Doing something different with the strip this week. Today I’m starting a little experiment and I can’t decide whether to do it for only five days or for a full two weeks. I have four strips in the pipeline; I’m not doing a poll, but I do want to hear whether you want to see more of this or go back to video game stuff, or whatever your thoughts are. Leave a comment on this post (remember, Livejournal comments don’t get to me) or e-mail me at mwmailsea at yahoo dot com. Comments will be counted if they’re in by Thursday at 8 PM PT.
So I stayed up until after 3 AM just to try and get my computer to settle down enough to get my Truth Court demonstration up, a half hour after that to get the strip up, and a half hour after that to get this up.
I made an error in the strip that has nothing to do with the lack of sleep, because I made this strip back in February.
As I learned, well, I guess last night now (a guy just ran by apparently delivering newspapers and it’s not yet 4), the Opening Ceremonies do not start at 8:08:08 AM Chinese time.
They start at 8:08:08 PM Chinese time.
Which means I could have run today’s strip on 8/08/08, instead of the less pretty 8/07/08.
A while back (in the Pre-Morgan-Mar-LiveJournal era) I mentioned Samuel Klein’s street blade gallery, and I e-mailed him about mine, and I never got an e-mail back and I never saw anything pop up on his street blade gallery tag, so I thought it had been ignored and that was that.
Well, today, on a lark, I decided to see if maybe he’d put something up without telling me, and lo and behold he had… but as it contained no Blogger tags (it did contain Technorati tags), I would never have found out by following an RSS feed without subscribing to his site’s general feed. And street signs are about the only aspect of his site I’m interested in.
(And it was only put up on Monday anyway.)
So. I looked into my site’s hit logs. 49 hits so far this month for my street sign gallery alone, 101 in June, 67 in May.
Wait… again, 49 of those hits are coming from the month in which the post was made. The street sign gallery more than doubled that the previous month alone. And I’m looking at a daily average of 408 hits for June (across all pages and including reloads) but only 136 for this month. That includes 1873 hits June 6.
This (scroll down to the comments) accounts for only 148 of the “referrers”, with all the higher ones being either direct hits or coming from the website itself, mostly the webcomic. Again, this is across all page views. So that helps explain the deluge for the web site.
But I last mentioned the street sign gallery on July 17, when I also mentioned Klein’s gallery, and before that it had been ages since I brought it up. So where did 101 hits for the street sign gallery, of all things, come from? The only thing I can think of is that a lot of my referrals come from Google Image Search, and they can’t all be Sandsday.
But it also got me thinking about something else. Subtract any referrers that begin with “morganwick.freehostia.com”, and in July so far, I have a total of 749 hits to my web site, doubtless some of them referring to images, and 15 of them coming from variants of morganwick.blogspot.com. And some of them are probably me. By contrast, I have about 370 hits to Da Blog in the last month and about 640 page views. That’s an average of 25 a day to the web site and 21 page views on Da Blog, with half a hit a day coming from Da Blog to the web site.
It’s not exactly the most popular of sites, but I am thinking of making some changes to capitalize on what little popularity I have. Stay tuned.
(Oh, and after my e-mail contained a lengthy explanation of several signs for someone unfamiliar with Seattle, I find out Mr. Klein had seen many of the signs I had before, just had never taken any pictures of them.)
Is it just me, or did ABC not treat the ArenaBowl like a championship game? Well before they ended the broadcast the instant the game ended without a trophy presentation, it felt like just another game.
The strip is finally moving back to an 11 PM PT post time, for real this time.
(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…
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.
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
Here‘s the strip. Here‘s the xkcd. Here‘s the Dinosaur Comics.
It used to be that xkcd was full of obscure math jokes, though that seems to have transitioned, in some respects, to something called “human relationships”. Either way, I can’t get into it. Meanwhile, DC has shown that it’s hard to really shake out of a routine with a gimmick like that DC has. That, and I don’t think DC‘s sort of humor really appeals to me.
Post frequency is going to go down significantly at the end of the week and I don’t know when it’ll return. I’ll make an effort to get the currently-suspended storyline some approximation of finished over the weekend, so I’ll have a steady stream of strips for a while. My mom is REALLY on my case about finding a job and I need to get a real Internet connection anyway.
