Author and Thinker
In about a week I’ll be starting the Sandsday mail call, to honor the strip’s first anniversary, where the characters will respond to your questions – assuming I get any. You can submit questions by leaving a comment on any “webcomic news” post or sending me an e-mail at mwmailsea at yahoo dot com.
I have a LOT of stuff to wrap up over the next week or so…
As hilarious as this is, I think I have indeed found an omission (highlight the next line):
“Then why do so many people seem to think there is one?”
The regular webcomic post will probably be tomorrow. Fortunately, I’ve been working on next week’s post for weeks and it should be ready for Tuesday.
Until no later than Friday, the strip will post around 9 or 10 AM PT. The reasons have to do with a complex process I call “staying up so late watching TV it’s 3 AM by the time I even have the strip written and it’s raining outside”.
(VH1 Classic is doing a one-week marathon of actual music videos from the era people actually watched them that they’re branding as “2009 for 2009” and ever since I finally figured out they’re alphabetized by title I’ve been addicted, looking for certain songs or videos I anticipate coming up. I’m so pathetic I actually rickrolled myself Sunday night. So of course this whole marathon has to coincide with school starting up again…)
Oh, and Buzzcomix got suspended by its web host over the weekend and lost all its votes, and so if you’re reading the strip and like it, go vote for it RIGHT DAMN NOW! Let’s see how high it can go!
…this is the only post you get from me today.
Because of all my college football stuff, I’ve sort of been growing distant from the NFL Lineal Title (the Colts’ long reign hasn’t helped). During the before-the-bowls interregnum, I’ve been neglecting to update it at all. That changes now. However, the college lineal titles aren’t updated until after the National Championship.
Because a lot of sites I visit are putting up predictions for the new year, so am I, and I’ll check back in at year’s end to see how I did:
And that just left me incredibly drained and depressed. I think it’s better if I don’t try to predict what happens, and just try and enjoy the ride. You should try it some time.
(From Irregular Webcomic! Click for full-sized… .)So, did you hear? Apparently the very fabric of the universe got torn apart yesterday.
Bit of a grim way to put up my first post of the new year, eh?
On another note, why isn’t Supers or Miscellaneous among the myriad of themes listed on this strip?
(Yes, I am reviewing a comic that’s not by David Morgan-Mar today. However, I’m probably going to put up another post on IWC if and when there’s another comic. Which I will spend all of today, if not beyond, anxiously awaiting.)
(On another note, I’m fairly sure Sandsday is the very first comic to update its “status” on Buzzcomix in the new year, going by timestamps at least. Yay me! Let’s put up a wildly propagandized historical marker to mark the occasion!)
Because I just got a new idea and I’m breaking up my minor bowls into two posts, you’re actually getting THREE posts each today and tomorrow!
Wow.
Wow.
Can you believe that just happened?
I mean… this was a year in which, after eight years of Bush, a Democrat was elected President in resounding fashion. And in so doing became the first black president in the nation’s history… after being completely unheard of four years ago (and arguably, not much better two years later). And running a campaign that was not only the culmination of a four-year trend of people’s participation in political campaigns, but was almost a people’s movement on par with anything coming out of the sixties. Almost literally, Barack Obama was no longer a candidate or even a person; he was a cause.
Speaking of his race, this was a year when – out of nowhere – after years of both groups being in the wilderness, it became virtually guaranteed from the start that either a black or a woman would garner a major-party nomination for President.
And both of those produced, by far, one of the most entertaining presidential campaigns ever.
This was a year that ushered us into what almost everyone is calling not a mere recession, but our worst crisis of the sort since the Great Depression… and it has a shot to be even worse than that, and upend everything we know about American society.
This was a year that produced so many great sports moments that ESPN had little to do but sit there, awestruck, and produce one single special, lacking any of the formatting of past specials, that proclaimed it simply “the Greatest Year in Sports”, including an Olympics that produced too many moments to count, from the Opening Ceremonies to Michael Phelps to Usain Bolt and plenty more you probably didn’t see. No “Top 10 Games” special as in years past, and I should have included the Ryder Cup in my own list. Probably at #8, bumping out #8 or #9. Seriously, I could have easily made it a top 20, and that may have been the problem.
And most of all, this was a year that produced a lot of turmoil in my own life… when I launched my own webcomic and finally found a voice on Da Blog, when I found myself at a crossroads that will only begin to be resolved as we enter the new year.
It’s kind of hard to imagine that such a chaotic year is finally coming to an end.
I had seen 2006 as a fairly pivotal year, but that was because of my interests: the ten-year-old UPN and WB networks finally collapsed into the CW (with its sloppy seconds joining a hastily-formed network that now, shockingly, is in far better position than the CW), the NFL started a new primetime paradigm with NBC, ESPN, and its own network, and the Democrats took both houses of Congress and set the stage for the retaking of the White House.
This was far bigger than that. This was my generation’s 1968.
Depending on how much Bush’s legacy holds up, this could prove to be the true beginning of the “twenty-first century”, much like World War I was the true beginning of the 20th (and the end of the Cold War was arguably its end). In my own life, it seems like I’ve been 20 forever (are you sure I was only 19 when the Iowa caucuses happened, let alone when I launched Sandsday?), and I’m still going to be 20 for almost five more months! It’s like the previous 20 years was just a prelude to this year forward in my life.
Here’s to 2008, in all its wild wackiness, in all aspects of the game.
2009 has a heck of an act to follow.
It’s going to be a mite awkward for it to sink in that it is 2009.
Okay, so maybe I’m not posting on another webcomic tonight (Tuesday). In fact it’ll probably not be out until Thursday at the earliest. As I’ve mentioned, several popular webcomics aren’t updating because of the holiday, so I picked out a webcomic for this week fairly late.
I will have two posts both tomorrow and Thursday to make up for it.
One of the things Robert A. Howard accosted me for in his comment-rant a little over a week ago was my tendency to squee like a fangirl at any links whatsoever.
Now, the main reason I post whenever I get linked, aside from being convinced that this is the link that will bring me everlasting fame and I want to commemorate the moment, is to alert potential advertisers of traffic bumps, so they can bump up their bids accordingly. However, I’m not sure it’s particularly useful for that purpose. Most people probably use Project Wonderful’s “campaign” feature to place their bids, which automatically scale to match current traffic, and PW also provides its own tools to alert bidders of important links, albeit from a select list of traffic generators. Find out more here, although I’m not even sure if this system still works. (Not to say that you can’t get on to Da Blog bidding by hand – I did so successfully on what was really a test bid on a couple of webcomics advertising for Sandsday, though I think I only showed up on one. If that makes any sense.)
So in a new Da Blog Poll that’s been running since Sunday and will continue for a couple of weeks, I want to ask: do you find the acknowledgements of traffic bumps useful or annoying? Do you think they’re useful for advertising even if they are a little annoying to anyone else, or are they useless even for advertising because the acknowledgement tends to lag quite a bit behind the bump itself? You can find the poll in the sidebar, and the comment section of this post will allow you to sound off beyond just the two options on the sidebar.
I had a post in mind for Thursday, but I never could quite remember what it was.
I could have easily decided to take today off because of the holiday. But my streak will continue dammit!
I do have something planned for tomorrow though…