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 !!!!!!!!!
If it doesn’t come up in the next few moments I’m waiting until next Thursday to announce Truth Court, if I don’t wait a few months, if I end up doing it ever.
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(And this isn’t just a loss for me. This could end up being a loss for all of America. Because of a stupid screwy library Internet connection and how badly Blogger’s autosave function sometimes deals with not having an Internet connection anymore. Shiiiiiit.)
Street Sign Gallery is updated with a new batch of signs, all in the Seattle area. Redmond, Bellevue, and Tukwila (okay, okay, Shoreline and the University of Washington too) all get their moments in the sun, as well as a couple new Seattle pictures.
I mentioned when I started the project that I didn’t know if anyone else was doing this. Well, as it turns out, I did not know the terminology at all. Apparently the standard sign is known as a street blade, and one Samuel Klein has kept up a Street Blade Gallery on his (otherwise rather diverse) blog. Both of us are on the West Coast, so most of our signs are from around here, but both of us are interested in seeing what blades you have around your community. In my case, you can send it to mwmailsea at yahoo dot com.
Warning, Around the Horn geekery ahead:
I think we’re all losers in the mustache contest between Cowlishaw and Blackistone. Cowlishaw should never have shaved the goatee because he really does look like a porn star, while Blackistone just looked ridiculous yesterday, especially with those coke-bottle glasses.
The Drinking Game is updated to reflect the fact Michael Smith has not been on the show in ages and the new “Deal… (long pause) …or no deal?” kick Reali has picked up recently (and which should have been on the list a long time ago).
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.)
Okay, this is WAY later in the day than I was intending to write this post. I was hoping to set up SOME sort of backlog to start pumping out smoothly, but right now I’m not sure what’s going to come out on Tuesday. My webcomic posts usually require a significant amount of research, and the one I have in mind is no exception, so it may end up waiting past Tuesday. I don’t even have tomorrow’s strip written and drawn up and I have only the vaguest idea of what will be in it.
I recently finished reading True Enough by Farhad Manjoo, which fascinated me the instant I saw it in the store. Its main thesis is that, thanks to the Internet and cable news channels, we no longer differ merely in what opinions we hold, but in what we hold to be basic truths. I will have more to say about it in general when I announce Truth Court probably over the weekend, but there’s a point, expounded on on pages 113-122, which I want to devote a post to. It tells of an experiment performed by a researcher named John Ware. Ware hired an actor to masquerade as a distinguished expert and talk at length and with a lot of flair about a bunch of nonsense and not really say anything of substance. The audience was a bunch of college-educated professionals and even professors – in theory, able to see through the ruse. But instead, they all talked about what a great speaker he was, how stimulating his lecture was, and so on.
Ware had the lecture played for a second group and got the same results. He showed it to a group of students – a group “enrolled in a graduate-level course on educational philosophy” to boot – and got the same results. Some in the group even claimed previous experience with the “expert” or his topic. Ware soon became devoted to studying the “Dr. Fox effect” (after the name of the fictitious expert in the original experiment) and conducted several more experiments on the topic. One experiment involved breaking another group of students into groups and playing several lectures that varied based on “content” and “expressiveness”; the lectures with the highest levels of both did best, but expressiveness rated far higher than content.
I leave it to Manjoo to bring the implications into stark relief: “[P]rofessors were better off teaching very little very enthusiastically than teaching very much very badly.”
Manjoo makes the point that this means that some “experts” are only experts in presenting nonsense like Dr. Fox. But let’s repeat the implications one more time: If you attempt to tell the truth in a boring, dry manner, you will lose to someone who tells complete lies in the form of jokes. We’ve all heard about how people value style over substance, but you probably could have never imagined how important it could be. I’m honestly stunned you don’t see the implications fully realized more often – more politicians explaining their positions with flowery metaphors, more professors teaching their subjects with sarcasm instead of sleep. Of course, politicians that try to inject more energy into their speaking style end up coming across like Howard Dean, but personally, I thought “The Scream” made me more likely to vote for him, if I were paying more than superficial attention to the race and if I were old enough to vote at all. I want more energy in my politicians, and after reading True Enough, I suspect most Americans do as well, they just don’t realize it. Heck, I’m fully intent on making Da Blog as entertaining a read as possible, not just a blog of dry substance. Style and substance, in perfect unison, is the best blend of all.
After getting exposed to ZP (and before getting exposed to True Enough), I have become convinced that any speech can be made more entertaining by reading it really fast in a British accent laced with profanity while crude stick figures acting out everything the speaker says appear on the screen, laced with simple rebuses and often dissonant phrases. Go ahead, try it with the driest speech you can think of!
Ben Croshaw was a game-developer hobbyist and sometime reviewer for some time but didn’t get his 15 minutes of Internet Fame (TM) until he decided to create a special video review for a demo, which quickly proved so popular he did a second. And after just two videos, he was contacted by The Escapist to keep making funny videos for them every week so they might lure hordes of Internet losers some people in to their site and own them forever.
(See what I did there? This is a piece of cake.)
But perhaps I should let Croshaw explain it himself:
That only scratches the surface of ZP‘s popularity. I invite you to take a look at the archives I linked to above. I guarantee you you will find yourself watching video after video, unable to stop until you’ve been through the whole archive, even if you’re not really immersed in “video game culture”. ZP has become big enough that previews of it now air each week on G4 – a real, like, TV channel, and stuff. It’s not a tiny Internet subculture by any means. There are more than five hundred comments on – and thus many hundreds if not thousands more people watching – a bunch of crude images presented as though their presenter had ADD while a Brit basically says “omg popular gamez sux lol” really fast only with a lot more profanity. (Not to mention more than its fair share of ripoffs littering Youtube.)
That’s the future of dialogue regardless of the field. The more energy, the more visualness, the more everything you pour into what you have to say to make it more than “what you have to say”, the more you will survive and thrive. Simply put, The Daily Show is the wave of the future, not just in news but in everything from politics to sports. The people who say media is dominated too much by “sound bites” and who, well, gave us the “style over substance” cliche in the first place will probably decry this development, but if it gets more young people involved in politics, well…
Moving the RID to Wednesday because I’m settling into a groove of days of the week (such as webcomics on Tuesday and Sports Watcher on Friday) and I want to leave Mondays open for football-related stuff.
Strangely enough, the first time I activated StumbleUpon I was taken to TED.com again. But on the second try I was taken to this site. If you thought you were an insignificant speck of dust in the Universe before, this’ll make you really think you’re an insignificant speck… on an insignificant speck… orbiting an insignificant speck.
I doubt I’ll have much more to say on the “astronomy” tag.
Very briefly: Starting sometime over the next few days I will be transitioning back to a 11 PM (well, probably closer to 11:30 in practice) PT publishing time for the strip. The method I’m using now for publication works regardless of time. I had been planning on using the library but I think I’ve only used it once for various reasons.
Two things. I mentioned before that I conceived of Da Blog as a series of sub-blogs, but regardless of which sub-blogs you follow, you should probably also follow the blog news tag, because it will often have things pertaining to all other tags. I’ll also use “blog news” to herald the introduction of new tags you might like, like this “sports tv graphics” one.
I know a lot of people don’t like ESPN’s attempt to create a strip or banner at the top of the screen for a score display for tennis coverage; it’s rather non-intuitive. But everything is strips these days – the only networks that still use a box for ANY sport, not counting tennis, are CBS for football and TNT for basketball. And tennis doesn’t lend itself well to a strip; even after importing its post-“Sunday Night Football” broadcast package, NBC still uses a box for tennis, and so does its corporate sibling USA, and so does CBS, and so does the Tennis Channel.
Well, I’ve stumbled upon (no, this is not the Random Discovery of the Week) the BBC’s Wimbledon graphics package, and I believe I may have a solution. You can kind of make it out in this video (which is not the same as the one I’ve linked to):
It’s a box, but it may contain the key to creating a workable tennis strip. I’ve created a mock-up based on ESPN’s graphics package: I would probably want to make the space for the score longer, because “DEUCE” doesn’t fit in that space and I might want to say something like “AD FEDERER” rather than what ESPN does now, which is just “AD” and highlighting whoever has the advantage. And I forgot to include any indication of who’s serving. Break points, set points, match points, and the like would be indicated by a small banner slipping down underneath the strip. I don’t know what I would do for tiebreaks. My guess is either have another little banner fall beneath the strip, similar to what would be done for statistics, or shift over the spaces for sets and games and add a new space. Or separate both sets and games into their own clearly delineated spaces and simply open up a new space to the left of the others for the tiebreak. But that breaks the implied sets-games-points hierarchy.
Thoughts? Ways my idea could be improved? Or am I so off base I need to be whacked with a two-by-four before my abominations become accepted?
For the moment, and for the forseeable future (possibly for all of July), the strip’s update time is “whenever I can get it up”.
If you want to hasten the day when it returns to 11 PM PT, you can get me a laptop battery for my laptop.
Or you can pay for the first month of Clearwire wireless or Comcast cable Internet.
Or you can move in next to or above or below me and set up an unsecured wireless connection strong enough for me to easily use it. (In the latter case, you’ll have my dual gratitude for pushing out my loud, nocturnal, party-hearty neighbors.)
Or you can get me a job.
In the first two cases, I’ll pay you back when I no longer need the fourth. Contact me at mwmailsea at yahoo dot com if you’re interested.
And the opinions expressed in this comic are not necessarily those of the author. I’m not familiar enough with CAD, and all I know about UF is I started reading it from the beginning in 2006, and had to pry myself away from it when I got to 2004 because it was taking up so much of my time that I should have been using studying.
And both strips work now. Honest. ‘zojdf ,.zdM/jivzk.lngdipioads
