I am pissed off at myself.
I had planned to use the winter break to catch up on things that have been haunting me since July. I’d get to work on a number of my planned projects, including my planned book on the impact of the Internet, or at least catch up on feeds I’ve been falling behind on and fast, or at least a number of long-planned posts.
What have I been doing instead? Getting ensnared by TV Tropes. Again. In a similar manner to something that happened over the summer, except this time, combined with all the other crap I’ve loaded down my browser with in the interim, it’s enough to start causing Firefox to crash regularly. If it weren’t for that I could stave off temptation long enough to at least take care of some of the long-planned posts, or at least the timeliest ones, but instead I feel I have to spend all my computer time on TV Tropes just to get it over with. It does not help that I’ve made a habit of staying up well into the night, as in until 2 AM and sometimes as late as 5 AM.
That said, this was actually a somewhat productive year for me, and for what used to be Da Blog, even if I’ve been making pretty much exclusively football posts since the end of my flashy debut month in September. In fact, this could go down as perhaps the most pivotal year in the history of the Morgan Wick Online Universe, mostly because this was the year a foundation was laid for the future with the move of Da Blog and – at least nominally – the rest of the web site to MorganWick.com (and the associated re-posting of posts to Comixtalk and Bleacher Report). This site is very much still under construction – several features aren’t properly set up yet, I haven’t bothered to figure out how to make Sandsday accessible on the new site, and I haven’t launched the forum yet. The forum isn’t entirely my fault, as I’m not sure I’d be able to right now even if I got around to trying, as bbPress is in a pretty sorry state, especially compared to the more mature (and more paid-attention-to) WordPress. I promised a December forum launch last time I checked, but that’s probably not happening, because from what I hear I may still be running up against many of the same problems that haunted my first attempt.
And that’s not all. I launched Da Tweeter, which could become the new core of the Morgan Wick Online Universe. And as I prepared to write the aforementioned Internet book, I started writing more and more introspective and insightful things, including the “Webcomics’ Identity Crisis” series in February and Ideas Every Day month in September.
But my life, if anything, has entered a tailspin. Last year I reflected on all the job-searching I’d done, which wasn’t much because Da Blog had become my job. This year I did basically no job-searching at all. And my schoolwork has been suffering even without other online distractions, to the point I’ve been skating close to skipping out on multiple courses. The Morgan Wick Online Universe itself took a step back when I attempted to use Sandsday to hold a debate on global warming, only for first, no one to join the debate, and second, the resulting one-man debate driving me insane and leading to the end of Sandsday. I still intend to finish the debate some day, but there haven’t been any new Sandsday strips since July or August… maybe I’m still feeling the after-effects of the global warming series.
But beyond that, a lot of my problems seem to stem from a few sources, things I’ve been complaining about for a long time. Complaints about my workload are as old as the first time Da Blog picked up a sliver of popularity, but in 2009 they became acute. My RSS reader got so bloated I eventually had to take a temporary vacation from it when my school workload interfered too much, and as the above indicates, it has never recovered. Between my RSS feeds, personal projects, and schoolwork, I try to do more than there’s time in the day to do, or at least than there’s time in the day for me to do. It would help if I had Internet access from home, but that’s not likely to happen unless and until I get a job, and I can’t get a job if I’m already too busy for one…
Perhaps the solution is strict regimentation of my day, something I’ve long had in mind and the formation of Da Tweeter was partly intended to facilitate, but I’ve never been very good at holding myself to a schedule. Or perhaps the solution is focusing more on webcomic posts. More people I’ve heard of have noticed my webcomic posts than my sports posts, and even with no webcomic posts for months I’ve received more traffic to the webcomic section of the site than the sports section. Of my football projects, the SNF Flex Schedule Watch is the only one that’s produced significant traffic, and the College Football Rankings take up so much of my time I’m considering outsourcing them somehow or reverting to the 2007 approach of posting just the RTFs of the full rankings and not separate posts. (Of course it hasn’t helped that for most of the season I had to hop around various school computers to put the ranking posts together, but football projects were curtailing my ability to do schoolwork even before that.)
Or maybe the problem is not so much that I don’t have the time, but that I don’t have the brainpower. But then I need to get more brainpower somehow…
At any rate, even if it only added up to nine months, Year Three of Da Blog did a lot to set the course for Da Blog’s future. Now it’s time to find out how Year Four continues that course. And in honor of Da Blog’s third blog-day, I’m taking one of the posts I made this year, a list of books I’m looking for (and which might enlighten you too), and turning it into a constantly-updated page.
(From The Order of the Stick. Click for full-sized Darth Vader impression.)
The twilight of the National Football League
Watching Friday’s “Pardon the Interruption” last night, as Tony and Mike interviewed bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell (whose books I haven’t read but am very interested in nonetheless) about his New Yorker piece on the brains of NFL players, I was struck by a sudden realization.
The NFL – the undisputed king of the American sports landscape – could be in the waning days of its popularity if not existence.
For decades now, especially as boxing faded away with the decline of Ali and Tyson, the NFL has been the dominant sport on the landscape by appealing to our bloodlust. People tune in to the NFL each week, in part, because they want to see violence, brutality, and pain. Even if that may not be strictly true, it is true that for non-fans (especially for baseball fans), football is identified with that sort of violence and brutality, which fans are willing to take a blind eye to.
American culture, as well as other developments, may be turning against that tolerance to the NFL’s brutality. There’s been a confluence of events that’s started to show that people are starting to care more about the NFL’s brutality than in the past. Most of them are in the background for now, like the ongoing pension fight between retired players and the Player’s Association and pieces like Gladwell’s that actually quantify the effects (even in college and high school) and have led to an increased emphasis on concussions, but we’ve also seen the NFL itself make rule changes that have been seen by some as appealing to pollyannas, especially when it comes to protecting the quarterback. The NFL is becoming a more conscientious place about the well-being of its players, with “safety” becoming the watchword of the day, but nothing it can do might protect them as well as keeping them out in the first place.
I can’t link to a video of the PTI interview because ESPN hides almost all video from PTI and “Around the Horn” behind its “Insider” subscription wall, but I can tell you that the interview did touch on this very possibility. Gladwell suggested that to completely make the NFL safe might require massive rule changes that would turn the game into something else, and the prospect was raised of Congress potentially deciding the NFL needed to be banned and driven underground. Perhaps the most likely doomsday scenario, though, may involve parents deciding they cannot, in good conscience, allow their kids to play such a violent sport – or even kids making that decision themselves.
There’s another cultural development that doesn’t bode well for the NFL: our bloodlust is starting to move on back to combat sports, specifically MMA. If young people decide they would rather get their bloodlust filled by MMA, leaving the remaining new potential NFL fans no longer considering violence as a criterion in its favor (and maybe as a criterion against), there might be less direct connection to the league and the NFL may start suffering in comparison to less violent sports. Maybe this means baseball and basketball, maybe it means something new like soccer.
And this might affect the popularity of football on all levels, not just the NFL. Which would be one way to end college football’s playoff debate…