About Me

Reflecting on the end of one of the defining elements of my life

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(Note: This post was originally going to have pictures, but I seem to have lost a second data cable for my phone. With luck I may have pictures in time for the Blog-day post at the end of the year.)

As I mentioned in the third-ever post in the history of Da Blog, for the early part of my life I was a sort of vagabond. After living my first four years in the same house, over the succeeding years I moved to Los Angeles, the Seattle suburb of Issaquah, and Seattle itself, living a year in each place. Then in 1996 I moved again, this time just across the freeway from my previous place. This time, I would stay for more than a year. Much more.

Over half my life – indeed nearly two-thirds of my life – has been spent in that little hidden-away place as part of what might best be described as a quadruplex near Seattle’s University District. I moved in just before entering the third grade, and would complete elementary school, middle school, and high school there, as well as attend close to five years of college. I developed my habits there, cultivated my interests, discovered new ideas, started a blog. That house was where I discovered who I was and what I wanted to be. For a time I moved out and lived in a dorm room, but it was not meant to be, and after a few months I was back at the house where I started, where Da Blog became what it is today, whatever that is.

A few months ago my mom inherited a house in Issaquah when her mom died. Mom, not wanting to be anyone’s landlord, decided to move there herself, which meant I would have to come with her. And so it was that this past weekend, we packed up and moved away from my home of 15 years, bringing to a close a somewhat momentous era in my life.

I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a sobering moment, but I also have plenty of reason to look ahead. The area around the old house has changed over the years, and as I’ve chronicled on Da Blog in the past, I’ve had more than a few run-ins with obnoxious college student neighbors the past few years. This new house has no shared walls with anyone but people I already know. As it sets up, it also has a fairly private area for me to set up and do whatever I need to do, whether it’s on the computer, reading, or whatever; I effectively have an “office” for me to work in. On the other hand, a fairly lengthy commute to school is going to get even lengthier, and it looks like we’re going to add a dog at some point; I’ve never gotten along with dogs.

Although one era of my life has come to an end, a new one is just beginning, and I have every hope and expectation that this new home will provide the foundation upon which Da Blog will finally take off and I will achieve my success. Of course, I’ve said that sort of thing a bajillion times before, and this new home comes with something of a bad omen. I was already close before living in the Seattle area, but this new home is just eleven miles or so from the coordinates of the home of John from Homestuck.

Which spookily enough, brings me to my first real post from my new home…

A happier important notice on the future of Da Blog

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You may or may not have noticed that, contrary to what I’ve said in the past, and this past week aside, posting has picked up substantially recently, especially where webcomic posts are concerned. You may have also noticed that some of these posts have gone up at rather… interesting hours.

There are a couple of reasons for this. One is something I hinted at a while back: after years of my struggling to find an Internet connection, my mom finally got talked (not by me) into adding an internet connection for our house. This has made it far easier to update Da Blog, but considering what I said a while back about refocusing on school work, it’s not sufficient to explain this new focus.

The other reason I hinted at in my blog-day post. Having essentially unlimited access to the internet has illuminated to me just how addicted to the Internet I’ve become, and how far beyond Da Blog that addiction stretches. Given the opportunity, I can regularly surf the ‘Net late into the night, consequences be damned. I’d already passed only one out of two classes in each of the preceding two quarters, despite my commitment to suspend work on Da Blog and focus on schoolwork. But last quarter, despite the motivation of the Understanding the News series, you may have noticed I only put out one post in that series (other than the introductory post I linked to above). I wound up passing neither class that quarter. When it comes to passing classes again, it’s time for Plan B.

I realized that the last time I was regularly passing two classes was when I was regularly working on Da Blog, on webcomic posts and everything of that like. I theorized that having to spend a substantial portion of every weekday catching up on RSS feeds and working on posts (and Sandsday) provided a necessary structure and constraint on my addiction that allowed me to focus the rest of my time on more productive pursuits. (Note that there’s another theory here: recently, more and more of the classes I take require me to actually do the readings assigned, rather than just pick out a few important assignments and focus on those.)

So to rebuild my work ethic, I’m spending this summer focusing on fully catching up on my RSS feeds (right now I have only the feeds that most clog my reader to go, plus Darths and Droids), working on webcomics posts and future webcomics, as well as other big plans for Da Blog and my future. I’m hoping I can build enough momentum from working on those projects that when school starts in the fall I can shift gears and actually get work done without having other distractions. I still expect posting to decline precipitously, especially in fall, when football usually dominates Da Blog. And honestly, even this plan hasn’t been working very well, with two of my planned projects (in my opinion, the two most important) not having had any time spent on them at all with August about to start. Blame for that can largely be laid at the feet of a more personal project I’ve been working on, one which I hope will provide a shorter “last resort” alternative to Internet fun when the fall starts.

Now that that’s out of the way, now hear this… there will be at least two major site upheavals over the course of this year.

The first will be sometime in the next few weeks, and will involve finally upgrading WordPress to the 3.x series, putting in the forum, fixing the problems with the Sandsday archive, and probably completely overhauling the relationship between the Sports and Webcomics subsites and the main site. (This last I don’t want to do, but the plugin that creates the Sports and Webcomics subsites stopped updating IN THE MIDDLE OF UPDATING FOR 3.0, so it may be necessary.) This revamp will also allow me to start a brand new webcomic, something I’ve been giving a lot of thought to recently.

The second will be a more minor update over the course of late September through early December, as I take a web design class, and may involve next to nothing at all. While I like the general layout of the site and the basic principles behind its look, I’m not blind to the fact that it has some potential problems (the “how do you like my site” poll that came with the WP-Polls plugin didn’t come out with the best results), although some of the problems are things I’ve been meaning to change from the beginning, and it goes just enough against the WordPress standard I’m kind of dreading how on Earth I’m going to get the forum to work (one reason I didn’t start it last time I tried was because I just gave up trying to get it to work), so I’d like to optimize the site and identify those problems and fix them.

Between these upheavals and several new projects I hope to unveil over the next few months, it’s a bold new era in Da Blog’s history. Here’s hoping it all works out for the best.

Understanding the News: Introduction

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I have long considered myself a bit of a philosopher; in fact, for most if not all of Da Blog’s existence, philosophy was my main plan for my future, despite misgivings, hopes for Da Blog itself, and dabbling in other areas. However, I am not a philosophy major in college, because I find what is currently called “philosophy” to be too esoteric and ivory-tower, and overly focused on irrelevant and purely hypothetical questions.

Philosophy is not merely concerned with such esoteric speculations. I consider philosophy to be of the greatest importance for unpacking the critical questions of human nature. Philosophy has long been concerned with building a framework with which to understand human behavior. The conclusions reached have not always been entirely accurate – in particular often denigrating or denying the social aspect of human life – but it has been a common and constant theme in philosophy since at least the days of Plato’s Republic.

That philosophy has largely abandoned this ground, and made itself irrelevant and laughable to the extent that it has stayed, is quite unfortunate, because in my view, there is no question more important. For all that has been said about the wonder of the universe, the promise of technology, the hunt for the Higgs boson, and all the other myriad triumphs of the physical sciences, it is the simple question of human nature that has had and will have the biggest impact on the course of history, because it is, ultimately, humanity that sets that course.

Why are politicians so corrupt? Why are corporations so ruthlessly greedy? How come we can’t feed everyone? How come we aren’t doing anything about global warming? Why do wars happen? Where does religion come from? Where does evil come from? And most importantly, how can we fix all of the above?* The answers to these questions, and many more besides, are rooted in an understanding of how humans actually work and behave, and why. They are the most important questions for our modern world, not questions of the physical sciences or metaphysics.

(*Obviously, this question assumes that religion is something to be fixed, which you may disagree with.)

I’m currently taking a sociology class that has an assignment to write blog posts connecting current events to the numerous social theories developed over the years about the modern world. It’s a project that quite frankly, I should have started early last month, but I haven’t yet shaken my procrastination issues; I’ll be releasing two posts a week to compensate. (After my numerous attempts to compensate for the lack of an Internet connection at home were a minor theme of Da Blog for the first four years of its existence, someone from Comcast convinced my mom to finally get an Internet connection at the worst possible time, when my inability to complete even my modest class schedule is putting a severe damper on my finances.) However, I may not stop when I’ve completed the obligations of the assignment; I may continue the project indefinitely into the future, as a regular feature on Da Blog. In fact, this project may well be the start of something that becomes the most important part of MorganWick.com in the future.

As a storage place for the new project as well as a way to organize all the posts related to it in one place, I’ll be introducing a new category to Da Blog, “Understanding the News”. The category will start out a subcategory to “My Comments on the News”, but I may move it to the “Philosophy” category if I feel the need to (the fact that this very post isn’t a good fit to “My Comments on the News” may be a sign I may need to move it). It’s not the best of names, but I hope it gets across the notion that this project is about finding a better understanding of why the world is the way it is, and the forces behind everything that happens in the world that might not be obvious.

Get out of my head, Randall.

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(From xkcd. Click for full-sized ghost in the machine.)

I’m sick, it’s very late and I’m probably not very coherent right now, but it’s not as late as it was Tuesday night.

First a clarification: I stand by most of what I said in my original xkcd review yea so many years ago. I don’t think xkcd is compelling enough for me to come back to it three times a week. It’s more disorganized even than most gag-a-day comics; each strip exists in its own right, but even if Randall Munroe were to write the greatest comic in the history of history, it still wouldn’t keep me interested enough to check out any other strips. No matter how much consistent quality xkcd puts out, it’s still more of an editorial cartoon for geeks than anything else.

Recently, if I have nothing else to do and/or don’t feel like doing anything too “thinky”, I’ll mosey on over to xkcd. It’s good for a quick laugh to pick up the day, and I’ll also trawl the recent archives for other recent, quick-hit strips. xkcd consists of a bunch of isolated incidents that can occasionally rise to the level of being quite funny, and often thought-provoking. But I’m just not sure it’s enough to keep me coming back for a single isolated incident three times a week, and unlike, say, The Order of the Stick, I can certainly go long stretches without knowing what the latest xkcd happenings are. Since I’m not as well connected in the social web as most people on the Internet, I suspect much of what’s keeping xkcd going is its reputation as a meme factory.

But I just had to mention that on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, I was in the middle of a semi-unplanned 12-hour all-nighter to compose a paper for a philosophy class. Working on something I don’t necessarily enjoy for 12 hours straight isn’t really my forte, and I occasionally drifted over to other mindless activities.

One of which was checking xkcd and seeing a joke about the Allegory of the Cave.

I am convinced Randall Munroe is somehow connected to the essential life force of the universe.

An important announcement on the future of Da Blog

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You may have noticed that posting on Da Blog has slowed to an absolute crawl this year, and I’m long overdue for an explanation. Simply put, I’ve failed at my intended plan for Da Blog.

Call me a wide-eyed idealist, but I believe everyone should be able to make a living doing what they enjoy doing. By which I don’t mean simply “having fun” but whatever their passion is, what they would do if there were no need to make money. If you enjoy making tables and chairs and get a release out of it then maybe you should consider taking up a career in carpentry. This is, in fact, the only reason the Internet has created so much content that’s not directly paid for: people doing what they enjoy doing, people doing what they want to do. There are probably a wide variety of fields that I would be good at, but they wouldn’t be me. I would be working solely to pick up a paycheck. I want to work on what I’m interested in.

I created Da Blog, and later the forerunner to MorganWick.com, in large part to serve as a repository for my work on topics I was fascinated by, out of a hope that enough people would be interested in what I had to say about them to make Da Blog popular and possibly allow me to make some money off it without having to work in some grunt job or something out of a Dilbert cartoon. Once Da Blog was popular, I could use it to push some of my more controversial but profound thinking and build my true greatness. I’ve made several attempts over the years to build Da Blog’s popularity, from the various sports projects to Sandsday to the webcomic reviews to 2008’s October of Politics fiasco.

The webcomic reviews have been the most successful, or should I say least unsuccessful, of the lot… so naturally there may be no part of the site that has suffered more over the past year. One of the top two most popular posts in the history of Da Blog was the 2009 State of Webcomics Address, a post I was reconsidering my thinking on even as I was posting it, only to watch in horror as I was called on to defend views I was no longer sure I held, and given rebuttals I wasn’t sure I didn’t already agree with. One of my biggest regrets is never having posted a clarification to the Address giving a more refined version of my thoughts.

That I haven’t had the work ethic to work on all the posts I’d like to, that I haven’t been as fast or as committed as I’d like to be, has always been a problem of mine hindering Da Blog, but my time has also been restricted by the need to work on schoolwork. I’ve always attempted to juggle schoolwork and Da Blog, with a sensitivity towards the time-sensitivity of much of what I work on on Da Blog, and a desire to build upon what little I have. Honestly, my work on Da Blog has wound up having the impact of limiting the amount of schoolwork that gets done, and I wind up prioritizing the assignments that seem to me to be really important.

Everything started spiralling downhill last summer of 2009, when I took a summer class. Under normal circumstances, at my school most people take three classes at a time; as it happened, through a series of events early in my college career I was led to the conclusion that I was best off taking two classes at a time. But summer classes are very condensed and designed to be taken one class at a time, meaning for about a month, my schedule was equivalent to taking three classes at a time. The resulting time crunch was such that I decided to abandon following my RSS feeds (except for Order of the Stick).

A month may not seem like much to catch up on, but even before all this, my RSS feeds took so long to catch up on that I had to spend a significant portion of every single (week)day catching up on them. Combine this with the fact I wasn’t quite done with the work the course required, and while I made a fairly sizeable dent in catching up on my RSS feeds by the time regular classes started up again, it was far from complete.

Due to procrastination on my part, I was signed up for only one class when classes started up again instead of two, but fall is typically one of the busiest periods of the year for Da Blog because of all the football stuff, and my progress on my RSS feeds, slowed by the launch of the new site, had been derailed by my decision to commense an OOTS archive binge that, because of a related associated project, turned out to take far, far longer than I ever anticipated. Then, right as I finally finished the work for the summer class, the screen of my laptop broke, and it took at least a month before I finally got a new one, which hamstrung the work on the football projects and halted the archive binge, since I was having a hard enough time working on the work for my one class without a laptop. I still haven’t caught up on more than one feed since then.

The Christmas break was utterly unproductive, so I was still behind on the OOTS archive binge. That project wound up dominating my time for a good chunk of February, and in the meantime an old enemy flared up again. Despite writing some occasionally angry posts over the course of 2009, I had, in fact, figured that I had mostly shaken my old tendency to flare up in angry outbursts that got me into trouble and kicked out of classes. But one result of that was that I stopped seeing my therapist, and didn’t start up again even as the stress of not being able to keep up on my RSS feeds and the OOTS archive binge started getting to me.

So the end result was, I wound up kicked out of a class. Then, right as the quarter was ending, I had another outburst that would have gotten me kicked out of the other class if the quarter wasn’t ending. And at that point I was given an ultimatum: If you want to stay at Seattle University, you better make damn sure this crap never happens again. Otherwise you can go off to some online school for all we care.

For over a week I thought about it. On the one hand, leaving Seattle University would mean going all-in on Da Blog and hoping it works out, when it hasn’t worked out yet. But on the other hand, the requirements for staying at school – the steps needed to take to reduce the chances for another incident to as close to zero as possible – would involve strictly keeping up with the assignments and not falling behind on them at all, lest the stress of having to catch up cause problems, and to maintain that pace would require me to virtually abandon Da Blog for the two-plus years it would take to complete my degree.

I did eventually decide not to take the quitter’s way out, and I’m still going to Seattle University for the foreseeable future. But that means I can’t really juggle Da Blog and my schoolwork the way I used to while trying to get ahead with Da Blog anymore. I intended to use the summer as a way to wrap up a few projects of mine (as well as more schoolwork I didn’t get done during the actual school year) while making a last-ditch effort to make Da Blog popular enough to support itself, but thanks to TV Tropes and some other distractions, I wound up doing virtually none of that. Honestly, I don’t think that, at least in my case, colleges do a good enough job of reflecting and supporting their students’ true passions, instead boxing them in to a certain mode of living and learning.

Over the next couple of weeks I do intend to get one of my projects out of the way, an attempted reprise of the October of Politics with lessons learned from the past, but after that – unless it catches on – expect posting frequency to drop precipitously, and for the paucity of posts seen over the past year to become the norm. I’ll still get out a new State of Webcomics Address containing the aforementioned clarification of my views, and even finally catch up on my RSS feeds. But I’m probably not going to test the Line of Sight rankings this year, and once my desktop gets fixed I’m probably going to adopt the 2007 solution of posting only the RTFs of the regular College Football Rankings, at least for this year. Beyond that webcomics posts are probably going to be restricted to the summer only if at all, and summer in general should see the greater portion of the posts for the year over the next two years.

I’m not shutting down posting on Da Blog entirely, but if this new project doesn’t work out I think it’s very possible I may be back to square one in terms of finding something to do with my future. I need to find something that won’t grind down my soul, something that will properly use my abilities and that I’ll be able to enjoy at least a little (I need to find a word between “enjoy” and “tolerate”). Da Blog seemed like the best approach for my affinities, and I may now be back to Plan B, and the road ahead seems downright murky.

See me, feel me, touch me, heal me…

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I’ve never really been one of those to hide their identity online. I’ve always been very (sometimes brutally) open and honest about who I am and what I’m like. I’ve always supported accountability on the Internet and not hiding behind anonymity. So I thought I should put a face to what I post here.

This is what I look like. The desktop is a little anachronistic if you’ve been following my quest for Internet connections for my laptop; I have it at home but it’s not connected to the Internet right now. The image itself didn’t turn out quite like I envisioned, but close enough.

I’ll be posting this on various forums as I return to them (I should have already posted it on TV Tropes, Gravatar, Bleacher Report, and Twitter by the time you read this – not posting on Wikipedia because I don’t want to worry about licencing), and I’ve made some tweaks to the About Me page. Ironically, when I first started thinking about rewriting the About Me page it was to remove or tone down some of the scarier aspects, but now I think I’ve actually made it a little bit scarier. The story behind that is a story for another time, though.

Like father, like sons.

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(From The Order of the Stick. Click for full-sized Darth Vader impression.)

I am in no condition to be doing the heavy thinking required to make a blog post, let alone the schoolwork I’m behind almost the entire quarter on. (Let’s just say Thursday wasn’t a very good day for me.)

But… damn if Rich didn’t mostly make up for a mediocre first quarter of the book (and especially a current storyline that’s been dragging a little) with a strip you could tell he was waiting for as expectantly as the general. And damn if that’s totally not how I would have expected the general or Elan’s father to look or act like, and yet totally makes sense in retrospect.

I’ll likely have more to say later, as at this point I’m really interested in the backstory behind what’s happening now (the “Elan’s father = Tyrinar” theories are on life support at this point, but the idea of a connection between them is tantalizing), including why Tarquin put the hit out on Nale rather than the guy who had a vendetta against him (Malack), and getting a character two strips old seriously fleshed out, not to mention furthering the story itself.

(Seriously, Elan? An entire fatherless childhood is worth the one moment you stumble upon him? I shouldn’t be surprised given Elan’s propensity for the dramatic, but damn if it doesn’t suggest he has issues…)

Idle notes about myself.

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One of these days, I may just bite the bullet and get a subscription to the Atlantic.

This article does not mention Asperger’s syndrome directly, but it does make me a lot more confident than I used to be about the “Darwinist” theory on the rise of Asperger’s… as well as other neurological “disorders”. It examines findings in science that may suggest that the same things that make people with ADD such a handful may, properly nurtured, make them more successful later in life, and may make them more useful for a variety of tasks – serving an evolutionary purpose that may help explain how we got this far in the development of civilization, not just their own existence. “Savant syndrome” may be the entire evolutionary point of Asperger’s and other such things.

As much as I’ve benefited and believed in it, the philosophical, logical side of me has long wondered why only (well, primarily) autistics promote the “neurodiversity” movement, claiming that their method of thinking is not necessarily bad, just different. People with ADD and dyslexics also think “differently”, so why aren’t they claiming they shouldn’t be “cured”, at least to the same extent? Is it because autistics still have several “beneficial” aspects to them, so autistics are still making a “good/bad” judgment and saying their way of thinking is worthy of being preserved because it’s beneficial and others aren’t? This article suggests other neurological disorders may indeed have their own claims to legitimacy.

A belated not-so-happy blog-day.

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I am pissed off at myself.

I had planned to use the winter break to catch up on things that have been haunting me since July. I’d get to work on a number of my planned projects, including my planned book on the impact of the Internet, or at least catch up on feeds I’ve been falling behind on and fast, or at least a number of long-planned posts.

What have I been doing instead? Getting ensnared by TV Tropes. Again. In a similar manner to something that happened over the summer, except this time, combined with all the other crap I’ve loaded down my browser with in the interim, it’s enough to start causing Firefox to crash regularly. If it weren’t for that I could stave off temptation long enough to at least take care of some of the long-planned posts, or at least the timeliest ones, but instead I feel I have to spend all my computer time on TV Tropes just to get it over with. It does not help that I’ve made a habit of staying up well into the night, as in until 2 AM and sometimes as late as 5 AM.

That said, this was actually a somewhat productive year for me, and for what used to be Da Blog, even if I’ve been making pretty much exclusively football posts since the end of my flashy debut month in September. In fact, this could go down as perhaps the most pivotal year in the history of the Morgan Wick Online Universe, mostly because this was the year a foundation was laid for the future with the move of Da Blog and – at least nominally – the rest of the web site to MorganWick.com (and the associated re-posting of posts to Comixtalk and Bleacher Report). This site is very much still under construction – several features aren’t properly set up yet, I haven’t bothered to figure out how to make Sandsday accessible on the new site, and I haven’t launched the forum yet. The forum isn’t entirely my fault, as I’m not sure I’d be able to right now even if I got around to trying, as bbPress is in a pretty sorry state, especially compared to the more mature (and more paid-attention-to) WordPress. I promised a December forum launch last time I checked, but that’s probably not happening, because from what I hear I may still be running up against many of the same problems that haunted my first attempt.

And that’s not all. I launched Da Tweeter, which could become the new core of the Morgan Wick Online Universe. And as I prepared to write the aforementioned Internet book, I started writing more and more introspective and insightful things, including the “Webcomics’ Identity Crisis” series in February and Ideas Every Day month in September.

But my life, if anything, has entered a tailspin. Last year I reflected on all the job-searching I’d done, which wasn’t much because Da Blog had become my job. This year I did basically no job-searching at all. And my schoolwork has been suffering even without other online distractions, to the point I’ve been skating close to skipping out on multiple courses. The Morgan Wick Online Universe itself took a step back when I attempted to use Sandsday to hold a debate on global warming, only for first, no one to join the debate, and second, the resulting one-man debate driving me insane and leading to the end of Sandsday. I still intend to finish the debate some day, but there haven’t been any new Sandsday strips since July or August… maybe I’m still feeling the after-effects of the global warming series.

But beyond that, a lot of my problems seem to stem from a few sources, things I’ve been complaining about for a long time. Complaints about my workload are as old as the first time Da Blog picked up a sliver of popularity, but in 2009 they became acute. My RSS reader got so bloated I eventually had to take a temporary vacation from it when my school workload interfered too much, and as the above indicates, it has never recovered. Between my RSS feeds, personal projects, and schoolwork, I try to do more than there’s time in the day to do, or at least than there’s time in the day for me to do. It would help if I had Internet access from home, but that’s not likely to happen unless and until I get a job, and I can’t get a job if I’m already too busy for one…

Perhaps the solution is strict regimentation of my day, something I’ve long had in mind and the formation of Da Tweeter was partly intended to facilitate, but I’ve never been very good at holding myself to a schedule. Or perhaps the solution is focusing more on webcomic posts. More people I’ve heard of have noticed my webcomic posts than my sports posts, and even with no webcomic posts for months I’ve received more traffic to the webcomic section of the site than the sports section. Of my football projects, the SNF Flex Schedule Watch is the only one that’s produced significant traffic, and the College Football Rankings take up so much of my time I’m considering outsourcing them somehow or reverting to the 2007 approach of posting just the RTFs of the full rankings and not separate posts. (Of course it hasn’t helped that for most of the season I had to hop around various school computers to put the ranking posts together, but football projects were curtailing my ability to do schoolwork even before that.)

Or maybe the problem is not so much that I don’t have the time, but that I don’t have the brainpower. But then I need to get more brainpower somehow…

At any rate, even if it only added up to nine months, Year Three of Da Blog did a lot to set the course for Da Blog’s future. Now it’s time to find out how Year Four continues that course. And in honor of Da Blog’s third blog-day, I’m taking one of the posts I made this year, a list of books I’m looking for (and which might enlighten you too), and turning it into a constantly-updated page.