Author and Thinker
Morgan Wick Even if I wanted to write an actual post, I’m too tired after a long day with small meals to do so.
But even if I could, I’d probably be pouring into the new OOTS book I just got. (Mom tells me I should be saving for a new laptop. Psh!)
Coming sometime Friday: a post on Gunnerkrigg Court, Questionable Content, or the webcomic blog review I’ve been promising all week.
(From PVP. Click for full-sized anticlimactic revelations.)
Jeez, Max, it’s 2012. It’s not like the staff of PVP are a bunch of redneck homophobes. I don’t know if you have a problem with your lifestyle and that’s why this is so hard for you, but in this day and age I don’t think most people are going to think twice.
Hell, as Kurtz points out in the news post it’s not like this is even news to some of them. Now if you had a boyfriend and you were running off to get married, that might be something noteworthy.
(Random comment that came to mind while writing this post: Do we know where the PVP offices are? I thought it might be Seattle because Kurtz has a business relationship with the Seattle-based PA guys, but I seem to recall a storyline a while back that made a big deal about them being in Seattle as though it were a trip…)
You may recall I was feeling pretty sure of myself after the first two rounds of my FantasySharks League draft, when I had Larry Fitzgerald and Maurice Jones-Drew in my possession.
That…feeling didn’t last. My next five picks ended up all being wide receivers, and I wound up drafting eight wideouts over the course of the entire draft. If Jones-Drew’s holdout doesn’t end and none of the injured running backs I picked are ready, I’ll only be able to play one running back Week 1. I have a hard time believing I’m going to have a worse draft when I fill out the other 49 teams over Labor Day Weekend.
It’s apparent that the lists I was relying on overemphasize wideouts so much compared to their Shark League value that it’s going to be difficult to correct for. Someone told me that the lack of trading in Shark Leagues has a bigger impact on the draft than I would have thought, effectively leading one to focus on drafting their starting lineup at the major positions in the first six picks, but I’m not fond of trading anyway, and it wouldn’t change the fact that I drafted a wideout in the first and third rounds and probably would have filled my entire bench with them thereafter. I’m now playing “Wide Receiver Survivor”, with my eight wideouts fighting not to be cut in the first few weeks in favor of free agents to shore up my situation at tight end, running back, and possibly quarterback, though it’s entirely possible Jay Cutler, who broke the run of wideouts in the eighth, could work out.
I joined the Shark Leagues to test how far my own “strategy”, to the extent it could be called such, could really take me. I now suspect that the rules of the leagues have been intentionally devised to attempt to weed out anyone remotely noobish, and undercut any crutches such as I might use. So I intend to stick with it another year, but I’m going to have to make some big changes to my strategy to allow it to hold up under the circumstances. Even then, I’m not sure it’s going to be enough.
So, I think I’m starting to solve the problem of my beating my head against the wall on these projects I’ve been spending the whole summer trying and failing to work on. I’ve been doing so by working on another project that’s longer-term but that I haven’t been beating myself up as much on. Maybe with enough time working on that, I’ll be refreshed to take on the more pressing projects.
Expect this to be a webcomic-heavy week, by the way. I might have a webcomic blog review posted as soon as tomorrow.
As I said earlier in the week, this has been a singularly unproductive week in an unproductive summer.
However, I have reason to believe next week will be different.
Because for the next week, I will not be able to engage in an activity that has been keeping me up at night.
It probably isn’t what you think it is.
How’s that for a streak-filler post?
(From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Click for full-sized unnatural selection.)
Sometimes I think SMBC is a little too mean-spirited for its own good.
Oh, those kooky alternative medicine users, with their disdain for things like “evidence”! It’s not as though a substantial portion of what was once considered “alternative medicine” has since become backed by that “evidence” thing, with acupuncture being the most famous example! And it’s not as though a lot of what’s considered “evidence” for mainstream medical practices today is surprisingly sketchy, or as though science in general as practiced today isn’t surprisingly prone to subconscious researcher biases!
And it’s not as though the record of what constitutes valid “evidence” is centered around the Western cultural record to the exclusion of other cultures, and is subject to Western cultural biases! And it’s not as though the practice of science itself is based on the fallacy that it’s possible to isolate and atomize the effects of any one thing in exclusion to any other thing, an atomist view that a lot of “alternative medicine” is fundamentally opposed to!
Christ, I’m not even into this kind of thing, but the least Zach Weiner could do is know his opponents.
(And damn I hope reading the Comics Curmudgeon regularly doesn’t turn me into a John Solomon clone…)
This is shaping up to be an unproductive week in an unproductive summer.
It already didn’t help that I became obsessed with a fantasy football draft, but over the weekend I found myself getting hooked on the Comics Curmudgeon. I’d heard of it and from it many times before, but it took discovering its per-comic archives to enrapture me in its self-consistent jokes.
I briefly considered a streak-filling webcomics post, but I couldn’t decide which comic touching on academic themes I’m interested in to review, xkcd or SMBC.
I hope to have a webcomic blog review by the end of the week, but I’m not terribly confident about it.
Once, the Olympics were considered among the most pure of sports events, because of its tradition of amateurism. But today, years after it was abandoned, its past of amateurism is holding the Games back.
For the Olympics to be for amateurs only seemed natural in the early 20th century as the Games and the Olympic movement grew. But the prohibition on professionalism meant that FIFA had to create a separate World Cup if it wanted an international Olympic-type tournament. Today, the World Cup is arguably bigger than the Olympics and the Olympic football tournament is restricted to keep from competing with it.
The Olympic notion of amateurism was probably sustained well past its sell-by date by global geopolitics; the Cold War turned the Olympics into a point of intense patriotic pride regardless of who was competing. By the time the Cold War was over, the IOC had already dropped the professionalism requirement, setting up the 1992 Dream Team. Today, the Olympic basketball tournament is one of the biggest parts of the Olympics, indeed of the whole basketball calendar, and the hockey tournament positively dominates the Winter Games… yet David Stern wants to make the basketball tournament under-23 only and push FIBA’s Basketball World Cup as the new standard of international basketball competition, and NHL players might not participate in Sochi either.
Had the Olympics allowed professionals from the start, or at least in the 1920s, there would have been no need for a separate soccer tournament. The Olympic tournament could have filled the bill quite nicely. Without the World Cup? David Stern and the NHL wouldn’t even be thinking of dropping out of the Olympics. The Olympics would be the great nexus of international competition, which you don’t mess with unless you have a very good reason. I’m not even sure the Olympics would have dropped baseball; Bud Selig would have interrupted the season in a heartbeat to get major league players in the Games, because any sport would kill to have an Olympic tournament. With all these sports playing prominent roles, Americans might not even have to suffer through tape delays.
Instead? The Olympics could become the place for sports that aren’t popular enough outside it to have their own tournaments worth paying attention to. An Olympic soccer tournament with all the players participating might completely dominate the Games and push all other sports to the background, but those sports are more insidiously denigrated by the fact that soccer, and maybe basketball and hockey, are too cool for them.
At one point, I was thinking that if the Olympic basketball tournament became an under-23 affair, I would consider the Olympic Games mostly dead to me and push the notion of a “Pseudolympic Games”, consisting of all those tournaments in the off year between Olympic Games in Olympic-eligible sports that mostly exist because of the Olympic amateurism requirement or the popularity of the World Cup. But the Basketball World Cup might move a year later – funnily enough, to get away from the soccer World Cup – and to encompass the entire four-year Olympiad would result in complications, since the more traditionally-“Olympic” sports tend to have tournaments in every odd-numbered year. But every time a sport declares themselves too cool for the Olympics, I will sigh and observe that the ghosts of Pierre de Coubertin and 19th-century aristocratic notions of the gentleman still haunt the Olympic Movement.
I was planning on writing a post wrapping up the Olympics in more ways than one… but my day became completely occupied with my fascination watching the FantasySharks drafts over the course of the day. And my own league wasn’t even part of it, being stuck at #2 for over nine hours. I may have to consider the first day of the FantasySharks drafts a personal day for me from now on.
For the record, I think I’ve done pretty decently drafting so far (I’m 11th, so I get two picks pretty much one after the other). I’ve picked up Larry Fitzgerald and Maurice Jones-Drew, and I feel like I’ve dodged a bullet because I came very close to spending my first two picks on wide receivers. (The Shark leagues are PPR leagues, but with two wideouts and no flex, so people are reticent to take wideouts too early. By the way, I feel like ESPN’s PPR rankings are the Matt Millen of PPR rankings; four wideouts in the first eight spots?) Regardless, despite the differences between fantasy and real football, anytime you pick up two players among the Top 50 resumes for the Hall of Fame, you must be doing something right. (If you want to follow the rest of my draft, I’m tweeting every pick and I might write a wrap-up when it’s done.)
That Olympics post may be up by the time you read this, or I may have scrapped the idea entirely because I wasn’t feeling it. Time will tell.
(From Gunnerkrigg Court. Click for full-sized homework assignment.)
Remember when I did my original review of Gunnerkrigg Court, and talked about how a major theme of the comic was the conflict between magic and technology? Well, Tom Siddell is turning that theme completely on its head.
When we started a chapter entitled “The Great Secret”, I honestly expected the secret in question to turn out not to be so great. Siddell has shown in the past that he’s not above setting high expectations for a chapter only for it to turn out to be a shaggy dog story – though he’s also done just the opposite; a chapter depicting the formation of the Court had a cover page that made it look like another frivolous holodeck simulation chapter. In this case, I was proven dead wrong; we’re learning things that force us to rethink the entire comic. This post is going to be far short of what it could be; to do this chapter justice would require me to reread the entire comic, and I don’t have time for that, even considering how relatively short Gunnerkrigg Court is.
For Coyote, the mind of man is forever restless, never able to see things as they actually are. This isn’t a new concept to the Court, but to this point it has generally been used to explain the Court’s stance towards magic: a firm belief in Clarke’s Third Law, that everything that appears to be “magical” must have a scientific explanation, not realizing that maybe magic actually exists and all the weird phenomena in the comic just is that way. Siddell is now using it for the opposite purpose: that man is responsible for the existence of magical phenomena in the first place. To use Coyote’s example, a man doomed to die in the desert and have his corpse feasted on by a real coyote does not see an animal like himself driven to survive and opportunistically preying on his misfortune, but the power of a god that has actively decided his fate. When a man dies, the contents of his mind are absorbed into the “ether”, a concept that has appeared in the comic before as the source of its magic, and from that all the ideas in his mind bear fruit. Coyote himself is but a “being of the thoughts of man”; the content of the secret itself, in the single page in which he utters it, is “I do not exist!”
This gets to the heart of the conflict between the Court and the world of magic; we see the roots of the split between the Court and the forest in the same process by which Coyote describes his own creation, while the main driver behind Coyote’s actions appears to have been protecting the secret more than anything else. The pretense for Antimony’s visit to the forest in this chapter is that Coyote is bored and wants Antimony to tell him stories – about himself, something you would not normally expect him to need to do, but which ends up making a lot more sense when Coyote reveals his secret: the more stories about how great and powerful he is there are, the more great and powerful he actually is, or at least will ultimately be. Coyote is worried that the Court will either take control of the process described in this chapter, or cut off the flow of stories entirely with rational explanations, either way cutting off his power but benefiting mankind, freeing him from his own unconscious creations, while vindicating Antimony’s position as explained in my original review.
Robert A. “Tangents” Howard has been waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the comic to give us a reason to sympathize with the Court and what it sees in the forest for it to fear, and that may finally be happening, though not in the way he had in mind. Coyote once called the Court “man’s endeavour to become God“, and while we’re now starting to see what he meant by that, from man’s perspective it’s really more like a modern Prometheus. The comic becomes less about the conflict between magic and technology and more of a parable of man’s conquest of nature with science, as well as (like Homestuck) a commentary on the importance of story. Suddenly the imagination of man becomes the biggest weapon in the fight between the Court and the world of magic – indeed it’s no longer a sure thing that the comic is building to a fight in the normal sense.
To this point, while I have found Gunnerkrigg Court interesting, I haven’t found it any sort of literary masterpiece. But while my original thoughts on the comic’s entertainment value are unchanged, I now wonder if it might have just as much literary merit as Order of the Stick. If it weren’t for the fact that Antimony is in the middle of the third of five years at the Court, I’d think Siddell was starting to build to the end of the comic; as is, I’m now very interested in seeing what direction he goes with this, and I may want to take notes from the Court for my own future webcomic I’m working on. The comic’s direction has now changed course considerably.