Web site news

Fair warning.

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As you might have guessed, the level of activity on Da Blog the past month-plus has taken a bite out of my schoolwork, and it’s coming up on time to catch up on it.

As such, don’t be surprised to see activity on Da Blog ratchet down considerably. I’ll try to maintain The Streak, but I might miss a week or two on the full webcomic reviews, and engage in more filler.

I will still post on events in webcomics I already read as they happen, though. For example, judging by the fact I can’t get to the MSPA site right now, I have a feeling I’ll be posting on that on Monday…

The plan going forward

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I had intended to re-enact my 2008 October of Politics, one of the dumber decisions I had made for Da Blog, this year, only starting far earlier and with more of a buffer. Right now that’s not looking like it’s going to happen at the moment; even allowing schoolwork to fall by the wayside, I’ve gotten basically none of it done over the course of the past month. Most of my time (at least, that’s actually been productive) has wound up going towards webcomic reviews instead, as I’ve been reminded of why I stopped doing them in 2009 in the first place.

I had hoped that that political series would build enough momentum to allow me to raise enough money to pay hosting costs that are due near the start of June. That may end up happening anyway, thanks to support from my parents and, judging from the ad rates I’ve occasionally seen, Da Blog returning to heights of popularity unseen since 2009. I’m weighing the pros and cons of putting up a temporary donation link regardless.

I do still intend to pull off that series, but it’s now likely that it won’t get started until the middle of June. It’s also possible I decide to lay off those plans entirely in favor of another project I have in mind for the site. You may also see me take one or two weeks off from doing webcomic reviews later in the month and especially in early June, to make sure I have something going for my classes.

I’ll continue The Streak to the extent that it’s feasible until then, but I may need to come up with better ideas for filler, possibly even to the point of bringing back the Random Internet Discovery.

Blargh.

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Okay. This series has burned me out.

I’m not going to put up more posts about the new playoff system, which looks to be some form of bracketed plus-one, until later, though it’s probably still going to be before any sort of final decision is made. I leave you with what I originally wrote in 2009 about that system:

Plus-One top 4 bracketed: GPA: 2.18. Grade: C+. A top-4 plus-one, had it been adopted in 1998, would have had a longer honeymoon than the BCS, despite arguably ruining the 1999 title picture by introducing controversy where there was none in the BCS, by averting controversy in 2000 and 2001 and not ruining the 2002 title picture. Then in 2003 it might have worsened the BCS controversy of that year regarding Oklahoma still being vaulted to despite losing the Big 12 title game, but tweaks in the system would fix that. But in 2004 it would have increased the importance of a controversy that didn’t need it, repeated the 1999 incident in 2005, and would have been insufficient three straight years from 2007 to 2009, creating an argument that with increased college football parity, we need an 8-team system. Too bad 8-team systems would have been even worse those years…

Of the major formats of 8 teams or less, this was the best one; I graded it a C+ in 2010 and a C- in 2011 (the latter for picking Stanford over Pac-12 champion Oregon). There are a few different formats out there regarding conference champions, and I need to assess them, and that would be part of the point of continuing the series.

Blargh. And before I found out about the BCS meetings, I had other plans for this week that were so much better…

The real reason I wanted to post this? The site layout is back to normal! Also, apparently Randall went so far as to create special comics for browsers with Javascript not working right for the Umwelt comic.

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(From xkcd. Click for full-sized emotion chart.)

Randall Munroe is somewhat of a recluse. Oh, he has a “blag” that he posts on from time to time, but he almost never posts on specific strips there. It can be downright maddening to come across a comic and see it just sitting there, with nothing from the author beyond what’s there on the page, leaving it up to his sizeable fanbase to interpret the comic. Randall definitely belongs to the school that “my work speaks for itself”.

A year and a half ago, Randall’s fiance/wife was diagnosed with cancer. In the time since then, many an xkcd comic has reflected their ongoing struggles with the disease, especially since Randall posted some of the details in June of last year. Although the fanbase has been largely and rightly supportive, it’s been, well… interesting seeing Randall’s somewhat random, contemplative comic become affected by Randall’s having other things on his mind.

I think a large part of the fanbase’s support owes itself to the cancer comics not being any inferior in quality (or informativeness) to any other xkcd comic, and not completely taking over the comic at the expense of everything else they came for either. It’s not like xkcd has been turned into this. On the flip side, in fact, an interesting side effect of the whole ordeal has been to humanize Randall in the eyes of the comic’s fanbase, someone with actual feelings that actual things happen to, rather than some sort of comic-generating machine from outer space like the rest of the comic can seem like (even more so than David Morgan-Mar).

(Hey, I started writing this half an hour before the end of the day when it became apparent I’d have to wait another day to put up the next part of the College Football Playoff Systems series. Cut me some slack.)

Change of plans for College Football Playoff System series

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I really wish I’d known about the BCS meetings being this week, last week. Admittedly I kind of dozed off for several hours Wednesday, but as I write this I’m going so slowly I’m not sure I’ll even be able to hold myself to what I’m about to set.

For the first time since last year, I’ll be putting out two posts in a day on Thursday, covering both halves of the BCS era and examining how each and every one of the playoff systems in yesterday’s post would deal with them. That’ll set up Friday’s post giving a final verdict to all the systems. There’s an off chance I won’t give the final verdict until Monday, but I’m trying not to.

For the past four months, my main concern has been The Streak, but the BCS meetings are kind of imposing a bigger constraint on when I can post these things…

I hate my life right now.

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3:45 PM: I enter class hoping to find some sort of idea I can use as a jumping-off point for a post today.

4:15 PM: I find said idea and also realize I intended to write a post taking off on another idea I had. I begin writing the latter.

4:45 PM: Break time. People move positions such that I find myself in a place where I can’t get anything done for the rest of class.

5:50 PM: Half an hour of struggling to read a comic for a future review in the library.

6:25 PM: Leave campus.

7:25 PM: Get home, realize the school across the street is going to be making it impossible to get serious work done for the next two hours, and my mom and company aren’t helping.

9:40 PM: Mom and company start watching TV, which means I have more time where I’m not going to get stuff done other than having dinner.

10:30 PM: Mom and company stop watching TV. Naturally, I goof off a little in front of the TV myself.

11:30 PM: I finally get back to starting to write the post again, FIVE HOURS after I last attempted to work on it, intending not to allow me to rush myself… only to find I’m in no state to think coherently about it.

And you wonder why I wouldn’t be a fan of my current living and work situation.

(No lecturing me about working on my blog during class, please. Thank you.)

An open letter to the Internet Explorer team:

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If I exit Internet Explorer, and certain processes/pages don’t close for whatever reason, and I have to use the task manager to close them…

…then when I reopen Internet Explorer, the pages associated with the processes I had to close manually shouldn’t be the only ones that reopen.

Of course, what you should really have is an option to automatically resume the last session upon starting again (instead of hunting through the menu unless it crashed) like, I don’t know, EVERY OTHER BROWSER IN EXISTENCE.

(Still ticked off after planning to write a big post about Fox’s new Saturday night sports experiment and get a few other things done besides and instead spending most of my free time all day having to wipe the SAME piece of malware off my computer TWICE…)

ComicMix “Webcomics March Madness” Tournament Blows Up

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I’ve become fascinated with the “March Madness”-style tournament the ComicMix website has been running, partly because such a structured excersize is right up my alley, but also because it’s blown up into something no one could have ever anticipated, one that’s gotten multiple webcomickers’ competitive juices flowing, helped by the increasing cash prizes for comics making the Final Four. I only ever heard of it because of various webcomickers’ linking to it.

The site did much the same thing last year, but that stayed fairly self-contained and saw several fairly obscure webcomics having considerable success. That’s far from the case this year; the only comic in the Sweet 16, let alone later rounds, that I didn’t recognize is something called Romantically Apocalyptic, which knocked off the likes of Girls with Slingshots and defending champion Erfworld before finally falling to Goblins in the Elite 8, in a George Mason-esque run that would be like if a 14-seed in the NCAA Tournament somehow reached the Elite 8. The very first round saw every contest get more votes than the final round last year, and it’s only gotten more so from there; one particularly important creator has been Andrew Hussie, whose linking to the tournament has caused the site to repeatedly crash (which seems to be the case with everything MSPA touches). I’m positively scared of what they’re planning next month. I can’t imagine what this thing is going to look like next year, but I’ll probably be following it closely every step of the way.

When the final four came down to MSPA v. Gunnerkrigg Court and Goblins v. Order of the Stick, I figured for all the world that this gigantic showdown would, against all odds, come down to the two comics I currently regularly follow (although more on MSPA next week), MSPA and OOTS. However, in the end, that didn’t end up happening; Goblins managed to survive against OOTS, while the showdown between MSPA and the Court came down to an earth-shattering, apocalyptic, site-crashing showdown that, when the dust cleared and the site came back up, ended with the Court prevailing by a grand total of forty-six votes.

Now the final battle is in progress between Goblins and the Court, which if you wish and are familiar with the comics, you can take part in (or at least follow) here. Neither are comics that I myself have reviewed, but they’re both comics I’ve considered. In fact, I’ve had plans to review the Court and Questionable Content in some order since 2009, and when they met in the Elite 8 I decided to use the result of that matchup to at least help determine which to review first. Now, however, I’ve decided that the winner of the tournament, whichever it is, will be the subject of a review in two weeks’ time. Both I intend to review before the end of May, but this will determine which gets the immediate spotlight, and which I end up delaying until next month.

What? Of course I’m still a webcomic reviewer. Why are you laughing?

Update on the current situation

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I swear I haven’t up and decided to render The Streak meaningless by continuing it with a bunch of contentless posts. I do intend to start one of the better series I’ve planned for Da Blog, but the new quarter just started and I might be getting myself heavily involved in it. I have every intent to post something substantial tomorrow (Wednesday), though. Stay tuned.

Kickstarter Feature Jeopardized

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The method I had been using to keep track of all the highest-earning Kickstarters, both for the weekly Kickstarter posts and for a Google Docs spreadsheet of my own I was considering making public, no longer seems to be working.

I will consider finding another method, but it may be unable to catch Kickstarters that aren’t being listed with their category for whatever reason. I must warn, however, that the most likely outcome is just stopping with the feature, as I’ve gotten tired of the venture, it’s very time-consuming, and I’d like not to interrupt the week with something irrelevant if and when I start a new series I’ve been planning and hinting at.