Morgan Wick

For some reason I thought I had already posted this when I hadn’t even added the images.

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(From The Order of the Stick. Click for full sized Common Sense, or lack thereof.)

Well, it’s been over a month since the last time I talked about Order of the Stick at length (and it feels like much longer), and it’s high time for me to revisit the territory. As I’ve stated, OOTS started out as a jokey, funny gag-a-day strip about a bunch of adventurers trawling through a dungeon. It’s now a multilayered political drama, soap opera, and high fantasy tale. In other words, it’s been turned inside out by Cerebus Syndrome, and been about as successful as you could be in doing so, thanks in part to losing none of the humor and metahumor that characterized its early days, and if anything, increasing it.

OOTS even lightly poked fun at its descent into Cerebus Syndrome in this strip, made at a time when Websnark was still king of the webcomics world and still had many of the tics of its height, including the “submitted without comment” routine. For those of you who weren’t here when Sandsday made a blatant push for linkage from the now-mostly-defunct Websnark, I point you to the third panel of this strip. Sure enough, soon there was a comment-filled non-comment from Eric Burns, which contained this doozy: “It was funnier to me since there really isn’t a Cerebus Syndrome going on here, of course.”

A strip makes a joke about its own descent into Cerebus Syndrome when there isn’t one? How does that even make sense? But the first commenter to Burns’ non-comment comment agrees about the lack of Cerebus Syndrome. A later commenter claims “you can’t really start invoking Cerebus when the comic remains consistently and deeply funny” (I’ll have more on this in a sec, but for now I’ll say this seems to imply OOTS still hasn’t fallen into Cerebus Syndrome even now) and compares it to Goats (considering that strip’s descent into fate-of-the-planet-at-stake randomness, probably not the best example, but I’ll check the strips that were out at the time and get bac to you). Even now, if you ask people on the OOTS board when that strip went into Cerebus Syndrome, they’ll probably cite the sequence revealing the Snarl’s existence (a few may alternately cite the introduction of Miko), and the OOTS being tasked to stop Xykon from freeing it, even though if anything that sequence comes at the end of a long transition to a more plot-based model for the strip.

Let’s take another look at the definition of Cerebus Syndrome:

The effort to create character development by adding layer upon layer of depth to their characters, taking a character of limited dimension (or meant to be a joke character) and making them fuller and richer. The idea is to take what was fun on one level and showing the reality beneath it. ‘Cerebus Syndrome’ refers to Dave Sim’s epic, sometimes tragically flawed magnum opus, Cerebus the Aardvark. Cerebus started life as a parody of Conan the Barbarian starring an Earth-Pig born. Over time, it grew extremely complex, philosophical, and in many ways much much funnier. Then, Dave Sim went batshit crazy and Cerebus went straight to Hell, but that’s for another day. People saw how Cerebus’s humble roots could lead to glorious heights, and as cartoonists get bored with what they’re doing, they decided to pull a Cerebus of their own. […]

It is extremely hard to take a light, joke a day strip and push it through a successful Cerebus Syndrome. Dave Sim did it in stages, and at least in the early days of the transformation brought massive amounts of Funny to cover it over. Done perfectly, one only realizes in hindsight that the strip has turned out to be quite different than it used to be. Done sloppily, the Cerebus Syndrome fails, and the webcomic enters First and Ten Syndrome. Unfortunately, a failed Cerebus Syndrome is an excruciating process for the webcomic’s fans to endure. Please note that one can continue to bring the Funny while going for Cerebus Syndrome — and in fact, probably should. It is far more common to drop the Funny, which increases geometrically the chance to fall into First and Ten.

In the second paragraph quoted above, you could easily substitute out “Dave Sim” for “Rich Burlew”, because that’s exactly what Burlew did with Order of the Stick. There’s a long list of milestones in the march to Cerebus Syndrome taken by OOTS dating at least back to the revelation of the underlying plot in , and arguably continuing well after this sequence. Similarly, I suspect part of the reason most people cite the last of these major milestones as the tipping point is that that is the point where these people realized just how far the strip had come from its origins (especially if they weren’t there for those origins and didn’t realize how different they were).

It’s true that the revelation of the Snarl’s existence gave the strip an overarching plot driving all the action and ended about 75 strips of what amounted to aimless wandering, but it’s important to remember that the definition of Cerebus Syndrome says nothing about myth arcs or anything of the sort. It refers only to greater character development or, more colloquially, a general increase in drama and an arc-based model. The former starts appearing at least as early as the opening sequence of the second book, the middle at least as early as Miko’s introduction, and the latter far earlier than either. (And it’s important to remember that Burns specifically notes that a strip need not abandon humor to undergo Cerebus Syndrome.)

Besides, the quest to keep the Snarl imprisoned only really replaced the “hunt down Xykon and kill him” plot of the first book, and by the time it happened it didn’t really mark that seismic a shift. At least as early as Miko’s introduction the specter of Shojo and Azure City was already forming some sort of plot that was promising to carry the OOTS for quite some distance. The first hints of that were laid down at the end of the first book – where, remember, the strip had overturned its entire premise. And by the time the OOTS was brought before the court, Haley was speaking gibberish, the sort of thing that isn’t just a sign of Cerebus Syndrome but a hallmark of the nonstop angst that heralds full-blown First and Ten. And then there’s the little niggling matter of strip #242, where Haley remarks “we were a lot safer when we just made fairly obvious jokes about the rules!” By that point, The Order of the Stick hadn’t “just made fairly obvious jokes about the rules” for some time. A long time.

You want to point out the most important tipping point in Order of the Stick‘s march towards Cerebus Syndrome? The one strip that could best be used to separate the early, happy-go-lucky, almost continuity-free days of the early strips from the more plot-based OOTS we know and love today? The one point that you can point to and say, “This is where The Order of the Stick as we know it truly begins”?

You have to go all the way back to the first book, way before there was even any hint of the Snarl or even of any “gate”. You have to go all the way back to strip number 43.

And I’m not just saying that because I’ve had a fascination with the number 42 since even before I learned of its importance in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

It doesn’t look like much, especially if you’re someone used to the sort of strips that characterized the first 42 of OOTS’ existence. But trust me, Elan doesn’t just open the door to the Linear Guild at the end of this strip; he opens the door to plot, to story arcs, to gates and paladins and pseudo-Asian cultures. And Vaarsuvius’ monologue in the middle of the strip proves to be far more prescient, and far broader in scope, than most fans could have ever envisioned.

How pivotal is this strip? By the time all the loose ends are tied up from the ensuing story arc – by the time Durkon, left behind in the inevitable battle with the Linear Guild, finally returns to the group – it is strip number 85. Which means, when dated back to strip number 43, the entire sequence has gone 43 strips. Or just over half of all the strips published to this point. The Linear Guild sequence has lasted longer than the strip’s entire existence prior to it.

There’s a lot in the Linear Guild arc that hints at the strip to come in ways the Original 42 does not, starting with the slower pace of the plot compared to the limited arcs done in the Original 42. Not to mention the existence of some sort of long-form plot. We get some of the early hints of deep characterization (the OOTS were basically two-dimensional characters before the Linear Guild arc gave us such things as Elan’s backstory) and relationships between characters (at least nominally, virtually all of Nale’s actions after the arc concludes derive from a single panel in this strip). We see long-term planning starting to bear fruit, including the realization of a prophecy dating to #15 (which Haley even points out!).

We get the start of multiple ongoing running gags. We get the introduction of not only the group of villains secondary only to Xykon and his minions (at least through the end of the third book), but also Celia, who subsequently reappears to defend the OOTS in front of Shojo in the sequence that introduces us to the Snarl, becomes at least a brief fling for Roy, and is currently adventuring with Haley’s half of the OOTS. Although the art continues to evolve until at least Miko’s introduction, it’s during the Linear Guild arc that the dialogue reaches its current font size. And it’s before those last loose ends are tied up that we learn the deeper motivation for Roy’s hunt for Xykon.

The very next arc involves bypassing the entire rest of the dungeon and cutting straight to Xykon’s lair. That’s V’s plan from the start and, although that attempt doesn’t end well, that’s essentially what ultimately happens. If I was wrong in my initial post – if Rich’s descent into Cerebus Syndrome, as Eric Burns describes in part of his description I didn’t quote, was a result of boredom, not planned from the start (and remember, I own none of the OOTS books with accompanying commentary) – it came either after the original 42, or during or immediately after the Linear Guild episode, through the “bathroom break” of #86-87. The sheer number of subsequent subplots set up in the Linear Guild storyline suggests to me that, if Burlew didn’t decide from the start what he was going to do with his strip, he sure did before completing 43 strips. (And he probably had some idea before completing 15, judging by the long-term nature of Eugene Greenhilt’s prophecy. Even Elan’s recovery of a Belt of Gender-Changing in strip 9 winds up having importance over 200 strips down the road.)

From Rich Burlew’s perspective, I would think that strip 43 is where the transition – in retrospect, shorter and quicker than I let on earlier – from the gag-a-day OOTS of the Original 42 to the arc-based, plot-based strip we know and love really occurs. And from the perspective of someone who was around for those Original 42 strips (which again, I am not) it would have seemed impossible before #43 that in just 80 more strips, the Dungeon of Dorukan would be blown to smithereens and Xykon presumed dead (well, deader than before). And that such an event would not herald the end of the strip.

Even at the time, it would take until the revelation that Xykon still stands to really convince anyone that the end of the strip was not imminent, and until Miko shows up there’s not really much in-story reason for the OOTS to stick together at all. Take a look at this strip, fairly deep into the second book (deep enough that not only is it a wonder the OOTS stuck together long enough to reach the town (remember, I’m not a D&D player), it’s a wonder they’re still together even after reaching there) – Roy’s hunt for the starmetal is the only reason why the Order sticks together after destroying the Dungeon, and Roy’s swift-talking of Belkar and Haley is the only reason they stay in the group. Had it not been for that, the Order may well have never been tasked to stop Xykon from freeing the Snarl.

(Hmm. And Roy’s hunting of the starmetal was caused by Sabine shifted into a blacksmith. The Linear Guild are responsible for keeping the Order of the Stick together! I smell a fourth post brewing…)

Even in the Order’s subsequent relatively aimless wandering, no one would mistake it for being a gag-a-day strip, and in fact there are next to no “fairly obvious jokes about the rules” at all. The strip is fairly tightly organized into arcs, with a good part of the strip between the Order’s departure and Miko’s arrival taken up by the Order’s encounter with a group of bandits. There are also two semi-lengthy interludes involving Team Evil that help to establish their plot, one before the bandit arc and one, as previously mentioned, between the recovery of the starmetal and Miko’s arrival.

I mentioned some of the points in this post the last time I wrote a lengthy post on Order of the Stick. I mentioned how OOTS managed to overthrow its entire premise by the time the first book was over, and how it managed to keep going thanks to a strong balance of a compelling story and funny jokes. This, then, is something of an expansion of that post, showing just how early Order of the Stick started its metamorphosis into the rich, multilayered strip it is today, and both how much more sudden and more gradual that transformation was. And it ends, as I tend to, with a whimper because I always have trouble wrapping these posts up.

So I’ll see you in another month with an analysis of another aspect of OOTS.

I’ll admit it’s probably not the best ad I could have come up with. But it’s close. Suggest improvements in the comments.

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Editor’s Note: On the day this post goes up, we are exactly six months away from the transition to digital television in the United States, and the outreach effort has been, to put it simply, a fiasco. Even its successes have been failures because it has ended up spreading some inaccuracies. As such, I have taken it upon myself to create a DTV PSA designed to alleviate the misconceptions and spread as much information, good and bad, as possible, in a short, simple, concise form. I timed myself reading it and came out to about three minutes.

(An image appears of a grandfather clock.)

Voiceover: Remember when you went from having to memorize a bunch of rules to figure out what the time was…

(An image appears of a modern digital alarm clock.)

Voiceover: …to simply being able to read the numbers off the clock?

(An image appears of someone surrounded by paper doing a lot of writing.)

Voiceover: Remember when you went from having to do your finances by hand…

(An image appears of someone working on an Excel spreadsheet.)

Voiceover: …to having a computer doing all the calculations for you?

(An image appears of a newspaper hitting a doorstep.)

Voiceover: Remember when your parents only had a few choices for learning about what was going on in the outside world?

(A screenshot of Wikipedia slides in on top of the last image. Other screenshots from blogs, informational web sites, and the like slide in on top of it.)

Voiceover: Now there are literally dozens of options and more coming every day.

(A generic landscape appears.)

Voiceover: On February 17, 2009, TV will make that move, and it will change forever.

(An image fades in of a television broadcasting tower.)

Voiceover: On that day, all full-power television stations in the United States are required to broadcast exclusively in digital television.

(The image now fades to a television set showing one of those stock images used to show how bright, crisp and clear the image is. As the voiceover continues, it shows a NASCAR race and a mosaic of a wide variety of programming.)

Voiceover: It will bring (usually) better picture quality, better sound, and even entire channels added to the current landscape.

(Fade to a diagram of two broadcast towers, highly lit up, with rings radiating from them. The television set continues to flash images in the lower right.)

Voiceover: And it’s actually a very simple switch. Most TV stations are already broadcasting in digital at full strength alongside their existing analog signals; some have already stopped broadcasting in analog.

(A calendar showing the date February 17 appears. One of the towers stops radiating rings and its lights go out. The television set continues flashing images.)

Voiceover: On February 17, the remaining stations will simply shut off their analog signals and will broadcast exclusively in digital from then on. That’s it. Most viewers probably won’t notice the difference, assuming everything goes as planned, and won’t have to do anything.

(An HDTV appears with a NO symbol over it, fading into a chart showing HD -> DTV, and DTV with two arrows leading to HD and SD.)

Voiceover: You don’t need an HD set. HDTV implies DTV, but DTV does not imply HDTV.

(A new diagram appears. On the left side, the words “CABLE OR SATELLITE” and below it, “DON’T WORRY!” On the right side, on the same line as “CABLE OR SATELLITE”, read the words “ANTENNA TV”.)

Voiceover: If you subscribe to cable or satellite, you won’t need to do anything, even if you don’t have a converter box; you’ll get exactly what you get now and might not even notice that anything changed.

(A TV fades in over the diagram, showing the same mosaic of images shown earlier, just barely slower and not as clear.)

Voiceover: Your cable operator or satellite provider will handle everything for you, although you should keep in mind that your cable operator or satellite provider is not required to bring you all the new channels opened up by digital, and may condense the digital signal so you won’t get the clearest possible picture and sound.

(The diagram fades back into focus. On the “ANTENNA TV” side of the diagram, it is cut in half lengthwise. On the top half fades in an image of an HD set; on the bottom half, an old-fashioned SD set. Below the HD set fade in the words “DON’T WORRY!” The SD set zooms into focus when the voiceover starts “even if it’s still SD…”)

Voiceover: If you get your TV through an antenna, you still don’t need to do anything if your TV is an HDTV, and even if it’s still SD you may not need to do anything.

(Image of someone flipping through a TV manual and finding the SPECIFICATIONS page.)

Voiceover: Check the specifications of your TV; they should be in your TV’s manual or on the box it came in.

(A line from the SPECIFICATIONS page zooms in, with “TV standard” in the left column and “NTSC” or “ATSC” in the right column.)

Voiceover: If it says it uses the “ATSC” standard, you’re all set.

(The letters “NTSC” fade in in big white type as the rest of the screen goes dark.)

Voiceover: If it doesn’t, and it only uses the “NTSC” standard, you won’t need to get a new TV or antenna or anything.

(Image of someone setting a digital converter on top of his TV.)

Voiceover: All you need is a digital converter, which you can get at a discount with a coupon from the federal government.

(Diagram of a broadcasting tower slowly moving away from a television set. As it moves away, the image on the TV becomes pixelated and eventually goes dark. The antenna starts to grow in size, and as it does the image comes back pixelated and then clear.)

Voiceover: Note that although any antenna will work with both digital and analog signals, signals further away from where you live will require a more robust antenna, even if you receive the analog signal fine now.

(A camera, a broadcasting tower next to the camera, and a TV appear. The camera shows a bunch of images, and the number 2 is on top of the tower. The TV is off. The 2 slowly changes to 19. The TV turns on, clearly showing the number 2, and shows the same images as the camera.)

Voiceover: Also, although you won’t notice any changes in the channel numbers on your TV, many stations will be broadcasting from a different channel from their analog signals.

(“14-51” appears in white letters on a mostly black background. With each conjunction, the screen changes, first displaying a UHF-only antenna near “14-51”, then to “2-13” near a VHF-compatible antenna.)

Voiceover: Most of these will be in the UHF band and you can get them using a UHF-only antenna, but some stations will broadcast in VHF.

(Appropriate screenshots from the website appear.)

Voiceover: To find out if you need a more robust antenna and if you can get away with making it UHF-only, log on to DTVAnswers.com (or whatever the site of the organization producing the PSA is). There, you can also find out if there are any low-power stations near you that will not be transitioning to digital.

This probably won’t be the last I have to say about the Olympics. Probably. Maybe.

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Couple of notes from last night at the Olympics.

First, showing events live on both coasts isn’t the only thing the CBC beats NBC over the head with. I watched both networks’ coverage of the 1500 meter freestyle, and even though CBC was a complete homer for Ryan Cochrane, they still ran circles around NBC, who took until five minutes into the race (after a commercial break) to mention him. Were it not for the occasional check-ins on the status of Larsen Jensen, I might have thought I was hearing the Australian broadcasters, so focused were they on Grant Hackett. In the process, as they called Hackett’s doomed-to-failure chase of ???, they missed a pretty good chase for the bronze.

Second, I was probably the worst track athlete in the world in high school for two years, stumbling to Charlie Brown-like finishes in the most junky heats of the 100 and 200 (the latter of which I only raced in because I needed a second event), but I still consider that enough experience to put my TV analyst cap on regarding the 100. Usain Bolt may have cost himself more than a more unbeatable world record by celebrating several meters short of the finish. He may have made himself some enemies as well.

If other sports like basketball, but especially sports with a lot of tradition (and at over 2500 years, there’s no sport with more tradition than track and field), are any indication, there is probably an “old guard” who stands for doing things “the right way”, which at least in the eyes of some, usually means “don’t have fun”. I don’t know this for certain, but I’d be shocked if there weren’t some people who will say of Bolt, “he’s too cocky” – regardless of whether he is or not – “he’s too showboating, he let up with 15 meters to go in the 100, he’s too Hollywood” – you’re nodding your head, Tom, you know what I’m talking about!

How low a number can the strip get?

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Buzzcomix recently relaunched and I’ve set up Sandsday for the new platform. I kind of suspect Sandsday was kicked off Buzzcomix for some reason in the past, but it’s back on now and I encourage you to vote for it.

I’ve installed new vote buttons for both webcomic ranking services showing Sandsday’s rank on each. Funnily enough, with my one vote Sandsday shot from being just outside Buzzcomix’ top five thousand to being just outside its top five hundred. 5000… 500. Huh.

Note that even with my vote, I did not have quite as much success climbing up TopWebComics. As such, I should note that because TopWebComics’ vote image does not scale the font size of the rank like Buzzcomix, if Sandsday is outside TWC’s top 1000, the vote image will not appear to show the correct rank. Fortunately, you can fix that by, well, voting for it if you like Sandsday, and I would think that with just one more vote Sandsday would hit the TWC top 1000, considering with my one vote it’s inside the top 1500.

Also, I’ve started to fall behind on almost every site I don’t subscribe to the RSS feed of (including Ctrl+Alt+Del and any strip I’m reading on a preliminary basis for the purposes of posting on it), for a variety of reasons, so I’m setting up an RSS feed for Sandsday… sort of. This uses the new function of the Buzzcomix Reader, which basically means you have to sign up for a Buzzcomix account and make Sandsday one of your Favs. And I’m not sure if it would push through to any RSS reader. At any rate, there’s a button for it on Sandsday, for the interested.

No ads yet for Sandsday. Still thinking about the best way to do it…

I’d be more optimistic about the concept if I knew what the heck was going on in the demonstration.

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(From Penny Arcade Bogey Golf. Click for full sized… whatever the hell this is.)

I got an e-mail telling me my Freehostia account was now working shortly after I posted with today’s strip, so I guess that was unnecessary. On to other things.

Penny Arcade, like Ctrl+Alt+Del, has no forum dedicated to its own strips, Websnark has been reduced to Eric Burns popping in once a month to spout off on whatever’s making the rounds in geek culture, Tangents is still a homeless bum, and I know of no other blog that comments on webcomics as up-to-the-minute as those two. So I have no way of knowing for certain if Friday’s news post is a joke or not. It probably is, but it’s nowhere near April.

All I know is if it isn’t, it really screws up my plans, because I had been planning on PA being one of the two posts I was planning to make early in the week to make up for having no webcomic post this week.

Even if it is, I’m only really going to have two strips to work off of, so I’m probably reviewing another webcomic blog for the second instead, reviewing PA next week, reviewing one other comic the week after that, and maybe posting a third OOTS post the week after that.

And that’s assuming I don’t get too sidetracked by other things, like Buzzcomix’ recent relaunch, about which more later…

Sports Watcher for the Weekend of 8/16-17

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All times PDT.

Saturday
12:30-6 AM: Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, diving and the medal final in the women’s 10km track race (12:30-2 AM), plus primetime replay (2-6 AM) (NBC). Same on both coasts. You could watch USA on the East Coast to get closer to the start time of the next item.

10-6 PM: Little League Baseball, Junior League, Senior League, Junior League Softball, and Big League Softball World Series…es (ESPNU). Not necessarily in that order. The Little League Softball World Series ended back on Wednesday. That’s the only LLWS that doesn’t end on the weekend. Get with the program! Is it just me, or does the marquee age division of the LLWS seem arbitrary considering it’s the youngest group? We completely lose sight of these kids as they move up through Junior, Senior, and maybe Big League, then we regain sight in the College World Series, then we lose sight of them again until they get called up to the bigs because we pay no attention to AAA whatsoever.

7:30-12 AM: Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, track and field and swimming and the awarding of medals in both (NBC). Same on both coasts, so there’s interference with Little League on the East Coast. I had been thinking about writing a post about the rising tide of discontent on the West Coast at being told events are “live” when they’re still tape-delayed. Then I saw that more than half of the top five highest-rated major markets, and almost half of the top 17, are in the Pacific and Mountain time zones, and almost all the largest markets in those two time zones (eight of the top nine, with Seattle’s ratings depressed by being able to see events truly live on CBC) are averaging at least a 21 rating for the Olympics, which I believe is higher than NBC’s nationwide average. Which means one of two things: people on the West Coast are more into the Olympics than people back East, and I see no reason why that should be so, especially in Mountain time; or NBC’s decision to tape delay events is HELPING ratings in the Pacific and Mountain time zones. I have a feeling NBC may decide they’re never pulling strings to get events live in primetime for a non-American Olympics again (starting in 2012, that is). On another note, this is the last medal Michael Phelps needs to pass Mark Spitz, and it’s also women’s marathon day.

Sunday
12:30-6 AM: Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, beach volleyball, track and field, and the primetime replay (NBC). Same on both coasts. I’d put USA here but it interferes with NBC’s primetime coverage.

11-2:30 PM: NASCAR Sprint Cup Racing, Michigan race (ESPN). Because the Sprint Cup Series isn’t on here often enough.

3-5 PM: Little League Baseball, Venezuela v. “Saudia Arabia” (ESPN2). Yes, that’s how it actually appears on ESPN’s own web site.

5-8 PM: MLB Baseball, Philadelphia @ San Diego (ESPN). The Phillies may be in NL East contention, but you can tell this game was decided on before the season started.

9-11 PM: Beijing 2008 Olympic Games Softball, United States v. China (CNBC). Looking back over what I said last week about CNBC’s coverage, I’m not sure what they think their audience is. I accused them of misreading their audience last week, yet that was for a time slot that included tennis, which fits right in with the rich-snob demographic. I was focusing on boxing, yet that so often gets called the “sweet science” and seen as so much superior to the supposed bloodlust and chaos of MMA, as though boxing was as tame as golf. And then there’s softball, and the only way I see this fitting in with CNBC’s “male demographic” is if they’re thinking “Ooh! Boobs!” Yet at the same time, the fact that it’s softball and not some other female sport tells me it’s an old male demographic that remembers when baseball was the national pasttime (AS IT SHOULD BE!) and isn’t into all this football stuff the whippersnappers are into. Which… adds up to a pretty disturbing demographic.

11-11 AM: Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, water polo, synchronized swimming, canoeing, kayaking, field hockey, basketball, and table tennis, including the table tennis gold medal match (USA). Prepare to march back into work on Monday and fall right asleep, stay there till quitting time, sleep all the way home, and sleep the rest of the day.

My ad model is fluctuating by the minute.

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Hmm. My premier ad has a prime position at the top of the page. My standard ad is buried waaaaaay down underneath Da Blog Poll on the sidebar.

Yet, last I checked, the premier ad is showing the “your ad here” default image, and hasn’t yet even made me a cent, while the standard ad is going for three cents and has made me a nifty two cents so far. Admittedly, the premier ad isn’t showing up on the feed like I intended for some reason, but for future reference, chicks dig the tall ad.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised; I’m getting a lot of comics- and webcomics-related bidders, and it’s rare that I’ll see a webcomics site put up a banner ad.

Thanks for nothing, idiots.

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If you’ve been following Da Blog over the summer, you’ve no doubt noticed that I’ve been diligently looking for a job, without success. As I mentioned in a previous post, that’s largely because Da Blog has sort of been my job. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been doing some sort of due diligence.

For a while, I looked for jobs at CBCampus.com, the college-student-oriented arm of job search site CareerBuilder. But it became apparent that beyond the first page, CBCampus only had the exact same job search engine as CareerBuilder, with the exact same jobs. It didn’t even search by default for, say, jobs I could get with just a high school degree. It and other sites also didn’t allow me to add criteria such as no experience required, even when flags indicating such that should have been searchable without keywords existed. I wondered if there was a job search site that was really geared towards students. The closest I came appeared to be Student Central, which didn’t seem to have any jobs in my state, which seemed kind of pointless.

Well, today I recently got done meeting with a therapist which I meet with every so often to work on some of my issues, and he suggested that “job search sites” are a waste of time for everybody, not just me. Monster, CareerBuilder, you name it. He’s known maybe one person to get a job from those sites. Well, that was certainly useful…

But it seems that that condemnation could be used against just about anything else, including the classified ads in the newspaper, which are now often searchable online just like a job search site. So it begs the question: How does one really find a job, anyway?

So I’m turning this open to you: How have you found your jobs?

Newsbusters v. Kilpatrick et al: Part II of the Truth Court announcement

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After subscribing to Media Matters and Newsbusters, I’ve realized – or rather, re-realized – an insight that may come across as novel.

The battle over media bias has three sides, not two: conservatives, liberals, and the media itself.

The problem is, the two political sides merely conflate the media with the other side, and see no difference between them. Conservatives simply see the media as part of the vast left-wing conspiracy, and liberals see the media as simply being an arm of the right. But the media is worse: it doesn’t see itself as part of the battle at all, or rather, it sees the battle as an altogether different battle with “new media”, with bloggers and the Internet, and ignores some of the reasons why people may not be following them onto their own new media platforms. The media goes after the wrong enemy without realizing that many of the accusations of bias are within its own pages – hardly “new media”. Because the media doesn’t fight back against the actual charges and goes after a strawman instead, someone reading Media Matters and Newsbusters dispassionately might be led to believe that the media isn’t tinted to the left, right, or balanced; it’s just incompetent.

I should add that in order to truly reach that conclusion, you’d have to add another liberal blog, because Media Matters only goes after specific instances of “conservative misinformation”, while Newsbusters attacks at any perceived slight, no matter how minor. For example, Newsbusters has been attacking the MSM’s coverage of Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s troubles for allegedly not labeling him as a Democrat, when they would be so quick to label him if he was a Republican! Hmm, could that have something to do with the mayor of Detroit being an officially nonpartisan position? Could it be that if they had called him, say, “Detroit’s Democratic mayor”, as Fox News did, they would actually be inaccurate and would come in for an even heavier pillorying from the left? Newsbusters itself has found enough exceptions that it makes me wonder if the rare cases of being quick to label Republicans as such that they cite are themselves exceptions… though I’d need more information to verify that for certain.

Farhad Manjoo (of True Enough fame, remember) appears to be one of the few to recognize that the left and the right are really putting forth two sides of the same coin. One of the studies he cites in True Enough (page 154) concerns an incident in Lebanon in 1982 and the reaction to news reports on the incident by students at Stanford – one pro-Israel, one pro-Arab, and one neutral group. Predictably, the partisan groups believed the news was biased against them and towards the other side, likely to turn viewers against their own side. What did the neutral group think? Funnily enough, they didn’t see any bias one way or the other. It would seem to be evidence that, at the very least, the news could in fact be perfectly fair and balanced.

But it’s unlikely to convince partisans in the United States who would just see it as evidence that the bias in the news is “subtle”, even subliminal. Even if the neutral group didn’t see bias, didn’t even claim to favor one side or the other more than before, that’s just because the media tries to hide its bias because they know people want a fair and balanced account. In reality, the media is sowing the seeds so that when people hear something closer to the truth, closer to what the partisans know is true, they will dismiss it because “well, what I heard on the news was…” Certainly the fact that Newsbusters is on the lookout for such minutiae as whether a politician’s party is identified – which would be, if a crime, one of omission – would seem to support this idea.

But consider that conservatives have been hammering the media for having a liberal bias for decades. If people are abandoning the MSM for blogs because of all the bias they see in it (a claim often voiced in Newsbusters’ comments), if polls show that media bias is a bigger problem than worship of the almighty dollar in campaigns, if operations like Media Matters and Newsbusters exist to call them on any perceived slight the instant they show one and shame them for thousands, maybe even millions, of readers to see, why, the media would be absolutely foolish to show any bias whatsoever. There should be less media bias than at any time in history.

But not only do Media Matters and Newsbusters still have plenty of targets, the exact opposite has happened: The mainstream media has become more biased, even blatantly so. Fox News is the most obvious example (and it’s telling that Newsbusters sometimes calls Fox “fair and balanced” with a straight face), but CNN (ex. Lou Dobbs Tonight) and MSNBC (ex. Countdown with Keith Olbermann) have more than their fair share of partisan screeds disguised as news too. Even the seemingly balanced shows on cable news tend to be debatefests between pundits and/or party surrogates. (As I’ll explain in a later post, it’s possible that if anything, these debatefests are too tame, as though their contestants were politicians running for office and chasing the center. Give me a strong, popular extreme righty against a strong, popular extreme lefty anytime.) Perhaps this trend – that to avoid charges of bias, the media has made them come true – suggests that the problem was never that the media wasn’t balanced, but that it was too balanced. (That said, the fact that liberals only recently have taken up the media bias cant may suggest that the media was once at least slightly tinted to the left. Or it could indicate, as the title of Arianna Huffington’s book suggests, that “Right is Wrong”.)

But trying to be balanced to everyone is too much work. Say a study comes out that says a bunch of stuff about offshore drilling but doesn’t come out one way or the other. But if you don’t report on the study, the next time you do a story about drilling Newsbusters will hammer you for not reporting on the study that proves how far we could drive down oil prices and declare our oil independence by drilling (ignoring that the report shows Republicans arguing exactly that, albeit not citing the study). So you report on the study, only to find Media Matters accusing you of ignoring that the same study shows drilling would actually do nothing to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and would cause three species of marine life to become extinct. If you’d said the study had said that, Newsbusters would accuse you of purposely misrepresenting the study, so you have to present both the liberal conclusion and the conservative conclusion. And now both sides are accusing you of putting forth a partisan spin on the study “uncritically”…

What I’d like to see, then, is a blog defending the media from accusations of bias from both sides, enough of an insider to be privy to the discussions deciding what gets printed and how, but not so far inside the MSM that (s)he would be subject to some of its quirks like, say, not talking about the John Edwards scandal. The media doesn’t need to become what the news would look like if partisans ran it. It doesn’t need to see the enemy as this amorphous “new media” that’s just out to destroy it. We don’t even need to see a clear distinction between old and new media, and the fact that bastions of old media like the Los Angeles Times and ESPN have started sponsoring forays into blogging is evidence of that. It just needs people to credibly say, “no. We’re right, you’re wrong, and here’s why.” It needs someone to explain to Newsbusters why it won’t identify Kwame Kilpatrick as a Democrat (or why it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t), to Media Matters why it won’t report how closely John McCain has followed President Bush, to the right why it didn’t pursue the John Edwards story (and why it did pursue the affairs of Republicans – and even if more Republican infidelities are reported than Democratic ones, that may have more to do with the fact that Republicans are the party of “family values” than with any liberal bias), and to the left why it didn’t look more critically at the case for war in Iraq, and to sit through both sides’ rebuttals and patiently counter-rebut those.

Maybe no one in the mainstream media wants to put up a blog responding to the accusations of partisans. And maybe they don’t have to. Barring that, I’d like to see someone put up a site that employed both liberals and conservatives looking for bias from the mainstream media – but also looking for inaccuracies and shortcomings and distortions from Media Matters and Newsbusters and even its own analysts, and not just those but the entire conservative and liberal blogosphere. Its slogan could be “Keeping the media honest… and the people who watch them.” Or something like that. If blogs are the new place to get the news, surely they need a Media Matters or Newsbusters just as much as the mainstream media does. If I’m right, and the media itself is just as much a side in the debate as the left and the right, then it logically follows that it needs its own Media Matters or Newsbusters to keep the other two sides in check.

Or would that just be accused of being just as biased as the mainstream media itself? Newsbusters’ apparent decision to write off any explanation the mainstream media give for ignoring the Edwards story as “making excuses” suggests it may be. Still, if the consequenses otherwise are the “death” of the mainstream media made very real, replaced by a bunch of partisan outlets not speaking to one another, perhaps all sides would be better for a serious dialogue. Or rather, trialogue?