Category Archives: About Me

Da Blog is back, baby!

January 19, 2012 – 6:54 pm

Well, I can’t say this was the happiest 36 hours Da Blog has ever had.

First, I found out I’d deleted the plugin I’d used when first setting up Da Blog to hide it from public view, and couldn’t find it again. Then I downloaded a plugin that just coughed up a 503 error whenever I went to a WordPress-powered page – even my admin section, meaning I wound up having to disable all my plugins in my database administration just to undo the damage. Then, after finding a working plugin, I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress, only to discover too late that the plugin I was counting on to pick up the slack for the old one didn’t actually work that way.

So now we’re back on the road, and the Sports and Webcomics subsites are running on the last developmental version of the old plugin until I can find a longer-term solution. There are a few quirks, most notably that the main pages of both sites are currently serving up all my posts instead of just the ones in those categories, but it should still be functional. If you see any other problems, give me a holler in the comments.

However, now I have a new problem: the power went out at our house this morning and might not be back until partway through the weekend. As such, I’m going to queue up a quick post to go out tomorrow to continue the streak and won’t be able to do any more work on Da Blog or the site until Monday at the latest (and I really hope it can be sooner). I know I promised a full-fledged preview of the conference championship games, but the MXSes will have to suffice: Ravens 21½-28½ Patriots, Giants 19¾-22¼ 49ers.

More to come on Monday, including – hopefully – the much-delayed launch of the forum.

By Morgan Wick | Also posted in Blog News, NFL | Comments (0)

It’s the MorganWick.com National Championship Pregame Show!

January 9, 2012 – 7:27 pm

I’m frantically running around trying to make sure I have classes for the coming quarter (as in, the quarter that’s almost a week old already), so I only have one thing to say about the national championship game, which I won’t be watching.

The MXS for the game is Alabama 21¾-19¾. No, I have no idea why Alabama is favored when LSU won the first game on Alabama’s home turf and is playing closer to home.

Final college football rankings coming Tuesday, hopefully, though I wouldn’t bet on it.

By Morgan Wick | Also posted in Blog News, College Football, College Football Rankings | Comments (0)

We gon’ party like it’s your blog-day.

December 22, 2011 – 4:16 pm

Boy, has it been a wild, up-and-down Year Five in the history of Da Blog. One year ago at this time, Da Blog had hit a low point, with me writing the annual blog-day post in similar conditions to when I wrote the first post in the history of Da Blog – the last time I will probably ever write a post in such conditions. I had just finished the least productive year in the history of Da Blog, one in which I failed to crack 100 posts, thanks in large part to a decision to scale back posting to focus on schoolwork.

That wasn’t entirely successful. The winter quarter was marred by the Bracket Ladder project, then the spring quarter was marred by Mom getting talked into something that proved to be bad for my schoolwork but fantastic for Da Blog: an internet connection for our home. That sequence of events convinced me that the best thing to do for Da Blog was to refocus on it and try to recover the posting frequency that characterized late Year Two and early Year Three.

However, things went back down again for Da Blog over the summer, as I only managed to get a fraction of what I intended done, thanks in large part to getting derailed by another project. Then the school year hit and I stupidly added new football projects (the SEFL and NFL Schedule), resulting in a miserable end of November and early December as my laptop stopped working and I struggled with a late blitz to actually pass both of my classes for once… a quest that ultimately proved successful. (And, of course, all that was wrapped around the move to a new house.)

Now, at the end of the year, I feel like Da Blog is very much on its way back up. On Tuesday I posted on the 100 Greatest Movies Project for the first time in a long time – and I tried to time it so that it went up shortly after the SNF Flex Schedule Watch post, trying to nab that traffic influx. I also raised a question there that could help accelerate getting it done one way or the other. I’ve also been working on trying to further other projects to supplement everything the site already has going on. MorganWick.com is not that different than it was when it launched back in 2009. I’m trying to break it out of that inertia.

More to the point, I feel like I’ve been pointed in a direction that promises to break me out of my inertia. A number of events have taken place in recent weeks and months that could do much to turn my life around. I feel like late 2011 may prove to be a turning point in my life, one that focuses me on the track that will take me to where I want to go, and 2012 will tell the story of how I get there. Da Blog had about 140 posts over the past year, but nearly 100 of them have come in the second half of the year. Passing my classes may provide me with needed money, which may resolve a problem that was fast approaching in June: my Hostmonster account expires then, and if I couldn’t come up with the money (over a hundred dollars) to renew it, I’d have to move the site to Freehostia or worse. I’m not out of the woods yet, but I feel like I have some breathing room.

I promised two site upheavals back in August, neither of which has happened. The web design course didn’t teach me anything that I felt I could apply to the site; as a beginner’s class, the stuff it taught was either stuff I already knew or that I didn’t feel was applicable to a personal site like mine. I gave the design of this site a lot of thought when I created it, so in retrospect there wasn’t much that I needed to improve on. The first one I intended to do, though, I intend to get done before the end of the year.

I feel good about Year Six on Da Blog. I’ve felt good about Da Blog before, but I have a really good feeling that this is going to be the year we turn the corner. And I intend to hit the ground running with it right after Christmas.

By Morgan Wick | Also posted in Blog News | Comments (0)

Invoking the Da Blog Twenty-Fifth Amendment

December 20, 2011 – 5:00 pm

As this post goes live, I will be going unconscious.

About an hour later, I will come to, and my mouth will feel like utter crap and will continue to feel that way for most of the rest of the week after I get my wisdom teeth removed.

As a result, expect posting to be rather light for the rest of the week. I have already pre-written and scheduled the annual Blog-day post for this Thursday, and have attempted to back-load several other posts, but don’t be surprised if that and the NFL Schedule post are the only posts you get until maybe right before Christmas, if that.

By Morgan Wick | Also posted in Blog News | Comments (0)

Reflecting on the end of one of the defining elements of my life

October 25, 2011 – 7:06 pm

(Note: This post was originally going to have pictures, but I seem to have lost a second data cable for my phone. With luck I may have pictures in time for the Blog-day post at the end of the year.)

As I mentioned in the third-ever post in the history of Da Blog, for the early part of my life I was a sort of vagabond. After living my first four years in the same house, over the succeeding years I moved to Los Angeles, the Seattle suburb of Issaquah, and Seattle itself, living a year in each place. Then in 1996 I moved again, this time just across the freeway from my previous place. This time, I would stay for more than a year. Much more.

Over half my life – indeed nearly two-thirds of my life – has been spent in that little hidden-away place as part of what might best be described as a quadruplex near Seattle’s University District. I moved in just before entering the third grade, and would complete elementary school, middle school, and high school there, as well as attend close to five years of college. I developed my habits there, cultivated my interests, discovered new ideas, started a blog. That house was where I discovered who I was and what I wanted to be. For a time I moved out and lived in a dorm room, but it was not meant to be, and after a few months I was back at the house where I started, where Da Blog became what it is today, whatever that is.

A few months ago my mom inherited a house in Issaquah when her mom died. Mom, not wanting to be anyone’s landlord, decided to move there herself, which meant I would have to come with her. And so it was that this past weekend, we packed up and moved away from my home of 15 years, bringing to a close a somewhat momentous era in my life.

I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a sobering moment, but I also have plenty of reason to look ahead. The area around the old house has changed over the years, and as I’ve chronicled on Da Blog in the past, I’ve had more than a few run-ins with obnoxious college student neighbors the past few years. This new house has no shared walls with anyone but people I already know. As it sets up, it also has a fairly private area for me to set up and do whatever I need to do, whether it’s on the computer, reading, or whatever; I effectively have an “office” for me to work in. On the other hand, a fairly lengthy commute to school is going to get even lengthier, and it looks like we’re going to add a dog at some point; I’ve never gotten along with dogs.

Although one era of my life has come to an end, a new one is just beginning, and I have every hope and expectation that this new home will provide the foundation upon which Da Blog will finally take off and I will achieve my success. Of course, I’ve said that sort of thing a bajillion times before, and this new home comes with something of a bad omen. I was already close before living in the Seattle area, but this new home is just eleven miles or so from the coordinates of the home of John from Homestuck.

Which spookily enough, brings me to my first real post from my new home…

By Morgan Wick | Also posted in Webcomics | Tagged | Comments (0)

A happier important notice on the future of Da Blog

July 29, 2011 – 8:52 pm

You may or may not have noticed that, contrary to what I’ve said in the past, and this past week aside, posting has picked up substantially recently, especially where webcomic posts are concerned. You may have also noticed that some of these posts have gone up at rather… interesting hours.

There are a couple of reasons for this. One is something I hinted at a while back: after years of my struggling to find an Internet connection, my mom finally got talked (not by me) into adding an internet connection for our house. This has made it far easier to update Da Blog, but considering what I said a while back about refocusing on school work, it’s not sufficient to explain this new focus.

The other reason I hinted at in my blog-day post. Having essentially unlimited access to the internet has illuminated to me just how addicted to the Internet I’ve become, and how far beyond Da Blog that addiction stretches. Given the opportunity, I can regularly surf the ‘Net late into the night, consequences be damned. I’d already passed only one out of two classes in each of the preceding two quarters, despite my commitment to suspend work on Da Blog and focus on schoolwork. But last quarter, despite the motivation of the Understanding the News series, you may have noticed I only put out one post in that series (other than the introductory post I linked to above). I wound up passing neither class that quarter. When it comes to passing classes again, it’s time for Plan B.

I realized that the last time I was regularly passing two classes was when I was regularly working on Da Blog, on webcomic posts and everything of that like. I theorized that having to spend a substantial portion of every weekday catching up on RSS feeds and working on posts (and Sandsday) provided a necessary structure and constraint on my addiction that allowed me to focus the rest of my time on more productive pursuits. (Note that there’s another theory here: recently, more and more of the classes I take require me to actually do the readings assigned, rather than just pick out a few important assignments and focus on those.)

So to rebuild my work ethic, I’m spending this summer focusing on fully catching up on my RSS feeds (right now I have only the feeds that most clog my reader to go, plus Darths and Droids), working on webcomics posts and future webcomics, as well as other big plans for Da Blog and my future. I’m hoping I can build enough momentum from working on those projects that when school starts in the fall I can shift gears and actually get work done without having other distractions. I still expect posting to decline precipitously, especially in fall, when football usually dominates Da Blog. And honestly, even this plan hasn’t been working very well, with two of my planned projects (in my opinion, the two most important) not having had any time spent on them at all with August about to start. Blame for that can largely be laid at the feet of a more personal project I’ve been working on, one which I hope will provide a shorter “last resort” alternative to Internet fun when the fall starts.

Now that that’s out of the way, now hear this… there will be at least two major site upheavals over the course of this year.

The first will be sometime in the next few weeks, and will involve finally upgrading WordPress to the 3.x series, putting in the forum, fixing the problems with the Sandsday archive, and probably completely overhauling the relationship between the Sports and Webcomics subsites and the main site. (This last I don’t want to do, but the plugin that creates the Sports and Webcomics subsites stopped updating IN THE MIDDLE OF UPDATING FOR 3.0, so it may be necessary.) This revamp will also allow me to start a brand new webcomic, something I’ve been giving a lot of thought to recently.

The second will be a more minor update over the course of late September through early December, as I take a web design class, and may involve next to nothing at all. While I like the general layout of the site and the basic principles behind its look, I’m not blind to the fact that it has some potential problems (the “how do you like my site” poll that came with the WP-Polls plugin didn’t come out with the best results), although some of the problems are things I’ve been meaning to change from the beginning, and it goes just enough against the WordPress standard I’m kind of dreading how on Earth I’m going to get the forum to work (one reason I didn’t start it last time I tried was because I just gave up trying to get it to work), so I’d like to optimize the site and identify those problems and fix them.

Between these upheavals and several new projects I hope to unveil over the next few months, it’s a bold new era in Da Blog’s history. Here’s hoping it all works out for the best.

By Morgan Wick | Also posted in Blog News | Comments (1)

Understanding the News: Introduction

May 10, 2011 – 6:48 pm

I have long considered myself a bit of a philosopher; in fact, for most if not all of Da Blog’s existence, philosophy was my main plan for my future, despite misgivings, hopes for Da Blog itself, and dabbling in other areas. However, I am not a philosophy major in college, because I find what is currently called “philosophy” to be too esoteric and ivory-tower, and overly focused on irrelevant and purely hypothetical questions.

Philosophy is not merely concerned with such esoteric speculations. I consider philosophy to be of the greatest importance for unpacking the critical questions of human nature. Philosophy has long been concerned with building a framework with which to understand human behavior. The conclusions reached have not always been entirely accurate – in particular often denigrating or denying the social aspect of human life – but it has been a common and constant theme in philosophy since at least the days of Plato’s Republic.

That philosophy has largely abandoned this ground, and made itself irrelevant and laughable to the extent that it has stayed, is quite unfortunate, because in my view, there is no question more important. For all that has been said about the wonder of the universe, the promise of technology, the hunt for the Higgs boson, and all the other myriad triumphs of the physical sciences, it is the simple question of human nature that has had and will have the biggest impact on the course of history, because it is, ultimately, humanity that sets that course.

Why are politicians so corrupt? Why are corporations so ruthlessly greedy? How come we can’t feed everyone? How come we aren’t doing anything about global warming? Why do wars happen? Where does religion come from? Where does evil come from? And most importantly, how can we fix all of the above?* The answers to these questions, and many more besides, are rooted in an understanding of how humans actually work and behave, and why. They are the most important questions for our modern world, not questions of the physical sciences or metaphysics.

(*Obviously, this question assumes that religion is something to be fixed, which you may disagree with.)

I’m currently taking a sociology class that has an assignment to write blog posts connecting current events to the numerous social theories developed over the years about the modern world. It’s a project that quite frankly, I should have started early last month, but I haven’t yet shaken my procrastination issues; I’ll be releasing two posts a week to compensate. (After my numerous attempts to compensate for the lack of an Internet connection at home were a minor theme of Da Blog for the first four years of its existence, someone from Comcast convinced my mom to finally get an Internet connection at the worst possible time, when my inability to complete even my modest class schedule is putting a severe damper on my finances.) However, I may not stop when I’ve completed the obligations of the assignment; I may continue the project indefinitely into the future, as a regular feature on Da Blog. In fact, this project may well be the start of something that becomes the most important part of MorganWick.com in the future.

As a storage place for the new project as well as a way to organize all the posts related to it in one place, I’ll be introducing a new category to Da Blog, “Understanding the News”. The category will start out a subcategory to “My Comments on the News”, but I may move it to the “Philosophy” category if I feel the need to (the fact that this very post isn’t a good fit to “My Comments on the News” may be a sign I may need to move it). It’s not the best of names, but I hope it gets across the notion that this project is about finding a better understanding of why the world is the way it is, and the forces behind everything that happens in the world that might not be obvious.

By Morgan Wick | Also posted in Blog News, Philosophy, Understanding the News | Comments (1)

Get out of my head, Randall.

March 24, 2011 – 4:57 am

(From xkcd. Click for full-sized ghost in the machine.)

I’m sick, it’s very late and I’m probably not very coherent right now, but it’s not as late as it was Tuesday night.

First a clarification: I stand by most of what I said in my original xkcd review yea so many years ago. I don’t think xkcd is compelling enough for me to come back to it three times a week. It’s more disorganized even than most gag-a-day comics; each strip exists in its own right, but even if Randall Munroe were to write the greatest comic in the history of history, it still wouldn’t keep me interested enough to check out any other strips. No matter how much consistent quality xkcd puts out, it’s still more of an editorial cartoon for geeks than anything else.

Recently, if I have nothing else to do and/or don’t feel like doing anything too “thinky”, I’ll mosey on over to xkcd. It’s good for a quick laugh to pick up the day, and I’ll also trawl the recent archives for other recent, quick-hit strips. xkcd consists of a bunch of isolated incidents that can occasionally rise to the level of being quite funny, and often thought-provoking. But I’m just not sure it’s enough to keep me coming back for a single isolated incident three times a week, and unlike, say, The Order of the Stick, I can certainly go long stretches without knowing what the latest xkcd happenings are. Since I’m not as well connected in the social web as most people on the Internet, I suspect much of what’s keeping xkcd going is its reputation as a meme factory.

But I just had to mention that on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, I was in the middle of a semi-unplanned 12-hour all-nighter to compose a paper for a philosophy class. Working on something I don’t necessarily enjoy for 12 hours straight isn’t really my forte, and I occasionally drifted over to other mindless activities.

One of which was checking xkcd and seeing a joke about the Allegory of the Cave.

I am convinced Randall Munroe is somehow connected to the essential life force of the universe.

By Morgan Wick | Also posted in Webcomics | Tagged | Comments (0)

An important announcement on the future of Da Blog

October 18, 2010 – 6:52 pm

You may have noticed that posting on Da Blog has slowed to an absolute crawl this year, and I’m long overdue for an explanation. Simply put, I’ve failed at my intended plan for Da Blog.

Call me a wide-eyed idealist, but I believe everyone should be able to make a living doing what they enjoy doing. By which I don’t mean simply “having fun” but whatever their passion is, what they would do if there were no need to make money. If you enjoy making tables and chairs and get a release out of it then maybe you should consider taking up a career in carpentry. This is, in fact, the only reason the Internet has created so much content that’s not directly paid for: people doing what they enjoy doing, people doing what they want to do. There are probably a wide variety of fields that I would be good at, but they wouldn’t be me. I would be working solely to pick up a paycheck. I want to work on what I’m interested in.

I created Da Blog, and later the forerunner to MorganWick.com, in large part to serve as a repository for my work on topics I was fascinated by, out of a hope that enough people would be interested in what I had to say about them to make Da Blog popular and possibly allow me to make some money off it without having to work in some grunt job or something out of a Dilbert cartoon. Once Da Blog was popular, I could use it to push some of my more controversial but profound thinking and build my true greatness. I’ve made several attempts over the years to build Da Blog’s popularity, from the various sports projects to Sandsday to the webcomic reviews to 2008′s October of Politics fiasco.

The webcomic reviews have been the most successful, or should I say least unsuccessful, of the lot… so naturally there may be no part of the site that has suffered more over the past year. One of the top two most popular posts in the history of Da Blog was the 2009 State of Webcomics Address, a post I was reconsidering my thinking on even as I was posting it, only to watch in horror as I was called on to defend views I was no longer sure I held, and given rebuttals I wasn’t sure I didn’t already agree with. One of my biggest regrets is never having posted a clarification to the Address giving a more refined version of my thoughts.

That I haven’t had the work ethic to work on all the posts I’d like to, that I haven’t been as fast or as committed as I’d like to be, has always been a problem of mine hindering Da Blog, but my time has also been restricted by the need to work on schoolwork. I’ve always attempted to juggle schoolwork and Da Blog, with a sensitivity towards the time-sensitivity of much of what I work on on Da Blog, and a desire to build upon what little I have. Honestly, my work on Da Blog has wound up having the impact of limiting the amount of schoolwork that gets done, and I wind up prioritizing the assignments that seem to me to be really important.

Everything started spiralling downhill last summer of 2009, when I took a summer class. Under normal circumstances, at my school most people take three classes at a time; as it happened, through a series of events early in my college career I was led to the conclusion that I was best off taking two classes at a time. But summer classes are very condensed and designed to be taken one class at a time, meaning for about a month, my schedule was equivalent to taking three classes at a time. The resulting time crunch was such that I decided to abandon following my RSS feeds (except for Order of the Stick).

A month may not seem like much to catch up on, but even before all this, my RSS feeds took so long to catch up on that I had to spend a significant portion of every single (week)day catching up on them. Combine this with the fact I wasn’t quite done with the work the course required, and while I made a fairly sizeable dent in catching up on my RSS feeds by the time regular classes started up again, it was far from complete.

Due to procrastination on my part, I was signed up for only one class when classes started up again instead of two, but fall is typically one of the busiest periods of the year for Da Blog because of all the football stuff, and my progress on my RSS feeds, slowed by the launch of the new site, had been derailed by my decision to commense an OOTS archive binge that, because of a related associated project, turned out to take far, far longer than I ever anticipated. Then, right as I finally finished the work for the summer class, the screen of my laptop broke, and it took at least a month before I finally got a new one, which hamstrung the work on the football projects and halted the archive binge, since I was having a hard enough time working on the work for my one class without a laptop. I still haven’t caught up on more than one feed since then.

The Christmas break was utterly unproductive, so I was still behind on the OOTS archive binge. That project wound up dominating my time for a good chunk of February, and in the meantime an old enemy flared up again. Despite writing some occasionally angry posts over the course of 2009, I had, in fact, figured that I had mostly shaken my old tendency to flare up in angry outbursts that got me into trouble and kicked out of classes. But one result of that was that I stopped seeing my therapist, and didn’t start up again even as the stress of not being able to keep up on my RSS feeds and the OOTS archive binge started getting to me.

So the end result was, I wound up kicked out of a class. Then, right as the quarter was ending, I had another outburst that would have gotten me kicked out of the other class if the quarter wasn’t ending. And at that point I was given an ultimatum: If you want to stay at Seattle University, you better make damn sure this crap never happens again. Otherwise you can go off to some online school for all we care.

For over a week I thought about it. On the one hand, leaving Seattle University would mean going all-in on Da Blog and hoping it works out, when it hasn’t worked out yet. But on the other hand, the requirements for staying at school – the steps needed to take to reduce the chances for another incident to as close to zero as possible – would involve strictly keeping up with the assignments and not falling behind on them at all, lest the stress of having to catch up cause problems, and to maintain that pace would require me to virtually abandon Da Blog for the two-plus years it would take to complete my degree.

I did eventually decide not to take the quitter’s way out, and I’m still going to Seattle University for the foreseeable future. But that means I can’t really juggle Da Blog and my schoolwork the way I used to while trying to get ahead with Da Blog anymore. I intended to use the summer as a way to wrap up a few projects of mine (as well as more schoolwork I didn’t get done during the actual school year) while making a last-ditch effort to make Da Blog popular enough to support itself, but thanks to TV Tropes and some other distractions, I wound up doing virtually none of that. Honestly, I don’t think that, at least in my case, colleges do a good enough job of reflecting and supporting their students’ true passions, instead boxing them in to a certain mode of living and learning.

Over the next couple of weeks I do intend to get one of my projects out of the way, an attempted reprise of the October of Politics with lessons learned from the past, but after that – unless it catches on – expect posting frequency to drop precipitously, and for the paucity of posts seen over the past year to become the norm. I’ll still get out a new State of Webcomics Address containing the aforementioned clarification of my views, and even finally catch up on my RSS feeds. But I’m probably not going to test the Line of Sight rankings this year, and once my desktop gets fixed I’m probably going to adopt the 2007 solution of posting only the RTFs of the regular College Football Rankings, at least for this year. Beyond that webcomics posts are probably going to be restricted to the summer only if at all, and summer in general should see the greater portion of the posts for the year over the next two years.

I’m not shutting down posting on Da Blog entirely, but if this new project doesn’t work out I think it’s very possible I may be back to square one in terms of finding something to do with my future. I need to find something that won’t grind down my soul, something that will properly use my abilities and that I’ll be able to enjoy at least a little (I need to find a word between “enjoy” and “tolerate”). Da Blog seemed like the best approach for my affinities, and I may now be back to Plan B, and the road ahead seems downright murky.

By Morgan Wick | Also posted in Blog News, Internet adventures, Philosophy | Comments (1)

See me, feel me, touch me, heal me…

August 23, 2010 – 6:24 pm

I’ve never really been one of those to hide their identity online. I’ve always been very (sometimes brutally) open and honest about who I am and what I’m like. I’ve always supported accountability on the Internet and not hiding behind anonymity. So I thought I should put a face to what I post here.

This is what I look like. The desktop is a little anachronistic if you’ve been following my quest for Internet connections for my laptop; I have it at home but it’s not connected to the Internet right now. The image itself didn’t turn out quite like I envisioned, but close enough.

I’ll be posting this on various forums as I return to them (I should have already posted it on TV Tropes, Gravatar, Bleacher Report, and Twitter by the time you read this – not posting on Wikipedia because I don’t want to worry about licencing), and I’ve made some tweaks to the About Me page. Ironically, when I first started thinking about rewriting the About Me page it was to remove or tone down some of the scarier aspects, but now I think I’ve actually made it a little bit scarier. The story behind that is a story for another time, though.

By Morgan Wick | Also posted in Blog News | Comments (0)