About Me

Why “Lists” are my Favorite New Twitter Feature

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My first reaction upon learning of Twitter’s new “Lists” feature was “What the hell would the point of that be?” It seemed like a needless gimmick that didn’t really necessarily add anything to the Twitter experience.

When I entered the list-access group, and started to explore what lists were really like, I realized that not only were lists substantially more useful than I had supposed, Twitter had seemingly read my mind. If you’ve ever had or at least considered or heard of a stereotype of men as sorters and categorizers obsessed with organization, you’re talking about me. (Not that it helps me with physical things, like my bedroom, mind.) The Lists feature seemingly anticipated projects I had been considering involving creating a one-place resource for tweeters or even web sites in specific categories.

Now, to attempt to find all the tweeters in a given category would involve an insane amount of work, and I can’t create more than 20 lists anyway to cover all the categories I’d like to cover. Nonetheless, I’ve spent the past week (meaning “more time than I should have over the past week”) tracking down as many tweeters in the categories I was most interested in as I could. But I still need your help, so tweet me if you have a like-minded list. (One particular idea I’m interested in is at the end of this post.) Also tweet me if you know of any tweeters in any category I’ve left out – if I was the one who created the list. (Thanks to Listorious for many of the lists that aren’t mine.)

I’m also looking for Twitter lists for news for particular metropolitan areas – as I’ve said in the past, I’m fascinated by the centrality of cities in America. I can’t possibly handle all such lists myself, so I need you to create lists for your hometown containing ONLY:

  • All major TV news operations’ tweeters (for Seattle, that would be @komonews, @KING5Seattle, @NWCN, @KIRO7Seattle, and @Q13FOX)
  • All local newspapers’ tweeters (at least @seattletimes, for example)
  • News radio stations (@973kiro and @komonewsradio

In addition, I’d like city-by-city sports tweeters containing ONLY:

  • Every team’s OFFICIAL Twitter account
  • Every sports news tweeter that’s a spinoff of the news tweeters above
  • Every regional sports network
  • Every sports radio station

College Football Schedule – Week 9

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My laptop screen is cracked and between using the lab computers at school, dealing with both what to do about the laptop and setting up a new bank account, and being distracted by Twitter’s new Lists feature (more on that in a post when it goes live for everyone), I’ve been spending virtually no time at all on the college football posts. I’m taking care of the schedule now since we’re already behind a game and another game has probably already happened, so this will make the rankings obvious. With the laptop busted, I can’t post directly from Word from a school computer, so for this week only (because WordPress’ WYSIWYG editor seems to have never heard of tables) we’re going to experiment in making it look like I’ve always intended it to look and arranged it to look in Word but which always gets mangled in the final product. All times Eastern.

TOP 25 GAMES
Texas @ #16 Oklahoma State 8 PM ABC/ESPN2 Sean McDonough, Matt Millen, Holly Rowe
Florida* v. Georgia 3:30 CBS Verne Lundquist, Gary Danielson, Tracy Wolfson
Cincinnati @ Syracuse Noon ESPNU Clay Matvick, David Diaz-Infante
UNLV @ TCU 4 PM VS. Tim Neverett, Glenn Parker, Lindsay Soto
San Jose State @ Boise State 3 PM Gameplan Mark Johnson, Tom Scott, David Augusto
Indiana @ Iowa Noon ESPN Mark Jones, Bob Davie
Penn State @ Northwestern 4:30 ESPN Carter Blackburn, Chris Spielman
USC @ Oregon* 8 PM ABC/ESPN2
HD ABC only		 Brent Musberger, Kirk Herbstreit, Lisa Salters
North Carolina 20-17 Virginia Tech 7:30 TH ESPN Chris Fowler, Craig James,
Jesse Palmer, Erin Andrews
Kansas State @ #12 Oklahoma 7 PM FSN Joel Meyers, Dave Lapham, Jim Knox
New Mexico State @ #14 Ohio State Noon BTN Matt Rosen, Anthony Herron
Tulane @ #15 LSU 8 PM Gameplan Doug Greengard, Rene Nadeau, Kevin Guidry
Coastal Carolina @ #17 Clemson 1:30 ESPN360 Ryan Rose, Jeremy Bloom
#18 West Virginia @ South Florida 8 PM FR ESPN2 Joe Tessitore, Rod Gilmore
#19 Georgia Tech @ Vanderbilt 7:30 CSS/CN/CST Doug Bell, Chris Doering
#20 Nebraska @ Baylor 12:30 VS. Ron Thulin, Kelly Stouffer, Lewis Johnson
Kansas @ #21 Texas Tech 3:30 ABC Ron Franklin, Ed Cunningham
Wyoming @ #23 Utah 8 PM mtn. Ari Wolfe, Blaine Fowler, Sammy Linebaugh
Washington State v. Notre Dame 7:30 NBC Tom Hammond, Pat Haden, Alex Flanagan
#25 Mississippi @ Auburn Noon SEC Net Dave Neal, Andre Ware, Cara Capuano
WATCHLIST AND OTHER POSITIVE B POINT TEAMS
Rutgers @ Connecticut Noon B.E. Net Mike Gleason, John Congemi, Quint Kessenich
Miami (FL) @ Wake Forest 3:30 ABC/ESPN2
HD ABC only		 Bob Wischusen, Brian Griese
South Carolina @ Tennessee 7:30 ESPN Brad Nessler, Todd Blackledge, Erin Andrews
Utah State @ Fresno State 5 PM
UCLA @ Oregon State 4 PM
Central Michigan @ Boston College 3:30 ESPNU Todd Harris, Charles Arbuckle
Akron @ Northern Illinois Noon ESPN+ Michael Reghi, Doug Chapman
Southern Miss @ Houston 1 PM CSS Matt Stewart, Chuck Oliver, Allison Williams
Temple @ Navy 3:30 CBS CS Dave Ryan, Randy Cross
THIS WEEK’S OTHER HD GAMES
East Carolina 38-19 Memphis 8 PM TU ESPN2 Rece Davis, Mark May, Lou Holtz, Rob Stone
Purdue @ Wisconsin Noon ESPN2 Pam Ward, Ray Bentley
NC State @ Florida State Noon Raycom Steve Martin, Rick Walker, Mike Hogewood
Missouri @ Colorado 1:30 FSN Bill Land, Gary Reasons, Emily Jones
California @ Arizona State 3:30 ABC Terry Gannon, David Norrie
Michigan @ Illinois 3:30 ABC/ESPN2 Mike Patrick, Craig James
Eastern Michigan @ Arkansas 7 PM ESPNU Eric Collins, Brock Huard
Mississippi State @ Kentucky 7 PM SEC/FSN Bob Rathbun, Dave Archer, Jenn Hildreth
New Mexico @ San Diego State 7:30 CBS CS Tom Hart, Aaron Taylor
Michigan State @ Minnesota 8 PM BTN Wayne Larrivee, Chris Martin, Rebecca Haarlow
Marshall @ Central Florida 8 PM SU ESPN Dave Lamont, JC Pearson
BIG 12
Iowa State @ Texas A&M 3:30
ACC
Duke @ Virginia 3:30 ESPN360 Frank Giardina, Danny Kanell
MOUNTAIN WEST
Air Force @ Colorado State 4 PM mtn. James Bates, Todd Christensen, Roger Bailey
WAC
Hawaii @ Nevada 4 PM CSD.com Jim Leahey, Russell Yamahoa
Louisiana Tech @ Idaho 5 PM ESPN+ Trey Bender, Jay Taylor
MAC
Ohio @ Ball State Noon CSD.com
Western Michigan @ Kent State 2 PM CSD.com
Toledo @ Miami (OH) 3:30 Gameplan
CONFERENCE USA
SMU @ Tulsa 2 PM CBSCS XXL
UAB @ UTEP 3 PM CBSCS XXL
SUN BELT
Louisiana-Lafayette @ Florida International Noon CSD.com
Western Kentucky @ North Texas 4 PM CSS/CST Todd Kalas, Derek Rackley
Middle Tenn. St. @ Florida Atlantic 4 PM
Louisiana-Monroe @ Troy 7 PM CSD.com
BOWL SUBDIVISION
Arkansas State @ Louisville 3:30 SNY Drew Deener, Doug James

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

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So I’m trying to write this as quickly as I can given my computer’s slowness and my rush to get out the door by 7:45 to catch the next part of IFC’s Monty Python documentary they’re apparently not replaying after tonight after I couldn’t finish the CFB ranks in time, and I get one of the most interesting religious RIDs yet. If you want to have something to steal for your describe-a-religion project for religious studies or world cultures class learn more about world religions, here’s the place to go!

The twilight of the National Football League

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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…

Highlights from Ideas Every Day month

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For the past month I’ve had a post every single weekday, highlighting the top-notch writing on MorganWick.com. Here are some of the more thought-provoking or otherwise noteworthy posts from this time:

But “Ideas Every Day” is more than a one-month gimmick; it’s the basic principle MorganWick.com runs on. So next week, look for plenty more where that came from, including more and better NFL coverage than following a single gimmick, and maybe, just maybe, a webcomic post. I have plenty of work to do finding a job and doing work for school, though.

P.S. Why does the square Twitter widget have a font size as small as it does? Even a super-duper-long tweet uses maybe half the box. A large font size would give Twitter a widget that works for stuff like my 128-pixel-wide sidebar.

Forum Launch Prelude

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The forum software I want to use is driving me absolutely bonkers for style customization to the point I can’t even think straight about the process, so as a prelude to actually linking to and unveiling the site, I’m leaving this an open thread for features you want to have the forum to have when it launches.

UPDATE: Okay, I’m delaying the launch of the forum until Monday again, and I may have to delay it until December or even later for all the plugins I feel I need to update for the current version of the forum software. fk gmav brlgbgnhvnvngngt

The impending death of YouTube and the future of “you”

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I’m not sure to what extent I still believe a single word of what I wrote in yesterday’s State of Webcomics Address. As it was coming down to the wire I started realizing I was basically being a lapdog for Bengo and wasn’t really thinking about the situation clearly, right as my brain was burning out as well. I may take a more sober revisiting of the situation in a month or two.

But if there’s one part of it I do still believe in, it’s the opening section about the idealism of the youth, and that may be my starting point for a rewrite of the Address. And I can stand by that because it appears everywhere else I look at the Internet. A constant theme in all the developments to take place on the Internet is that people started a revolution first and asked questions on how to pay for it, or the impact on the money flowing to the institutions the revolutions were replacing, later, even for the most prominent and popular of those revolutions.

I was interested in Farhad Manjoo’s book True Enough last year, and now I may be adding his technology column for Slate to my RSS reader. And today, we’re going to go from Stuff From July week to Stuff From April week! Because it was in April that Manjoo wrote a column on the double-edged sword of user-generated content. It seems even YouTube, one of the most popular sites on the Internet, has been bleeding money and mostly been propped up by the parts of Google that have been actually making money.

Turns out that “user-generated content” can end up meaning “crap”. A lot of the stuff most people leer at on YouTube – copyright violations, groin shots and other dumb, vaguely voyeuristic things like that – are the stuff that advertisers don’t want to be associated with. The content that makes the most money is still content made by the pros. YouTube has attempted to make up for it by signing content deals with the pros, but that only gets advertisers to pay for the pro content, and still leaves YouTube holding the bag for the costs of storing the crap. YouTube may eventually have to impose restrictions or a limited paywall. User-generated content may have changed the world, but no one’s quite willing to sponsor it yet.

The result: I strongly suspect YouTube as we know it will die within a year.

And that’s the best thing that could possibly happen to it – and to the Web.

I say that because of Manjoo’s June column on the release of Firefox 3.5, which emphasizes its integration of the HTML 5 standard, especially the way it allows for video to be called up using an HTML <video> tag without calling up Flash. Manjoo emphasizes the way this could result in interactive video; I look at the way it could obviate the need for centralized video repositories like YouTube. User-generated video can now conceivably be hosted on the web site of the person that produced it rather easily, without needing a third party like YouTube.

I could see YouTube imposing a survival of the fittest system, where videos that fail to meet a certain support threshold, failing to earn its keep, will receive a warning and eventually be automatically removed. This would keep YouTube high-quality and fairly self-sustaining. This one-two punch – encouraging people to take on the costs of hosting their stuff themselves and making it easier to do so – would theoretically maintain the user-generated content revolution while dispersing its costs and making it more manageable.

What about other services facing the same problem? What about Flickr and Facebook? There’s not going to be some HTML white knight to save them, is there? Maybe not, but it’s telling that so many WordPress users have clamored for an image gallery in core, despite its gimmicky-ness, that one appears to be coming. Facebook may be harder to deal with, as it effectively is the place where a lot of this “decentralized” stuff would go, as is. Twitter may be starting to take some load off Facebook, but its core is its interconnectedness; is it even possible to decentralize social networking?

This brings me to the CWI’s Steven Pemberton’s vision of what Web 3.0 might be like. Web 2.0 was based in specific Web sites like Flickr, Facebook and Wikipedia (which seems to be doing well as the public television of the Web, running primarily on donations with zero ads), but Web 3.0, in Pemberton’s eyes, would be based on millions of personal Web sites. Pemberton’s concerned about the effect that potentially getting “locked-in” to a specific site might have if you decide to change sites, or if the site (or your account) gets shut down, or the redundancy of being on both MySpace and Facebook, and suggests instead that semantic standards be instituted for such things. For example, you could put your contacts on a page on your site, and an aggregator (of sorts) would compare that with other people’s contacts. Such an “aggregator” might actually be part of the browser itself. Imagine if Twitter were to shut down, without a replacement, but left a standard for people to send “tweets” from their own web sites that could then be read from within the browser. (Microsoft, of all people, may be getting a head start on this with the “accelerators” in IE8.)

Pemberton might seem to be a lone dreamer with his own wild vision, and at first glance, this may seem to be incompatible with corporate America’s demands to centralize everything in one place under one company that can rake in the dough. But because the Internet is free, they haven’t been raking in the dough – and because of that, money may actually encourage the creation of this new decentralized vision of the Internet, just to spread the costs out so they aren’t borne by a few companies.

The most important day in the history of the Morgan Wick Online Universe since the launch of Da Blog, and a day never to be matched in importance again.

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The day has arrived that I knew would come ever since I launched the web site.

I have moved the web site from morganwick.freehostia.com to morganwick.com.

Morganwick.com will be the new home for all aspects of the Morgan Wick Online Universe, from the seemingly-stalled comic strip Sandsday to the 100 Greatest Movies Project to the street sign gallery to my sports projects. That includes Da Blog. Effective immediately, all blog posts will be hosted at morganwick.com, and the Blogspot account will stop updating. (Some dummy posts may start appearing next year.) Please update your bookmarks and RSS feeds to point to morganwick.com.

I’ve made my frustration with Blogger and Freehostia clear over the past several months. Blogger was clunky and prone to problems. Freehostia had a clunky file manager in IE, a frustrating FTP, and only one MySQL database on the free plan. Both of them, however, should be commended for getting me a head start in building the content that will now make the move to Morganwick.com. In fact, the problems with Freehostia have been sufficiently mitigated that I might be tempted to continue housing the new web site on Freehostia, especially since my ads pay for my domain but not my hosting.

However, that’s only possible in the short term, and it’s not really possible. I’m only allowed one MySQL database on Freehostia and it pretty much has to be used by my blogging platform; while the blogging platform is robust enough to handle a lot, I kinda need to at least have the freedom to create a second database for certain purposes. And as long as I’m moving to my own domain and moving up to paying for the hosting, I should get the best domain, hosting, and blogging services there are out there, and get the most bang for the buck for them.

For me, and for those particular fields, that means moving to Namecheap, Hostmonster, and WordPress.

For most people, GoDaddy is the only domain registrar they’ve ever heard of. I decided very early on in the process of finding a domain registrar that I would not use GoDaddy. By all accounts, they’re all T&A (literally), no substance (or customer service), and possibly the worst domain registrar on the Internet, used only by amateurs who watch TV to find an Internet domain registrar and don’t really know what they’re doing. Namecheap was one of the most commonly cited and praised names that came up in a search for good domain registrars. I found Hostmonster the same way I found Freehostia – by looking at sites that would compare hosting services side-by-side for me based on other people’s reviews. Hostmonster came out on top on multiple such comparison sites despite some tight competition, especially since WordPress didn’t include a link to Hostmonster that I could use to support WordPress, but did contain a link to Hostmonster’s sister service Bluehost.

That might be the last time I mention either service. You don’t need to know who I paid for the domain or who’s hosting the site. It’s my very own domain now. I mention them in case I ever have problems with either service, or in case I ever move from either and have to shut down the site while the move processes. If there’s a quibble with Hostmonster, it’s that they’ve been known to shut down sites without warning for violations of Terms of Service, which basically comes down to backing up the site and not getting the domain and hosting from the same place lest you become unable to leave.

Chances are if you’ve ever heard of any of the three services, you’ve heard of WordPress. Even in the unlikely scenario you haven’t heard of it, you’ve seen it. Adherents to Movable Type would proclaim its superiority, but by many accounts WordPress is the best blogging platform on the Internet, and certainly the best free one. It’s fitting that there are three major blogging platforms and they all appeal to different people. Blogger is the quickest, dirtiest way to start a blog if you don’t want to pay any money and don’t know anything about the Internet, especially if you want to start building something big. (Both WordPress and Movable Type have hosting services using their infrastructure but WordPress’ functionality is extremely limited – ads aren’t even allowed. Typepad is a pay service, which makes me wonder why anyone who could afford it wouldn’t just start their own Movable Type site.)

Wordpress is the best service if you have your own hosting and don’t want to pay, and Movable Type is best if you believe “you get what you pay for” and can afford to pay the price to get better than a volunteer effort – though depending on your philosophy on the Internet and your exact needs, WordPress may still be best. (No less than the government of Great Britain uses WordPress to host its site.) It may be ideal to take the path I took – build an audience on Blogger and take it to a self-hosted WordPress site when it gets big enough.

Honestly, not only did I grow frustrated with Blogger over the years, I’ve started to distrust it a little; use of Blogger has started to throw up a red flag of amateurism for me, especially the use of variants of the default Minima template, which is used by some of my favorite blogs. The effect is mitigated with the use of templates that at least look original, and when people have their own domain it reminds me less that it’s a Blogspot blog, but there’s still that niggling feeling in the back of my mind that I can’t shake while reading something like Awful Announcing: why aren’t they at least using WordPress?

I saw why WordPress is so beloved shortly after starting experimenting with it. It was loaded with so many features that I could use. It wasn’t so clunky as to eat the code I tried to feed into it (see: my first attempt at Da Countdown). Some of the problems surrounding draft posts, such as the matter of finding them if I stopped working on them and wanted to come back to them later (something that led me to start scheduling unfinished posts), as well as some of the patches Blogger tried to put on, such as the inaccurate post time for all unscheduled posts that led Blogger to tweak the posting settings, as well as some of the quirks of scheduled posts, aren’t an issue with WordPress, which has a “last saved draft” field allowing you to schedule a post without making it leave draft mode. And WordPress’ “pages” allows me to create my own, custom, “about me” page.

More important to you, WordPress doesn’t make it complicated to post a comment – you won’t be tempted to post as “Anonymous” anymore when you wouldn’t normally do so. Just fill out your name, e-mail, and if you have a web site a link to it, and you’re all set. And because of the Akismet spam protection system you don’t have to fill out a CAPTCHA anymore either, which is really more trouble than it’s worth since it only protects against automated, not human, spam, and automated systems can easily crack it. (If your comment doesn’t show up, don’t panic; wait 24 hours to see if it shows up. After that, contact me with a copy of your comment; there is some anecdotal evidence of Akismet eating comments without the capability of accessing them, but if so it’s so rare that on the thread I looked at, WordPress couldn’t even reproduce it.) Tomorrow I’ll launch the new MorganWick.com forums to complement the site and the comments, which I’ll have more detail on then.

And perhaps most of all, WordPress has a robust system of “categories”, including the ability to make subcategories. WordPress also has “tags” and my initial instinct was to make all of my labels tags, since that was what they seemed to resemble, and only make those labels that bore the most resemblance to subsites into categories, so I was a bit frustrated when WordPress wanted to convert them all to categories by default without giving me a choice. But after reading up on the distinction between the two (it seeems tags are mostly a search engine helper) I decided that the way I use labels, it made the most sense to convert all labels into categories.

Because of my various interests, I always intended to create various subsites once I moved to morganwick.com to house my various projects in various fields. Because of that, because of the presence of subcategories, because of the decision to make Da Blog the front page of morganwick.com, and because of the intricities of the move itself, I have made several changes to the category structure, with virtually all categories affected:

  • All categories are now properly capitalized.
  • The “100 Greatest Movies Project” label is now a subcategory of “movies”.
  • “About Me” remains as-is but may, in the future, be split into multiple categories.
  • “Advertising” is now a subcategory of “Web Site News”. As I’ve said before, most important information about ads will now come via Twitter.
  • “Astronomy” is now a subcategory of “Science”.
  • “Blog News” is now a subcategory of “Web Site News”. The exact role of both “Blog News” and “Web Site News” given the merger of the two, the further splitting of the blog into subsites, and the role of Twitter, is undetermined at this point.
  • Because not all formatting was preserved when importing all the old posts from Da Blog, and because comments will not be associated with any other comments you make going forward, the “Classic Da Blog” category will be extended to include all posts before last week, and will no longer be just a quick way to get Technorati to update correctly. (By the way, 5vjhdtuzmg I forgot how much I hated Technorati Profile.)
  • “College Football Lineal Title”, “College Football Schedule”, and “College Football Rankings” are all now subcategories of “College Football”.
  • The just-launched new category “Constitution” is now a subcategory of “Politics”, as are both the Democratic and Republican Platform Reviews.
  • “Election 2008” is also now a subcategory of “Politics”, and “Election 2008 Live Blog” is in turn a subcategory of “Election 2008”.
  • “Education Policy”, “Foreign Affairs”, and “Health Care”, all categories used solely in the platform reviews, are now subcategories of “Politics”.
  • “General TV Business” is now just “TV Business”. See below.
  • “Human Nature” is now a subcategory of “Philosophy”, two categories neither of which with very many posts.
  • There is a new “Random Internet Discovery” subcategory of “Internet Adventures”.
  • “IRL” and “NASCAR” are now subcategories of “Auto racing”.
  • “Microsoft” is now a subcategory of “Computer geekery”, two categories that may never be used again.
  • “MLS” is now a subcategory of “Soccer”.
  • “News You Can Use” is now a subcategory of “My Comments on the News”; both its posts were members of that category already.
  • “NFL Lineal Title” is now a subcategory of “NFL”. “NFL Superpower Rankings” has been deleted, and all the posts it contained moved to “Superpower Rankings” which has been made a subcategory of “NFL”.
  • “Non-UFC MMA” has been renamed “MMA” and “UFC” has been made a subcategory of it.
  • “Fantasy Football” is now a subcategory of “NFL”.
  • “Simulated CFB Playoff” is now “Golden Bowl Simulated CFB Playoff” and a subcategory of “College Football”.
  • “SNF Flex Scheduling Watch” is now a subcategory of “NFL”.
  • “Sports in general” is now simply “Sports” and all sports categories have been made subcategories of it, as have “Sports TV Business”, “Sports TV Graphics” and “Sports Watcher”. “NFL” and “College football” are now subcategories of a new “Football” category, and “NBA”, “College basketball” and “WNBA” are now subcategories of a new “Basketball” category. All my sports posts are available at sports.morganwick.com, as are the old Morgan Wick Sports features.
  • “TV Upfronts” is now a subcategory of “TV Business”.
  • “Webcomic news” is now “Sandsday”, a subcategory of itself, and a subcategory of “Web site news”. (To clarify: “Web site news” now contains a subcategory “Webcomic news”, which contains a subcategory “Sandsday”, which contains all the old “Webcomic news” posts.)
  • “Webcomics” is now hosted at webcomics.morganwick.com and is loaded with new features, including an index to reviews, tags for each webcomic mentioned in a post, new categories for full-fledged reviews and reviews of webcomics blogs, a new “Webcomics’ Identity Crisis” category for both the series itself and the ongoing blog thereof, and an index to said series, with potentially more features to come. (Note: The review index and index to “Webcomics’ Identity Crisis” are not linkable at this time. I’ll tweet and remove this note when they are.)

In addition, all web site features have new addresses, and may not be immediately accessible:

  • morganwick.freehostia.com/greatestmovies (the Greatest Movies Project) is now at greatestmovies.morganwick.com.
  • morganwick.freehostia.com/sports (Morgan Wick Sports) is now at sports.morganwick.com. It may be a while before this section of the site returns to full functionality, and when it does everything will be at a new URL. Watch the Twitter feed to find out when everything is restored, and where to find it.
  • morganwick.freehostia.com/streetsigns (the Street Sign Gallery) is now at www.morganwick.com/streetsigns.
  • morganwick.freehostia.com/webcomic (Sandsday) is now at sandsday.morganwick.com. I’m still trying to translate the PHP from PHP 4 to PHP 5, so it won’t be linked to there until then.

For the time being, the Premier ad is being shut down, as it doesn’t translate easily to the new site. I’ll continue working out the kinks throughout the week morganwick.blogspot.com and morganwick.freehostia.com will remain up, but not maintained; in a year my Freehostia account will lapse and that site will no longer work.

It’s a new day on MorganWick.com. Let’s go boldly forward into the future.

Truly, the end of an era. Hopefully, not of the earth.

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If I’m going to give my critical thinking skills a workout, I need to give my critical thinking skills a workout. And since I hope to do a lot of thinking over the course of my life, this should be an important and positive excersize for me. So you know what? I don’t care anymore that no one’s pitching in at the Global Warming Open Thread, or e-mailing me with their arguments. It’s going to be a bit more work for me, but it’s work I probably should do. … It’ll be a more fulfilling experience for me, building skills I’ll need to do more of these series in the future, perhaps even skills that will prove useful for snagging a real job or at least doing well in college. … If there’s a downside, I might not have as much information as I’d like if it doesn’t pop up right away in Google, and I want as complete a picture as possible for this heady issue. But I think it’s worth the risk from a personal growth point of view, and I hope you’re all along for the ride.
–Me, in April

Do me a favor: Next time I say something like this, give me a good smack upside the head.

Seriously, I actually thought this would be a “personal growth” experience instead of my own personal hell?

I’ve been in a bit of a schedule crunch for the past few months, with a lot of stuff on my plate and some of my school studies starting to suffer a bit. The worst part, and the part that I think has been dragging me slowly insane, has been the global warming series. You may have gleaned some evidence of this from the increasing lateness of the strip (seriously, I posted the strip at 7 PM PT yesterday?) and from some of my Twitter posts, but I haven’t been in the mood to do research for the series as much as I’ve needed since entering the second phase. Research for the series started out as not too bad if time-consuming and sometimes shied away from, but it has since become an obligation I really haven’t wanted to do, a job I tack on as an afterthought after doing everything else, especially since starting my recent summer class. I told myself, as was hinted in a recent strip, I had to maintain a daily schedule to finish the series as fast as possible, but for most of the second phase I’ve rarely worked more than one strip in advance.

What’s more, the sheer weight of the research required has started to wear on my brain. You’ve seen me start to give a more pro-global-warming bias than I ever intended to give, failing to properly explore arguments, and breaking them off prematurely – or over-relying on waiting strips that move the argument precisely zilch, often essentially repeating prior arguments. This series hasn’t “given my critical thinking skills a workout”, it’s worn them down to nothing.

All that might be excusable if I had touched off the open debate I hoped to start, or attracted the people I hoped to attract to Sandsday to explore the debate for themselves as I present it. But not only has none of that happened, readership has actually gone down compared to the preceding video game strips. Previously the strip, according to Project Wonderful stats, averaged about five page views a day; right now I’m lucky to get two. The Sandsday ad box has actually been delisted, something that never happened before – suspended for no one loading the box, but not out-and-out delisted for poor performance.

So all that leads to the development at least hinted at in today’s strip: I am suspending – not aborting – the global warming series for about three weeks, maybe four. During that time we’ll go back to the sort of strips that characterized Sandsday before the series began, that is to say, video game strips. Afterwards, the series will start up again. However, once the series starts up again I will not hold myself to a daily schedule, but will instead do research when I feel like it and release strips accordingly. There may be long swathes without any strips at all, or periods where a lot of strips are released, one a day for weeks. I will allow the series to play out more organically and naturally from here on out until it reaches a conclusion. Once the series reaches an end I will end Sandsday right then and there with my final verdict. I’ve considered ending the strip before – at one point I was considering ending it at #500 – but the inability of the global warming series to increase readership and its increasing job-like nature have convinced me that I probably will never get the readership I’d hoped for and probably will never find the strip as enjoyable as I would need to to continue with it.

Sandsday will not be the last comic I do, not even the last webcomic; I have at least two other ideas I’d like to bring down the pipeline, although they almost certainly won’t be ready before the site relaunch. I still stand by the basic gimmick of the strip even if I was not able to utilize its potential in the way I had hoped for, and I feel like I’ve tarnished the gimmick in some way by working on it myself instead of leaving it for other, more talented writers to pick up. I would like Sandsday to go down as an experiment that I used to help build my writing abilities by getting in over 500 reps over a period of nearly (if not over) two years. I’ve gotten some appreciative comments about the strip; I have also gotten some comments that have told me to, essentially, get some art lessons and abandon this hopeless carcass. Through it all, I maintained a streak of consecutive days with a strip that will run to over 550 by the time I start dropping strips. I don’t take the decision to end the strip lightly, but I trust that with the time I’m freeing up by ending the strip, there will be more and better stuff to come into the Morgan Wick Online Universe that will make up for the loss.

Hilarity in cereal tie-ins.

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So today I finish off a box of Frosted Mini-Wheats and I happen to notice the giveaway on the back of the box.

As a tie-in for the Star Trek movie, it allows you to send in for a “Starfleet T-shirt” so you can look like you’re on the Starship Enterprise. The shirts are available in blue or red.

“For just nine tokens, or one token plus $9.99, you can own the original red shirt! Wait, where are you going? How come we’re selling out in blue but haven’t sold a single one in red?”