Well, I’m running a new Da Blog Poll alongside the other current one, which I will refresh presently. This one asks if I should select between all the StumbleUpon topics, pick only the ones I like, or poll you for the ones you like. (The latter may end up being hosted on the Web site. There are 78 topics?
The poll will run through next week’s RID. I’ll think of something else to get us through this week’s RID. And I may have to use that something else to get through all subsequent RIDs as well.
My webcomic write-up for tomorrow is finished, so I can spend tomorrow either recreating my Truth Court announcement or working on next week’s webcomic write-up. Who says I don’t have a job?
I was going to post on Robert Howard’s Tangents on Tuesday, but its current host is shutting down, and Howard’s plans to move it to an independent host were not far enough along yet for him to implement. So it is currently being hosted on LiveJournal and is archivefree. That last bit, plus my reluctance to link to a temporary site, means you get something completely different (as in, an actual webcomic) on Tuesday.
I will make a post on Tangents when it moves to a permanent host in “a couple of weeks”, though I may have a week delay to actually read the archives and write the post. I have at least three comics which I’ve read enough of to make it through any delays, plus a second post on Order of the Stick, so I’m good through August 19. Now I need to get to actually writing them. Throw in another webcomic blog, a fourth comic I have some things to say about even though I’ve actually read none of it, and a third OOTS post and I’m good through September 9. I can probably throw together something on Penny Arcade or User Friendly if I need to after that.
In other blog news, I made a change to this week’s Sports Watcher upon being reminded of something.
Well, it turns out that part of the reason the StumbleUpon Demo draws from such a small pool of sites is because, once the Toolbar is installed, it requires me to select several interests before I can do any stumbling.
So either I select a long list of “interests” that don’t interest me at all, or the Random Internet Discovery turns out not to be so “random” after all.
Street Sign Gallery is updated with a new batch of signs, all in the Seattle area. Redmond, Bellevue, and Tukwila (okay, okay, Shoreline and the University of Washington too) all get their moments in the sun, as well as a couple new Seattle pictures.
I mentioned when I started the project that I didn’t know if anyone else was doing this. Well, as it turns out, I did not know the terminology at all. Apparently the standard sign is known as a street blade, and one Samuel Klein has kept up a Street Blade Gallery on his (otherwise rather diverse) blog. Both of us are on the West Coast, so most of our signs are from around here, but both of us are interested in seeing what blades you have around your community. In my case, you can send it to mwmailsea at yahoo dot com.
Warning, Around the Horn geekery ahead:
I think we’re all losers in the mustache contest between Cowlishaw and Blackistone. Cowlishaw should never have shaved the goatee because he really does look like a porn star, while Blackistone just looked ridiculous yesterday, especially with those coke-bottle glasses.
The Drinking Game is updated to reflect the fact Michael Smith has not been on the show in ages and the new “Deal… (long pause) …or no deal?” kick Reali has picked up recently (and which should have been on the list a long time ago).
Okay, I need to actually install the Stumbleupon Toolbar now. Once again, the first time I looked for a Random Internet Discovery I was taken to last week’s RID. Then I was taken to a page that I had encountered the first time I tried to write a RID, but which I was too tired (and worn out from fighting for an Internet connection) to write about. So it looks like the demo page just cycles through a small number of select pages.
I still don’t have much to say about it, in part because I don’t know how to interpret it, so I’ll just keep whining.
Part of the reason I didn’t install the actual Stumbleupon Toolbar is that it is influenced by what you rave and what you downgrade. I want my Random Internet Discoveries to be random internet discoveries, so I may be tempted not to register my opinions. But if I keep getting sites that don’t affect/effect my sensibilities at all, I may have to change my tune on that front.
So. I’m getting the Toolbar on my computer. Eventually. When I have a moment when I can close my IE windows. Sometime before next Wednesday.
Truth Court is being announced tomorrow, but the last time I mentioned it I promised something in the title that is looking more and more distant.
Okay, this is WAY later in the day than I was intending to write this post. I was hoping to set up SOME sort of backlog to start pumping out smoothly, but right now I’m not sure what’s going to come out on Tuesday. My webcomic posts usually require a significant amount of research, and the one I have in mind is no exception, so it may end up waiting past Tuesday. I don’t even have tomorrow’s strip written and drawn up and I have only the vaguest idea of what will be in it.
I recently finished reading True Enough by Farhad Manjoo, which fascinated me the instant I saw it in the store. Its main thesis is that, thanks to the Internet and cable news channels, we no longer differ merely in what opinions we hold, but in what we hold to be basic truths. I will have more to say about it in general when I announce Truth Court probably over the weekend, but there’s a point, expounded on on pages 113-122, which I want to devote a post to. It tells of an experiment performed by a researcher named John Ware. Ware hired an actor to masquerade as a distinguished expert and talk at length and with a lot of flair about a bunch of nonsense and not really say anything of substance. The audience was a bunch of college-educated professionals and even professors – in theory, able to see through the ruse. But instead, they all talked about what a great speaker he was, how stimulating his lecture was, and so on.
Ware had the lecture played for a second group and got the same results. He showed it to a group of students – a group “enrolled in a graduate-level course on educational philosophy” to boot – and got the same results. Some in the group even claimed previous experience with the “expert” or his topic. Ware soon became devoted to studying the “Dr. Fox effect” (after the name of the fictitious expert in the original experiment) and conducted several more experiments on the topic. One experiment involved breaking another group of students into groups and playing several lectures that varied based on “content” and “expressiveness”; the lectures with the highest levels of both did best, but expressiveness rated far higher than content.
I leave it to Manjoo to bring the implications into stark relief: “[P]rofessors were better off teaching very little very enthusiastically than teaching very much very badly.”
Manjoo makes the point that this means that some “experts” are only experts in presenting nonsense like Dr. Fox. But let’s repeat the implications one more time: If you attempt to tell the truth in a boring, dry manner, you will lose to someone who tells complete lies in the form of jokes. We’ve all heard about how people value style over substance, but you probably could have never imagined how important it could be. I’m honestly stunned you don’t see the implications fully realized more often – more politicians explaining their positions with flowery metaphors, more professors teaching their subjects with sarcasm instead of sleep. Of course, politicians that try to inject more energy into their speaking style end up coming across like Howard Dean, but personally, I thought “The Scream” made me more likely to vote for him, if I were paying more than superficial attention to the race and if I were old enough to vote at all. I want more energy in my politicians, and after reading True Enough, I suspect most Americans do as well, they just don’t realize it. Heck, I’m fully intent on making Da Blog as entertaining a read as possible, not just a blog of dry substance. Style and substance, in perfect unison, is the best blend of all.
After getting exposed to ZP (and before getting exposed to True Enough), I have become convinced that any speech can be made more entertaining by reading it really fast in a British accent laced with profanity while crude stick figures acting out everything the speaker says appear on the screen, laced with simple rebuses and often dissonant phrases. Go ahead, try it with the driest speech you can think of!
Ben Croshaw was a game-developer hobbyist and sometime reviewer for some time but didn’t get his 15 minutes of Internet Fame (TM) until he decided to create a special video review for a demo, which quickly proved so popular he did a second. And after just two videos, he was contacted by The Escapist to keep making funny videos for them every week so they might lure hordes of Internet losers some people in to their site and own them forever.
(See what I did there? This is a piece of cake.)
But perhaps I should let Croshaw explain it himself:
That only scratches the surface of ZP‘s popularity. I invite you to take a look at the archives I linked to above. I guarantee you you will find yourself watching video after video, unable to stop until you’ve been through the whole archive, even if you’re not really immersed in “video game culture”. ZP has become big enough that previews of it now air each week on G4 – a real, like, TV channel, and stuff. It’s not a tiny Internet subculture by any means. There are more than five hundred comments on – and thus many hundreds if not thousands more people watching – a bunch of crude images presented as though their presenter had ADD while a Brit basically says “omg popular gamez sux lol” really fast only with a lot more profanity. (Not to mention more than its fair share of ripoffs littering Youtube.)
That’s the future of dialogue regardless of the field. The more energy, the more visualness, the more everything you pour into what you have to say to make it more than “what you have to say”, the more you will survive and thrive. Simply put, The Daily Show is the wave of the future, not just in news but in everything from politics to sports. The people who say media is dominated too much by “sound bites” and who, well, gave us the “style over substance” cliche in the first place will probably decry this development, but if it gets more young people involved in politics, well…
Moving the RID to Wednesday because I’m settling into a groove of days of the week (such as webcomics on Tuesday and Sports Watcher on Friday) and I want to leave Mondays open for football-related stuff.
Strangely enough, the first time I activated StumbleUpon I was taken to TED.com again. But on the second try I was taken to this site. If you thought you were an insignificant speck of dust in the Universe before, this’ll make you really think you’re an insignificant speck… on an insignificant speck… orbiting an insignificant speck.
I doubt I’ll have much more to say on the “astronomy” tag.
Never let it be said that I don’t give you what you want. Since posting my most recent poll, I have gotten a unanimous consensus (okay, it’s only three votes, but still) that among the things I should add to Da Blog is a series of random Internet discoveries.
So we start with TED.com. Such a valuable address was snapped up by an
annual conference [that] brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes). This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. More than 200 talks from our archive are now available, with more added each week.
We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world. So we’re building here a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world’s most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other.
The TED Conference, held annually in Long Beach, is still the heart of TED. More than a thousand people now attend — indeed, the event sells out a year in advance — and the content has expanded to include science, business, the arts and the global issues facing our world. Over four days, 50 speakers each take an 18-minute slot, and there are many shorter pieces of content, including music, performance and comedy. There are no breakout groups. Everyone shares the same experience. It shouldn’t work, but it does. It works because all of knowledge is connected. Every so often it makes sense to emerge from the trenches we dig for a living, and ascend to a 30,000-foot view, where we see, to our astonishment, an intricately interconnected whole.
Mm. Interesting. And in no small way connected to my non-random discovery last week.
The conference is actually only moving to Long Beach in February of next year, after spending 20 years in Monterey, and is being simulcast to an audience in Palm Springs. Don’t expect to be able to attend it live – “attendance at TED is by invitation only,” consists significantly of people more famous than you and me, and sells out fast – and the Palm Springs conference is probably equally crowded. But you can still watch the videos on the site.
I was originally planning to make this feature daily, but I don’t think that’s feasible, for the same reasons as Sports Watcher…
Blogger’s Draft feature recently unleashed a deluge of new features for bloggers to try out. There’s things like a star rating system, Google search info, that sort of thing. There’s new functionality to put a comment form right there on the permalink page instead of in a popup or a separate page, which is probably going to be popular.
There is also a new editing window that promises to fix so many of the issues I had with Blogger that it could very well prevent me from deciding to move Da Blog to WordPress at some point down the line.
Of course, I won’t stop thinking tables are an afterthought around here unless there’s a table button in the toolbar, but if that’s my biggest issue it’s a tremendous improvement. Expect to see some changes in the coming months, including the possibility of changing layouts to accomodate wider screens like mine.
Oh, and for the first time ever, I have an actual job interview scheduled for tomorrow.
Could you remind me in the future to mark down June 26, 2008 as a critical day in my life?