For the first time since July 14 of last year, I did not have a post on a weekday yesterday.
I had been intending to continue The Streak until I hit the one-year mark. Oddly, that might have resulted in extending the streak into at least September and possibly (after college football season) December, because of at least one project I have in the works.
Honestly, after abandoning webcomics posts for March on the grounds I needed the time to work on a paper, I’ve been completely procrastinating. I spent most of yesterday sleeping, watched more TV than I should have or planned to, went out for a while and had no place to really use the Internet (nor, for the most part, did it cross my mind to), and used the last few hours of the official Tuesday playing games rather than at least work on the paper. Really, the paper’s barely started and I’m going to need a three-day blitz to write… eight pages? I hit a research bottleneck where I had to go running around for books to cite to make the point I intended to make (by not being what it calls an “indiscriminate collection of information” Wikipedia may actually be hindering the Web’s potential as a repository of all knowledge by attracting too many queries for it to itself) and that’s been taking up a lot of time I could use actually working on the paper.
(For the sort of research I want to use not just for this paper, but spending much of my life doing, I have a feeling I’ll need a lot of money for books… and I STILL don’t have a real job…)
I may well start a new streak with this post anyway – I have posts planned for the remainder of the week and may try to get a second post out today.
I was planning on doing several state-ofs on webcomics I’m reading today. You can blame my inability to find anyplace quiet enough on campus for me, perhaps partially attributable to my growing inability to handle any disturbance to the quiet – or noise, as the case may be – for the fact that I mostly goofed off today instead. (It doesn’t help that it seems most people seem to have forgotten what used to be inextricably linked to libraries – a “quiet” rule – even at the school library where it used to hold relatively well; less than a year ago I was called out for breaking it.) I’m keenly aware of the risk of it happening again though, so I’m going to try to at least get a start on one tonight, so I have a reason to already be in the mood tomorrow.
Because I don’t want that to be my only reason to post today, two graphics packages I want to look at now. I don’t know what it is with the holder of the NFL primetime package and the need to change up the graphics for the Super Bowl. CBS didn’t make a single change to its package for Super Bowl XLI, and the closest thing to a change Fox made compared to the playoffs was to swap out the “NFL on FOX” logo for an “XLII FOX” logo whenever the banner didn’t show. I could understand it for ABC at Super Bowl XL (even they didn’t used to do this) because they were rolling out their new adaptation of the banner for all sports. (It was the only time they could do so for the NFL, and in less than a year it was made obsolete when ABC Sports was folded into the ESPN brand, but whatever.) NBC… what is the point of spiffying up your graphics?
It’s definitely not a long-term change, because it was back to normal at the Pro Bowl. I’m not necessarily criticizing the banner itself, because it’s basically the old one with slicker graphics and animations, but it’s kind of pointless.
ESPN, meanwhile, rolled out a new banner for its tennis broadcasts. You may recall that ESPN’s first attempt at adapting the banner for tennis, back at Wimbledon, didn’t go well. I suggested that ESPN take a cue from the presentation of tennis scores in other countries and simply list the number of sets won and the number of games won in the current set, rather than the awkward-looking take they went with. ESPN didn’t do that, but there’s little to complain about in the new strip. The score of the current game takes up the bulk of the strip, with the set-by-set score relegated to a side space. It’s almost the reverse of what most tennis boxes have looked like in this country, where the game score has been subordinated to the match score. In fact, the match score gives way to present updates of games on other courts, as well as break, set, and match points, deuce numbers, and for the duration of any tiebreak. Stats are presented by causing the game score to give way to the stat numbers, and the match score to give way to an indication of the stat displayed, but when indications like upcoming schedules and the time in both Melbourne and someplace in the States appear above the banner, I wonder why the same couldn’t be done for stats.
However, I have a couple of quibbles. First, the order of the players for display of the game score switches places for each game, depending on who’s serving, in order to maintain the “Server-Returner” order (a knock on the Wimbledon strip). This might be useful to differentiate each game as a separate game, but that might be kinda pointless. But more to the point, it doesn’t look much like any other strip ESPN has. In a sense, it evokes the new Monday Night Football banner, which also has more of an emphasis on squareness than ESPN’s other, parallelogram-based strips, but it doesn’t look a heck of a lot like that either, and it doesn’t have the MNF banner’s distinctive feature of containing all extraneous graphics within itself. It’s about as good as ESPN could have hoped for, though there’s still room for improvement, and certainly an improvement over the Wimbledon banner that was so awful I can’t really find a video of it anywhere.
I was going to comment on one other (national) strip at one point, but damned if I can remember what it was now. Instead, please enjoy how not to design a score graphic, from the Portland Trail Blazers.
I personally think the centralized approach, which ESPN tried for MNF the first two years, has potential, but this isn’t it. The main sin is this: each team’s score naturally invites comparison to the other team’s score. The easier you make it to tell which team has the lead, the better. That’s the thinking behind the weird “bar” TNT has introduced on its new NBA box. You do not put each team’s score on opposite ends of your box or strip!!! Especially when they are separated from the time by the team logos, which makes them look lonely as the only changing element compared with its immediate neighbors. (And it only gets worse when individual stats are displayed.) I know what the Blazers were going for – emphasizing the “opposition” – but something compact like ESPN’s “orb” would have worked for that purpose just as well. Or Versus’ graphics. Or The Score’s efforts. This strip would be greatly improved just by switching the place of the score and team abbreviation with that of the logo, but the time and especially the shot clock still take up way more space than they need. I’m not a fan of spelling out “QUARTER” either. The Blazers should have just let the professionals at Comcast SportsNet design their graphics.
(In general, when teams have their graphics designed by people not good enough to get jobs working for national outfits or nationwide regional sports networks, they tend to get painfully experimental, when they don’t blatantly and clumsily rip off other networks’ graphics as is the norm in the NFL preseason. The Yankees’ YES Network has one of the better team-designed graphics, and it’s very conventional – and the Yankees and YES are big enough to afford national-quality designers. (Also worthy of praise: the Orioles and Nationals’ network, MASN; the Red Sox and Bruins on NESN; and if the Padres designed Channel 4’s graphics they did a good job, but still couldn’t help but experiment a little.) When the Cleveland Indians got their own network in SportsTime Ohio, their first season was spent with a fairly conventional strip – then they decided to get experimental, and stuck a box in the lower-right that disappeared when the ball was in play (setting baseball graphics back to 1995) and displayed the logo of the team at bat when no one was on base.)
My eye is pretty much back to normal. Sometimes I think about stopping or restricting the RID because what comes up rarely interests me, and then come days I’m thankful it’s one fewer day of posting I need to worry about.
So I think I accidentially poked myself in the eye last night and it’s still red and sore and anything I had planned for today may have to wait for tomorrow. Which includes some important things…
I have four posts I want to get to over the course of the next week: the state of Ctrl+Alt+Del and Darths and Droids, and two sports-related posts. All but one requires me to be connected to the Internet to do most of the work. But those and the RID are all you’re getting over the next week and I may backslide on one or two of those.
After that, I’m going to try and refocus on webcomics reviews as my main focus of posting, in order to get work done on other things. I have a paper to do for a class I’ve been falling behind on the reading in, I have to try and find a real job, I have to work on a lengthy series for Sandsday, I have to work on a series of posts I have planned for the summer. I have to figure out what I’m going to do with my life.
I put too much stuff on my plate this quarter; my schedule is only supposed to be this full in the fall when I’m doing football-related stuff. I need to get back to basics in a sense. But between my RSS feeds, the above projects, my webcomic reviews, and another fairly major project that will partly spin out of the “Webcomics’ Identity Crisis” series… is anything really changing? Am I really reducing my workload?
I don’t intend to be late with Tuesday’s fifth part of “Webcomics’ Identity Crisis”, but I had basically no time at all to use the Internet across the entire weekend, and didn’t make as much progress as I would have liked on certain things. I spent a lot of time sleeping, or at least napping, trying to shake off some weird feelings, and having issues with certain things. Meanwhile, what bump Part IV produced was basically limited to what came up on search engine results. I’m definitely leaning more towards Thursday than Wednesday for Part VI.
I mentioned recently that I had finally gotten everything back from my old USB drive, and some of the stuff included would start filtering out in the coming weeks. One of the things getting my stuff back allows me to do is the 100 Greatest Movies Project, a list of the greatest movies of all time compiled from all the ones that have come before (and there have been quite a few). On the web site, you can read all about the Project, including the lists involved, and some information about the system used to calculate the list. You can also use Da Blog’s 100 Greatest Movies Project tag to learn more about the Project.
What’s missing, and why the list itself isn’t up yet, are actual entries for the 100 movies involved, explaining why these movies are so beloved. That’s where you come in! I’ve written some entries myself and I’ve had someone else write some too, but mine aren’t that great (I haven’t watched very many of the movies myself), and my second can’t do everything, so I’d like at least one more volunteer to contribute their writing to the Project, complete with full credit for your entries. If you’re a film buff e-mail me at mwmailsea at yahoo dot com if you want more information.
(If you can include in your workload an entry on Some Like It Hot in particular, all the better.)
You may get Part III of “Webcomics’ Identity Crisis” tonight, but I spent much of today goofing off and I’d like to make sure I have all the latest info. It’s probably just as well if it gets bumped to tomorrow, because the site that did much to kick off this whole mess appears to have fallen to the same fate as Buzzcomix, at least for the time being. Sounds like you should stay far, far away from Panelbox. (Important: I’m not quite sure if Buzzcomix was running on Panelbox, but the error screen looks the same. Also, despite Panelbox showing up in the URL of the error screen, it appears the site in question, judging by the happenings from Twitter feeds of the proprietors, technically works off a different host. Also, it appears the problem with this particular site was simply running over its bandwidth threshhold.)
UPDATE: I have made a decision. Part III is coming, well, today, Thursday. Part IV is coming tomorrow (Friday), and Part V is coming Tuesday and will double as the monthly OOTS post. Part VI will come Wednesday or a week from today, and I’ll have an epilogue to the whole series a week from Friday. Parts V and VI will become far removed from their context, and I’d prefer to have released them today and tomorrow, but it’s become unavoidable. To allow maintenance of cohesiveness, all parts of the series will be given the “comic book” label, even though Part VI has little to do with comic books.
Incidentially, do you want to know what happened on Monday?
Something I’ve been agonizing over for months?
Something with big-time impact on Da Blog and the web site?
I FINALLY GOT MY OLD FILES FROM MY OLD USB DRIVE BACK!!!
That only took, what, four months? But they’re ALL there, too.
This has impact on the 100 Greatest Movies Project, my street sign gallery, my plans for the lead-up to my birthday, and much more, that will start playing out after the “Webcomics’ Identity Crisis” series is over.
(Also coming up at that time? I need to do my monthly OOTS post – which may be part of the series – AND there’s something happening – or NOT happening, rather – at Ctrl+Alt+Del that’s worthy of attention.)
This may just be me and my computer, but I don’t like an autosave feature that causes the editor to freeze up every thirty seconds and forces me to wait while the letters I just typed actually appear and I can move on. Very annoying.
Proving once again that even with my fun stuff I work on the wrong things, I didn’t get in Part II of my ongoing series today – well, yesterday(my typical webcomic day!) because I was distracted by another project. This part is fairly involved, and is going to be written mostly off memory, and I’m going to try to get it in tomorrow – well, today – plus Part III to make up for today – well, yesterday – but for all I know this could be my platform reviews all over again…