Blog News

Some brief words of disappointment

by

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.

Introducing the Morgan Wick Fantasy Football Fifty Challenge!

by

Last year, I decided to carry out a project called the Simulated Experts’ Fantasy League. I’d take the “big boards” of eight prominent fantasy sites and draft an eight-team league using each of them, then play out a season. It was an interesting experiment, but not one I’d like to try again with. I intended to run a second league, the Simulated Experts’ Auction Fantasy League. This league would attempt to hold an auction using several sites that listed recommended auction values for players.

After waiting for sites to have as up-to-date and relevant big boards as I could, possibly too long (Yahoo never did release a big board that reflected the end of the Chris Johnson holdout), I held the SEFL draft all day on Wednesday, the day before the start of the season. On Thursday, I woke up intending to hold the auction draft… and found that NFL.com had replaced its big board with Week 1 rankings. And there was no way to get the big board back, even though you could still draft a team right up to kickoff of the Kickoff Game.

I looked frantically for some way to get the big board back. NFL.com’s fantasy system has a feature where you can enter a draft – not a mock draft, a real live draft – just by clicking some buttons. As I would find, it’s a devious way for them to suck people into their fantasy football product. I entered a draft room to find that I could, in fact, get the big board back that way… but of course, it didn’t have what I actually needed, the auction values, and NFL.com is only supporting actual auction leagues starting this year. Nonetheless, over the course of the time I spent in there, I wound up drafting a team.

It was a strangely engrossing experience, and I decided to run a team in as many sites as I could, but I was only able to draft a team on ESPN before the Kickoff Game started. I’ve said before that I tend to go against the grain of what everyone else is doing, that I tend not to be caught up in whatever the current trend is, but in retrospect it’s kind of surprising that I hadn’t taken up fantasy football before; it involves just the sort of obsessive ordering, sorting, and categorization that’s right up my alley. For someone like me, who isn’t really a fan of any particular team, it’s really the perfect way to follow the NFL. For much of last season I was actually considering doing a live online radio show every Sunday of this year where I keep track of the developments in one specific fantasy league, to be auctioned off to the highest bidder.

(For the record, my impression was that the people on NFL.com were more prone to make boneheaded mistakes and massive reach picks than the more knowledgeable drafters on ESPN… so naturally my NFL.com team did horribly while my ESPN team dominated the league after Cam Newton basically fell into my lap and I turned out to have something like the two best running backs in the league, propelling me all the way to the championship game before getting crushed.)

Now that I know for a fact what my opinion of fantasy football is, I intend to take it to the next level, and finish what I briefly started last year, by running as many teams as I possibly can – a total of a whopping fifty at the same time. Why? Because I’m apparently insane and have decided that, after a summer I’d earmarked as a critical one with a number of projects I intended to get done that wound up progressing slower than I would have liked, and heading into a hardcore quarter at school where I’ll be taking a class that’s both critical and might end up demanding the most work of any I’ve taken, the best thing for me to do is to take one of the major saps on my time last fall and increase the work involved in it fivefold.

One of these leagues will be one of the MyFantasyLeague.com leagues from FantasySharks.com, despite my having no intention of using the actual advice on their site much – their ranking on FantasyPros.com, one of the sites in the SEFL, doesn’t lie, though their draft advice is of some use. So why am I doing it? Because FantasySharks.com has come up with a brilliant idea that I’m not entirely sure why no one has tried before: bringing promotion and relegation to fantasy football. At the top is the “Great White Shark League”, a 12-team league consisting of nine users of the site, two of the site’s top experts, and an automated team. The bottom four teams get relegated to one of two “Whale Shark Leagues”, which similarly each contain nine users, two experts, and an automated team, with the champion and the team with the most total points promoted to the Great White Shark. Below that are four “Hammerhead” leagues containing all users, then eight “Mako” leagues, then 16 “Blue” leagues, then the current lowest level, the 32 “Tiger” leagues (though there is a possibility that a new “Leopard” level could be added this year).

I love this concept in every way, from the way it raises the stakes on every level to the most important reason I’m actually participating in it, its usefulness as a yardstick of ability and success. I’ve actually expanded this idea out to one of a championship pyramid for all of fantasy football, a good 20 levels following the same power-of-2 structure, complete with a new-player-qualification scheme so new players don’t have to wait a lifetime to reach the top. For the limited competition that’s there now, I’ll be starting in Tiger League 3 with a team with the whimsically nerdy name of the “Green Lantern Corps“.

For the other 49 teams, I’ll be drafting as many teams as I can on every single free fantasy football website. NFL.com has a maximum of six, CBS three, ESPN and Fox ten each. Yahoo and Fleaflicker have no limit, so ten teams on each of those sites brings me to an even 50. All of these drafts, except the FantasySharks league whose draft will start this Monday and has a 12-hour timer so it could last upwards of a week, will be held over Labor Day Weekend and in the run-up to kickoff. To reduce the effect on my time during the school year, I will stop actively maintaining any team that starts 0-4 or 1-5, but I will maintain at least one team on every site and under no circumstances will I abandon the Shark team. I’ll track my progress over the course of the season and give my quick impressions of each site as I go along, on Twitter and on Da Blog.

Here are the times I intend to hold the draft for each league. All times Pacific.

August 13:
6 AM: MyFantasyLeague/FantasySharks.com

September 1:
9 AM: NFL
10 AM: ESPN
11 AM: Fox
Noon: Yahoo
1 PM: Fleaflicker
2 PM: CBS
3 PM: Yahoo
4 PM: ESPN
5 PM: Fox
6 PM: Fleaflicker
7 PM: ESPN
8 PM: Yahoo

September 2:
9 AM: Yahoo
10 AM: Fox
11 AM: ESPN
Noon: NFL
1 PM: Fleaflicker
2 PM: Fox
3 PM: CBS
4 PM: ESPN
5 PM: Fleaflicker
6 PM: Yahoo
7 PM: NFL
8 PM: Fox

September 3:
9 AM: Fox
10 AM: ESPN
11 AM: Yahoo
Noon: NFL
1 PM: Fleaflicker
2 PM: Yahoo
3 PM: Fox
4 PM: Fleaflicker
5 PM: ESPN
6 PM: NFL
7 PM: CBS
8 PM: Fleaflicker

September 4:
Noon: ESPN
1 PM: Fox
2 PM: Fleaflicker
3 PM: Yahoo
4 PM: Fox
5 PM: ESPN
6 PM: Yahoo
7 PM: Fleaflicker
8 PM: NFL

September 5:
Noon: Fleaflicker
1 PM:  Yahoo
2 PM:  Fox
3 PM:  ESPN

State of my Summer

by

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.

Coming up on Da Blog in August…

by

I tried to get back in the swing of doing webcomic reviews earlier this year, and I’d be dumb if I didn’t take advantage of the summer to get more in. I’ll probably lay off the webcomic reviews once school starts, but I’ll start putting up some next week. I have three different comics in the hopper for me to write reviews on and a few more besides.

Also, I’ve had quite a few spam comments get through the filter recently, so I’ve been thinking about making some changes to the comment system.

I’ve also removed the ShareThis buttons, despite our being in the middle of the #OccupyTea series, because I’m sensing a growing laziness on their part. The list of buttons I can add via the customization feature has barely changed since I installed the plugin, and oddly, I can use checkmarks to add Google+ and Pinterest buttons but I can’t do so in customization, at least according to their help page. Then after upgrading the plugin and changing some of the settings, I saw that the default button name now appears to be the short code for each service, which results in some pretty long names. Long story short, I don’t like the direction the plugin is headed and I might try and look for an alternate solution, one that doesn’t hijack the entire sharing process.

Yes, this is basically a stall post to continue The Streak. Waist-deep in a personal project right now, don’t know how much work on the #OccupyTea series I can get in this week.

Argh.

by

I was all set to have all these plans for the week that I’ve mentioned in previous posts, and I was going to give my thoughts on the sanctions against Penn State today…

…and then last night I realize I have an insect bite on my left pinky that’s restricting my ability to straighten or bend it all the way. Then today I notice it’s restricting blood flow to the tip of my finger, and I end up going to an urgent care clinic, and now I’m on antibiotics and Benadryl all week and I’m already sleepy as I’m typing this.

I still intend to get everything done I said I was going to, but all in all this might be a pretty light week.

Okay, this isn’t working.

by

I was quite proud of myself for buckling down and getting Part V of the #OccupyTea series finished last night. I was on cruise control throughout the entire process.

It took about four hours.

There were some periods when I was doing things not productive to getting the post finished, but not very many, and I’d spent a significant amount of time writing about half the post earlier in the week. Let’s be generous and say each post is going to take me six hours to complete at that rate. Even if I were to focus entirely on the series all day, with a break to catch up on RSS feeds and watch my normal shows, I’d probably only complete about one and a half posts each day. I was hoping to work with a buffer with this series. That’s not a picture very conducive to that, and it’s certainly not a picture conducive to me figuring out what order results in the best flow of ideas, best allows ideas to build on one another, as opposed to picking topics semi-randomly on the fly like I’ve been doing.

So I’m going to abandon any pretense of this series being a five-day-a-week series. I will endeavor to complete at least one post a week, and complete the whole series before school starts and certainly before the election, but I will only work on the series when I’m particularly motivated to do so. In order to get that flow of ideas I mentioned in the last paragraph, expect another one-post week next week, with the rest of the week filled with the stuff I mentioned in my last Blog News post. By not forcing myself to focus on this series when I don’t want to do the heavy thinking associated with it, I can focus the rest of my time on another project I’m more into, one I actually have higher hopes for raising the profile of the site with, and one I’m nowhere near as through with as I’d like.

The schedule heading into next week:

by

Expect two more #OccupyTea posts Thursday and Friday.

Sometime next week, I’m going to flesh out my thoughts on the PA Kickstarter a little more, specifically further clarifying the distinction between them, an up-and-coming or new artist, Louis CK, and a big media conglomerate.

There will be reference to things Gabe and Tycho are doing as part of the Kickstarter.

I will probably also post on the end-of-act flash in Homestuck next week, assuming it comes out by then. My hunch is that, in the unlikely scenario it comes out before the end of this week, I’ll still put the post off until next week.

I also have a hunch I’m going to be posting on Questionable Content at some point in the next ten days as well.

(Hey, remember when the webcomics section was all about OOTS, Ctrl+Alt+Del, and comics by David Morgan-Mar? Those were the days, weren’t they? Now I’m just another one of those guys who freaks out at every Homestuck update, with a little QC, xkcd, and general webcomic news mixed in…)

More on the Penny Arcade Kickstarter

by

It’s late, and the next part of the #OccupyTea series is substantially far away from completion and is probably going to undergo substantial revision before it goes up, so I want to say a little more about the Penny Arcade Kickstarter. I’ll probably have a more complete takedown later, but right now I want to tackle the way the PA guys are positioning this, that “rather than work for advertisers, we want to work for you”. Evidently, Gabe and Tycho would rather not be employing an ad sales staff and meeting the content needs of advertisers, and would rather devote the time and money currently going towards advertising towards creating new and better content instead.

This strikes me as a really, really, really, really weak argument, and it further weakens the notion that this represents any sort of breakthrough for other webcomics artists. Perhaps the PA guys have run the numbers and decided that having a dedicated ad sales team and personal relationships with advertisers would, even after considering the cost of said team, pay substantially more than Google or Project Wonderful ads to justify the expense in time, money, and integrity (assuming PA actually does lose any artistic or editorial integrity) over simply slapping on ads and passively monitoring whatever shows up on them. Even if so, would PA, one of if not the most popular webcomics on the Internet, actually still lose the ability to do all the things they want to do as a result of the Kickstarter by switching to Google or Project Wonderful, or some other such ad service? And considering that the vast majority of webcomics already use such services and so avoid the problems Gabe and Tycho want to avoid, would they actually gain anything from PA‘s success?

I don’t mean to denigrate a group of creators that understand how the Internet works a lot better than most big media corporations, with or without the Kickstarter. If PA can convince those big media corporations to embrace the Internet as well, more power to them. My worry is that what they are doing is wholly unnecessary and undermines other people trying to also make some money on the Internet or from Kickstarter. To the people Robert Khoo says come up to him and ask how they can support PA when they block ads and don’t buy merchandise, I say, “Penny Arcade runs one of the biggest entertainment and gaming expos on the planet. They don’t need your support. Instead, give your money to someone else who’s operating off the same basic model but doesn’t have PA‘s wild success.”

(And turn off your damn Adblock. Adblock should default to off with a blacklist for sites with bad ads, not default to on with a whitelist for sites with good ads.)

State of the #OccupyTea series

by

Boy, for something I had such high hopes for, that I spent half the year bringing myself to get started, this series has been something of a massive disappointment. Not even in the sense that it hasn’t attracted anyone new to Da Blog; I’ve become used to that sort of thing when it comes to my forays into politics. No, this series has been a disappointment because:

  • I was originally hoping to have something of a buffer going when I started, and I kept postponing starting it for weeks at a time to avoid having only two posts in the series in a week. Well, when I actually did start it the second post (Part I of the Platform) was only mostly done, and now I’m finishing a week with only two posts.
  • While each post hasn’t taken that much time cumulatively, I’ve been short on actual time to work on it, especially since I can’t even get stuff done at home during the day even when there isn’t anything going on at the high school across the street. As a result, each post has taken up most of a day to get done, leaving me little time to work on other projects, or even other posts in the series.
  • You may have noticed that I’ve sometimes sidestepped a number of issues, or given them lip service. Besides my inability to untangle very complex issues, there’s also the fact that, because I haven’t been able to work with a buffer, the series has progressed in an ad hoc fashion, with me being unable to preplan the order of posts so things build logically on top of one another. A number of these issues are extremely interconnected.
  • More to the point, not only do I dread working on this series, I had already largely discounted this series as an effort to attract more readers to Da Blog, and it may actually detract from another project I’m more interested in working on.

As such, I will no longer attempt to hold myself to a post a day. I will try for a post a week minimum, and preferably two with me trying to work on as many as possible, but I reserve the right to abandon the series entirely if I see fit.

Don’t expect me to give you a post in this series on Monday, either. I’m way overdue for a sports graphics roundup.

Want to know how my day went?

by

First, I had to go to an out-of-the-way town to get my state ID card renewed, missed the place to do so, kept looking for too long (really past the point where I should have by all rights stopped), had to walk 15 minutes to get back there, which left me too pissed off to focus on anything else while I waited, and STILL saw the bus I needed to take to get back pass me by just as I was done, leaving me stuck for almost an hour.

Then, I found out that there was a live band playing outside the library for some reason, AND I was locked out of the house, not that I would have wanted to stay there anyway because I could hear music even there (not to mention baseball across the street).

Then, after I passed the time elsewhere for a while, I waste way too much potentially productive time doing something else instead of the next part of the new series.

That next part will go up sometime Saturday morning or afternoon, and I’ll try to get the part after that up later in the day Monday, and work on as many parts as I can over the weekend. I may also introduce an #OccupyTea category for the new series. That’s right, I’m resorting to Twitter hashtags as categories. Clearly, we have reached a new low.