Sandsday

The Importance of Voting

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This is very important to me. I know all ten of you reading the strip probably aren’t reading it for this sort of thing, and most webcomiceers would probably say go ahead and leave if you don’t like it, but if you yourself are wondering, “Why would I want to vote?” – and even if you’re not – I implore you to stick around. Not only because I want the readers for my own ego, but because I feel very strongly about this and I feel everyone I’m trying to appeal to needs to read this.

I understand why you might not think it’s worth it to vote. Writing this, I found myself questioning my own desire to vote. It’s been suggested, in an academic setting, that the impact of voting is so infinitesimal that, if the cost of voting is anything at all, it’s not worth it to vote. Of course if no one votes, the system breaks down – not to mention there’s suddenly a reason to vote again, because your vote suddenly becomes super-decisive. That remains the case for the first four or five votes before the value of your vote starts sinking back down to “why bother?” levels. You can see why even a member of the hundred-strong United States Senate might wonder why he’d bother to show up for all but the most narrow, party-line votes. (Of course, his votes are public so there’s at least a little bit of incentive there.)

But over the next few weeks, leading up to the election, I aim to demonstrate why you – especially if you’re in my demographic and age group – SHOULD vote, and hopefully deconstruct every reason you might have NOT to vote. That’s the goal; if anyone has anything to add, any arguments I missed, they can e-mail me at mwmailsea at yahoo dot com. You can also leave a comment (possibly on this post) if you have any suggestions fo the series. If, after reading this entire series, you’re still not convinced of the effiacy of voting, you can leave a comment as well and I’ll aim to take care of any concerns you may have.

I would have written a stronger post, but between my plans for future posts and the tangent it would have gone off to, might as well not. Oh, and I didn’t start as soon as I should have.

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Tonight – last night as you read this – was not a good night for me.

Actually, I take that back. This whole month has not been good for me, and to a lesser extent the last three months plus have not been good to me. I haven’t found any jobs (and it’s become abundantly apparent that I’m not remotely qualified for all that many), I’ve developed a humoungous backlog on Da Blog just as I have to deal with the start of the new school year and all that entails, my USB drive stopped working and just getting my files back will cost me upwards of $800 if it works (more on that later).

I went to a Mariners game last night on what amounted to a last-minute change in plans, which didn’t go well. There were rowdy people behind me and I think I was especially sensitive to everything – my mom thought my nervous system was on overdrive. I did settle down but didn’t get into the flow of the game, since the Mariners stink so bad they essentially threw in the towel before the game even started, and while I generally like to pretend I’m a TV or radio announcer at games I attend live, a string of controversial calls going against the Mariners (and thus not replayed on the big board, preventing me from assessing them for myself) pretty much soured me on the idea.

Things continued not to go well on the way home, which I won’t bore you with. I will mention that when I get mad, I get Hobbesian, and so I can’t help but wonder if civilization is based on a denial of humanity’s basic nature, and on attempting to get everyone to deny it. Civilization can be considered as the ability to be complacent about one’s own safety and tranquility, and for it to be maintained we must ignore the fact that humans have still spent much longer scratching out a tightrope, dog-eat-dog, alliance-for-protection lifestyle than we have employing something called civilization.

(GRR. I HATREkahmi eo;lgn the fact I got the idea for this post on a bus and was in too cramped quarters to start writing it while the ideas were coming.)

(And my mom just lectured me about the direction of my life and my priorities. Remind me to write a post on that topic soon.)

It’s almost 4 AM and I barely feel tired.

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I think I live in the worst possible area for me to live. There are bars and party-hearty young people and other places that are popular at night almost everywhere I look. The nearest real accessible Internet connection is near one such place, at least at 11, and is way too inconsistent for me to post the strip. The nearest place I know of that I could access at 11 PM that isn’t too near a bar is about seven blocks, or probably almost half a mile, away.

Morning update!

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I know there are probably quite a few people who are used to the strip going up in the morning PT, but I’m going to start working my way back to 11 PM PT the previous day, okay?

(Well, except for the part where I was up at 6:30, left shortly after 7, and only now at 8:15 have the strip up, thanks to the free wi-fi the city provides that’s completely useless anywhere except a bus stop, and where the only bus stops along the route that have seats are, it doesn’t work, and it seems to be abandoned anyway.)

Ginning up some interest every Tuesday

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Remember last week, when I overhauled my ad model? At the same time, I placed bids for advertising on the Little Gamers and Joe Loves Crappy Movies comics, so at some point people from there should start trickling in to watch the Sandsday boys in action. For all I know bidding could be high enough to shut out my ad entirely, but if my ad ever does show up in the rotation we could get a few loyal fans for the future. At most it’ll cost me about sixty cents earned from previous advertising on Da Blog, and probably much less, but we’ll see if bidding for Sandsday’s ad space (and the every-site ad space) makes up some or all of the difference.

(Hey, this is my first time writing one of these advertising posts. Give me a break.)

A major change to the ad model

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After giving it some thought, I have made several important changes to the ad model. Two primary concerns are leading me to adopt an alternative strategy to the one I was considering. First, my sidebar is too narrow to accomodate a skyscraper ad, so the largest ad size the sidebar will accomodate is a square ad. Second, my plans for a square ad were originally to have four a page – but I’ve recently started wondering if that’s exactly the best approach for a site with basically no visitors.

Those concerns, plus the fact that my attempts to let people know they’re better off bidding on my premier ad have mostly resulted in depressing bidding on the Standard ad without increasing bidding on my Premier ad (which STILL isn’t topping the Standard ad’s rates), have led me to change my ad strategy for Da Blog as well. So on the right side, you will see space for two square ads. Those are NOT in the same ad box. One of them is an ad that also appears on the rest of the Morgan Wick sites, the other is technically the same ad box Da Blog has had since August, only it’s now a square box. If you have previously bid on the standard skyscraper box your bid is now null and void and you must bid again with a square ad. To get the best bang for your buck with your square ad, you should be bidding on the top Morgan Wick box, but if you have a lower budget and can’t afford the top box you can still reach most of the same people with the bottom Da Blog box (although the top Premier box will still be a better investment in most circumstances, and now it’s bigger!). I’ve also put advertisements for Sandsday in both of the Da Blog-specific boxes that will run if there are no bids otherwise.

If that’s a bit confusing, don’t worry. I’ve created an advertising FAQ on the Web site that aims to put the answers to any questions you may have – and links to every one of my ad boxes – in one place. That includes not only the ad that appears across the Web site, but a new ad I’ve created just for Sandsday. I’m still debating what to do with the rest of the site, including possibly committing the forbidden act of using Google Adsense.

While I’m at it, I’ve also added a new item to the Around the Horn Drinking Game, fixed some buggy links on Sandsday, and updated the NFL Lineal Title. I’m starting to think I should study Javascript more too… PHP doesn’t seem to work on Freehostia for files whose extensions aren’t .php, so I can’t use it to create a dynamic sidebar unless I rename all my files, and it seems to require the use of Javascript to obtain the user’s screen resolution, which would be nice for fixing one of Sandsday’s biggest problems, the inability to be viewed properly at 800×600 resolution.

Forget about what I was going to do today. (And forget I mentioned I was going to do something.)

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It’s 2:15 as I write this and I decided to try a new place for Wi-Fi and it turns out to use Comcast to supply its connection. And Freehostia and Comcast STILL aren’t getting along. So here’s today’s strip to tide you over until I find someplace else to put it on the site.

In honor of Labor Day, this will probably be my only post of the day, but expect a deluge tomorrow.

Possible important notice

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Well, earlier today I had a lively e-mail conversation with Freehostia support, and determined that Comcast had somehow blocked my normal IP address from accessing Freehostia for some reason.

My hunch was that some computer at Comcast was down, and I wasn’t the only one to complain about inability to access Freehostia. Regardless, I can’t complain to Comcast because the connection isn’t mine to complain about, so unless this turns out to be a one-day problem, until further notice the strip will probably update at somewhat unpredictable times, determined by my ability to get to the library. That will probably mean 10 AM PT Wednesdays-Saturdays, 1 PM PT Mondays and Tuesdays (or even later), and who knows when on Sundays.

If I had a job and could thus afford an Internet connection of my own, if I had a better battery, if my computer stood by and hibernated properlyjlav ;amsdbjg.tlkhcnbxcoidsgddv9tew – if ANY of those conditions were in place I could give you a more reliable update schedule. Even if I had some way to time when Freehostia performed certain uploads and updated the MySQL database (so I wouldn’t have to worry about strips leaking early). But this pattern will probably hold for the next month until school starts up again, although the instant I get a paying job I will probably sign up for some sort of Internet service.

(You can take care of one of these conditions by buying a battery compatible with the Dell Inspiron B130 for me and e-mailing me for my snail mail address. Offers left in the comments may NOT be accepted.)

No, today’s strip isn’t on the website yet and will probably go up with tomorrow’s strip. It’s below for the curious. (Well, assuming you’re not on the LJ feed or permalink page, anyway.)

This is why I was considering dumping Freehostia.

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Figures. I wake up early enough to post the strip and Freehostia’s not working. I’m not resorting to posting it on Da Blog, though. That would smack of cheating just to get the strip back to posting at 11 PM PT, and there would be little reason for me not to just schedule a post.

EDIT: Okay, it’s still not working at 9:10 AM, so here’s today’s strip: