About Me

An important announcement on plans for Da Blog and my life going forward

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Except for around Christmas (including the annual blog-day post), this is the last post I will make on Da Blog from the Seattle area for the foreseeable future.

In my last blog-day post, I mentioned the possibility that my work on Da Blog would be “directly supported and nurtured”; now I can say a bit more about what that was referring to. Over the Labor Day weekend, I will be moving down to live with my dad in Los Angeles. We’ve been talking for several years about this; the plan is for Dad to support me and allow me to work on Da Blog without being distracted by school, a job, the people I live with, or the school I’ve lived across the street from for the past three years, with Dad as my “boss” to keep me focused and try to actually get an audience going and increase exposure to my writings. (While this is going on, the “Da Blog in LA” category will only be used for LA-specific posts I couldn’t have made if I weren’t there, which is to say it probably won’t be used at all.) At one point we talked about us living together for about two years; I don’t know if that’s still the plan, but I have the site’s hosting locked down through June of 2016, and if we still don’t have anything going by then – if we’re at the same place we’ve always been throughout what will then be nine and a half years of Da Blog – it may be time to give up on actually making anything of Da Blog.

Some things have been settled already, but most of the details will be fleshed out on the drive down. I may have another post after the weekend is over detailing any substantial changes coming to Da Blog in the near term as a direct result of this move.

In the meantime, I’ve updated the lineal titles in preparation for football season. It seems I never actually updated the lineal titles before last year, despite what I said in last year’s post. Both of last year’s new college football lineal titles got merged with others; the BCS title was merged with 2006 Boise State pretty quickly, while Ohio State’s claim was merged with 2009 Boise State at the Rose Bowl. This year starts with three lineal titles; Alabama went undefeated until the Miracle at Jordan-Hare and Auburn went on to the BCS Title Game, so 2006 Boise State starts the year with national champion Florida State. You can see what happened to the NFL lineal title on the history page accessible from the category page.

The potential of the American Sports Network

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The Sinclair Broadcast Group is representative of everything wrong with broadcasting in the new millennium. During the 00’s they became notorious for repeatedly airing “documentaries” on their stations that were hit pieces on Democratic figures and causes, most notoriously one on the Swift Boat accusations against John Kerry in 2004. Even before that they were a dirty word in media consolidation circles for their use of shell companies to circumvent FCC rules prohibiting owning more than one station in a market (and later, owning more than two in a large market). Recently, they’ve gone on an acquisition binge, including DC-based Allbritton and Seattle-based Fisher, that has them bumping up against another FCC limit: if the FCC goes forward with eliminating the “UHF discount” (counting UHF stations as only half their market value against the national cap) Sinclair will be bumping up against the limit in a way that the companies owning the stations in the largest markets – and who also own the very networks Sinclair is affiliated with – will not be.

But Sinclair’s market power also gives it considerable influence over the future direction of the broadcast industry. And in that light, today’s announcement of the American Sports Network, or ASN, fits so perfectly into the framework I laid out a year ago that I can’t help but wonder whether someone at Sinclair read the version of that post I put on RabbitEars.info. Assuming it’s not so dependent on retransmission consent revenue that it results in Sinclair undermining their own nominal means of distribution, it could well be the key to the broadcast industry’s turning around its fortunes. And though it launches with only five mid-to-low-tier college conferences on board (only one of which plays FBS football), it could well prove to have a better shot at running down ESPN than any other player that has come along so far.

ASN will initially be distributed primarily across Sinclair’s CW and MyNetworkTV affiliates, and on digital subchannels on Sinclair’s other stations. The press release also mentions that “other broadcasters” are interested in airing ASN content as well. This makes me wonder whether Sinclair’s long-term plan is to turn ASN into a potential replacement for the CW and/or MyNet, especially in light of yesterday’s news of Fox’s attempt to buy Time Warner, which would have given them half-control of the CW and likely resulted in either the CW turning into CBS’ version of MyNet or the closing of MyNet entirely (and especially if they throw in Ring of Honor wrestling). The press release also mentions the potential launch of “new cable networks and digital platforms” surrounding ASN content, pending securing agreements with cable providers – which could refer to an aspect of what I had in mind last year I didn’t dare mention or even hint at, which would allow ASN, were they to set their sights much, much higher than the likes of Conference USA, to avoid the pitfalls that were the downfall of Fox Sports Net.

Throughout the 90s, many people felt that the collection of regional sports networks across the country, including the majority of them operating under the SportsChannel and Prime names, were they to join together as a single force, could put together a sports empire rivaling ESPN, given their distribution advantages and the attractive programming from local teams they could offer. But when Rupert Murdoch bought the SportsChannel and Prime networks with an eye to doing just that, the very thing that looked like so much of an asset proved to be FSN’s undoing. Any national programming FSN had was prone to being pre-empted for local teams’ games, which meant any entity with a national programming arrangement with FSN automatically had a worse deal than if they were with anyone else (something then-Pac-10 fans especially chafed at in the early-to-mid-00’s), and any national studio shows couldn’t count on a consistent time slot or even consistently airing at all. (I remember how upset I was when the Mariners played an East Coast game that pre-empted “I, Max”, the show Max Kellerman got from FSN upon leaving ESPN, entirely.) Now the rise of the RSN owned by the team playing on it, coupled with the rise of Comcast as an RSN player and aided by Fox’s own actions, has taken Fox’s once-complete hegemony over the RSN marketplace and greatly dismantled it.

Suppose Sinclair were to sign up a much bigger array of content for ASN – major professional sports and major college conferences, maybe some top mid-majors as well – and signed up affiliates from all over the country. And suppose they then launched a cable channel that amounted to an ASN national feed, taking content from their various rights deals and distributing them to a national audience. Sinclair could offer certain ASN programming “nationally” to various ASN stations, but even if that programming were to be rejected or pre-empted for something of local import, Sinclair could simply stick it on the ASN national feed, ensuring truly national distribution for the biggest content Sinclair has. Sinclair could then have an alternate feed to stick on other programming in markets where the main ASN game is airing on the local ASN station. In effect, rather than being inferior to any cable network with decent national distribution, being on the ASN national feed would be a sort of hybrid between being on a national broadcast network and being on an ESPN knockoff.

For ASN to really reach its potential, the FCC (and Congress) would need to fix the broken economics of the broadcast business, where broadcast stations and networks must either embrace the retransmission consent regime and thus see themselves as cable networks first and foremost, or inexorably lose programming to actual cable networks with their decided monetary advantages. Depending on how it’s done, and how the Internet shakes up the live video marketplace, it could completely upend the competitive landscape and destroy the potential of most of the ideas (not to mention the metaphors) in the previous paragraph. But if it happens, here’s the blueprint I would have for ASN to succeed where FSN failed and for the broadcast industry in general to bounce back from the point where its own nominal guardians have turned against it:

  • Convince teams, leagues, and conferences that between the FCC’s reforms and the impact of the Internet, the cable network market is badly oversaturated, and given the superiority of the technology of broadcasting (leaving aside the economics and regulatory landscape surrounding it), the regional sports network and league- and conference-owned network, though in better shape than most cable networks, is a bad way to go, especially considering the bitter carriage disputes surrounding them. Convince stations around the country of the same thing and that whatever obstacles they may face in the short term will be outweighed in the long term by eliminating one of the biggest barriers left to widespread cord-cutting.
  • Offer to negotiate on behalf of every English-language general-entertainment station not associated with one of the major networks (or a network seriously trying to be one of the major networks), not just ASN stations. Then make a deal with the leagues: so long as there are stations available, every game of a team that claims a given market will be televised, but any game there’s not enough stations for cannot be blacked out on the out-of-market package. This may take the form of an NFL-esque deal where ASN handles the distribution of every team’s game not on a non-ASN national platform. This is especially important for baseball, but allowing the ASN national feed to take content from any station allows the national feed to take content from any team or conference it wants without tipping the scale in negotiations towards ASN stations. (Some side notes: first, “digital subchannels” are a failure and I don’t see them surviving the upcoming FCC-mandated auction and repack; otherwise the ASN national feed might be one. Second, this would be largely dependent on CBS and Fox being open to aiding something that might take a bite out of their main networks in order to maximize the number of stations available in the largest markets; if they aren’t, the FCC might have to repeal or severely tighten the duopoly rules, which could leave Sinclair unable to run ASN. Third, the borders between conferences are blurry enough now that many areas may be within the sphere of influence of multiple conferences, so it may not be possible for ASN to handle them all alone; fortunately, more markets than you think have at least two stations of the type I discuss here even with a fifth network, especially if you count the enigmatic Ion network. And fourth, every game is more than any station has ever showed in a non-NFL professional sport, but in retrospect that practice merely opened the door for the RSN to walk in and undermine independent broadcasters, at least sooner than it could have.)
  • The existence of the ASN national feed and rise of the Internet may obviate the need for league-owned networks. Some college conferences (namely the SEC and Big Ten) may be confident of their ability to keep their conference networks going even under the new economics, given the passion of their fanbases. To counter this, export the conferences you do have to the entire country. You don’t have to give national distribution to every single conference, but if most of SEC and Big Ten territory can get ACC or Big 12 games for free (and hopefully, without needing a kludge to get them on a mobile device), and can’t do the same with the SEC and Big Ten, it could put a big scare into the both of them.
  • Don’t get involved with the NFL unless it falls in your lap, then snap it up in a heartbeat. Some of your stations are probably going to show NFL preseason games and cable-game simulcasts without your help.

The end result could be a landscape where only two cable sports networks are left: ESPN and the ASN national feed (assuming cable networks themselves still exist as we know them once the Internet is done with them). Things that don’t fit the local team-sports framework like NASCAR and golf would probably go to ESPN, and ESPN would probably still have important maj0r-league pro sports games, but events like the college football national championship game would abandon ship and return to major broadcast networks where they belong, and ASN’s combination of national distribution and local broadcast stations could give it a significant advantage in any negotiations, and they could find themselves in possession of important MLB, NBA, and – perhaps especially – NHL playoff games.

Is this a bit of a utopian pipe dream? Sure – this is the sort of idle imagining I spend way too much of my free time on and then am hesitant to put on the blog because it has so little relation to reality. This one, though, has just enough relation to reality to be an enticing vision for those that believe in broadcast television – and sometimes, a concrete yet distant vision is just what’s needed to be the impetus for change. If the future of broadcast television lies in live sports, this may be the first, halting acknowledgement of that fact – and the start of broadcast television’s comeback. The only problem is, is it too late?

A not-quite-so-belated blog-day.

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In many ways, Year Seven of Da Blog was a wasted year for me. This is the 91st post since my last blog-day post, when I didn’t think I would ever have less than 100 again, considering the circumstances when I last had that few. The reasons I’ve had low post output in the past don’t seem to apply this year – for example, neither this post nor last year’s blog-day post were made cowering in a bus stop shelter.

Part of the reason is that, after making a commitment to more webcomic reviews in my first post of the new year, I wound up not doing a single full review this year, in part because the comics I chose to start with on Comic Rocket were uniformly uninspiring at best (though I hope to get one in by the end of 2013). I also haven’t managed to get completely caught up on Homestuck all year, which would have been good for a substantial number of webcomics posts, and OOTS has gotten even slower at post frequency since Rich’s thumb injury. But even webcomics posts are only part of the story. I’ve tried to put more focus on schoolwork (passing one of the two incredibly difficult classes I had to pass), but even that only goes so far towards explaining things.

No, a bigger issue is the thing that has increasingly taken over Da Blog over the past six months-plus, causing me to be ridiculously late on a number of things, including a sports graphics roundup I should have put up by the end of August: the sports ratings posts. The Studio Show Scorecard has been an especially nasty culprit. The only responses I got on the semi-recent Da Blog Poll were supportive of keeping the Scorecard going, but I’m serious, without it going through each week’s ratings would take only 40% of the time it does and it would still come out to over an hour and a half; as it stands it takes almost four hours, and much of the SSS work is really tedious. (And I’m going to add something else to the SSS that’ll make it take even longer when we get to the November 18 post.) Other than the SNF Flex Schedule Watch, which is pretty short and easy for me to do and attracts a considerable amount of traffic to Da Blog, virtually all other posts disappeared once the SSS started, and neither type of ratings post has been all that successful at attracting traffic to Da Blog. Among other things, the final year of the college football rankings ended up being nonexistent as a result.

In some way, shape or form, Year Eight is going to be a big year for Da Blog, whether good or bad. I’ve said that before, but in this case it kind of has to be. I believe I have one class remaining before graduation, meaning I would be effectively taking the spring off, and the way that class is set up for me I might be effectively taking the winter off. I’m probably going to have to get a real job fairly quickly, and by the end of the year I’ll either be working that job – and probably will have figured out how much time I can devote to Da Blog long-term – or in a situation where my work on Da Blog is being directly supported and nurtured.

I’m going to be making some effort to make something of Da Blog over the first few months of 2014. I’m working on a series of posts taking a big-picture view of the sports TV wars that should go up in the first few weeks of the new year, I’m going to try and do some bigger things around the sports TV ratings posts, and I have a few more ideas I’m going to try to make something of. 2014 is going to be a transition year for me, one unmatched since the year that saw the launch of Da Blog. Only time will tell if it’s going to be a transition that’s good or bad for Da Blog.

How Windows 8 Changes Everything, Part V: The Reinvention of E-Mail (And How Another Blast from the Past Could Be Your Google Reader Replacement)

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If you follow my tweeter, you know that I finally got on board the smartphone bandwagon a few months ago, shortly after completing (or so I thought) this series. I’d lost my cell phone back in February and for all her reticence, Mom wanted me to have a cell phone while she took a vacation in Phoenix over my spring break, so she gave me her old iPhone. As you might expect, it has proceeded to become a massive time-suck, not helped by my laptop being unusable during the break and falling apart now (I honestly fully expected to have a Windows 8 tablet by now, but Mom actually seems to be holding out for the more expensive tablet with cellular access).

Confession time: the e-mail address I’ve given on Da Blog in the past, the mwmailsea at yahoo dot com one? I’ve actually checked it very seldomly for years. For the most part, it’s filled up with a bunch of newsletters I signed up for many years ago, some not even intentionally, most of them before I got IE7 and its accompanying RSS reader, that I never really intended to even read, so the signal to noise ratio has been low and I’ve generally used another e-mail address to actually communicate with my family, therapists, and school personnel. Even that address I’ve never checked as obsessively as some people check their e-mail.

Now, however, I’ve hooked up both e-mail accounts to the iPhone’s e-mail app, meaning I now find myself checking both accounts regularly throughout the day. In the process, a funny thing has happened. Those newsletters that I signed up for lo those many years ago, that I’ve never given a second thought to in years? I’ve actually bothered to look at some of them, and some have managed to link me to rather interesting articles, some of which I’ve even gone on to link elsewhere.

For years, e-mail has sort of been the quiet, unsung backing of Internet communication. As Google, Facebook, Twitter, and more have continued to seize the headlines, e-mail has remained the same, quietly plugging away and serving as the backbone of everything else. Almost every time you’ve set up an account on a new site, or submitted a blog comment, you’ve had to provide a valid e-mail address, but e-mail itself has remained under the radar, with most people using it either for one-on-one communication or as a dummy to throw at those sites asking for one. But with e-mail now taking a newly central role on smartphones and tablets, it’s possible it could be the key to understanding the future of the Internet.

Earlier in this series, I mentioned that there may soon be a new syndication mechanism geared towards blogs, one that doesn’t simply collect text the way RSS does but allows blog creators to optimally place ads and other content. Could the e-mail newsletter be that mechanism? E-mail allows for the addition of images to such an extent that you can make it look like your actual website in a way RSS doesn’t allow, and most blogs already have the ability to subscribe via e-mail tucked away somewhere. Even the structure is more in your control; many big sites offer a daily roundup of relevant stories in one complete package. It does have a number of drawbacks; besides the susceptibility to spam and viruses, which leads many e-mail providers to put up filters that break images, signing up for too many newsletters could overwhelm you without filters to move them into folders, which doesn’t always work. (This is the case with RSS as well, but folders are easier and more reliable there.)

Webcomics tend not to support e-mail delivery. There seems to be a philosophy around the webcomics community these days that says that the design of your site is as much a part of your comic as the comic itself. There’s something to be said for that, but only insofar as the design of your site serves to define your site. As Part IV should have made clear, site design becomes less important in a mobile world, unless you’re talking about the design of your app, which is pretty much the same thing. Besides the ability to customize e-mail to look more like your site, two elements are really the only ones important enough to be included in an e-mail, assuming you don’t just ape what you’re putting in RSS feeds already (for comics that put their comic images in their RSS feeds): an ad and perhaps a link to the store. This could be another place where “comics page” services could come in handy, if not with delivering comic images alongside ads the revenue from which gets passed on to creators, then at least with links to comics that have updated since the last e-mail.

Perhaps the revival of e-mail could be the key to bringing everything together into the decentralized social network I put forward at the end of Part III. It won’t be able to do everything, since e-mail is still geared more towards one-to-one communication, and other things will need to take the role currently filled by the social networks of today – although Tumblr and Twitter might cover most of what’s needed, especially since most e-mail clients allow you to sort your contacts into groups that you can then contact all of with the push of a button, serving a similar function to Google+’s circles. Regardless of anything else, it seems clear to me that e-mail is a critical cog in understanding the Internet of the future.

Webcomic reviews! That’s a completely original idea!

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Back in 2009, during my previous webcomic-reviewing life, I discovered Komix! after that site made multiple appearances in the ads for Da Blog. Though my initial main concern was the ability to add RSS feeds for comics that didn’t have RSS feeds at the time, I got the sense that the real core of the site was its interface for browsing comics’ archives and tracking your progress, which I ended up making use of for my Scary Go Round review. On the other hand, it was essentially run by a single person who gave it a weird gimmick of adding exactly one new comic to the service a day. Eventually, several comics (including Order of the Stick) lost the ability to use Komix to browse their archives (which, since Komix’ browser loaded the full content of each page without stripping out or adding ads, I didn’t quite understand), and the site as a whole inevitably fell by the wayside as its proprietor became busy with real life.

When David Morgan-Mar and his friends started mezzacotta, one of the “half-baked” ideas they trotted out on it was Archive Binge, Morgan-Mar’s attempt at creating a Ryan North-esque webcomic tool. The idea was to make it easier to catch up on webcomics with massive archives by allowing people to create their own custom RSS feeds to read them in chunks of up to ten comics a day. Somewhat paradoxically, the entire point of it was not to “binge” on a webcomic’s archives in a short amount of time, but rather to consume the comic in more sane portions spread out over a period of time. Perhaps something like “Archive Diet” or “Archive Tour” would have been more appropriate. Regardless, I got the sense that the project eventually stalled with a somewhat disappointing number of strips supported.

Fast-forward to about a month ago, when I learn from Fleen that Morgan-Mar has handed over control of Archive Binge to some outfit called Comic Rocket that I’m hearing of for the first time. Comic Rocket turns out to be something akin to a better-supported, more-professional version of Komix. It, too, seems to have as its main feature the ability to bookmark your place in any comic and move it as you go along, which (in theory) makes it a great home for Archive Binge, but it also seems to have considerably more support from the webcomic community, more people working on it than just one, and way more comics in its system than Komix has ever had. (It also recently finished a crowdfunding operation to create a mobile app that ended up surprisingly disappointing, only making its $5000 goal fairly late and barely cracking its $7000 stretch goal for Android support; I wonder if it would have gotten more support if it were on Kickstarter rather than the more obscure, Matthew “The Oatmeal” Inman’s success notwithstanding, Indiegogo?)

One of the things that has long held me back as a webcomic reviewer is my desire to hold some sort of archive binge for all but the most continuity-free strips. Even complete gag comics with zero returning characters or continuity still get archive-binged to a limited extent, because it’s not just having a proper appreciation of the events leading up to the present, it’s also about having a large enough sample of work fresh enough in memory to form an opinion of a comic as a whole. And archive binges are time-consuming things; even Gunnerkrigg Court, which struck me by the speediness of its archive binge, damn near monopolized a weekend, and that’s time I don’t actually have. So I can sympathize with Morgan-Mar’s desire to make it easier to catch up on a long-running strip. Hell, I’ve done it; on at least two different strips (Doonesbury and Sluggy Freelance) I’ve stared a thousands-of-comics-long archive in the face and told myself that just by reading two comics each day I’m already doubling the comic’s update rate and so will have to catch up eventually, no matter how long that takes.

So I’m going to try an experiment. I’ve identified four or five comics I’ve been meaning to review and started Archive Binge feeds for all of them (as well as a few other comics I want to catch up on). Once those feeds are all caught up, I’ll move them to my tryout space for reading as it comes out for however long it takes to get an impression of it in that state, at which point it’ll be time to write the review. I hope this will allow me to write reviews significantly faster than the snail’s pace I seem to have always worked on them at without getting too much in the way of other obligations. That said, I’m a little worried about how this will change the reading experience; I’ll be getting a comic in little dribbles at a time, dribbles that will have to compete with several other dribbles for my attention, and the process of archive binging will be stretched out over a substantially longer period of time. I may be moving substantially faster than the comic’s own update pace, but catching up this way may impede my ability to get that sense of a comic as a whole.

The way Archive Binge itself is set up doesn’t help; although it’s tied in with Comic Rocket’s own interface and now supports every single one of its comics (including more than a few newspaper comics), beyond that it probably hasn’t been modified much from its mezzacotta incarnation, not even affecting the bookmark under any circumstances (while there were times I wished I could decline to advance Komix’s bookmark, not having the option to start moving it when I’m on the same page as it is a major pain with Comic Rocket). To me, the most glaring issue is that there seems to be no way to increase the rate of update beyond 10 comics a day, which seems low. It’s nowhere near sufficient for Homestuck, but even beyond that it seems to cause older webcomics’ archives to take a disturbingly long time to get through (expect me to review a lot more low-continuity gag-a-day comics and meme factories) and doesn’t provide that good sense of a webcomic as a whole I’m looking for, which could exacerbate the reading-experience issues I worry about. 20-25 would seem to be a more realistic cap; I originally intended to set the update rate for each strip at whatever would take no more than 15 minutes to get through, but quickly decided to set them all at 10.

Personally, I have to scratch my head at Archive Binge’s very structure, which dumps whatever number of links you set into your RSS reader. Regardless of the comic, they’re all links, so you have to click on them to bring them up, but you’re not going to be clicking on each link to bring up each comic; you’re going to click on the first link and then you’re going to want to use whatever interface that page presents to move to the others. Naturally, most RSS readers sort entries in reverse chronological order by default, which means the link you’re presented is the opposite of the one you want, and while Google Reader (for example) allows you to sort each feed oldest first, a) setting it for a folder’s full view doesn’t set it for the child feeds, despite the reverse appearing to be true, and b) it only allows you to set whether or not to show read items on a global basis, despite this seemingly being a prerequisite for the oldest-first view to be of any use at all (aside from, well, archive-binging) and thus defeating the point of making the latter something that can be set feed-by-feed (a lingering general issue I have with Reader).

(To be fair, the issues with Archive Binge’s implementation are multiplied by a) two false starts on getting started with this experiment causing unread entries to pile up in Reader and, more importantly, b) other things about Reader that interfere with Archive Binge’s apparent intended workings, namely, the fact that all entries are marked as read automatically as you scroll down, with entries taking a ton of space in a small window. If I were working in Internet Explorer’s RSS reader, all entries would be marked as read as soon as I left the page, and the sort order would, ideally, be completely irrelevant.)

If I were designing it, I would tie it in much more closely with the other functionality of the site, and indeed make it something that was less of an RSS feed and more something that applied to your Comic Rocket account directly, essentially providing a direct reminder (or something) to stop once you reached the end of your allotted pages for the day, and tracking pages still to be read for the day as a subset of the entire unread portion of the archive.

But then, I’m not sure Comic Rocket understands what the point of bookmarks are when it comes to webcomics, because they seem to be trying to give their site a “social” dimension, allowing you to “share” what comics you’re reading (and not allowing you to choose which ones to share except indirectly by content rating), despite the fact that the bookmark function (which is how “reading” is defined) is primarily useful for catching up on webcomics, not reading them as they come out, or in other words, when you’re trying out a new webcomic as opposed to already knowing you like it. As it stands, Comic Rocket is of limited usefulness for tracking comics you’re already reading, especially if you have an RSS reader (which, you know, you kinda need to use the whole Archive Binge thing); if anything, without Archive Binge being more integrated into the main Comic Rocket interface, trying to use it to read comics as they come out just gets annoying because it gets in the way of the comics you’re trying to catch up on.

As such, I’m not sure I know what Comic Rocket is actually trying to do, and I’m not sure they know either. I think they have potential as a “comics page” to keep up with your favorite webcomics as well as those comics you’re trying to catch up on (without losing the aspect of linking to the original site as opposed to simply stealing images from it), but right now they seem to be trying to serve several masters at once and serving none of them well. It is in “beta”, as meaningless as that can seem on the Internet, but there are definitely enough signs of unfinished business, especially where Archive Binge is concerned (besides the above, clicking to set up a new Archive Binge feed doesn’t take you directly to actually set it up; you have to click again to “edit” your new feed to do so, which seems to violate User Interface Design 101) but also in other areas (the site and Archive Binge in particular is damn near useless when it comes to Girls with Slingshots, where its crawler picks up old, outdated news posts along with actual comics, which probably afflicts other comics as well), that maybe it can improve over time.

Regardless, I’m going to give Comic Rocket and Archive Binge a go, and I’m going to press on with this experiment for the time being, so look forward to more webcomic reviews sometime in April; I’ve added a tentative schedule to the Webcomic Review Index that I reserve the right to change at any time (and incidentally, with ArtPatient not updating in ages, I’m running low on ideas for future webcomic blog reviews; any other good webcomic blogs you know of, preferably not podcasts or behind a paywall?). But I do hope the proprietors of Comic Rocket try to figure out why some webcomics had Komix access shut down and avoid those same mistakes; fortunately, their robust system of bookmarklets, partly designed as a way to avoid using the interface, seems like a potentially viable backup plan if they can continue to collect archive links (not to mention being the only competent way to read comics like Girls with Slingshots).

A (very) belated post-apocalyptic blog-day.

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So, how’d that Mayan apocalypse go, eh?

Funny story: The idea that the Mayan calendar “ended” last week was always wrong to begin with. I always felt that Y2K was an apt comparison for the whole “Mayan apocalypse” hysteria, since last week actually marked the end of the previous and the start of a new b’ak’tun, a period of about 394 years. The Mayans themselves don’t seem to have ever believed the world was going to end in 2012, referring to future events after that date, but they did have a creation myth that said that the previous world ended at the start of a 14th b’ak’tun, the same one that started a week ago. That previous world was scrapped as a failed experiment that never had humans placed in it, so people who believed the world was going to end last week were a) implicitly believing in the Mayan gods and b) implying this world was a failure despite c) the presence of humans (which should be a mark of success) in it.

Think about that for a second.

Another funny story: The last change in b’ak’tun was in 1618, just a few years after the Catholic Church forbade the teaching of the Copernican heliocentric model of the cosmos, which caused Galileo to stay away from the matter for the seven or so years following. Before that, 1224 was just the year before the Magna Carta became law. 830 saw the foundation of the House of Wisdom, which played a key role in preserving many Greek texts by translating them into Arabic, and roughly corresponds with the decline of the Mayans themselves, or at least their “classic” period; 435 is a couple centuries too late for their rise, but it is smack-dab in the middle of another, more well-known decline, that of the Roman empire, and just five years after the death of St. Augustine (and only nine after the completion of his City of God).

The year 41, less than a decade after the crucifixion of Jesus, saw the formation of the first Christian communities and Jews being given the freedom to worship following Caligula’s death. Alexander the Great was two years old in 354 BC, and it’s possible some of Plato’s later dialogues were being written around that time; as such, the entire b’ak’tun from 748 BC (four years after the traditional founding of Rome, and possibly the rough time Homer lived and Zoroastrianism, perhaps the first monotheistic religion, was founded) to 354 BC corresponds fairly well with the so-called “Axial Age”.

It’s probably engaging in the same sort of over-reading believers in a Mayan apocalypse do to actually claim any sort of correlation between the Mayan calendar and these developments, and even if so it’s hard to figure out what it means given the disparate nature of the milestones involved. It’s worth noting, though, that the last three milestones can be correlated with, respectively, the birth of modern science, the birth of modern notions of freedom and equality, and the birth of the modern intellectual tradition. Now consider that the exact date the Mayans placed the founding of our world at was 3114 BC. This is only 12 years before the start of the Hindu tradition’s Kali Yuga, and right in the middle of the period between the creation of Adam and the Flood in the Bible, suggesting a cross-cultural placing of importance on that time period, and both can be correlated with the unification of Egypt, the start of construction on Stonehenge, and the rise of the Minoans, as well as the earliest writing systems, which some scholars consider the start of “history” itself. It is, in short, the period when what we call “civilization” begins.

Given that history, what sort of period might we be entering now?

It’s possible, as I tweeted a while back, that this is essentially the point when global warming becomes unstoppable and inevitably plunges us back to the Stone Age if not worse. Personally, I prefer to look more optimistically at it, that this is the herald of a change that will make all the changes in human history since the agricultural revolution look like child’s play. Call me conceited, but as a philosopher, I always felt that at this point, I would introduce my own nominee for this change, by starting to increase humanity’s awareness of its own nature. As such, much of the entire history of Da Blog up to this point has been preparation for something to happen on December 21st. I initially planned to release the first of several treatises outlining my philosophy on that date. Later I planned to start my new webcomic then, and even felt, after failing to do much work on that comic over the summer, that I could use one of my classes as an impetus to work on it. When even that failed, leading to me flunking two classes when I hadn’t failed one in over a year, I was all set to settle for writing a rant on America’s reaction to the Newtown shootings and how completely wrong it was in every way.

The day came and went, and what did I do? Bupkis.

You might say I’m going through a personal apocalypse right now. I allowed my e-mail box to completely fill so I could focus with laser intensity on the comic, which of course, didn’t work. Then I planned to write an apology to my teacher, but haven’t been able to work myself up to do it, which also means I haven’t even registered for the new quarter; I’ve been thoroughly depressed throughout the winter break, especially after not doing anything for the 21st, and have wasted most of it on semi-random pursuits. I’m still five classes away from graduation, but that includes probably the two hardest, and I don’t know what’s motivating me to complete them anymore; I seriously considered taking winter quarter off entirely. Flunking two classes means that, for the next three months at least, Mom will cut me off from home Internet access for the entire quarter, reverting me to the state Da Blog was trapped in for much of its history.

Such is a fitting close to Year Six on Da Blog, a year which saw my attempt to recover my early posting frequency with the return of The Streak and a brief return to semi-regular webcomic reviews, yet the former took a far lamer form than it ever had before, with me repeatedly having to finesse and fudge my way to maintaining the streak to a significant extent (often with posts explicitly existing just to continue the streak), and most days posting less than an hour before midnight, leaving me wondering if something was wrong with me compared to the earlier streak, despite the Random Internet Discovery helping sustain the previous streak. Would I have been more able to pull off my goals just a few short years ago; has something damaged my decision-making ability beyond its already questionable levels? That may be unanswerable, and I don’t know whether I want to find it out. As if that wasn’t enough, I finally launched the long-awaited forum, which I saw as the birth of a community that would do much to boost Da Blog’s popularity, yet I might shutter it before it hits its one-year anniversary because it’s gotten to the point I simply assume any new thread was started by a spammer.

A year ago, I felt Da Blog was on its way up. Now, I feel like my future and that of Da Blog has never been cloudier. I still feel the need to do something with my ideas on human nature, if only because I fear the only people who have the clearest vision on human nature lack either the work ethic to share it with the world or the scruples to use it to benefit anyone other than themselves, and I still believe enough in my webcomic idea to do something with it, but it really does feel enough like work that I don’t know how willing or even able I am to do it. There’s something unreal about most of my plans, like they’re all fantasies of mine that I rationalize my way into relying on and which are all disconnected from one another, and they certainly don’t seem to be connected with an actual experience of doing them; I rarely have a clear, realistic path to a concrete goal. I’ve seen myself as a philosopher for years, yet I’ve always found it far easier to think about my philosophy than to actually put it down on virtual paper, and so long as it feels like a job I don’t know if it’s what I’m meant to do after all.

Perhaps my future is in numerical analysis of sports – the SNF Flex Schedule Watch has long been the most consistently popular aspect of the site, and I spent much of my post-failure funk working on several different mathematical formulae with different applications for sports. That’s certainly something I wouldn’t have thought even a month ago when I was thinking of shutting down the College Football Rankings and Flex Schedule Watch after next season. Or maybe not; I knew going in that the FF50 project was going to gobble up a massive amount of time at the worst possible time, but by the end I was finding it so tedious that I doubt I’m going to do much of anything on that front next year. This despite the fact I took 11 of my 42 teams to the championship game – something like double the rate I expected – and won all 11 (after losing my one championship game last year and despite screwing up my ESPN lineups last week knowing ESPN has two-week playoff rounds so I could make it up in Week 17), so let me take a moment to acknowledge my championship fantasy teams: Fox 2, Fox 8, ESPN 3, Fox 3, NFL 6, Split Backs, ESPN 8, Fox 1, ESPN 6, NFL 3, and ESPN 10. (Yeah, Fox leagues don’t seem to attract the strongest players…)

Perhaps that might be the inevitable fate of all my projects, for me to take them up, work on them obsessively for a time at the expense of my other obligations, and then abandon them as they become work and get too tedious. That may have already happened to those formulae I was working on, and it certainly would be consistent with some things I’ve read about Asperger’s Syndrome (including, of all things, an argument that Order of the Stick‘s Eugene Greenhilt has the same thing). Perhaps this site is always doomed to be a holding place for whatever project I take up for some period of time and eventually abandon, my own personal mezzacotta. If so, it doesn’t bode well for its ability to sustain itself, or my dreams of, whatever it is I end up doing in life, being one of the all-time greats at it.

Thanks in large part to The Streak, I’ve written 262 posts since my last Blog-Day post, which is in no way close to a record, as hard as that may be to believe when I couldn’t even hit 100 a couple years ago. I doubt I’ll fall short of 100 again. But I also doubt I’ll ever approach these heights again either. Here’s to Year Seven, a year I can’t even begin to predict.

Ugh.

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So, I’m theoretically working on a project where my current stage of research involves hanging out on TV Tropes, in hopes of it feeling less like work.

Today, I spent so much time doing completely unrelated things on TV Tropes that I didn’t even submit waiver claims for any of my fantasy teams.

I have no idea what’s wrong with me or how to fix it, but whatever it is I have it bad.

It’s only a matter of time before Rose signs up for Bubblr.

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(From MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck. Click for full-sized DRUNKEN LESBIAN GLOWING VAMPIRE TROLLKISS 2012.)

I have said very little – okay, nothing – about the progress of the intermission so far, and I suspect I’m going to save most of my remarks for when the intermission is over. I’ve been trying to put together two posts’ worth of coherent thoughts on Homestuck in general, but as anyone who’s been reading my other posts knows, it’s been more of a distaction than anything else.

For now, let me say that while the walkaround non-flashes have been fun to play and explore in, the pre-scratch trolls are so much one-dimensional cariactures that Hussie has seemingly telegraphed that they’ve only been introduced for him to kill them off, and I’ve had… mixed reactions at best to the segments with the original kids, which is odd considering how much I’ve missed them. (The sooner the new sitcom “The Adventures of John and Jade” gets cancelled, the better, and watching Rose stumble around falling-down drunk is making it hard to read her earlier appearances as arguably the most clear-minded member of the group.)

However… whatever your reaction may have been to this, I will freely share it. Well, unless maybe you were a Rose/Kanaya shipper. Not putting down your preferences, I’m just not into that sort of thing. But for anyone else who underwent some combination of shock, bemusement, and bewilderment, well, allow me to add my name to the list.

(While I’m here, and need to fill out space to fill out the thumbnail, let me say that I was very surprised to see John learn of Vriska’s life-free status before finishing his journey, especially since Vriska went straight into exposition mode before John had a chance to commiserate about it.)

(Wow… have I spent a year in this place already? Funny how the time flies… and how long Act 6 has seemingly ground everything to a halt… really puts things into perspective just how much the post-Scratch kids have taken over the comic… feels like the comic’s really going to have to rush to its conclusion if Act 6 is still going to be shorter than Act 5…)

What a wasted week.

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So on Sunday, I started a new focus medication.

In the following week, I did exactly zero work on anything pertaining to school or a non-football project I’m working on for the site.

The idea was that the focus medication would help me get some work done. But now I wonder if it’s helping me focus on the wrong things.

(Hell, I was kinda hoping to have a post on Homestuck today, but I doubt that’s going to happen.)

Update on my school year

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Okay, I’ve clearly completely failed at managing my projects vis-a-vis actual schoolwork, because I’m tired all day and I’m falling horribly behind on it, despite the fact that I was trying to make one of my projects into schoolwork.

Obviously the FF50 challenge is a major timesuck, but there’s one or two other projects as well, which are actually starting to crowd out one another, and I’m not sure how to weed them out. I can’t abandon leagues much faster than I’m already doing; if I’m in contention for a playoff spot, let alone the championship, for me to then abandon my team would cause utter chaos. Already down to 42 leagues before I even started, I was thinking of dropping to 32 next year, and now I’m thinking even lower, because I have never put in all the roster moves I would have liked to before deadline.

Thoughts on the new baseball contracts coming Wednesday.