, suggesting it might be useful to help tell, say, Phil Foglio apart from Tim Buckley apart from Rich Burlew and Randall Munroe and David Morgan-Mar and Ryan North and Tom Slidell and Jerry Krahulik and Mike Holkins and Scott Kurtz, though that might be a lot of work for little gain (and again, might be more of a blog feature pending the execution)...

...the blog of someone not named Roger Ebert for some reason; "commentary", not always by Ebert himself or about movies, and probably close in concept to Da Blog itself; guides to film festivals and the Oscars, the former of which isn't completely applicable (concepts like Zuda perhaps?) and both of which are more appropriate to blog posts (though things like sub-indices might be appropriate); "editor's notes" that are basically comments by the author of the aforementioned blog; "one-minute" (short) reviews; and the equivalent of "letters to the editor". There's also places to search the review archive and get movie times and tickets (again not applicable). Are there any things I could add to a new webcomic review site other than straight-up lists of links? What do you think?

Whatever comes of it, let us plow forward into the second year of my webcomic reviews... and hope it comes out better than the second half of the first.

The people you meet when you Twitter.

2009-06-25T21:31:00.000-07:00

I know, I know, follower counts are really meaningless, but it's still exciting to see my follower count rise over 60. Yes, some of them are spammer accounts, and some are semi-automated accounts that automatically follow anyone who follows them, but there are still enough legit ones that I suspect quite a few of them, maybe even the majority, have to be reading me on Twitter but not Da Blog. (Not that I've made things easier with my paucity of posts recently. We'll see what the effect of this post is, though.)

But I'm not sure about some of these followers, who seem to automatically follow anyone who happens to mention a certain key word relevant to them.

Okay, I can understand AspergerKids and TMS01 following me after I mentioned Asperger's in a recent tweet. I actually happen to have Asperger's, so the connection is logical there. But... what the hell is up with GHuntersFansite following me after I said Cartoon Network was starting a Ghost Hunters ripoff? If there's one thing I'm not into, it's that sort of claptrap.

I'm not sure whether I hate it for its dishonesty, or whether I love it for the sheer irony of it...

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

2009-06-24T18:08:00.000-07:00

Is it a bad sign when (I believe) two consecutive posts are spent on the RID?

Is it also a bad sign that I couldn't think of anything else to say about this?

Save the RID, please! If the current results hold - they're currently for maintaining the status quo - I think this may be the very last RID ever.

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

2009-06-18T15:58:00.000-07:00

It'd be nice if this told you what it is before throwing you into it.

The current RID poll is likely to end on Monday regardless of when it says it's going to end, simply because the changes that will happen to Da Blog then are too major.

Say hello to the NBO!

2009-06-16T17:58:00.000-07:00

Since the bowl contracts are coming up for renewal, here are my thoughts on a potential new bowl order. I haven't associated any of these with bowls, just idle thoughts. Mostly based on my college football rankings and bowl-eligible teams last two years.

SEC #2 v. Big 10 #2
Pac-10 #2 v. Big 12 #2
ACC #2 v. Big East #2/Notre Dame
SEC #3/4 v. Big 12 #3
SEC #3/4 v. Big 10 #3
Big 12 #4 or Big 10 #4 v. Big East #3/Notre Dame
SEC #5 v. ACC #3
Pac-10 #3 v. MWC #1
Big 10 #4 or Big 12 #4 v. ACC #4
Big 10 #5 v. Big 12 #5
MWC #2 v. WAC #1
C-USA #1 v. ACC #4
Big 10 #6 v. MAC #1
ACC #5 v. Big East #4
Big 12 #6 v. ACC #6
SEC #6 v. Pac-10 #4
SEC #7 v. ACC #7
ACC #8 v. C-USA #2
Pac-10 #5 v. WAC #2
C-USA #3 v. Navy
MWC #3 v. WAC #3
WAC #4 v. MAC #2
MWC #4 v. C-USA #4
C-USA #5 v. Sun Belt #1
MWC #5 v. MAC #3
MAC #4 v. Sun Belt #2
C-USA #6 v. Sun Belt #3 or Army

Let's play "What is Tom Hansen talking about?"

2009-06-16T16:56:00.000-07:00

From his interview with the LA Times:

It [a college football playoff] would be so negative for college football in my opinion that it just doesn't make good sense. Including the fact it would be 16 teams, not the four that many people advocate, because politically you couldn't stop at four, you couldn't stop at eight, you couldn't stop at 12. And even at 16 you'd have problems.

What political pressures and "problems" is he talking about?

If he thinks a playoff would have to pick the best 16 teams, yes, that would be a problem and devalue the regular season. But the political pressures I'm imagining would create an 11/5 playoff, which would mostly maintain the sanctity of the regular season and create an exciting postseason. And wouldn't be terribly different, when you think about it, from an 8-team playoff with the best 8 teams.

Or is it just the logistical issues involved with scheduling 15 playoff games?

The last notice of links to Da Blog

2009-06-16T13:39:00.000-07:00

Remember when I said the new Tweeter wasn't for advertisers? I lied.

Effective immediately, I will no longer acknowledge links to Da Blog on Da Blog. It makes me come off as desperate for attention. Instead all such notices will come only on Twitter. Follow me on Twitter if you're an advertiser interested in knowing when I get linked to.

Now, then, here are the last two links to Da Blog you'll find on Da Blog. First, the ArtPatient blog linked to my 8BT review and I suspect will be linking to my webcomic reviews on a fairly full-time basis from now on. Yay, an important milestone on the road to being respected as a webcomic reviewer!

Wait, what's this? My post from yesterday is a "Related Article" "around the web" for Fanhouse's examination of whether anyone else will win 10 NBA titles, behind only articles from SI and USA Today?

Du...duh...duh...

The legacy of the 2009 NBA Finals.

2009-06-15T13:58:00.000-07:00

Of all the Kobe Bryant-Phil Jackson titles, this one is especially special.

But not because it's Kobe's first without Shaq. No, this title is special because it locks up Phil Jackson's legacy.

Phil Jackson now has more titles than any other coach in NBA history, even Red Auerbach, but has rarely gotten any respect for them. After all, people say, he just so happened to be the coach who won six titles with Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, then won three more with Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant. Lucking into two all-time great, title-winning pairings shouldn't be the criteria that gets you seen as great.

Well, this year, Phil Jackson proved he really is that great a coach.

This wasn't a Jackson/Pippen or O'Neal/Bryant situation. Jackson had Bryant, but he came into the 2005-06 season without much else. Those years proved that Jackson and Bryant were in fact human; they would have to earn a fourth title together. You can attribute the Lakers' success to shrewd front-office decisions, but it was Jackson that turned Bryant into the leader he always wanted to be, and Jackson that created the environment that allowed the team to gel and succeed.

The jury's still out on whether Jackson is the greatest coach of all time, but he's locked up his spot in the top five to ten. If you don't think Jackson had something to do with the Lakers' win, you're effectively saying that coaches never have anything to do with successful basketball teams. After all, didn't Auerbach have Bill Russell for much of his career?

Now, maybe that's the case. But here are the last 25 Finals winning coaches, from most recent to least recent: Jackson, Doc Rivers, Gregg Popovich, Pat Riley, Popovich, Larry Brown, Popovich, Jackson, Jackson, Jackson, Popovich, Jackson, Jackson, Jackson, Rudy Tomjanovich, Tomjanovich, Jackson, Jackson, Jackson, Chuck Daly, Daly, Riley, Riley, K.C. Jones, Riley. The only possible duds (or even non-Hall-of-Famers) of that bunch are Rivers and Jones, and Rivers had three great players working for him (and arguably, Jones did too) and Jones comes close to being the oldest name on the list.

It seems apparent that even great players can't get to the Finals without a good coach by their side, especially with how egocentric NBA superstars tend to be. If Phil Jackson is the luckiest coach in NBA history, there should now be no doubt he created some of his own luck. He deserves to be on the same level as Red Auerbach and the other great coaches. That can no longer be disputed.

I finally get to pick a fight with an established webcomicker! Because slamming Dresden Codak wasn't as fun.

2009-06-12T17:09:00.000-07:00

(From 8-Bit Theater. Click for full-sized inevitable hopelessness. Which is a good way of describing 8BT itself, actually.)

So, it's been long enough. After a brief stint with doing actual webcomic reviews, I got bogged down in all sorts of other stuff, and so I haven't been doing actual webcomic posts for a while. And it's high time I sat down and got back into the thick of things. Especially given how close I've been coming to putting something off to the point of eternal regret.

Because I never got around to reviewing 8-Bit Theater.

That may well be my eternal shame as a webcomics reviewer. In all my posting about identity crises and sports ratings and April Fool's jokes and global warming series and missing sports graphics and stressful classes and personal neuroses and complaints about Draft Image Upload (very very close to becoming irrelevant by the way) and overload of side projects and other obsessions, I never got around to reviewing 8-Bit Theater.

I don't mean to say it's the greatest webcomic in the history of the universe. I don't even like 8-Bit Theater. But after I used Komix to subscribe to 8BT with an eye towards eventually writing a review early this year, and seeing it move to a new system and something vaguely resembling an actual RSS feed while Komix' proprietor was on vacation, and putting off writing the review for one distraction after another, I'm not going to let 8-Bit Theater, which ranks high among the ranks of the Tier 1 comics, pass into oblivion without my having reviewed it.

What's more, because I'm catching it as it makes its big finish towards the end, I may be getting an unrepresentative sample. One thing that struck me as I was reading it day-by-day originally is that it seems to leave off one plot thread and start up a new story so fast you're wondering how we got from there to here. When Black Mage says in a recent strip that "this whole goddamn adventure has been nothing but pointless build ups to pay offs that never happen", most people can't help but think there's an element of truth to it. But as I start to re-read it I can't help but wonder if this is actually cross-cutting between different groups and plotlines that makes sense in context. Still, it can come off as complete nonsense to the uninitiated. Even within a plot, there's a lot of hopping around back and forth between different stati quibus, and keeping track of what's going on can be especially difficult when reading it one page at a time.

So, what else? Well, um, 8BT is interesting in how it structures its updates. It uses the one-page-at-a-time approach of Girl Genius and Gunnerkrigg Court and doesn't really ever stretch it out like Order of the Stick, yet it's better than the first two at making each update stand out in its own right.

And.

Um.

Yeah.

8BT reminds me of xkcd in a way in that there's not much I can say about it. Reviewing the updates I originally followed "live" in an archive binge leaves me without much to say either. In fact 8BT leaves me questioning my own ability to go on with my webcomic reviews, just because I'm having trouble properly analyzing it, and that may say a lot about 8BT in and of itself. The characters almost seem to be interchangable cyphers for the most part, without much in the way of distinguishing them or making us care much about what's going on, which makes it all the worse that it can be a little hard to keep track of what's going on even when you read it all at once. (With the possible exception of Black Mage, and I swear and hope to God I'm not just saying this to echo what Robert A. Howard said recently, which I just read as I write most of this.)

Oddly, 8BT may have actually been a bit funnier in its very early strips, and maybe a bit more distinguished in its characterizations. Some of its jokes are actually funny, and the strip managed to balance a gag-a-day format with a continuing story, though it did have a habit of making the sort of joke way too endemic of sprite comics: "Look! I can't draw and sprites have limitations so here's an explanatory caption to show what this is supposed to be!" And everything tended to be all over the page with side jokes all over. As for characters, Black Mage was the evil one, Fighter the dumb one, Red Mage the munchkin, and Thief... well, here's where the trouble began, probably. Thief was basically a storehouse of all the jerk-y traits the other three didn't have. He's supposed to be greedy and hoarding gold, but that doesn't really tell you much. They were all fairly one-dimensional (as characters and visually).

It's easy to see why Red Mage and Thief got mixed up, since they were basically "someone who wants more stuff" and "someone who wants more gold"; Fighter out-and-out decayed, becoming less and less of a complete buffoonish dumb idiot and starting to show slightly more intelligence whenever Brian Clevinger needed a line that didn't make sense for the other three to say for whatever reason. Then occasionally trying to run too far the other way to compensate. So they all became, basically, "we're jerks and Black Mage is pure evil". Even Fighter became too consumed by his stupidity to be an effective counterpoint to the others' jerkness, and leaned more towards the other Light Warriors than, say, White Mage in those instances when he snapped out of it. One wonders if Clevinger made him "he's really a good guy - but he's friends with pure evil because he's too stupid to realize otherwise! Get it? It's funny!" in a last-ditch effort to maintain the distinctions, the same reason Red Mage developed an odd cross-dressing fetish (which just made Thief look even more generic).

In fact, let's save you the trouble of actually having to read 8BT yourself, as here's a pretty good summary of the strip:

(Click to see full-sized version. In a week's time it should be inline with the page at close to actual size.)

I guarantee you that strip is more funny than almost all of 8-Bit Theater, and probably a lot better as well.

In my full-fledged Darths and Droids review I said it was no insult to call 8-Bit Theater a poor man's Order of the Stick. I see now I was wayyyy too kind. 8BT isn't even as good or compelling as Bob and George, which may be partly the result of having characters that should by all rights be the villains as the protagonists to the extent that you hate them more than rooting for them. Not even Ethan from Ctrl+Alt+Del is as bad as these guys! OOTS' Belkar is, but you root for him more than you root for even Fighter! Of course, maybe the real problem is that the former has Lucas and Lilah while the latter has the rest of the OOTS to balance them out, while the closest thing to balance the Light Warriors have, White Mage, hates them as much as anyone else and only pops in and out. Another possibility: Belkar is funny when he's doing evil things while the Light Warriors are funny when bad things happen to them. (To be honest, probably 90% of the actually funny jokes in 8BT are just Fighter being stupid.)

I'm not sure why people attack CAD so much or why John Solomon went after B&G when 8BT is far more deserving of the vitriol. I want to make clear: this isn't an anti-sprite-comic review. I read and enjoy Bob and George (which, having ended, is ineligible for a review) and I don't even see sprite comics as a crutch for an inability to draw, as Dave Anez and Clevinger have mad Photoshop skillz to tweak their sprites the way they want to. The problem is that in Clevinger's case, he seems to have put too many skill ranks in those and not enough in "being funny" or "having a decent story", and Anez has a few in at least the former. Like CAD did for video game comics, 8BT started a trend (well, furthered the one started by B&G, much like CAD accelerated the trend started by Penny Arcade) of bad sprite comics by people who only see a way to get into comics without having a lick of art skillz, or even a reason to get into comics. Unlike CAD, I can't discern Clevinger's secret to his success, and my leading hypothesis is a bit distressing: geeks like the kind of non-sequitur nonsense Clevinger specializes in. If more CAD strips were like the Chef Brian strips it might be as beloved as xkcd.

On the other hand, if I find out 8BT in any way inspired The Order of the Stick, then all is forgiven. Though I'll still rib Clevinger for Rich Burlew showing him how it's done.

Sorry, @RaysIndex, but you're no better than the other roids speculators.

2009-06-11T14:39:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry, Mr. "Professor". But you're reading way too much into Jon Heyman's 2007 "does Sosa belong in the Hall?" piece if you think it makes him a hypocrite now for calling out people who baselessly speculate whether this guy or that guy is using steroids.

You have to keep in mind that Heyman did not start the speculation that Sammy Sosa had used steroids, especially after his disasterous testimony on Capitol Hill. In fact, I think his piece could be read as a defense of Sosa against people who want to keep him out of the Hall against baseless speculation.

Steroids speculation is making everyone crazy. But one of them is not Jon Heyman. It's the nameless proprietor of the Rays Index.

If the blogosphere is going to be the mainstream media of the future, it needs to be able to look critically on itself and catch itself when it errs.

Expand the Pac-10? Uh... no.

2009-06-11T14:23:00.000-07:00

Really? You think Utah is too good for the Mountain West? That's your real problem, isn't it?

Sorry, the reason the Pac-10 is NOT expanding anytime soon, no matter what you may want to happen, isn't just to maintain the truthfulness of the "10" part, unlike the Big Eleven. Right now, the Pac is divided into five nice and neat geographic rivalries. Adding Utah and Boise State (the next logical football addition) wouldn't maintain that pattern.

And frankly, as much as I respect the mid-majors, I really think Utah, Boise State, or any other addition from the Mountain West or WAC would be Cal-Oregon-Oregon State-Arizona-State-on-a-good-day level in the Pac-10, not USC level. USC and the good SEC/Big 12 teams are perennially just that good. (Keep in mind, USC beat Utah 16-0 on the road in the Golden Bowl Octofinals.)
Quit worrying about the Pac-10's lack of respect and start worrying about your real problem - the Mountain West's lack of respect and its need to expand with Boise State and maybe Hawaii, Fresno State, or Nevada. Who knows, maybe someday the Pac-10 will be wowed with the prospect of conference championship money and bring on Utah and BYU (both fairly good teams in both football and basketball). But as some of the commenters on this opinion piece suggest, getting more appropriate bowl tie-ins and less reliance on FSN is probably going to have to come first.

(This would not be a full-fledged blog post if I wasn't on Twitter. I might not have even heard of it if it weren't for Twitter, but that's not the point.)

Idle musings on America's most watched shows.

2009-06-10T20:12:00.000-07:00

Okay, let's see if I have this right.

Ignore for a second that the Sports Business Daily has made an article available free if only briefly. This (courtesy Fang's Bites) is a list of the highest-rated programs so far this year. The only programs to get more than 24.8 million viewers are the Oscars and episodes of American Idol.

(Does anyone know of any other programs to get into that range that come later in the year that aren't sports?)

So, let's take the Super Bowl's rating of 42.0, divide it by its number of viewers (98,732,000), then multiply by the lowest number of viewers on the list to establish the cutoff, and we get a rating of 10.5.

Wait... the lowest-rated sports event on the list is the Ravens-Titans playoff game. Which got a 15.4 rating. Ravens-Dolphins should have also gotten on the list at 15.0, as should have Cardinals-Panthers, Falcons-Cardinals, the Rose Bowl, the college basketball championship game, and depending on relative positioning, the Super Bowl Pregame Show.

Okay, let's try the conference championship games. Try the AFC Title Game. That last place episode of Idol should have gotten a 13.4. That still doesn't account for the three NFL Playoff games I mentioned. The NFC title game? By those standards, the lowest rating should be 14.1. Still doesn't account for Ravens-Dolphins.

Okay, let's zip down to Ravens-Titans. Well, this makes more sense: a 15 even, evidently with more viewers than Ravens-Dolphins. Still, evidently rating/viewers is not a constant and there's a bit more that goes into the formulae... which could be a problem if I want to work with that sort of thing.

(Although at the very bottom it says the ratings are Live + Same Day. Are those not the same numbers as the final ratings? How useful is that?)

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

2009-06-10T16:29:00.000-07:00

The world's largest Linux ad!

I may have to cut the poll short at the end of the week, and I have to say, I'm dreading the only vote I've gotten so far potentially being the only vote.

More on the greatest player of all time debate.

2009-06-08T17:05:00.000-07:00

So earlier today I heard Michael Wilbon claim on PTI you have to put Federer ahead of Sampras because the tiebreaker is that Federer won the French and Sampras didn't.

Um, NO. Sampras got the same number of Grand Slams as Federer against better competition, and you can't begrudge him never winning the French because of that. ESPECIALLY since the only reason Federer won the French is because Nadal crapped out.

Get it? Got it? Good.

Let's bring this guy down to earth.

2009-06-07T17:00:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry, Mr. Perrotta.

There IS debate as to whether Roger Federer is the greatest player of all time. You don't get to cop out by saying "well, you can't compare players of different eras". You CAN say Federer played against inferior opposition for most of his career and never won the French when he had to get past Nadal.

You CAN say Sampras, or Agassi, or McEnroe, or Conners, or Borg, or even Laver and some guys I've never heard of were better because they may not have been as dominating, but they proved it against opposition that was as good as they were.

Top 10? At this point, yes. But I vehemently object to anyone who suggests there's no debate that Federer is the greatest player of all time.

Let's look at the big picture.

2009-06-04T16:13:00.000-07:00

First, in order to keep Extra Innings the cable companies swung a deal that gave MLB Network wide distribution, not just on the Sports Entertainment Pack.

Then, Comcast and the NFL spontaneously settled their differences out of the blue, and Comcast agreed to give the NFL Network wide distribution as well. At the same time, Comcast also finally reached an agreement with ESPNU, and that'll involve wide distribution as well.

Now, in the past week, Comcast has engaged in similar distribution-broadening with the NHL Network, and now NBATV. (Although the NBATV deal was reported on as early as March.)

That doesn't even mention the end of the impasse between Comcast and Big Ten Network last year; outside the Big Ten footprint it was placed on the Sports Entertainment Pack.

So I have to ask: Is Comcast giving up on its Sports Entertainment Pack?

What's next? Will CBS College Sports or the FCS networks get bumped up? What about the Tennis Channel? Will new channels like GOL TV get added to make up for the losses? Is ESPN Classic getting bumped down, as was rumored? Could I even have the opportunity to get the mtn. outside that conference's footprint?
(I'm certainly not complaining about the sudden jolt in options, and the ability to watch all the cool new stuff, especially on NFLN and ESPNU.)

The ideal Firefox RSS plugin. Also, why Firefox may be driving me back to IE8.

2009-06-03T18:30:00.000-07:00

Everybody loves Firefox. It's the best web browser in the history of history. Especially compared with IE, which sucks so badly the only reason anyone uses it at all is because it comes with Windows and the great unwashed don't know any better. It's the worst web browser in the history of history.

But for as much as IE's recent browser releases may have aped Firefox in the same way its Windows releases since 95 have aped Mac, in aping Firefox IE7 may have leapfrogged it in the area of RSS feeds, at least for novices. Microsoft, incredibly, went from "no RSS support at all" to "better than Firefox, at least without plugins".

(Depending on your point of view, IE8 may have done the same thing in other areas.)

In my review of Sluggy Freelance, I found a blog post from 2006 wondering when RSS' "killer app" would come along, and suggested it may have turned out to be IE7. Now I think I can safely add, "And not just because most people don't use Firefox." FF's RSS reading model is the idea of "live bookmarks". Each RSS feed is essentially treated as a special type of folder amongst your bookmarks; each individual entry is a bookmark within that folder. It's a nice metaphor, but I think it kind of misses the point of RSS, especially when FF has no native way to easily see when there are new items. You have to install plugins for that. (Perhaps FF's model was designed for sites that completely clear out their RSS feeds on a regular basis because they have such a high density of posts.)

IE, on the other hand, gets RSS. Feeds are placed on a separate "feeds" panel, but otherwise can be organized in much the same way as ordinary favorites. Feeds you've saved are regularly checked (as often as 15 minutes if you set it that way, although annoyingly some sites arbitrarily set feed times for less often and IE treats those as the minimum instead), and if there are new items, the feeds turn bold. When you open a feed it opens a sort of web page displaying every item in the feed (if there are new items it displays only the new items) along with their descriptions.

I think that if Firefox had a plugin that showed a simple alert whenever your feeds were updated, perhaps by making them bold or something to set them apart from feeds with no new items, and carried that bolding to the folder level (so if a folder contained feeds with new items it would turn bold as well, again aping IE but something that neither the Boox or LiveClick plugins do), something like that would probably spark a larger wave of people deserting IE for Firefox. Ideally such a plugin would work from within the existing Live Bookmarks system, just to set a limit so people wouldn't have to wade into the wide, wild world of independent RSS readers, as well as to prevent confusion and later frustration when subscribing to a new feed, and to ease feed input. The best plugin I've seen for someone transitioning from IE is probably the Feed Sidebar, which does a pretty good job of capturing the benefits of the Firefox model of feeds in a form familiar to IE users, but I would like the ability to sort feeds into folders that alert in the same way as individual feeds, or at least tweak the order feeds update and have some control over what order feeds are listed. I don't know if that would be possible without leaving the Live Bookmark system, however.

In any case those issues aren't as big of dealbreakers as I originally thought, and I probably would be using the Feed Sidebar long-term for my RSS-checking needs... if I were sticking with Firefox at all. But I'm not. You know how, to hear from many Firefox partisans, "oh, once you try Firefox you'll never go back to IE!"? Well, I'm running screaming back to IE. Even after the issues with IE that led me to leave in the first place.

Here's the thing. When Firefox partisans tell you how much faster it is than IE they're not telling you the whole story. There are two components to speed of a web browser. There's the speed with which it surfs the Internet... and there's the speed it takes to run. And Firefox - I don't know if this is just because of plugins (every RSS reader I tried at least partially makes Firefox freeze temporarily while checking feeds) but sometimes it will slow down for no apparent reason - is a huge resource hog. I think it might be using something like 300 MB memory regularly, depending on how you interpret the Task Manager, something IE only achieved when it was really reaeeaaalllly taxed. My computer was basic in 2006, so Firefox is as slow as molasses. Maybe one day I'll install Firefox on my desktop once I get a real job and a real Internet connection I can hook it up to, but for now I'm re-setting up IE8 as my default web browser the instant I post this post.

Now, of course, I still have some issues with IE8, so: any Chrome or Opera users out there? I'm looking for a web browser that will operate reasonably well in Windows XP on a 1.7Ghz Pentium processor with 504 MB RAM. (I sometimes have 10-20 tabs open in a single window with pages loaded but mostly not being used.) Preferably, I'd like something that browses the web faster than IE, but actually running faster than IE would be a big plus as well. (IE has had no shortage of random freezes of its own, but FF randomly freezes several times a day.) I'd also like an IE8/FF-style favorites bar, but could go without several FF features I like because this is almost unusable. Nice but not required: an FTP system that works better than Windows' built-in one. I think I have one or two other issues with IE8, probably holdovers from IE7, but damned if I can think of them right now.

I may take Chrome out for a spin as soon as next weekend unless I hear that it's not suited to my computer or browsing habits.

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

2009-06-03T12:25:00.000-07:00

Experimenting with doing this from Friendbar's "lucky site" button. As I'll explain in a post later today, I might not keep it up even if it works. And because it's "a site that is popular today" I'll be late to the party instead of "discovering" anything.

Is the story in the headline - Google Analytics' dominance - or in the first paragraph - we like to know how our info is being used?

A thought on the Belmont Stakes.

2009-06-03T11:53:00.000-07:00

You may recall that before the Preakness I was wondering if I would be cursing Rachel Alexandra for skipping the Derby and ruining her own shot at a historic Triple Crown.

There's still that element with the added element of skipping the Belmont, but now I think I might be cursing her for running the Preakness and ruining Mine That Bird's shot.

Any Triple Crown is historic at this point after the long wait, but this one might turn out to have been ruined at the Preakness instead of the Belmont like so many others this decade.

Now I could be wrong about the first sentence...

2009-06-02T16:55:00.000-07:00

Weren't ESPN The Magazine stories placed on Insider before they launched a new website with all the bells and whistles?

And does this mean I have to start paying for ESPN The Magazine stories (with an Insider subscription that requires an ESPN The Mag print subscription anyway)? (I'd rather not lose Bill Simmons' magazine columns!)

Could actually be worth watching... basically one test of the "you can only read our stuff if you pay to receive the dead trees" model for Saving Newspapers (tm).

My mornings have become 100% unproductive even when I'm up for them. I need a starvation diet at some point.

2009-06-01T01:17:00.000-07:00

I was all set for an incredibly productive weekend. I was going to make boatloads of headway on my backlog in my communication class. I was going to work all weekend on banging out three different papers.

The amount of headway I actually made? One-third of a reading.

(On the flip side, I will agree with my comm teacher on this: Distracted by Maggie Jackson is interesting enough that I'd like to have the whole book to read for my book on the Internet.)

And while feed-and-Twitter checking can take a couple of hours, it shouldn't dominate the whole day! (Blame the need for naps for some of the rest.)

My plan for tomorrow: Feed/Twitter check, lunch, retake an exam for another class, get a new bus pass, and HEAD HOME. I need to at least partially make up for lost time.

Idea to save the NHL.

2009-05-31T20:53:00.001-07:00

I've heard it suggested that the reason the NHL hasn't caught on in the South is because the kids can't play it without any ice or snow. I personally think that's bullshit, since I don't think I've ever touched a football in my life. Maybe the NHL needs to adopt a convoluted and insane championship system! :)

But if that does explain the unpopularity of the NHL in the south, tell me what you think of this idea: Put ice rinks in YMCAs, youth centers, standalone buildings, and the like in southern, warm-weather cities. They can be used for anything - figure skating, hockey, even just skating for fun, like on dates and the like. Maybe start some small youth hockey leagues while you're at it, even if you can field only two teams at first with no subs.

Over time, once the kids have a place to play, maybe it can help make the NHL a reasonably national sport and return it to the Big Four so it doesn't have so many problems like getting jerked around the schedule so it's not Conan's leadin, bumped for Yanni, mired on Versus, and other such stupid, stupid, idiotic things.

(Actually, having the same teams as last year could serve as a good control for whether NBC's first two games should be 1 and 2 instead of 3 and 4 long-term, a change I've liked for at least a year no matter what circumstances brought it about. And I personally think that in the age of the Internet, buzz and word-of-mouth could eventually turn the NHL into a fairly national sport anyway. Seems everyone on the Internet likes the NHL, except for some NBA partisans - each side seems to want to turn any mention of either league on Sports Media Watch into a "my league rulz your league sux" shoutfest.)

Hope DMM didn't break things by trying to do "IWC on a Postcard" for 2317, assuming he was trying to do so, especially right as he went on vacation...

2009-05-31T14:22:00.000-07:00

(From Irregular Webcomic! Click for full-sized charitable act.)

So most of what's happened up to this point in the Steve and Terry theme since the reboot of the universe turns out to have been an extended flashback that just ended (in what may have supposed to have been June).

Which is rather interesting in terms of fueling the "did the universe reboot to the beginning or not?" debate. All signs now seem to point to "no, except for Space". Still, the fact that so many comics went into flashbacks with so many different approaches and explanations still seems to hint that the Irregular Crisis is not yet over, especially as regards the implications in themes such as Space and Cliffhangers.

What does it say when you learn moral lessons from Xykon, and he's RIGHT?

2009-05-30T14:25:00.000-07:00

(From The Order of the Stick. Click for full-sized second chance(s).)

Curse you, Rich Burlew.

I was all set to have a nice, enjoyable weekend where I could focus on finishing off some assignments for one of my classes, and you had to go and put up this whopper last night.

Uncharacteristically for this comic, and perhaps to its detriment, it engages in a bit of moralizing, but it's all to further the greater goal. In the end, V's real "ultimate power" may come without saying any words at all. This is a major moment in the story of V's character, on par with taking the soul splice in the first place.

V really learns two lessons here, both related in a way, and they're both put into stark comparison with each other in this strip. The one Xykon preaches to him is how quixotic V's quest for "ultimate arcane power" really was all along, how one-dimensionally V saw power, how it ultimately wouldn't ever be enough, and against someone who really grasped power, wasn't enough. This seems to both support the idea of the soul splice representing the Four Words, though perhaps for unexpected reasons, and suggest that if it wasn't, then when the prophecy eventually does come true it'll come with a twist. ("I'm going to multiclass.")

Hmm. Maybe the real four words were "My power EXCEEDS yours!"

The other lesson provides the forces of good's response to Xykon's characterization of power, and if anyone here is likely to vocalize it it's O-Chul. It's this lesson that V takes to heart in her holeside epiphany. Some forumites, before this strip, suggested that V's run-in with Xykon showed the value of teamwork (after all, Redcloak and Tsukiko did most of the critical dirty work), but what V learns here is slightly different - baby steps, perhaps - and more fit to her situation. It's learning not to think entirely about himself all the time. In that one moment, V realizes there's a greater good going on here, and while self-preservation may mean resuming getting out while the getting's good, the right thing means letting someone get a few more licks in on Xykon. In an odd way, while forum speculation for a while suggested that V and Belkar marked a study in contrasts as they flipped places on the alignment scale (one half fake, but still), the real contrast may be that while Belkar is faking character development and becoming a team player, V is getting the real thing. Maybe they could become real buddies now.

(It's also worth comparing V to his good friend Haley, who recently said she "takes responsibility for her own actions," defending why she wouldn't crack down on Belkar at all. In a way, it makes perfect sense that if V was going to make friends with anyone it would be Haley with their respective look-out-for-number-one tendencies. And now, both are starting to grow out of those shells in varying ways.)

It's here that V gets her redemption from his failure from earlier. Out of spells and trying only to make it out alive, V indirectly caused the death of several fleeing soldiers as the Battle for Azure City was drawing to a close. When this was revealed, it may have seemed a hastily-conceived way to explain V's apparent character derailment in the 500s (check out that book V's holding at the end). But this is an almost identical situation, except here V figures out how to pitch in without any spells and while putting himself at great risk.

The rules of story indicate O-Chul pretty much HAS to get some major damage in against Xykon now. Imagine this scenario (rather plausible without the early plot holes): O-Chul kills Xykon, returning the favor V just paid him, but doesn't finish off the phylactery. Vaarsuvius and O-Chul leave, but for whatever reason don't take the Monster in the Dark. Patrols come around, and while Vaarsuvius is powerless to hold them off, O-Chul isn't. So, V gets out alive no matter what he did at the hole in the wall, but by doing something for the greater good gets someone else to help him out and actually comes out better in the deal. And suppose they subsequently find the Resistance - V gets a chance for some further literal atonement for her failure from earlier. It may have ruined the reunion of the Order, but taking off to fight Xykon may prove to be the best thing to happen to them, and to Vaarsuvius.

This might be a bad sign for Windows 7. On the other hand, IE7 was the "Vista Browser" and it kicked ass...

2009-05-30T14:17:00.000-07:00

I was actually a little psyched to get IE8. Maybe it could fix some of the more quirky aspects of IE7, some of its slow stretches. maybe it could even keep from stopping my computer from hibernating.

Well, the new "accelerators" are overrated - the people behind the sites you visit actually have to create them, so no Yahoo Mail accelerator for me. It and a lot of the other new features are hopelessly gimmicky. I mean, color-coded tabs? Especially when I can't define each tab's color?

What's more, Autocomplete is now limited to the first (not, say, most recent or relevant) 20 history results (and most recent 5, plus any favorites) as part of "spiffing up" Autocomplete. And scrolling with the side of my touchpad sucks now for speed-scrolling. (Word has a similar problem, in that it'll sometimes refuse to scroll past the insertion point.) And the slowness issues, if anything, may have gotten worse.

I had been considering taking Firefox for a test drive to see how it could match up compared to the more concerning aspects of IE7. The main thing preventing me from doing so was the promise of IE8 and its new features, which either would be enough to keep me from going to Firefox or wouldn't be. I didn't think it was possible, but IE8 has actively driven me to Firefox.

(Oddly, even though I myself use IE and IE is the most popular browser, most visitors to Da Blog use Firefox. Maybe that says something about the sorts of people who would visit Da Blog...)

What's the difference between About, Cast, and New Reader pages?

2009-05-29T10:43:00.000-07:00

It's a topic brought up by a webcomics.com post that seems to conflate them. To be sure, a conflation can help some to understand why they're reading old Websnark posts where Eric Burns(-White) calls out webcartoonists that don't have a cast page ("dude, it's a cast page! It's not the Great Artifact that will bring about the Age of Transcendence!"), but it seems some don't agree.

Whether or not you conflate them probably depends on your specific circumstances - for example, do you have a gag-a-day comic, or a story comic? If you do conflate one or more you can probably label it with anything it fills the role of. Regardless, I would draw the boundaries like so:

About: Basic information about the comic, and optionally, about the author. A quick and dirty way to get acquainted with the setting or the concept. A comic FAQ might fall under an "about" header.
Cast: Information about the cast, their personalities, and where they are in the story.
New Readers: A more advanced form of the About page, explaining "the story so far", reducing the reader's need for an archive binge. May contain links to relevant storylines, for example, if the reader wants to "experience it for themselves".

So, an About page is about the comic, Cast is about the cast, and New Readers is about the story. Burns(-White) loves cast pages because they can so easily serve as a filter to reveal info about the comic and the story. Cast pages can obviate the need for New Readers pages, but About pages don't obviate the need for Cast pages without turning into Cast pages, especially when you consider the pages' relative utility to old readers.

(No, you did not just stumble into the Floating Lightbulb by accident.)

2 obscure 4 a pic.

2009-05-29T08:55:00.001-07:00

Day 61 of the BottomLine watch, it's now been nearly two months since the false start.

Happened to flick on off-road racing on the Deuce late last night, and while it was using the same new banner as NASCAR and the Indy 500, it did not replace "RUNNING ORDER" with "INTERVALS" so much as take the traditional tack of moving "INTERVALS" to the side and making it constant. However, the racers and the intervals themselves are still on the same line.

(Wow, 140 characters is shorter than I thought...)

You know what just occured to me?

2009-05-28T22:37:00.000-07:00

Hey... I'm on Twitter now... a new channel to communicate with me... and a public one at that...

I'm tempted to try and start up the global warming debate again I tried to start back in April, and put some of the research pressure off of me.

Delusion of grandeur, or could I actually get both sides to take part in a massive Twitter debate and make real the "mirroring effect" I envisioned for the series? YOU DECIDE!

Crap. Okay, change of plans.

2009-05-28T16:58:00.000-07:00

Should I start a new "twitter news" label?

So Peter C. Hayward commented on my Twitter intro post to inform me that apparently I can't have a post that appears in anyone's public timeline AND is also sent as an @reply. At least, not according to the normal @reply system. So, any posts to Da Blog will be prefixed with "Da Blog:" in the Twitter feed.

I'd kinda prefer not to do this and the alternative could be to just abandon the notion of phrasing Da Blog post titles as @replies, and if I'm understanding right and it's entirely IMPOSSIBLE to do both there's not really a point to instituting this step and taking the alternative would be better... maybe I can make that a Da Blog Poll in the future.

Sorry, advertisers, the new tweeter isn't for you!

2009-05-28T15:54:00.000-07:00

So I decided to take a look at my Project Wonderful account for the first time in a while because I noticed the Sandsday ad box was significantly higher than I was anticipating.

The first thing I noticed was that Project Wonderful spruced things up a little while I wasn't looking. I can login right from the front page, for example.

The next thing I noticed? Despite only 8 page views a day (down from the height of the post-Komix era), Sandsday is fetching about 6 cents a day, while far more significantly viewed ad boxes (as in, 20-30) fetch only 1 cent a day, including on the Morgan Wick Sites in general.

So if you really, really want to advertise on Sandsday, you could actually get a bargain advertising to significantly more people that read Da Blog, not just the smaller comic audience!

Oh, and I finally crossed the $10 barrier needed to take some money out of my account. But that's trivial.

(Wait... I think I forgot to tag my Twitter post as "webcomic news". So, I have a new Twitter feed, it's on the sidebar, sign up and get alerts the instant I post a new comic instead of whenever Komix' trawlers happen by!)

Tweet, tweet! Tweet, tweet, tweet!

2009-05-28T12:45:00.000-07:00

The stated purpose of Twitter is to exchange answers to the question, "What are you doing?" with friends and family. There are a few obvious problems with the concept. In some sense, it's really just a service to send a text message to a bunch of people at once, as though you couldn't do that anyway if you have a half-decent phone. Then there's the obvious question whether you, or your friends or family, would want your friends and family to know about every single thing you're doing. There's a limit to how much following you can do at once, especially if you're getting text messages for every single tweet (meaning you're constantly interrupted by each incoming text) and racking up your text message bill. There are all sorts of horror stories of people begging their friends, "don't tweet me every couple of minutes!" and "I don't want to know what you had for dinner last night!"

In fact, if Twitter was as simple as I just described, it probably would not be on its way to becoming The Next Big Thing(tm). Instead the makers of Twitter made several decisions that, in retrospect, represent them lucking out on something they could cash in on if they just found the right business model:

Tweets are public. Anyone can read them, even people who haven't signed up for Twitter (contrast, say, Facebook). This is why Twitter is called a "microblogging" platform instead of, say, a "mass text message" platform.
Followers control whether they want to follow you, not the other way around. It would be at the very least impractical for Ashton Kutcher to send messages to a million-plus screaming fans all at once. Big celebrities and news organizations like CNN could set up a "text this word to this number and get alerts right to your phone!" service, and probably do (for one thing, they could charge their own fees for it). But Twitter allows them to save the expense of having such a system AND open them up to anyone who desires to read them, in the spirit of the Internet itself. In fact, followship is not even a reciprocal relationship as with most social networking services, so it doesn't have the "commitment" of "friendship", and you don't have to follow someone you're not interested in just because they want to follow you. (I suspect some celebrities and corporate tweeters don't get this and blindly follow everyone that follows them.)
It's possible to run Twitter without using text messages, or even going to the site that often. Twitter has opened things up for anyone to "build a better Twitter". I'm not really sure what the point is - either Twitter's admitting their site sucks or it works just fine and there's no need to use something else - but I do know I would like a Twitter platform that won't go on the fritz if it's disconnected from the Internet (i.e., it'll pick right back up when you re-connect to the Internet). And that won't prevent me from hibernating but there's only one way to find out if that's the case.
I think Twitter itself anticipated that their service would not just be used to answer the question "What are you doing?" even though almost everything about their site works under that assumption. How else to explain the existence of "@replies" or "retweets" (admittedly the latter is unofficial) or other such things? Twitter clearly sees itself as a social networking platform of some kind.

At the same time, Twitter's relative independence from social networking platforms like MySpace and Facebook work to its benefit as well, including the non-reciprocity of followship, which actually creates more of an incentive for people to follow you when it means strictly "receiving their tweets". If Twitter were just another social networking platform it probably would never have been able to run down the giants. By focusing all its attention on a sole feature - quick, bang-bang updates sent out to as many people as want to hear them - and downplaying the social networking aspect of its existence, Twitter has established for itself a separate identity. You don't go to Twitter to meet new people or whatever else you do on MySpace, nor should you, and you don't go to Facebook to write a bunch of little blurbs every half hour.

Okay, so why tweet instead of blog? Isn't tweeting just an extremely limited form of blogging? There's the social networking aspects, but Blogger's decided to ape those with its "follower" feature; there's the ability to receive text messages instead of always going to a computer, but surely someone could have come up with a service that did that without outfitting it with all the bells and whistles of Twitter, right? There's the ability to send text messages to tweet, but surely an outfit like Blogger could institute that capability too, right? So why is it that blogs - Blogger blogs even, like Fang's Bites - not only have Twitter accounts on top of their blogs, but use them almost entirely to post links to their blog posts? I have to imagine it's to allow text message notification to people for whom RSS feeds aren't immediate enough, or blog promotion. (I personally actually prefer to read Fang's Bites off the RSS feed than in its "original" form.)

Perhaps more interesting is those people who put some things in their Tweeters and other things on their blogs. Why not just put the stuff you're tweeting on your blogs and stop antagonizing readers by either polluting their text messages or Twitter roll or withholding content from them? When I made Da Blog's tagline "The ONLY blog written by Morgan Wick", the intended joke was that of course it was the only blog written by me, because why would I create another one when I had this one? Why would anyone start a second blog - especially one that limited how much you could write so severely - when they already had one?

Twitter really hit mainstream consciousness with the Ashton Kutcher-CNN "race to a million" and Oprah deciding to get a Twitter account - but the mere fact that Kutcher and CNN could race to a million showed that Twitter had attained some sort of mainstream acceptance even before that. People have been pushing Twitter as the "next big thing" since at least 2007 (it only launched in 2006). Celebrities and ordinary Joes alike have flocked to Twitter in droves over the past year or so, convinced they have to get on board with this next big thing, and there is some evidence they eventually get confused or frustrated and quit.

Forget, for a second, whether or not the dropoff rate is the result of people using "better Twitters", as opposed to using the website, as some have suggested. Newbies are less likely to know they exist, so there's probably some genuine dropoff. I've listed above some of the confusing aspects of Twitter, areas where the uninitiated might wonder, what the hell is the point? I think some of the people wondering about Twitter should make sure they've looked at the tweeters of people who have already taken to it like a glove so they can really get a feel for the technology and what the community is like.

Twitter isn't just narcissistic; it can be a more two-way form of communication than almost anything else on the Internet, including ordinary blogs with their comments and even discussion forums, as you can have public conversations with anyone you're following and/or who's following you, from anywhere in the world - or even have a true "chat" room where just about anyone can come in and out. In this way it can be a way to elicit comments or contributions or other such things, invoking the "wisdom of crowds". The immediacy of Twitter helps greatly with this as well; you don't necessarily have to wait for a follower to go to the computer and actually look to check. You can use Twitter for personal purposes as well, such as to-do lists or notes, or to manage projects, or to cover events "as they happen" (impractical with a blog), or things you'd never expect to do with such a simple concept. There are a lot of rather unique Twitter accounts with some unique applications of the concept, more than I could possibly list here.

I said in Da Blog's introductory post that I would never have a MySpace or Facebook account. I saw them as things that were overly popular that I was therefore, in some way, "too cool" for. I had no use for them, and if I were to hop on their bandwagon I would effectively be going along with the crowd and doing what everyone else was doing. But Twitter intrigues me. In an odd way, I actually have some personal interest in Twitter's stated goal, of letting people know "what are you doing?" Since I was very young, I imagined any number of imaginary TV channels that in some way involved me and any number of... I won't call them imaginary friends, per se, but imaginary people. Through various corporate acquisitions and permutations (I have very well-developed fantasies - I read Calvin and Hobbes as a kid), I've managed to maintain these fantasies in some form all the way to the present day. Through all these permutations, I almost always managed to have one channel that followed me around all day long in whatever I did, except maybe when I was eating. I've always had some interest in the rituals of my own life and how exactly I spent my day every day, what I was doing at each moment. Twitter and I were practically made for each other!

So I've been thinking about hopping on board the Twitter bandwagon for a little while - I've only had sufficient exposure to it to really think about it this year, but still. This is actually a little sooner than I had intended to do so, as I had intended to hop on board around the same time as certain other developments (that haven't happened yet) came along, but I received an assignment from my communications class to (among other things) keep a log of my media usage for a four-day period. That aligns with one of the things I was intending to tweet about, and I just loved the irony of maintaining such a log on Twitter. From now until Monday, relevant entries in said log will be marked with the "#MediaLog" keyword.

So say hello to the real-life Morgan Wick Channel, also known as www.twitter.com/morganwick, your one-stop shop for all things Morgan Wick. Here you'll find:

Everything (or almost everything) I'm doing. Am I on the bus? In class? Checking feeds? Working on the latest blog post? Doing actual work? Watching TV? You'll know.
If I'm moved to leave a comment on something somewhere on the Internet, I'll usually elect to write a mirroring Twitter post, depending on how much I've talked about the topic on Da Blog and some other factors. (Sports or webcomics? Yes. Global warming? No.)
Anything happening in the Morgan Wick Online Universe (which I intend to tighten soon). Every time I make a post on Da Blog, it will appear on the Twitter feed with a link. This includes "web site news" items, so you'll get tweets every time I update the web site. I'll also tweet every time a new Sandsday goes up, which should be a more reliable and punctual option than the Komix feed, as well as alert you when I need to post the new comic on Da Blog. If I have other projects that for whatever reason I don't post about on Da Blog every time a new one goes up, I'll tweet those as well. This is another reason for me to go to Twitter: anyone who likes me for anything else will be exposed to any of my other projects!
Other comments as I'm moved to leave them, including my more ranty moments, which will be phased off Da Blog.

I think there are enough problems with Twitter as constituted now that I'm not sure how full-bore I can go into it. Right now I'm (or rather, my mom is) charged for every text I send or receive, meaning I need to avoid texting any tweets if at all possible, and I either can't go around following everyone under the sun or I need to turn off text reception of tweets. There are plenty of other reasons for the latter; simply put, as presently constituted there is a practical limit to how many people you can follow without getting overwhelmed by tweets, many of which you're probably not the least bit interested in.

I'm laying down a few ground rules for my use of Twitter that will also affect what I post to Da Blog:

Any post that could be a tweet will be posted as a tweet. If I'm ever tempted to post something shorter than 140 characters it will be posted on Twitter and not Da Blog.
If I am ever tempted to write something that would span two or more Twitter posts it will be posted as a blog post instead. This could potentially actually counteract the loss of short posts to Twitter; I'll go along and happen upon something I want to make into a tweet, but it comes out too long. Off to Da Blog with it, even if I would not have made it a blog post otherwise!
Some Da Blog posts may have titles written with Twitter syntax. For example, I could write a post directed to the "example" Twitter account, and so I would have a post with a title beginning "@example". If you decide to rely on Twitter to find out when new blog posts are up you'll want to make sure you're seeing all my @replies. (UPDATE: Okay, never mind. See comments.) Also, from now on if I have to put up Sandsday on Da Blog the post title will start "Sandsday #XXX" to mirror the Twitter format, as opposed to now when it's just a random thought on the action.
No retweets. I find merely copy-pasting someone else's tweet to be essentially pointless. Instead I'll just make it a reply to the tweet. (There's a chance I'll retweet in the title of a blog post once or twice.)

Links to my Twitter feed will be located in three places: on the right sidebar of Da Blog, on the front page and 404 page of the web site on the sidebar, and on Sandsday, both in the sidebar and below the comic. Da Blog's sidebar, in particular, will contain "Da Tweeter", which will display my tweets in real time.

Okay, now, I spent long enough writing this introductory post that I'm going to have lunch and immediately start working on a paper for my communication class. What will I do next? You'll have to read my tweeter to find out.

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

2009-05-27T10:04:00.000-07:00

Okay, this blog has a very very weird update schedule. No posts since January 2007... and before that the last post was August 2006, and before January 2006 the last post was in 2004.

Do you see why I struggle to keep this feature up?

Oh, I'm close to coming up with my own solution to the draft-image-upload situation. Very close indeed.

2009-05-26T17:36:00.000-07:00

(From The Order of the Stick. Click for full-sized doors! Why did it have to be doors!)

There's... a lot of stuff going on here. There's so much going on that I even have more titles than I know what to do with.

First, a lot of the thinking I had in mind for what would happen after #653 is completely busted. Rather than a lot of talking, we got an action sequence. Truth be told, I probably should have done a post on #655, which was pretty weighty in its own right. So let's see, Redcloak loses an eye and Xykon's on the verge of losing his phylactery to someone who was a complete no-name before the current book. That's not an important strip to pay attention to at all.

Yes, I am going to fulfill the April OOTS post I owe you, only with a week left in May. That was a brilliant strategy, wasn't it?

So in order of what happens in this strip: See those X's in Panel 2? So Jirix was worse than a background character, but may have saved... someone's life. As we'll soon see, possibly not Xykon, maybe Vaarsuvius, but perhaps most likely is just ruining O-Chul's.

V still has at least a couple of spells left. That screws up some of the thinking that I, at least, had in mind.

Xykon's phylactery is loaded with protections, as we find out the first time someone tries to break it... which probably suggests Xykon was not as close to being destroyed in the tower as we were once led to believe. So what happens when the time comes to actually break it near the end of the story? Or does Xykon actually survive the end of the story?

Third-to-last panel almost seems designed to address some of the more out-there and deus-ex-machina theories held by forumers... so why do I think it's going to lead to forum speculation about Qarr popping in despite very little for him to do?

Cleverly, O-Chul's last panel in this strip is him at the exact moment of him getting hit with the lightning bolt, and it's clear in the last panel that he's down, but we not only don't see him we don't even see Xykon. Is he dead? Negative hit points? Zero hit points? Even in positive hit points but too weakened to go on?

And now what happens? It would be stupid for someone to just crack open the door and render this little dilemma moot. Does V stick around for a while in the room or something? Does he hop out that huge hole in the wall, if that would be effective in any way at all other than getting a lot more scratches? Maybe Qarr really does hop in and do something? V ain't gonna die here, because if she was she would be dead already... unless Xykon's dealing with O-Chul has its own impact, like turning the MitD against him? It's like Rich is playing chess with his audience!

And what about the rest of the book? We have at least one more strip of V running around like a chicken with his head cut off, that's 657. Possibly a second, but I could at least see us moving on after the next strip if the circumstances are right. Then we have to zip back over to the main body of the OOTS for the return of Roy. That's at least two, maybe three, strips. We need a strip for Roy himself to make his triumphant return, then at least one strip to assess the situation, and maybe a strip for looking forward or to serve as transition. That takes us to 660 when you combine the two maybes. Heck, maybe the OOTS will even meet back up with Hinjo and his group.

Because it doesn't look like we're going to get the exposition I anticipated for this stretch, you might think that means we're using fewer strips. And you would be wrong. We've already burned two in the tower for different reasons than I anticipated. We have a bunch of establishing shots to burn as well (such as where Redcloak went and what V's doing), and if the Linear Guild is going to show up in this book we need to see them soon. That's a minimum of two (the LG and the end-of-book montage) and probably more, taking us to 662 or more.

An average of the last two books' duration would suggest that the current book will end at or around the auspicious number of 666. We don't have a lot of strips to answer all the questions that are best answered in the current book. Where do the OOTS go from here? What's the Linear Guild doing? What will V do if and when he escapes? Are Xykon and/or Redcloak affected by these events? Where did Redcloak go with that Word of Recall? Will Roy tell off Celia? Will the OOTS replace V? How did Redcloak know about soul splices and will V find out? Is there special importance to the island both the Sapphire Guard and OOTS wound up at? Is the sky blue? Is grass green? All that and more, tonight on a very special episode of the Order of the Stick!

So this post isn't quite as long or in-depth as I originally had in mind. Again, Rich kind of ruined things by going as far away from the exposition as possible. I can't help but shake the feeling I'm forgetting something by rushing through this post, on either end of it. But at least in my own mind, I'm fulfilling my end of the deal, and that's all that matters.

I'm probably leaving enough clues for you to figure out what this is.

2009-05-25T16:41:00.000-07:00

I have a number of things on my plate. I have some posts I've been sitting on because I've had more urgent things to work on in the time when I'm not completely distracted trying to catch up on feeds. I'm trying to make a big finish to make sure I pass one of my classes, for one thing.

I also have a decent-sized series I was planning to start tomorrow that would have served to maintain a consistency of posts into the fall, and combined with other projects, the RID, and webcomic reviews, maintained my 5-post-a-week pace well into next year. But because of procrastination on my part, I entered this past week with quite a bit of work to do to get that project ready. It was already somewhat doubtful I'd be able to get all the requisite research done in a week and might have needed to go to backup plans.

So naturally I get zero of that research done, or much of anything else, personal project or no, during the past week, and now I have a mountain of makeup work to get done, and I've been spending the past weekend catching up on seven hours' worth of TV shows as a result of missing two before last week. TV Tropes has ruined my life again! (Or in this case, introduced me to the Nostalgia Critic. It takes a lot of doing to get me to actually laugh out loud, and this passes with flying colors.)

So I feel I have no choice but to delay this project for a year until 2010.

I'm not particularly pleased with this decision. It passes up a once-in-six-to-eleven-years opportunity to start the series on a Monday, and by doing it next year I'm starting it on a Tuesday, which is... awkward. I could have the second part still be on Wednesday, or delay it two years to 2011 and start it on a Wednesday, but the latter might be too long for me and the nation and the world, and it would be most useful if I could get it out before the 2010 midterms, so the short notice a postponement entails is dicey enough.

But I feel it's probably for the best. I don't want a repeat of the mess that was the October of Politics, where the work I get done is of significantly less quality than what I had in mind and derails my life. Perhaps by waiting a year, I'll have a larger audience and the series would make a larger impact. Also, I originally envisioned the global warming series being mostly over at this point, and it's barely getting started, so the two mega-projects would be running concurrently for most of the time, complete with the research needed for each. There's some research I still need to do and fast to move on to the next part of the global warming series, and two posts I was hoping to get done over the weekend that I'm unlikely to get either done today, even with this postponement. Basically, I have way too much on my plate already for the next week without this little distraction.

With luck I can focus on the problems I have now, and hold off on this problem for another twelve months.

Tweet-worthy comment on the Indy 500:

2009-05-24T21:01:00.000-07:00

Helio is officially in the annals of the great open-wheel drivers evar.

This week in Questionable Corporate Decisions:

2009-05-24T20:41:00.000-07:00

Recently I wrote a paper for my communication class on the local Tully's, which I frequent for its Wi-Fi, as a social space. One thing I remarked on was the weird blend of easy listening and lite rock playing on the sound system.

It appears they've switched to 90s hits.

Now I find it significantly more distracting. Not what I would call the smartest decision in the world.

A question for Twitter users.

2009-05-24T19:19:00.000-07:00

Does Twitter allow you to change the time display so it shows the exact time a tweet was posted regardless of how recent it was, instead of "X amount of time ago"?

(Geez, you'd think someone would put up a comprehensive guide to the settings screen somewhere. Maybe that means it's really intuitive, but it sounds like that's not necessarily the case.)

Hate to ruin the party, but...

2009-05-21T11:47:00.000-07:00

Daryn Kagan via Fang's Bites links to an "inspirational" story of a small newspaper that's doing well in the face of a tough market for newspapers - maybe it's a model for other local papers? - and...

...it's incredibly depressing. If Fang thinks this is the way to save bigger papers, he's incredibly naive about the issues surrounding newspapers. Do you realize it basically amounts to a blog in print form with a price tag attached?

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

2009-05-20T10:01:00.000-07:00

If I had decided exactly what strip I was running today, let alone actually made it, the strip would be posted about now. Instead it's probably not going up until after 3 PM PT.

Still no votes on the RID poll? Do you people care that little about it? Well, this is probably hardly the first time I've linked to some vegetarian site, and it's definitely not the first time I've linked to a recipe site...

Blog of Webcomics' Identity Crisis: The End of "Free Content"?

2009-05-18T10:45:00.000-07:00

A "case in point" on the thought-provoking nature of the Floating Lightbulb: Today Bengo argues that webcomickers should stop thinking of themselves as giving content away for free.

He makes some good points but since he emphasizes preparing comics for later print distribution, I suspect that Scott "Infinite Canvas" McCloud would scream bloody murder at him...

On top of everything else, Draft Image Upload is STILL screwed up.

2009-05-16T17:03:00.000-07:00

(From Irregular Webcomic! Click for full-sized Swiss chocolate.)

So... if the Joneses are still on their way back from the Underworld...

...but at the same time are rescuing each other from the Nazis...

...what impact will that have if they collide?

More evidence the Irregular Crisis isn't over yet...

I desperately need a real job, so naturally I've put in zero effort towards that for months.

2009-05-16T17:00:00.000-07:00

I'm pissed at myself, I'm pissed at the library, and I'm pissed at timing.

I wouldn't ordinarily hate the University District Street Fair. I've strolled through it myself on occasion, taken in sights, seen and tasted interesting things.

But when the vast majority of the decent Wi-Fi spaces near my house are right near the fair, I don't particularly want a big booming concert when I'm trying to do something, and I certainly don't want the library to make it hard for me to work under those circumstances.

(It didn't help that I lost my keys right before I left the house.)

So I'm really pissed that all this conspired toaln dfjhkrqvkaflhalsbwvnfhushwimowbtjwo ybiofvhqepg35nogv2g3qv[ delay posting the strip until not that long before 5.

Tomorrow's strip will be no earlier than noon PT.

A message to ESPN.

2009-05-16T01:14:00.001-07:00

I am currently subscribed to this to get Bill Simmons' columns. I'm pretty sure you can replace "Bill Simmons" with any ESPN.com writer for the below until the solution.

When ESPN redesigned their website, they changed things so those RSS feeds, instead of just pointing to the guy's columns, points instead to the guy's search results.

I don't need to sit through a gazillion things that just happen to mention Simmons by name.

So I'm actually considering switching to this.

Two drawbacks:

I still have to sit through links to the "BS Report" podcasts, which I'm not interested in. I'm not a fan of podcasts in general, but that's a subject for another post. Podcasts are always boring as hell for some reason, probably in part because everyone's voices are so ordinary.
After making fun of Twitter in his last mailbag, Simmons has taken to Twitter like a sponge, meaning I probably have to sit through a gazillion updates every single day, way more than I'm getting from ESPN now. (This is my one major ambivalency about Twitter, which I'll go into more detail on later this month.) But at least those updates actually come from Simmons himself instead of being "Hey, Bill Simmons said this in a column you've already read..." if even that.
Oh, one other thing. For whatever reason, links don't work in Twitter RSS feeds.

By my standards, I think I'm a month late with this.

2009-05-15T21:59:00.000-07:00

In February, at the end of my "Webcomics' Identity Crisis" series, I said this about The Floating Lightbulb:

I'm probably going to do a review of the Floating Lightbulb itself one day, and when I do I'm probably going to say that Bengo is a more cerebral John Solomon. Bengo doesn't hate all webcomics - though the Floating Lightbulb doesn't do much in the way of actual reviews at all - but he certainly seems to hate most of the personages in mainstream webcomics. In his eyes, most big-time webcomics creators are self-promoting jerks who probably cheated to get to the top and as such are bad role models, and most webcomic bloggers are ego-strokers, often with rampant conflicts of interest, who shill the same comics over and over again. Not every webcomic blog gets this charge, not even biggies Tangents and Websnark; mostly the vitriol goes to Gary "Fleen" Tyrell and [Xaviar] Xerexes, proprietor of Comixtalk.

Shortly thereafter, Bengo wrote a post explaining, among other things, that he didn't hate all mainstream webcomics, he just reserved his vitriol for those grouped under the names of Dumbrella and Halfpixel. And even though he never mentioned me by name and I'm still not sure if he even knows of Da Blog's existence, I started to panic and planned to start this post with a comedown, stating that maybe I'd overstated his hatred.

Well, earlier this week he banged out a post that seemed to show where I might have gotten the idea he was a curmudgeon. Apparently a large number of webcomic creators are engaging in an e-e-evil plot to mislead Aspiring Webcomickers Everywhere in order to maintain their own standing and keep webcomics mired in a cesspool of mediocrity. Oh yes, what they disseminate is nothing but a mess of LIES! But they won't succeed, oh no, even now their kingdoms are falling, and soon the curtain will fall away and THE TRUTH SHALL BE REVEALED! They can't keep it down forever! Ha ha ha, ha ha ha, aha ha ha ha ha hahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!!!

(This isn't the first time I've sat through Bengo putting his tinfoil hat on, either. He seems to think that people who think Scott Kurtz is "nice" are victims of an elaborate charade and front so dead-on and uncanny he should be an actor, not a webcartoonist! Because it can't possibly be that Kurtz is just a complex, contradictory - GASP! - human being who feels nice in some circumstances and egotistical in others! Not that Kurtz being an arrogant jerk who thinks he's Scott McCloud's heir as Representative of All Webcomicdom but always ends up putting his foot in his mouth in doing so is exactly a secret...)

I don't want to give the impression I find TFL the conspiratorial ramblings of a madman. In fact, TFL is one of the better, or at least more interesting, blogs you'll find when it comes to advice for aspiring webcomickers. About a year ago, Bengo started trying to research webcomics in preparation of a new project he hoped to do with his wife Pug. Distressed at the paucity and contradictory nature of information, he started the Psychedelic Treehouse website as a storehouse of his findings, and started keeping a running log in TFL. Bengo nonetheless plowed on and ultimately contributed to two webcomics and a side project, while continuing to look for information on what to expect on the financial front. He became so distressed at the information in the HalfPixel group's "How to Make Webcomics" that after a bad interview with Dave "Sheldon" Kellett and Brad "Evil Inc." Guigar, he wrote a scathing post casting severe doubt on the book's business model that made him a lifelong enemy in Kurtz and is largely singlehandedly responsible for much of TFL's popularity, such as it is (which is to say "more than that of Da Blog").

The metaphor implied by the title is probably the most succinct summary of most of TFL's contents. Well, kind of. Sort of. Actually, according to an informal overview I did, only a little more than half Bengo's posts were classified as "ideas webcomickers can use, perhaps to increase their revenue or help their art, sometimes taking their cue from things existing webcomickers are doing. Often this takes the form of cool stuff on the Internet people can use. Other times it's highfalutin' ideas, concepts and classifications that would make Scott McCloud and Eric Burns(-White) blush." The rest, for the most part, is split fairly evenly between actual webcomic reviews, mere observations about the webcomic community, or ripping into people Bengo hates.

All of those three categories, to some extent or another, furthers the same goal as the first: educating aspiring webcomickers. Bengo reviews webcomics so we can learn from them, his recent posts on webcomic traffic trends were made with an eye to trying to find out why so aspiring webcomickers wouldn't fall into the same traps, and he doesn't want anyone looking to Scott Kurtz as a role model or have their business plan ruined by "How to Make Webcomics". This isn't just generic stuff you can find anywhere else on the Internet, either. Bengo pretty much assumes you're looking to enter webcomics for the long haul, and make some money from it at the same time, and maybe even join the Tier 1 Pantheon of Popular Webcomics. I can't vouch for the effiacy of any of the advice Bengo gives - I'm afraid I would have to classify his comics as Tier 3 and unreviewable until proven good (or at least potential-filled) - but there's a lot of stuff you won't find anywhere else (by which I mean you won't find any competing or affirming advice) and a few things where Bengo seems to be downright pioneering, daring to go where no one has gone before. Where else are you going to find stuff like this?

All of which means TFL has a rather interesting clientele in that it is written primarily not for the general public at large, but for aspiring webcomickers. What really makes this interesting is that a blog written entirely for aspiring webcomickers would ordinarily go entirely into the advice pool. Bengo writes for a specific subset of that clientele, yet he's also calling out the webcomics community at large for their practices that derail aspiring webcomickers. I think the closest thing to an equivalent I can think of would be Bengo's mortal enemy at Halfpixel at webcomics.com, yet even that site doesn't really go into current events or reviews or that sort of thing, yet despite the tagline of "webcomics news," TFL isn't really a news site either (by which I mean it's not much of a news site at all). (The tagline used to be "Webcomics Eureka", which was a little more accurate if a little redundant with the title and not entirely sensical.)

Now so far, my webcomic blog reviews have been of review sites, so I should probably say a few words about TFL's reviews. Briefly, they tend to focus on obscure webcomics, and somewhat surprisingly for TFL's normal subject matter, they tend to be rather basic, focusing on such things as what the setting is, what the format is, how good it is with mechanics, and what Bengo likes and what he thinks could be improved. They're short, general, and to-the-point, without too much of the rambling or dwelling on specifics of the Burns(-White)/Howard/Solomon/Wick crowd.

The Floating Lightbulb is the closest thing I've yet found to the Order of the Stick of webcomics blogs, in that it's hard for me to find anything (well, much) bad to say about it. If Bengo's insights into webcomics are vindicated - which really only happens when you become popular, as people either deconstruct your arguments or tell people how much you helped them; it's damn near impossible to do what the opposite of vindication is, since you generally don't get popular if you're wrong, and in any case Bengo may be well on his way - TFL (and Psychedelic Treehouse) could become an absolute must-read for anyone looking to jump into webcomics, as well as anyone else examining the field. And the Webcomic Blog List is not only a useful form of webcomic blog promotion, it's a useful resource for anyone looking for webcomic blogs to read, such as someone like me who's looking for more webcomic blogs to review.

The one big elephant in the living room where TFL is concerned is Bengo's sometimes-obsession with Dumbrella, Halfpixel, and their cohorts, which can come off as just trying to drum up attention by picking fights and proclaiming "everything you know is wrong!" (If Bengo decides to respond to this post in any way, I fully expect him to go on another possibly-conspiratorial rant about all the damage Kurtz and Co. do to webcomics just like all his others.) When Bengo isn't ripping into the self-proclaimed "role models" of webcomics, his posts are thought-provoking and insightful. Even when he is they can be enlightening and affirming. Either way, you're guaranteed to get your recommended daily allowance of brain food just about every day.

The Floating Lightbulb is, pending verification of Bengo's advice, most highly recommended. And I'm not just saying that to get on the Webcomic Blog List - TFL's on my RSS reader for good. As I said back in February, I'd bet anything Bengo would rip me and Da Blog to shreds, both for lavishing praise on him and focusing too much on popular webcomics for my own good (and maybe echoing Robert A. Howard's critique on top of that).

Semi-random thought.

2009-05-14T21:01:00.000-07:00

I really don't think "Chris Berman's" Twitter page is really Chris Berman's.

I think it's a form of stealth marketing for some ticket scalping site.

Is there any way we can report this?

My take on the latest abuse photo controversy

2009-05-14T20:30:00.000-07:00

Honestly, as Orwellian as it sounds, we don't need to see more abuse photos. I think we can all agree that we did some scary bleep out there and leave it at that. No need to make people angry with the details, just promise we won't do it again.

There's a part of me...

2009-05-14T17:28:00.000-07:00

...that's rooting against Rachael Alexandra.

Not because I'm sexist or anything and I don't want fillies to win against the colts.

I can't bear the thought that we possibly maybe could have had a Triple Crown, first Triple Crown in over 30 years, and moreover the once-in-forever possibility of a filly winning the male Triple Crown, only the horse that could have done it ran in the Oaks instead of the Derby. I don't even care why that decision was made.

We could have had something for the media to legitimately blitz over dammit!

NBA Playoffs First Round Ratings

2009-05-14T17:18:00.000-07:00

Source: Sports Media Watch. This is an experiment. Asterisks indicate rating not reported by SMW; if there is an asterisk and no network, I couldn't determine whether it was on ESPN or NBATV. I can forgive the lack of NBATV ratings and even the one missing ESPN2 rating. But asterisked ESPN games could get over 2.0 and appear on my year-end roundup! (CLE @ DET Game 3 is most likely to do so and all the others are rather unlikely, and it might not be SMW's fault, but still.)
EASTERN CONFERENCE FIRST ROUND
DET @ CLE Game 1, ABC, 2.2
DET @ CLE Game 2, TNT, 2.4
CLE @ DET Game 3, ESPN, *
CLE @ DET Game 4, ABC, 3.5

CHI @ BOS Game 1, ESPN, 2.0
CHI @ BOS Game 2, TNT, 2.5
BOS @ CHI Game 3, TNT, 2.2
BOS @ CHI Game 4, ABC, 3.3
CHI @ BOS Game 5, TNT, 2.5
BOS @ CHI Game 6, TNT, 3.5
CHI @ BOS Game 7, TNT, 4.4

PHI @ ORL Game 1, TNT, <2.0
PHI @ ORL Game 2, NBATV, *
ORL @ PHI Game 3, ESPN2, *
ORL @ PHI Game 4, TNT, <2.0
PHI @ ORL Game 5, *
ORL @ PHI Game 6, *

MIA @ ATL Game 1, TNT, 2.2
MIA @ ATL Game 2, TNT, <2.0
ATL @ MIA Game 3, TNT, <2.0
ATL @ MIA Game 4, TNT, 1.8
MIA @ ATL Game 5, TNT, <2.0
ATL @ MIA Game 6, *
MIA @ ATL Game 7, ABC, 2.6

WESTERN CONFERENCE FIRST ROUND
UT @ LAL Game 1, ABC, 3.2
UT @ LAL Game 2, TNT, 2.3
LAL @ UT Game 3, TNT, 2.6
LAL @ UT Game 4, ESPN, 2.2
UT @ LAL Game 5, TNT, 2.4 (SMW has this game listed as Game 4)

NO @ DEN Game 1, TNT, 2.0
NO @ DEN Game 2, TNT, 2.0
DEN @ NO Game 3, ESPN, *
DEN @ NO Game 4, *
NO @ DEN Game 5, TNT, 1.9

DAL @ SA Game 1, ESPN, 1.7
DAL @ SA Game 2, TNT, 2.0
SA @ DAL Game 3, NBATV, *
SA @ DAL Game 4, TNT, <2.0
DAL @ SA Game 5, TNT, 2.2

HOU @ POR Game 1, ESPN, 2.1
HOU @ POR Game 2, NBATV, *
POR @ HOU Game 3, ESPN, *
POR @ HOU Game 4, TNT, 2.1
HOU @ POR Game 5, *
POR @ HOU Game 6, TNT, 2.5

V's first question after recovering from the shock, assuming the fight doesn't continue: "How in the Lower Planes do you know about soul splices?" Hey, now that the robe's red and eyes're normal again, maybe Redcloak recognizes her as an OOTS member.

2009-05-13T21:07:00.000-07:00

(From The Order of the Stick. Click for full-sized end of the line.)

Technically, I still owe you an OOTS post for April, and this doesn't count. But it does give me some ideas for a full-fledged OOTS post, which I was planning to have next week... assuming I can get a post I was planning for this week in by then. Because it's been too long since I reviewed another webcomic blog.

Yes, Blogger-in-Draft is still making it impossible to upload images and forcing me to go back to old Blogger (screwing people who had made Draft their default dashboard and can't go back no matter what they try), why do you ask?

But anyway, since I normally make posts on Big Events and the forums are down as usual, I might as well make some comments here.

First, reflecting back on my original post on the splice, for two reasons. First, Burlew did a good job of keeping us on our toes with the splice. I started out thinking that, despite the power level, V had a good chance of hanging on to it into the next book; then it was revealed that V would lose splices one at a time and I thought that meant it made the most sense for them to all be lost within the current book; then plotlines started getting used up left and right, and things kept happening to V and he never lost a splice to them, and I started thinking there wasn't enough room for two splices to be lost in the relatively small time left in the current book. Then he decided to take on Xykon.

The pattern established with Haer(t)a seemed obvious: use an epic spell that would see the spliced caster appear "in the background" behind Vaarsuvius, then that caster would have their splice lost. While all the plotlines were being wrapped up, V had already used Ganonron's epic spell, so every time something happened that might ordinarily cause a splice break, I figured that meant V had one more teleport in her. And there was enough portent in V's decision to run to Xykon to figure that last teleport had arrived.

It would have been bad enough, in my view, for V to lose Ganonron alone and thus the ability to teleport away from the scene of the crime. I can certainly see the logic in Haer(t)a being the only lone splice lost - to establish that a splice could be lost at any time, to take her spells off the table, that sort of thing. But the fact that Jephton was not able to get off an epic spell doesn't sit well with me, and tells me that either Rich couldn't find a place for a third epic spell (a second "Epic Teleport" doesn't count) or changed his plans at some point after #643 - possibly, given the suddenness of the last two strips, just lost patience with the splice. Certainly I could have seen Ganonron lost but Jephton able to get off an epic spell against Xykon before he was lost - it seems Rich couldn't figure out what to do that would be big enough to give that shadow shot. (Some forumites suggested Jephton be given a completely ineffectual joke spell, though, so even that's not a show-stopper.)

Second, after the previous strip I figured that since Xykon had just fired off two Energy Drains and might have more in store, severely weakening the splices (seriously, if Jephton lost all his epic spell slots after the first, he might well be lower level than V after the second) the prudent thing for V to do was get out while the getting was good. Therefore, I figured something would happen to prevent V from leaving. Survey says... not really. I can see going for the Bixby's Hand after the energy drains, but staying in the game after Xykon neutralizes even that? With your next move being a simple Disintegrate?

It actually makes an odd level of sense, but in a way I doubt Rich intended. While it's possible that either V, Rich, or both weren't thinking the circumstances through (less likely than you'd think in the former's case with two more clear-thinking souls along for the ride with the most to lose), I prefer to think that this is V's pride and hubris rearing its ugly head again. V really does believe "my power... EXCEEDS yours!" and he can still defeat Xykon with brute force even after evidence comes up to the contrary, only realizing the prudency of retreat once it's too late. (That pre-current-book V's style of pounding on a problem until it falls fits the situation is an idea worth considering as well.)

I'm holding off on most of my future predictions until next week, and even then I'll want to hold off on some because I have a between-books state-of planned for when the current book ends. But for now I have only this: I think we're more than set up for the remainder of the book between any Team Evil-Vaarsuvius discussions and any discussions surrounding Roy's resurrection. We're already about halfway through the "20-strip cooldown period" I've identified at the end of each book. I can easily see three strips or more to wrap up the battle and have some catching up to do and tie up loose ends here, plus at least three strips to cover Roy's resurrection, throw in the usual splash page at the end - that's seven right there, out of about ten - and since we haven't seen any of the Linear Guild in the book so far, if they're to have any real substansive role in the next book - and it's becoming a fairly firm consensus they will, for reasons relating to Elan's and Nale's family - or just appear in this one, they better show up soon.

And if there's any importance to Roy meeting V's "subcontractors", could it be the knowledge that V could have lost them and remain trapped in Azure City, life status uncertain?

Blog of Webcomics' Identity Crisis: The End of the Second Comic Book Distribution System?

2009-05-13T13:29:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, you went to the newsstand to pick up the newspaper, some highbrow and lowbrow magazines, and the favorite comic books. That was the first comic book distribution system. It was marked by a wide variety of genres and publishers until about the 1960s.

Then comic book stores and the direct market sprung up. That was the second system, and it was marked by the dominance of superheroes, DC and Marvel superheroes especially.

Now DC and Marvel are making considerable gobs of money outside comic books while Diamond's anti-small-publisher practices portend a potential mass move to the Internet and comics are starting to bang on the door of bookstores.

So if DC and Marvel eventually decide to scale back and rethink the way they do comic books, Sean Kleefeld thinks that will be the death of Diamond.

I'm not sure what will replace it or if anything other than webcomics replaces it, or what the third system will look like, either in terms of the distribution mechanism, the selection of genres, or the diversity of publishers. But it'll be very different from the second system.

(The model of the monthly comic is really rooted in the first system. If DC and Marvel decide to move to mostly a graphic novel format, or move entirely to the web, I think you'll see those "pamphlets" become basically unheard of.)