Author and Thinker
Cooking By Numbers this week. Have a look if you want. I don’t have much to say about it.
Judging by the results of the poll, I’m going to be using all the StumbleUpon interests. Sorry for pushing the polls down with the sheer size of the label list. I need to find a more compact label list that doesn’t require me to do some hacking.
So it seems we have a few more readers now than we did a week ago, especially with a second LiveJournal linking to us. Yesterday and the day before, Da Blog had nine times more visitors than it did the day before that, so it seems some housekeeping is in order.
First: RSS feeds. The-zaniak has created a LiveJournal feed for Da Blog, and my response is: Um… you do know Blogger comes with its own RSS feed, right? If you have IE 7 or Firefox, you should see an RSS icon light up when you see the page. (I can only speak to IE there; I don’t know how it works for Firefox.) Unless I get something else cool from having an LJ feed, it seems a bit unnecessary. This has prompted me to add feed links to the sidebar. (If you wanted to create an LJ feed, you’d have done better to create one for Sandsday. I’d create one myself if I knew how to create an RSS feed from a pre-existing MySQL database.)
I’ve also posted in the past on the idea of Da Blog as a collection of sub-blogs, and as such I’ve also added a list of all of Da Blog’s labels to the sidebar. They come complete with their own feeds; this post explains how you can form them. Both those new sidebar items are right below the larger blog archive, which makes them, and Da Blog Poll, less visible.
I’m also re-opening and extending by one week one of Da Blog Poll questions, removing the Random Internet Discovery from the list of options and replacing it with the fairly self-explanatory “Explorations into History”, which could include such things as my opinion on the presidents. Although I have saved the other results to a personal file, if you are one of the three people that have voted on the poll before, I strongly urge doing so again. If you vote “other” I expect you to specify what you have in mind on this post (where you can also learn more about the options) or this one. This is probably the last time I’m going to re-open this particular poll, which has existed in some form almost since Da Blog was founded. I’m also giving you until the end of August 16 to tell me whether you think I should post every time I put up a new strip. You can vote on any or all of the poll questions. I also encourage you to contribute to the poll on the front page of the web site.
Also, after nearly a year since the Web site was put up, I’ve finally deleted the long-dormant Da Blog Poll from the days when Blogger didn’t have its own poll element.
Finally, I’m offering you the chance to have your name in lights, as long as you won’t get paid for it, at least not right away. If you’re a movie buff – and not just the “Spiderman” kind, but one with a real grasp of film history – I invite you to join my 100 Greatest Movies Project, my seemingly endless quest to create the definitive list of greatest movies from all the ones that have come before, to sing the praises of the movies that make the list. E-mail me at mwmailsea at yahoo dot com if you’re interested and I’ll show you a sample write-up and a list of movies that are either on the list or close enough to make it on when I retabulate the list (or at some point in the future when new lists come out). I used the same principle in creating the NFL SuperPower Rankings, and released lists for last year, but it proved to be too much work. If you’re an NFL buff, and you’re willing to put in the work, you can have it for your own website as long as you credit me with the idea, and I’ll link to you on Da Blog.
And if you have any other ideas for what the web site or Da Blog could use, feel free to leave a comment on this post.
UPDATE 7/25: Okay, this is why I have long thought about leaving Blogger, because of unnecessary bullshit. Evidently for the last 24 hours the reposted poll and the two new features were at the top of the sidebar even though I had THOUGHT I had saved their moves. Then when I was told I had changes I hadn’t saved, it wouldn’t save, and then it would tell me “an error occured” no matter what I did after that. lk asfdasilnbg grlkldoe m,x bjfk dsndihtsgugvwbgjwhidxdyf
Wow. Wow.
David Morgan-Mar went beyond just commenting on one of my posts this time, linking to my Darths and Droids review with a thumbs-up on his LiveJournal. (And I didn’t even ask for the link!) Between that and Morgan-Mar’s various LJ friends, I got 60 hits yesterday and I’m already approaching that mark today, numbers Da Blog has never heard of outside football season.
So a quick welcome to new readers and a polite request to read my various other posts, on webcomics or otherwise. Of course I also invite you to check out my web site, link is on the top of the sidebar.
Well, I’ve decided that until the poll is closed, I’m setting StumbleUpon to check all topics – even though that often leaves me without anything to say – and here’s why.
I have my toes dipped in a lot of fields. One thing I’ve noticed is that there are often groups of sites that all tend to have the same group of regulars. It’s fairly rare, though, for those regulars to really cross over into fields that are too different. It’s rare for me to encounter someone from a webcomic board on a political board, or a sports board.
One thing that I hope to do with Da Blog is to connect various different groups together and expose them to vastly different viewpoints, and a variety of fandoms. I hope that large, disparate groups can come and cross-pollinate, become exposed to new ideas and experiences, and come out richer for the experience. That’s part of the reason why I’ve conceived of Da Blog as a collection of smaller sub-blogs.
So we begin with a brief history of the Middle East through the people who have conquered it, which reminds me of David Horsey’s “Brief History of the Holy Land“.
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.
I’ll think this over over the weekend.
Can you believe I had my entire announcement of Truth Court all written up and ready to go, and I click to have my post get published, and my connection HAS to drop at THAT INSTANT, and it turns out that Blogger NOT ONCE saved a copy of my post, and I had to be a dumbass and not give it a current saved draft – WHY did my brain choose THAT MOMENT to brainfart on me?@ lj
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.
(From Ctrl+Alt+Del. Click for full-sized The Talk.)
Oh no.
Oh hell no.
Near as I can tell, this can only lead to one thing: the dissolution of their impending marriage, thus causing two years of storyline to be reduced to “shaggy dog story” in less than three months or so.
I mentioned in my CAD post that I was leaving open the possibility of the miscarriage storyline being the start of a descent into First and Ten Syndrome, but that I also wasn’t ruling out CAD recovering from it. Things are not looking good for the latter possibility right now.
The silver lining is that the Lucas-Kate relationship is, at the moment, the only other piece of dramatic continuity in Ctrl+Alt+Del (not counting the main characters’ jobs; Ethan’s and Lucas’s have never really been used as a source of any real drama, and Lilah’s hasn’t even been brought up in ages). If the Ethan-Lilah relationship is reduced to “just friends” (going with a full-scale separation leaves open the door to more drama) it could mean pulling back from the Cerebus Syndrome ledge, returning to a largely pre-2006 status quo, and devoting more strips to wacky hijinks.
So it’s entirely possible that, far from jumping off the ledge to First and Ten Syndrome, this strip marks a hard slam on the brakes before reaching it. If so, though, it’s a clumsy way to drop the relationship, and it’s kind of doubtful anyway.
And if Buckley manages to throw in one more heart-wrenching dramatic turn into his comic, even after coming through with this? That may be enough to drive me away from Ctrl+Alt+Del.
Tread lightly, Buckley. I’m watching you.
(I promised two posts over the weekend and delivered neither. They are forthcoming but will probably wait until Thursday, and one of them may take even longer.)