Author and Thinker
Experimenting with doing this from Friendbar’s “lucky site” button. As I’ll explain in a post later today, I might not keep it up even if it works. And because it’s “a site that is popular today” I’ll be late to the party instead of “discovering” anything.
Is the story in the headline – Google Analytics’ dominance – or in the first paragraph – we like to know how our info is being used?
You may recall that before the Preakness I was wondering if I would be cursing Rachel Alexandra for skipping the Derby and ruining her own shot at a historic Triple Crown.
There’s still that element with the added element of skipping the Belmont, but now I think I might be cursing her for running the Preakness and ruining Mine That Bird’s shot.
Any Triple Crown is historic at this point after the long wait, but this one might turn out to have been ruined at the Preakness instead of the Belmont like so many others this decade.
Weren’t ESPN The Magazine stories placed on Insider before they launched a new website with all the bells and whistles?
And does this mean I have to start paying for ESPN The Magazine stories (with an Insider subscription that requires an ESPN The Mag print subscription anyway)? (I’d rather not lose Bill Simmons’ magazine columns!)
Could actually be worth watching… basically one test of the “you can only read our stuff if you pay to receive the dead trees” model for Saving Newspapers ™.
I was all set for an incredibly productive weekend. I was going to make boatloads of headway on my backlog in my communication class. I was going to work all weekend on banging out three different papers.
The amount of headway I actually made? One-third of a reading.
(On the flip side, I will agree with my comm teacher on this: Distracted by Maggie Jackson is interesting enough that I’d like to have the whole book to read for my book on the Internet.)
And while feed-and-Twitter checking can take a couple of hours, it shouldn’t dominate the whole day! (Blame the need for naps for some of the rest.)
My plan for tomorrow: Feed/Twitter check, lunch, retake an exam for another class, get a new bus pass, and HEAD HOME. I need to at least partially make up for lost time.
I’ve heard it suggested that the reason the NHL hasn’t caught on in the South is because the kids can’t play it without any ice or snow. I personally think that’s bullshit, since I don’t think I’ve ever touched a football in my life. Maybe the NHL needs to adopt a convoluted and insane championship system! 🙂
But if that does explain the unpopularity of the NHL in the south, tell me what you think of this idea: Put ice rinks in YMCAs, youth centers, standalone buildings, and the like in southern, warm-weather cities. They can be used for anything – figure skating, hockey, even just skating for fun, like on dates and the like. Maybe start some small youth hockey leagues while you’re at it, even if you can field only two teams at first with no subs.
Over time, once the kids have a place to play, maybe it can help make the NHL a reasonably national sport and return it to the Big Four so it doesn’t have so many problems like getting jerked around the schedule so it’s not Conan’s leadin, bumped for Yanni, mired on Versus, and other such stupid, stupid, idiotic things.
(Actually, having the same teams as last year could serve as a good control for whether NBC’s first two games should be 1 and 2 instead of 3 and 4 long-term, a change I’ve liked for at least a year no matter what circumstances brought it about. And I personally think that in the age of the Internet, buzz and word-of-mouth could eventually turn the NHL into a fairly national sport anyway. Seems everyone on the Internet likes the NHL, except for some NBA partisans – each side seems to want to turn any mention of either league on Sports Media Watch into a “my league rulz your league sux” shoutfest.)
(From Irregular Webcomic! Click for full-sized charitable act.)
So most of what’s happened up to this point in the Steve and Terry theme since the reboot of the universe turns out to have been an extended flashback that just ended (in what may have supposed to have been June).
Which is rather interesting in terms of fueling the “did the universe reboot to the beginning or not?” debate. All signs now seem to point to “no, except for Space”. Still, the fact that so many comics went into flashbacks with so many different approaches and explanations still seems to hint that the Irregular Crisis is not yet over, especially as regards the implications in themes such as Space and Cliffhangers.
(From The Order of the Stick. Click for full-sized second chance(s).)
Curse you, Rich Burlew.
I was all set to have a nice, enjoyable weekend where I could focus on finishing off some assignments for one of my classes, and you had to go and put up this whopper last night.
Uncharacteristically for this comic, and perhaps to its detriment, it engages in a bit of moralizing, but it’s all to further the greater goal. In the end, V’s real “ultimate power” may come without saying any words at all. This is a major moment in the story of V’s character, on par with taking the soul splice in the first place.
V really learns two lessons here, both related in a way, and they’re both put into stark comparison with each other in this strip. The one Xykon preaches to him is how quixotic V’s quest for “ultimate arcane power” really was all along, how one-dimensionally V saw power, how it ultimately wouldn’t ever be enough, and against someone who really grasped power, wasn’t enough. This seems to both support the idea of the soul splice representing the Four Words, though perhaps for unexpected reasons, and suggest that if it wasn’t, then when the prophecy eventually does come true it’ll come with a twist. (“I’m going to multiclass.”)
Hmm. Maybe the real four words were “My power EXCEEDS yours!”
The other lesson provides the forces of good’s response to Xykon’s characterization of power, and if anyone here is likely to vocalize it it’s O-Chul. It’s this lesson that V takes to heart in her holeside epiphany. Some forumites, before this strip, suggested that V’s run-in with Xykon showed the value of teamwork (after all, Redcloak and Tsukiko did most of the critical dirty work), but what V learns here is slightly different – baby steps, perhaps – and more fit to her situation. It’s learning not to think entirely about himself all the time. In that one moment, V realizes there’s a greater good going on here, and while self-preservation may mean resuming getting out while the getting’s good, the right thing means letting someone get a few more licks in on Xykon. In an odd way, while forum speculation for a while suggested that V and Belkar marked a study in contrasts as they flipped places on the alignment scale (one half fake, but still), the real contrast may be that while Belkar is faking character development and becoming a team player, V is getting the real thing. Maybe they could become real buddies now.
(It’s also worth comparing V to his good friend Haley, who recently said she “takes responsibility for her own actions,” defending why she wouldn’t crack down on Belkar at all. In a way, it makes perfect sense that if V was going to make friends with anyone it would be Haley with their respective look-out-for-number-one tendencies. And now, both are starting to grow out of those shells in varying ways.)
It’s here that V gets her redemption from his failure from earlier. Out of spells and trying only to make it out alive, V indirectly caused the death of several fleeing soldiers as the Battle for Azure City was drawing to a close. When this was revealed, it may have seemed a hastily-conceived way to explain V’s apparent character derailment in the 500s (check out that book V’s holding at the end). But this is an almost identical situation, except here V figures out how to pitch in without any spells and while putting himself at great risk.
The rules of story indicate O-Chul pretty much HAS to get some major damage in against Xykon now. Imagine this scenario (rather plausible without the early plot holes): O-Chul kills Xykon, returning the favor V just paid him, but doesn’t finish off the phylactery. Vaarsuvius and O-Chul leave, but for whatever reason don’t take the Monster in the Dark. Patrols come around, and while Vaarsuvius is powerless to hold them off, O-Chul isn’t. So, V gets out alive no matter what he did at the hole in the wall, but by doing something for the greater good gets someone else to help him out and actually comes out better in the deal. And suppose they subsequently find the Resistance – V gets a chance for some further literal atonement for her failure from earlier. It may have ruined the reunion of the Order, but taking off to fight Xykon may prove to be the best thing to happen to them, and to Vaarsuvius.
I was actually a little psyched to get IE8. Maybe it could fix some of the more quirky aspects of IE7, some of its slow stretches. maybe it could even keep from stopping my computer from hibernating.
Well, the new “accelerators” are overrated – the people behind the sites you visit actually have to create them, so no Yahoo Mail accelerator for me. It and a lot of the other new features are hopelessly gimmicky. I mean, color-coded tabs? Especially when I can’t define each tab’s color?
What’s more, Autocomplete is now limited to the first (not, say, most recent or relevant) 20 history results (and most recent 5, plus any favorites) as part of “spiffing up” Autocomplete. And scrolling with the side of my touchpad sucks now for speed-scrolling. (Word has a similar problem, in that it’ll sometimes refuse to scroll past the insertion point.) And the slowness issues, if anything, may have gotten worse.
I had been considering taking Firefox for a test drive to see how it could match up compared to the more concerning aspects of IE7. The main thing preventing me from doing so was the promise of IE8 and its new features, which either would be enough to keep me from going to Firefox or wouldn’t be. I didn’t think it was possible, but IE8 has actively driven me to Firefox.
(Oddly, even though I myself use IE and IE is the most popular browser, most visitors to Da Blog use Firefox. Maybe that says something about the sorts of people who would visit Da Blog…)
It’s a topic brought up by a webcomics.com post that seems to conflate them. To be sure, a conflation can help some to understand why they’re reading old Websnark posts where Eric Burns(-White) calls out webcartoonists that don’t have a cast page (“dude, it’s a cast page! It’s not the Great Artifact that will bring about the Age of Transcendence!”), but it seems some don’t agree.
Whether or not you conflate them probably depends on your specific circumstances – for example, do you have a gag-a-day comic, or a story comic? If you do conflate one or more you can probably label it with anything it fills the role of. Regardless, I would draw the boundaries like so:
So, an About page is about the comic, Cast is about the cast, and New Readers is about the story. Burns(-White) loves cast pages because they can so easily serve as a filter to reveal info about the comic and the story. Cast pages can obviate the need for New Readers pages, but About pages don’t obviate the need for Cast pages without turning into Cast pages, especially when you consider the pages’ relative utility to old readers.
(No, you did not just stumble into the Floating Lightbulb by accident.)
Hey… I’m on Twitter now… a new channel to communicate with me… and a public one at that…
I’m tempted to try and start up the global warming debate again I tried to start back in April, and put some of the research pressure off of me.
Delusion of grandeur, or could I actually get both sides to take part in a massive Twitter debate and make real the “mirroring effect” I envisioned for the series? YOU DECIDE!