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I’m probably leaving enough clues for you to figure out what this is.

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I have a number of things on my plate. I have some posts I’ve been sitting on because I’ve had more urgent things to work on in the time when I’m not completely distracted trying to catch up on feeds. I’m trying to make a big finish to make sure I pass one of my classes, for one thing.

I also have a decent-sized series I was planning to start tomorrow that would have served to maintain a consistency of posts into the fall, and combined with other projects, the RID, and webcomic reviews, maintained my 5-post-a-week pace well into next year. But because of procrastination on my part, I entered this past week with quite a bit of work to do to get that project ready. It was already somewhat doubtful I’d be able to get all the requisite research done in a week and might have needed to go to backup plans.

So naturally I get zero of that research done, or much of anything else, personal project or no, during the past week, and now I have a mountain of makeup work to get done, and I’ve been spending the past weekend catching up on seven hours’ worth of TV shows as a result of missing two before last week. TV Tropes has ruined my life again! (Or in this case, introduced me to the Nostalgia Critic. It takes a lot of doing to get me to actually laugh out loud, and this passes with flying colors.)

So I feel I have no choice but to delay this project for a year until 2010.

I’m not particularly pleased with this decision. It passes up a once-in-six-to-eleven-years opportunity to start the series on a Monday, and by doing it next year I’m starting it on a Tuesday, which is… awkward. I could have the second part still be on Wednesday, or delay it two years to 2011 and start it on a Wednesday, but the latter might be too long for me and the nation and the world, and it would be most useful if I could get it out before the 2010 midterms, so the short notice a postponement entails is dicey enough.

But I feel it’s probably for the best. I don’t want a repeat of the mess that was the October of Politics, where the work I get done is of significantly less quality than what I had in mind and derails my life. Perhaps by waiting a year, I’ll have a larger audience and the series would make a larger impact. Also, I originally envisioned the global warming series being mostly over at this point, and it’s barely getting started, so the two mega-projects would be running concurrently for most of the time, complete with the research needed for each. There’s some research I still need to do and fast to move on to the next part of the global warming series, and two posts I was hoping to get done over the weekend that I’m unlikely to get either done today, even with this postponement. Basically, I have way too much on my plate already for the next week without this little distraction.

With luck I can focus on the problems I have now, and hold off on this problem for another twelve months.

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

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If I had decided exactly what strip I was running today, let alone actually made it, the strip would be posted about now. Instead it’s probably not going up until after 3 PM PT.

Still no votes on the RID poll? Do you people care that little about it? Well, this is probably hardly the first time I’ve linked to some vegetarian site, and it’s definitely not the first time I’ve linked to a recipe site…

I desperately need a real job, so naturally I’ve put in zero effort towards that for months.

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I’m pissed at myself, I’m pissed at the library, and I’m pissed at timing.

I wouldn’t ordinarily hate the University District Street Fair. I’ve strolled through it myself on occasion, taken in sights, seen and tasted interesting things.

But when the vast majority of the decent Wi-Fi spaces near my house are right near the fair, I don’t particularly want a big booming concert when I’m trying to do something, and I certainly don’t want the library to make it hard for me to work under those circumstances.

(It didn’t help that I lost my keys right before I left the house.)

So I’m really pissed that all this conspired toaln dfjhkrqvkaflhalsbwvnfhushwimowbtjwo ybiofvhqepg35nogv2g3qv[ delay posting the strip until not that long before 5.

Tomorrow’s strip will be no earlier than noon PT.

I posted a strip I never should have, so I have two strips redundant with it.

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(From Sandsday. Click for full-sized going around in circles.)

EDIT: I forgot to remove this post when I actually DID post the strip before leaving earlier today. I’m spending the weekend in the Portland area for a wedding. I may have street signs NEXT weekend. But not as many as I would have otherwise hoped, at least from this trip.

I wonder if the weightiness of the topic, the amount of research required, the stress of it all and all that is related to the lateness of the strip.

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The strip is finally up, and there’s a very good reason it’s so late: I’m just about done with a lengthy discourse that starts with this strip and will ultimately close out the first phase of the argument and carry on into Phase II. (Yes, I know it’s more than a little disturbing that the first phase took a month.)

To celebrate, I’m going to take a full week off from doing any of that sort of heady research and use the time for more productive pursuits, such as working on posts I’ve been putting off (expect at least one webcomic post to actually come along on Tuesday), then spend some time on another research project I anticipate being much simpler, before re-starting work on the Global Warming Series.

I actually think the remaining phases, despite being the more heady parts, could be a little easier for me to write, since they’re less philosophical, less foundational on their own, and could be a little less interconnected. (Famous last words…)

Now that that’s over with…

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I’m not trying the trick I used last night to post the strip again. Actually I think I got Yet Another reason I need to leave Freehostia. For a while now, for whatever reason, I think they think I have a virus or something because a lot of the images I’ve submitted – images that were created on my desktop and only ever were on my USB drive and laptop en route to their servers – have had their permissions changed so that no one can “execute” them (not the same as “read”). Execute images. It might be something having to do with FTP, I don’t know, but using the trick I tried last night I first had the FTP connection crap out on me (either I hope IE8 fixed how Windows handles uploading to FTP or Freehostia needs to fix their FTP system) then I saw that the strip had been uploaded after all but it was no good, so I uploaded it to the file manager and it seemed to work okay but I find out today that the strip image was completely missing so I had to upload it AGAIN around 7 PM. As far as I’m concerned the strip was up so I’m plowing forward.

So after the past weekend’s expletive-laden rant let’s get into details. My ideal Plan A is to work on the web site and Da Blog and everything from home, but that hasn’t been an option, for whatever reason, for nearly if not over a year. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts I go to my Dad’s workplace and mooch off an Internet connection that’s not even the workplace’s. The place itself is supposed to have a connection but that hasn’t worked since virtually the instant it was instituted. So earlier this month the place I normally mooch off of decided to secure their connection, but they’re fine with me mooching off them, which would be great if my laptop could get past the “detecting network type” stage without spitting out a “network doesn’t seem to exist” error despite the fact it’s staying on the list of networks the whole time. So now BOTH my Plan B and C, accessed from the same location, aren’t working, and while both are nominally working on the problem it’s at a glacial pace (and I don’t think it’s a good idea to only have one guy who knows the security code who’s not always working there if you intend for actual patrons to use the connection) and to varying extents I get a vibe from them that it’s my problem, forcing me to use my battery for Plans D and E, which for whatever reason tend to be pretty slow, perhaps slower than normal, at least for Plan D.

On the plus side, those annoying downstairs neighbors are finally gone, so if you move in directly downstairs from me and set up an unsecured Internet connection I can use fairly reliably I’ll give you a gazillion dollars. (Gazillion dollars to be paid in varying amounts at varying intervals over whatever period of time the payer deems adequate including never.) Or at the very least you can chip in your IT expertise at Dad’s workplace or the place next door and get at least one Internet connection working enough to be useful.

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

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I don’t see how this is any different from a spiffier version of this. I mean, it’s barely been two months since that earlier RID! The alternative is to get insane, and probably hypnotized.

The Random Internet Discovery is a colossal failure compared to what I originally had in mind for it. I hoped I would have a bunch of interesting sites that would appeal to me and that I would want to disseminate and expose to the teeming masses flooding Da Blog. Back when I had my political series last fall I hoped to bring in whatever interesting political sites I could find. Maybe I could find interesting webcomics or other interesting things.

Instead the RID has been a parade of funny astronomical stuff, cat pictures, other funny pictures, sites that should probably be illegal, religious sites not worth commenting on, interesting lists and tools, and just plain incomprehensible stuff. There have been maybe one or two RIDs worth commenting on since I started it in August or so.

The RID hasn’t been part of the “enlighten the world” plan I had for Da Blog at all. Its main value has been in giving me one less day that I have to think about posting. The irony of that is that I had planned to write rather interesting commentary for the sites I actually found relevant and interesting. By and large, the RID has been incredibly disappointing and pointless.

So I’ve started a new Da Blog Poll, the first since the new year. It’ll run for two weeks and ask whether or not I should continue the RID, stop it, or introduce biases into my StumbleUpon account. I ran a similar poll when I started the RID and the consensus seemed to be that I should allow all interests in, and I didn’t intend to introduce any biases by flagging it whenever I encountered a site I liked, but that system doesn’t seem to have worked that well. “Fixing” RID by introducing such biases could make RIDs slightly rarer, by bringing in sites I would need to actually write something about, but it would also make RID more meaningful to me and to my audience.

Your thoughts?

My revised mission statement on the global warming series

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I think I’ve had an epiphany.

I have a confession to make. My intent with the global warming series was that I would attract partisans on both sides to argue their points on Da Blog, using my sources and the strip as a jumping-off point. My hope was to depict an argument so complete and convincing even hardcore partisans would be forced to rethink their positions if they disagreed with the final result (or even if they agreed). As such, I didn’t want to leave any information on the table, and partisans wouldn’t allow any argument to go unchallenged, lest it help serve to convince me that they were wrong, and thus allow the strip to convince others. So whenever I posted a round of the argument, people disagreeing with it would post a rebuttal, which would then get incorporated into the strip. That strip would provoke rebuttals, and the process would continue ad infinitum. To save time and blunt the impact of the argument in the strip, people might even respond directly to the original posts and vice versa, creating a full-on debate that would be mirrored in the strip.

I would need those partisans in order to have that debate, though, so last weekend I picked a fight at Newsbusters and posted a thread at Democratic Underground hoping to bait and guilt-trip them into coming here and at least starting the debate. Then I sat back and watched…

…as absolutely no one from either side showed up.

Yes, it was always far-fetched in retrospect because the strip wasn’t likely to convince much of anyone with its lack of readership, not to mention the inherent silliness of a freakin’ comic strip being so world-changing. In fact part of the plan was to build that readership that would be convinced by bringing in the people that would help make it convincing. I never said it was a flawless plan. Still, I grumbled as I set out to try to use Google and my existing sources to fill out the arguments, perhaps a little bit relieved at not getting chewed out by the partisans for a month or two but otherwise disappointed I couldn’t get them to do my research for me.

Another problem was that although I tried as hard as I could to create a balance between skeptical sources and environmentalist sources, between partisans on the left and right, I wouldn’t be able to be a neutral judge on the matter, because I myself was coming from a liberal background. In fact I portrayed my project to the people at Newsbusters as them debating me, neglecting to mention my trip to DU. But in truth, part of the reason I started the series in the first place was that I found skeptical arguments compelling and felt I could potentially be convinced. In fact I often find myself emphasizing with whatever side’s information I’m reading at the time. I thought this fact would help convince skeptics I really was interested in their position and my neutrality could be trusted.

After my attempt at bringing people to Da Blog to debate was a bust, I still maintained e-mail contact with one right-wing partisan, the maintainer of that last, lengthy skeptical source, arguing more about the merits of debating here and via e-mail than about the actual matters at hand. I insisted the point I made in the previous paragraph, and Thursday I got this unexpected response:

“If the side you take is based on whoever you read last then I am sorry, that is pathetic and you are absolutely hopeless at analyzing information. In this case I will not be able to convince you of anything.”

My mind raged with responses. Most people are probably like that (that, or it’s based on whoever they read first)! If the balance of arguments ultimately tips one way or the other, sure I can eventually be convinced! My plan was to collect all the information over the course of the series, then reread the whole thing, churn through the arguments in my head, and decide on a position! It’s not that I don’t have critical thinking skills, I just need to give them a workout, and this series is part of that!

So why don’t I?

In the end, I decided, he’s right. I shouldn’t just take whatever I’m told as given, I should work through the evidence myself. I shouldn’t need the partisans to tell me what to think. If I’m going to give my critical thinking skills a workout, I need to give my critical thinking skills a workout. And since I hope to do a lot of thinking over the course of my life, this should be an important and positive excersize for me.

So you know what? I don’t care anymore that no one’s pitching in at the Global Warming Open Thread, or e-mailing me with their arguments. It’s going to be a bit more work for me, but it’s work I probably should do. I’ll still look through and take into account the comments on the Open Thread, but I won’t be as upset if there aren’t any, I’m not going to be specifically looking for them, I’ll work through the research myself to the extent that Google and my existing sources allow me to, and I’m no longer checking my e-mail on a daily basis, but at the rate I normally do. It’ll be a more fulfilling experience for me, building skills I’ll need to do more of these series in the future, perhaps even skills that will prove useful for snagging a real job or at least doing well in college.

If there’s a downside, I might not have as much information as I’d like if it doesn’t pop up right away in Google, and I want as complete a picture as possible for this heady issue. But I think it’s worth the risk from a personal growth point of view, and I hope you’re all along for the ride.