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Requiem for a lost summer

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In less than a week, school will start up again for me.

I had all sorts of ambitious plans for the summer. As it turned out, no thanks to the Webcomic Overlook (and a fairly ambitious Homestuck post I’m trying to write), I couldn’t even get any webcomic reviews in – I couldn’t even catch up on Ctrl+Alt+Del like last summer! – and now I probably won’t be able to get any in for most of the rest of the year. I might sneak in a couple of reviews of Erfworld and VG Cats at some point, and maybe eke out a Girls with Slingshots review at some point down the line, but that might be it for the foreseeable future.

In all likelihood, I’m going to drop the streak sometime soon, and in fact posting on Da Blog could hit an all-time low for the next eight months or so. All the posts on Da Blog are going to involve football, the sports TV wars, OOTS, Gunnerkrigg Court, or Questionable Content for the remainder of the year. I’m still going to try to get a project off the ground, but I had been hoping to be so far along with it that I could say with confidence that the end of The Streak wouldn’t matter. Needless to say, that did not come to pass.

I may have mentioned before that I’m about to hit a series of classes that will involve some hardcore work that needs to get done, more even than I’ve otherwise encountered at school up to this point. Regardless of anything else, I would expect posting on Da Blog to come to a near-complete halt in April through early June, and if nothing else I would hope to high heaven I can at least get this project off the ground by then.

God I’m so pissed off at myself. This was going to be an absolutely critical summer for the future of Da Blog, and it may have actually been less productive than other recent summers. What the hell is wrong with me?

Update on the state of my laptop

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So I finally got my laptop back, and not only was my hard drive either reformatted or replaced, I actually got DOWNGRADED to Windows XP instead of Windows 7, EVEN THOUGH WINDOWS 7 CAME WITH THE COMPUTER. Oh, and the sound is crappy, the power cord is being finicky all of a sudden, and the W key is loose on an allegedly new keyboard, making me wonder if the only reason the hard drive needed reformatting or replacing is because they screwed it up.

Honestly, I’d much rather have gotten a brand new laptop, and I have a feeling that could be the main thing dominating my Christmas list. I might be able to reinstall Windows 7, which might fix a number of those issues, but I’m worried it might cause a host of new ones, given the options staring me in the face.

In the meantime, I’ve brought back the donation button to try to help raise funds for such a computer. If I get Windows 7 back and I’m satisfied with how I do so, I’ll probably take the button off.

Setting the stage for the next week

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My laptop is on its way to HP. Under the circumstances, it looks like I’m probably going to be working off Mom’s computer for all of next week, and maybe into the week after that.

The FF50 challenge looks to be in good shape. I may have to either move Tuesday’s drafts later, or move at least the noon one to 9 AM PT, due to various commitments, but other than that everything should proceed swimmingly, aside from Mom’s attempts to get me to do other, more productive things.

Naturally, after my promises to keep webcomic posts to a minimum while my laptop is getting fixed, next week may prove to be a rather webcomic-heavy week. QC and Homestuck definitely, Gunnerkrigg Court maybe. The HS post will be rather general in nature; I’m going to hold off on posting on Act 6 Intermission 3 probably until it’s over, intentionally this time, partly because of the three daisy-chained exploration non-flashes that either start or consist the intermission that are probably intended to form one long non-flash, partly because of how buggy it is still; even in the preferred Chrome browser on Mom’s computer, sometimes the sound will spontaneously shut off for no reason, so I’m going to wait until my computer comes back to go through the other non-flashes.

Between webcomics and other things, I have plenty of ideas to fill out the next week of posts already.

As if I wasn’t having enough trouble getting anything done this summer…

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So, the frame of the screen of my laptop has become disconnected from the screen itself in one corner, AND one hinge has come loose, so I’m going to have to send it in to be repaired and that could take over a week.

The timing on this could not be worse as it jeopardizes the FF50 competition; I will probably have to do the drafts on my mom’s computer, if I do as many as I had planned at all, as Mom’s probably not going to be happy about me monopolizing the computer for large chunks of the day, especially when I could be doing more productive things.

Also, I’m going to be keeping my webcomics posts to a minimum over the course of the week. It’s unfortunate with the current events in Gunnerkrigg Court and Questionable Content that could become post-worthy soon, but it’s probably necessary.

Bakson busy bakson.

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Even if I wanted to write an actual post, I’m too tired after a long day with small meals to do so.

But even if I could, I’d probably be pouring into the new OOTS book I just got. (Mom tells me I should be saving for a new laptop. Psh!)

Coming sometime Friday: a post on Gunnerkrigg Court, Questionable Content, or the webcomic blog review I’ve been promising all week.

A change of pace.

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So, I think I’m starting to solve the problem of my beating my head against the wall on these projects I’ve been spending the whole summer trying and failing to work on. I’ve been doing so by working on another project that’s longer-term but that I haven’t been beating myself up as much on. Maybe with enough time working on that, I’ll be refreshed to take on the more pressing projects.

Expect this to be a webcomic-heavy week, by the way. I might have a webcomic blog review posted as soon as tomorrow.

Welcome to Concrete Promises for Vague Reasons Theater.

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As I said earlier in the week, this has been a singularly unproductive week in an unproductive summer.

However, I have reason to believe next week will be different.

Because for the next week, I will not be able to engage in an activity that has been keeping me up at night.

It probably isn’t what you think it is.

How’s that for a streak-filler post?

Some brief words of disappointment

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This is shaping up to be an unproductive week in an unproductive summer.

It already didn’t help that I became obsessed with a fantasy football draft, but over the weekend I found myself getting hooked on the Comics Curmudgeon. I’d heard of it and from it many times before, but it took discovering its per-comic archives to enrapture me in its self-consistent jokes.

I briefly considered a streak-filling webcomics post, but I couldn’t decide which comic touching on academic themes I’m interested in to review, xkcd or SMBC.

I hope to have a webcomic blog review by the end of the week, but I’m not terribly confident about it.

Great, ANOTHER streak-filler post?

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I was planning on writing a post wrapping up the Olympics in more ways than one… but my day became completely occupied with my fascination watching the FantasySharks drafts over the course of the day. And my own league wasn’t even part of it, being stuck at for over nine hours. I may have to consider the first day of the FantasySharks drafts a personal day for me from now on.

For the record, I think I’ve done pretty decently drafting so far (I’m 11th, so I get two picks pretty much one after the other). I’ve picked up Larry Fitzgerald and Maurice Jones-Drew, and I feel like I’ve dodged a bullet because I came very close to spending my first two picks on wide receivers. (The Shark leagues are PPR leagues, but with two wideouts and no flex, so people are reticent to take wideouts too early. By the way, I feel like ESPN’s PPR rankings are the Matt Millen of PPR rankings; four wideouts in the first eight spots?) Regardless, despite the differences between fantasy and real football, anytime you pick up two players among the Top 50 resumes for the Hall of Fame, you must be doing something right. (If you want to follow the rest of my draft, I’m tweeting every pick and I might write a wrap-up when it’s done.)

That Olympics post may be up by the time you read this, or I may have scrapped the idea entirely because I wasn’t feeling it. Time will tell.

State of my Summer

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I said before that I was going to try to keep punching out posts in the #OccupyTea series at a minimum of one a week. Well, it didn’t happen last week and it looks like it’s not going to happen this week.

I had a project last week that was tangentially related to the Olympics, but this week? I’m just out of it. It hurts that the next part of the series is on a topic on which there isn’t much to say, and it’s kind of hard to do research for. What makes it even worse is that I have a bunch of other posts in the pipeline that haven’t gotten done either.

We’re already in August and I’ve made little headway on the other project I wanted to do this summer. I’m going to be announcing a project next week that could take up quite a bit of my time all the way through the rest of the year. A very disappointing summer that I had told myself was going to be critical for Da Blog.

I’ve become disappointed enough in my productivity that I’ve started seeing a psychiatrist and taking happy pills. And I’m skeptical that they’re going to work at doing what I want them to be doing.

Next week, I hope, will be a more productive week post-wise. We’ll see.