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More on the Penny Arcade Kickstarter

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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

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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?

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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.

The Tea Party Occupies Wall Street

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The funny thing about the “people’s movements” that have energized both sides of the aisle and challenged their respective parties over the course of the past three years is that they’re not inherently incompatible.

In fact, they largely stem from the same source. The Tea Party was a reaction to the perceived encroaching dominance and enriching of government; Occupy Wall Street was a reaction to the perceived encroaching dominance and enriching of big corporations. Both at least portrayed themselves as movements of the people against those with a lust for power and money, and even to the extent they were single-issue movements – the Tea Party excessive taxation, OWS Wall Street’s role in the economic crisis – it was still possible for someone to sympathize theoretically with both positions. Indeed, part of OWS’ message is precisely that big business has taken over the government.

Although both movements are largely associated with a particular political persuasion, the Tea Party positioned itself as a libertarian movement independent of the two major parties, while even some conservatives felt Occupy Wall Street had a point, even if they disagreed with their methods. It was possible to be a Democratic Tea Partier and a Republican occupier of Wall Street. To be sure, the diehards of each political persuasion could probably never be convinced of that, claiming the former to be fakes or the latter to not be “real conservatives”.

Still, I see in the compatibility of the two movements hope for moving beyond our tense ideological divide. A lot of people across the country saw outrage in their particular economic situation, and a lot of people across the country saw outrage in the general economic situation, enough so that they felt the need to demonstrate their outrage. It’s a shame that OWS seems to have lost a lot of its momentum, unable to seize the momentum of the initial protests into a long-term political movement like the Tea Party, and it’s also a shame that the Tea Party itself may be sputtering out as the Republican Party has settled on its most moderate plausible candidate for President, but in that may be opportunity. Had both movements remained strong they might have become irreconcilably opposed. Now, though, if we can take these two different currents of populist outrage and find a way to articulate a coherent, populist message and platform from the both of them, we can effectively give voice to the broader position of the people, and in so doing, create a better chance to “take back the country” than either movement could have done alone or in opposition.

This unified, populist platform, with the potential to strike fear in the heart of both parties, might have among its guiding principles:

  • The liberty of the people shall not be infringed.
  • The people will fight for their freedom and their livelihood against all who would take it.
  • Government should not take our hard-earned money so they can intrude into every aspect of our lives.
  • Wall Street should not be able to make themselves rich at the expense of everyone else.

If I had to distill the message sent by the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street into a single sentence, it might be: We won’t let anyone else screw with us. Whether the enemy is government or Big Business, the people are willing to fight back against the both of them. And considering how huge the people are compared to government or business, that’s a force that will prove impossible to ignore.

Over the next several days and weeks I’m going to look at how this position might play itself out in practice. I’m going to look at various issues and consider what a policy based on the best interests of the people would decide. At no point will I give more power or money to government or big business unless there is no way for that to come at the expense of the people and there is no alternative. As such, I won’t always advocate things either political party is backing right now. In so doing, I hope to give structure to this new populist movement, to recommend concrete strategies for people to advocate and follow and guiding principles for voting and activism.

It’s time to move beyond pointless division and allow all of us to move forward as Americans, truly and passionately, as more than a buzzword for politicians who are about to realize just how much they didn’t actually want it to happen, and if nothing else, set an example for a Congress seemingly unable to do so.

Update on the forums

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On the eve of my long-in-the-works political series, I’ve all but started over on the forums.

For one thing, I’ve put up a proper registration page.

More importantly, I have instituted a new rule: any account that remains inactive for 14 days after creation will be automatically deleted. As the plugin I’m using for this isn’t very common and hasn’t been tested with even my somewhat-outdated version of WordPress (and thus I don’t know how bbPress-compatible it is either), please let me know if it causes any problems it shouldn’t as well.

Apologies if you have created a legitimate account; you can re-create it when needed, but I’m not fishing through the nearly 800 squatter accounts that were deleted as a result of this. CAPTCHA on individual posts wasn’t going to cut it for me; I would have preferred to institute CAPTCHA on the registration page, but without a plugin to do that, this is the next best thing.

Expect a post on the rules thread laying out some of the rules that are inactive because of the lack of bbPress plugins to institute them in the near future. My hunch is that I will need to install the BuddyPress plugin to institute many of them. More on that when we get there.

Hopefully the last streak-filler-post.

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This is going to take some explanation.

If you’ve been reading Homestuck, you know that over the weekend Andrew Hussie dropped a bit of a bombshell on his audience.

Now, in retrospect, I should have done a post on it on Monday, but I felt that, even with as much as Hussie had already dropped, he was about to drop some more. Part of it was that I was looking for the answer to a question that I had no way of knowing was going to be answered that imminently. Towards the end of the day, I did have the vast majority of a Homestuck post written, but a lot of it was rushed, and by the end of the day there was another page that convinced me even more that the bombshell-dropping wasn’t over.

Instead, we’ve gotten the standard look-around-the-new-character’s-home, and right now any post would be an after-the-fact post, so in effect I’m rolling this up into the post I’d need to put out for whatever this is leading up to. Which I hope isn’t the end-of-act flash…

Summer plans

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I intend for this to be quite possibly the biggest summer in the history of Da Blog, so here’s what you can expect.

First, there will definitely be a Homestuck post at some point this week. Probably Tuesday or Wednesday. Recent events, shall we say, have seen to that.

Also by the end of this week, the webcomic reviews may start up again. I stress may, because it depends on a number of factors.

I have hinted at another political series, and I’ve tentatively scheduled the start of that for July 2, so in two weeks. There’s an off chance I’ll start it a week sooner, depending on how the writing goes later this week.

Before that series starts, I need to make a major cleanup of the forum, which has literally hundreds of spam accounts (and to my knowledge, only me as a legitimate one). I need to figure out how to make a registration page that weeds them out.

Once the series starts, it will dominate Da Blog other than webcomic reviews, so that will be the main proximate consequence of the summer.

The most important parts of the summer, though, are going to happen later, maybe not even really during the summer.

Stay tuned.

State of My Life and MorganWick.com

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As I type this, I have had an actual good night’s sleep exactly once since Sunday.

The worst part? I’m still not sure whether I did enough fast enough to pass my classes.

On the plus side, I’ve started the process of paying for hosting; I should have a year’s worth of hosting paid for by the end of the week, so I’m taking off the donation link that, predictably, no one clicked on anyway. That means both the domain and the hosting will be coming up for renewal in a year’s time, so I’m going to spend the summer working on something to provide a long-term underpinning for the site.

I think.

Oh! And I got my OOTS Kickstarter package while everything else was going on. Basically, I bypassed all the other stuff and just dug into the main book I got. I don’t know if that says anything about anything.

My Adventures with HP Tech Support

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So I mentioned a week ago that my power cable broke, right? Well, here’s the story of what happened to my replacement:

Apparently I didn’t get it as early as WEDNESDAY because HP sent it to my old address but my new city and ZIP code, despite my giving them the correct address AND their not having a problem with the address before. Neither FedEx nor HP directly told me of the problem until SATURDAY MORNING, and when Mom called them only TWO HOURS later she was initially told we were out of luck because it was already scheduled to be shipped back to HP. When we picked it up I got the impression that whoever called me went out of process, meaning I SHOULD have never been notified at all.

Making matters worse, I found out later that day I’d wasted my saved-up money faster than I thought and I’m counting on the donation drive on the left side of Da Blog more than I thought just to get back to being able to pay for a year’s hosting. With auspicious timing, I’m probably going to have a lot of filler throughout the drive, specifically a continuing short story I might bang out, so I can concentrate on schoolwork, though I will still post on any breaking developments in the webcomics I’m reading.

So yeah, not the best day I’ve ever had, but hey, my power cord is back!

The Great MorganWick.com Donation Drive of 2012

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I’ve bit the bullet and added a donation button to the left side of Da Blog. My hosting bill comes due later this month, and while I’m reasonably confident I have enough money to cover one year of hosting, the more money I have the more years of hosting I can buy.

This is not me going to “donation as a business model” or anything like that. This is a short-term pledge drive to pay for as much long-term hosting as I can. The donation button will be removed once the hosting is paid for, which could be anywhere from one to two weeks. I’m hopeful that within the next year I’ll have at least laid the groundwork for a more sustainable income stream for the site.

I don’t seriously expect to get much in the way of donations anyway – based on my number of visitors, I probably shouldn’t expect more than one or two donations, and I’m pretty sure one of those is going to be my dad…