Morgan Wick

Don’t worry, I’ll have a less lame excuse to continue the streak tomorrow. Look for an MSPA post, god willin’ and the creek don’t rise.

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(From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Click for full-sized dick facts.)

At some point this year, I fully intend to do a full review of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Most of the time, I would probably describe it as a modern version of The Far Side, with more off-color humor.

This comic, though, I would probably describe as something more akin to a poor man’s xkcd.

With more off-color humor.

In fact, this comic is one that I would not be remotely surprised to see as an xkcd comic. I don’t know whether that says more about xkcd, SMBC, or this particular comic…

(For the record, and just as another tease, I haven’t changed my stance on xkcd – and I’ve realized that even without the same volume of overly technical jokes it’s often had a reputation for, I still find myself going to the forums to get the joke – and I don’t think I find SMBC a superior product, nor am I likely to start following it… but I don’t want to commit myself to that at this early date, either. How’s that for you?)

A quick teaser. OK, a lame excuse to continue the streak.

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I had Big Plans for this week. I was going to get Stuff Done, start writing a series of posts for next week or the week after that could really build some momentum for the site, maybe not finish it but build enough momentum to carry me through into the new quarter. And I certainly wasn’t going to let an assignment for class ruin my spring break and carry it down to the wire.

An assignment for class ruined my spring break and had to be carried down to the wire.

I still intend to get the series going, but I may get very little out of the way this week. I’m venturing back into politics for this one, much like I did four years ago, but this one will be a little less insane and substantially more stretched out. Basically, it’s the reason I’ve been committed to the Streak to begin with. One problem: It’s been so long since I had the idea I’m no longer certain what my original plans for it were. I have other ideas that could rejuvenate the site as well.

As for this week? Well, you might be able to expect an MSPA post Thursday…but Friday is anyone’s guess.

For @PTI and @RealMikeWilbon: The Case Against Hines Ward for the Hall of Fame

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So I don’t know if you heard (apparently some guy named Manning was also in the news today), but Hines Ward has officially called it a career. As the relationship between Ward and the Steelers slowly sputtered to an end over the winter, every time it was brought up on Pardon the Interruption Tony and Mike described him as a surefire Hall of Famer. Back in February, he didn’t appear on my Top 50 Active Resumes, and honestly didn’t come very close – in other words, I had him just as surefire not to get in. The last time the PTI guys brought him up, when the Steelers finally cut him, they expressed incredulity that anyone would disagree with their assessment. He has all the receiving records for the vaunted Steelers! He’s eighth all time in receptions and 18th in receiving yards! He has two Super Bowl rings! How can you not put him in the Hall of Fame?

Two words: Passing. League.

Prepare to hear those two words a lot for the next few decades and possibly the remainder of the history of the league whenever the Hall of Fame merits of any wide receiver to play this century come up. Simply put, it’s hard to overstate how inflated today’s passing and especially receiving stats are compared to earlier eras. Every single one of the players ahead of Ward on the all-time receptions list played at least four seasons as Ward’s contemporary (you have to go down to #12 Art Monk to find someone who retired in the 90s) and only Cris Carter didn’t play during at least half of Ward’s career. Only four players ahead of Ward on the receiving yards list didn’t play at least one season as his contemporary. Even discounting that, being the best receiver on the traditionally-run-heavy Steelers doesn’t mean as much as you might think – only two Steelers receivers are in the Hall, and not only did Lynn Swann have a very long wait he seems to have gotten in mostly on the back of his memorable Super Bowl catches, not his actual career.

The smoking gun on Ward’s resume is this: although he made the 2nd-team All-Pro three times, not once was he named to the first team. Over the course of his career, the following receivers were named 1st-team AP All-Pro (and thus, were considered better than Ward) at least once: Randy Moss, Antonio Freeman, Marvin Harrison, Carter, Terrell Owens, David Boston, Torry Holt, Muhsin Muhammad, Steve Smith, Chad Johnson, Andre Johnson, Larry Fitzgerald, Wes Welker, Roddy White, Reggie Wayne, Calvin Johnson. Moss, Owens, Harrison, Chad and Andre Johnson, and Welker were named multiple times; Jimmy Smith, Rod Smith, Wayne, and Fitzgerald were named 2nd-team All-Pro in at least two different years Ward wasn’t; Holt, Steve Smith, and Calvin Johnson were also named 2nd-team All-Pro in a year Ward wasn’t. Throw in the Hall’s infuriating inability to pick between Andre Reed, Carter, and Tim Brown, and how can you even find room for Ward to get in at some point?

Shouldn’t a Hall of Famer make more than four Pro Bowls in a 14-year career, especially if they were never one of the two best receivers in the league in any year? Do Super Bowl rings even matter for non-quarterbacks? Would Tony and Mike disagree with my February post that, just among active players, the Johnsons, Moss, Fitzgerald, Steve Smith, Welker, and Wayne are all more deserving of the Hall of Fame than Ward – before you even get to retired players who aren’t eligible yet like Owens, Harrison, Holt, or Isaac Bruce, or the aforementioned eligible players that haven’t gotten in yet?

Perhaps, like Swann, another beloved Steeler receiver can get in late in his eligibility despite a questionable career. It is, after all, the Hall of Fame, not the Hall of Great. But if you still want to read more, you can browse through this post from January and the associated comments.

This Week in Kickstarter #5

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  • The HuMn Wallet? FrackNation? David Lynch Documentary? Child’s play. Meet the real poster child for the Double Fine effect: Wasteland 2. In its origins, it’s rather similar to Double Fine, this time being a sequel to the forerunner to the Fallout games, complete with a whopping $900,000 goal, a mark that, not that long ago, only two projects in the history of Kickstarter had ever achieved. More astonishing? It’s already passed its goal and become the fourth million-dollar Kickstarter, shooting past the OOTS drive into third place, with a month to go. Double Fine itself got more of a late push than I thought was possible in its last 24 hours, setting the final mark at $3.3 million, a mark I’m fairly sure will stand for a pretty long time… by which I mean “a month or so”.
  • But wait, there’s more! Meet The Banner Saga, which set a lofty $100,000 goal and has already locked up two-thirds of it within the first twenty-four hours or so, with a month still to run. Even allowing for considerable slowing, I fully expect it to lock up a quarter of a million dollars. The effect of Double Fine’s ending (and possibly the launch of Wasteland) also seems to have reinvigorated FTL, which has raised an additional $40,000 in the past week; $150k once again seems in reach, and possibly more. Idle Thumbs isn’t making $30,000 goals in two hours like when it started, but it did make close to $10,000 since I last checked a week ago and could get a substantial late push in its last 48 hours.
  • Meanwhile, the new Elevation Dock is probably the intriguing Geode, which made nearly $200,000 in its first week-plus. The Digital Bolex raised a whopping $283,000 in its first week, but seems to have ground almost to a halt; it’ll still be one of the top ten projects in the top-heavy Design category. The HuMn Wallet should be over $200,000 by the time you read this; with two weeks still to go, it should easily be one of the top 25 projects in Kickstarter history. The ZBoard got another spurt of backing that propelled it substantially over $200,000.
  • The David Lynch Documentary only raised $25,000 this week, so who knows if it can even meet its current $150,000 stretch goal. What Makes a Baby has become the second-most funded project in the history of the Publishing category (that I know of). Erfworld Year of the Dwagon finished with a whopping $84,981, which does much to make it look less like a yawning chasm from Womanthology to the rest of the Comics category than it was before. Finally, Goats appears to be the newest beneficiary of the OOTS effect. It hasn’t blown away its goals, in fact it’s already hit its last 72 hours, but it has slowly and steadily climbed into the top ten projects in the Comics category, and induced Jonathan Rosenberg to restart the comic.
  • Money has arrived in Rich Burlew’s bank account and orders have been placed for the first few things funded by the drive itself.

The Future of Content, Part IV: The Home of the Future

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I’d previously claimed that in a few decades, TV as we know it may become a thing of the past. But it’s possible that what may really become a thing of the past is the desktop computer.

Already laptops serve many of the same purposes for a lot cheaper and with a lot more portability, with desktops’ only advantage being the ability to play video games, where they’ve long competed and lost to console systems. But we’re fast redefining what it means to be a “computer”. As the iPad proved, today’s “phones” are really miniature computers, and many of today’s “TVs” are also starting to redefine what that is.

Last night I posted that our house finally got HD earlier this year. Since then, we’ve added a Sony Blu-Ray player with Google TV functionality to our repertoire. HD will not change the way you see TV appreciably; Google TV (and its competitors like Apple TV) definitely will. Google TV’s main feature is the ability to search for programs using a text-message-like keyboard, but that’s just the start of it. It comes with a version of Google Chrome, allowing you to surf the Internet on your TV. It also can support a wide variety of the same apps that run on an Android phone. On the same TV you watch March Madness on, you can also send tweets and update Facebook, catch up on your favorite blogs, watch some YouTube videos, even download movies and TV shows from Netflix.

Someday, I predict that every home will have something that looks like a TV but is really a computer, capable of running apps, playing games, and connecting to the Internet. Much of what falls under the domain of “watching TV” now will instead involve a trip to YouTube or hitching onto some sort of stream. Everything will still be available in crystal-clear HD quality, assuming it was made with that quality. The TV, desktop computer, and video game console will effectively be merged into a single unit (video game consoles are increasingly adding Internet access and other smart-TV-like functions). It will be the most powerful form of computer, supplemented by portable tablets and smartphones. Laptop computers will be retained by employers and educational facilities for the productivity software, but that may change if cloud-based solutions like Google Docs prove popular, since they can conceivably run on the “TV”.

This explains why Microsoft is overhauling its venerable Windows operating system to match its johnny-come-lately Windows Phone system. Mobile OS’s are fast becoming more important than old-fashioned desktop operating systems, as evidenced by Google TV’s patterning itself on Android. The business world may soon approach an inflection point as the old-fashioned keyboard and mouse undergo a revolution. Mouses may even come to be seen as quaint and old-fashioned as touchpads on laptops and smart TVs and touchscreens on smartphones and tablets supplant the mouse’s old breeding grounds, the desktop computer.

The television industry is not particularly friendly to this shift; Web sites affiliated with television networks have blocked access to their content from Google TV and its competitors. (Cable companies are also lukewarm, perhaps because they don’t want to cannibalize their current “on demand” offerings.) Given that they’re obviously not blocking their content from any other browser, the only explanation I can think of is that they’re worried no one will have a reason to watch their regular, linear channel, with its greater number of ads, if they can watch the same thing on the same device through another avenue; like everyone else I called out in Part I, the television industry is being dragged kicking and screaming into the inevitable future, not wanting to give up their current business models. But in doing so, they may be digging their own grave, for within a couple of decades, the very avenue they’re trying to block may be the regular channel.

My One-Month Review of HDTV

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I finally joined the twenty-first century earlier this year: our household finally got HDTV. Specifically, we got it the day before the Super Bowl, but couldn’t get actual HD service until the day after, meaning there was a period of less than 48 hours where we had to watch TV in pixellated stretch-o-vision, a period that just so happened to include, oh yeah, the single biggest reason to get HD in the first place. Oops.

I have to say I was never as swept off my feet by HD before as some people might have claimed. I was impressed at how certain graphics looked in HD when I happened upon various public displays of it, but I never felt the picture quality was such an improvement that I couldn’t bear to watch in SD, though as more and more channels (especially those showing sports) have gone letterboxed in recent years I could tell the writing was on the wall. To me, HD is just another way of saying “big”, as in, it keeps the effective picture quality of a big TV about the same, maybe a little sharper, as my old SDTV of half the size. If anything, I can say that I would never want to watch SD on an HD set.

But even though graphics were the thing that most impressed me about HD before, now that I’ve had a month of up-close-and-personal experience with it, I’ve gotta say… I’m not that impressed with the state of HD graphics.

Part of it is that a lot of graphics on a lot of channels are still designed for SD. They leave a lot of awkwardly-used space on the sides of the screen if their channel isn’t letterboxed, and they make the type too big if it is (which can affect even SD viewers). But a potentially bigger issue is that a lot of times, text in HD is just too sharp. It creates an odd air of artificiality that can come off as jarring, especially when it’s against raw video as a background.

Maybe I just need to get used to it, but I’m not sure that I totally agree with xkcd that we only see higher-quality video as somehow more fake only because of what it’s been used for. I think there definitely comes a point at which higher quality starts to become oddly artificial, perhaps even falls into an uncanny valley. At the very least, I would think any use of Helvetica on television should probably die pretty quickly.

Not that the opposite problem doesn’t exist; it’s one of my beefs with the March Madness graphics, but I’ll get to that at a later date. Also, while my own mockups of my own sports graphics concepts have often used black-on-white only because of my lack of creativity with colors, I now find it a rather stark contrast when I see it on ESPN and TNT’s basketball coverage. I’d say any use of solid blocks of color should probably be re-examined.

Finally, I have long bemoaned the lack of respect broadcast television receives, and how cable’s unfair advantages threaten the usefulness of free over-the-air television. When I grew up, there were broadcast channels and cable channels (and premium channels and pay-per-view channels), and they were all very well defined. But now… now I get the sense that HD really dissolves the distinction between broadcast and cable for the uninformed viewer, to a greater extent than before, even considering the effect of local stations and how iffy their graphics can be. Part of it may be that broadcast channels can have odd differences in quality from any cable channel on my cable system in SD, which disappears in HD. But if nothing else, it helps me realize how someone might not care so much for the declining state of broadcast.

My Sleep-Deprived Bracket

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You can tell, because I became enamored at the prospect at something happening that’s never happened before in the national championship game, something that would doubtless send ratings through the roof. I’m running myself ragged trying to finish up classes. Honestly there aren’t that many teams I’m enamored of in this year’s tournament, and many of the ones I am enamored of I have going down. This bracket basically predicts a repeat of when Duke won the national championship a couple years ago basically by being the last team left standing when the carnage cleared. I’ve actually done something I’ve never done before: submit multiple brackets.

The problem with having the NCAAs and NIT broadcast by two different organizations.

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This is a day late, but I wanted to stretch out The Streak while keeping the Kickstarter feature on Monday:

So as I mentioned Friday, truTV had a “Hardcore Brackets” show that revealed the full 1-68 seed list of the teams in the tournament. Not only that, it also revealed the “first four out” of the NCAA field. Those teams were Oral Roberts, Miami (FL), Nevada, and Drexel.

You would expect the “first four out” to also make up the four seeds in the NIT, right? Wrong. NONE of those four are seeds in the NIT. Miami is a , Drexel is a , and Oral Roberts and Nevada are playing each other in a 4/5 game. ORU, which appeared to be the very first team knocked out of the NCAAs, is a 4 seed, barely getting a first-round home game, and Nevada isn’t even that lucky.

For some reason, ESPN’s “Bracketology” show never mentioned the seed list that was being revealed simultaneously, and the NIT Selection Show seemed to dance around ORU’s bubble status. NIT committee chair C.W. Newton’s interview with George Smith was heavy on vague platitudes and light on actual insight; Newton claimed that there wasn’t much difference between the NCAA and NIT committees, but was never asked why his committee diverged so much from the NCAA committee in their assessment of the first teams out of the NCAA field.

To be fair, it seems the committee never took a vote on the last team in the field before St. Bonaventure’s win in the A-10 final stole that bid, and the teams that would have been included in that vote would have also included Mississippi State and Seton Hall, so it’s entirely possible Seton Hall (which did get a 1 seed in the NIT) would have won that vote, but still, Nevada goes from being potentially the last team in the NCAA field to not even hosting an NIT game?!? What the hell is going on here???

The OOTS Effect, Part IV

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  • Has the OOTS/Double Fine effect worn off? I ask not only because of the number of projects that have lost momentum, but there really aren’t any notable new projects this week – can I really get excited about The Classic Crime or Shell Game raising 5o grand in a week? There is the weird case of the ZBoard, which raised over $100,000 in the past week, yet seems to have already slowed down considerably by now.
  • Double Fine is getting a late push in its last 24 hours and could end up doubling the second-place Elevation Dock. That’s a record that could stand for a long, long time. More projects have lost momentum: the LowLine made about $12,000 in the past week, while FTL made less than $10,000 and Atomic Robo: Last Stop made a little more. A Show with Ze Frank finished at $146,752, just short of tripling its goal, so it lost a lot of momentum (about $20,000 in the last week), but still finishes at in the Film and Video category until FrackNation finishes. However, The HuMn Wallet doesn’t seem to be losing any momentum, raising $30,000 in the past week. And the David Lynch Documentary raised another $40,000, suggesting $200k is in reach. Meanwhile, Second Class Citizens Documentary finishes in fifth place in the Film and Video category, but is likely to be passed by FrackNation at least.
  • The success of Erfworld Year of the Dwagon is becoming astonishing. It enters its final three days at over $66,000, raising just over $10,000 in the past week. It probably can’t catch in the Comics category, but until pretty recently a Comics project raising over $60,000 might have seemed unthinkable. Yet Diesel Sweeties got enough of a late push that it wound up passing Benign Kingdom, and the $60,000 mark, for what’ll eventually be fourth in the category as well.
  • Finally, back in OOTS-land, based on previous updates, about 16.9% of all the pledge rewards should be in the mail by now.

A modest proposal to all bracketologists:

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I don’t know if you’ve heard, but truTV will be airing a special “Hardcore Brackets” show after the selection show on Selection Sunday. And on this show, for the first time ever, we will learn the actual order that the NCAA ranks all 68 teams in the tournament.

I know a lot of you like to measure just how accurate you are each year, so I would hope that you recognize the new opportunity this presents you. As such, I call for as many of you as possible to release your own S-Curve rankings when publishing your final bracket if you do not already do so.