I’ve figured out why this streak is so much more challenging than the last one.

by

One problem I’ve realized I’ve had recently is that even my filler posts leave me stumped. If I don’t find anything going down the list of comics I’ve reviewed, my only real recourse is a metapost like this one.

You may be wondering why I don’t put up the Erfworld review, or some other post that’s been coming down the pike for a while, then. Well, the simple answer is that it’s sort of daunting how long it might take, long enough that it might not solve the problem for tonight. I have no idea how long it’ll actually take, but I doubt I could finish it tonight, and in fact I doubt I could finish it off in the near future.

Next week should be easier. The first College Football Rankings post comes out then, as does a couple of ambitious webcomics posts… and they’re not what you think.

Because when even the Webcomic Overlook – which NEVER comments on comics unless it’s to review them or they’re making actual news – is commenting on something, I have to join in.

by

(From xkcd. Click for full-sized big world out there.)

I think I’ve become more than a little fascinated with xkcd and its wild popularity that seems to transcend anything you might call a “webcomic”. (Questionable Content is over twice as popular as Homestuck? Who knew?)

When I originally reviewed it, I was wholly disappointed by it. I didn’t find it consistently funny or provide me enough of a reason to read it on a consistent basis. It was a meme factory with appeal to geeks and that was pretty much the core of its popularity. And while I still find it to be the vanilla ice cream of webcomics, something’s struck me about it as I’ve read other similar comics like Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Namely, it has a certain heart that those other comics don’t.

Perhaps that’s a result of Randall Munroe’s idealism, which goes well above and beyond anything you’ll find in any other webcomic. Or perhaps xkcd, while it often tries to be funny, is not a humor comic. It is, rather, what I described it as in my original review: a “thought of the day”. Sometimes that thought will be a whole new way of organizing or seeing the world. Sometimes it’ll just be a casual slice of life. Sometimes it’ll be some musing on something making news in geekdom. Sometimes it’ll be a straight-up meme factory, more than once setting original compositions to the tune of existing songs. Sometimes it’ll be what SMBC calls “graph jokes“, often without the joke part.

And every once in a while it’ll blow you away completely with Randall’s grasp of the infinite canvas.

Usually this takes the form of some massive, poster-sized thing, be it his “maps of the Internet” (themselves showing a unique grasp of metaphor) or more generic measurements of scale. Recently, though, he’s taken advantage of other elements of his Internet setting to create unique experiences unlikely to even be replicated anywhere outside the Internet. It probably started with the fairly simple “Umwelt” comic, but now he’s combined the two forms of infinite canvas and created something so expansive that, even given his past work, you can’t help but wonder if he’s every bit as much a space alien as David Morgan-Mar. I almost get the sense that this is something where you’re not supposed to reach the edges, to maintain the illusion that Munroe has created a world as large and expansive as our own.

(Though Robert A. Howard? Rest assured that when Randall doesn’t provide something, his insanely dedicated fanbase will.)

I’m still not likely to take up xkcd on a regular basis. I’ve gone on record repeatedly that, typically, a webcomic needs one of two things to be successful, at least in my eyes: humor, or story. Darths and Droids wormed its way into my heart with innovation, doing something I hadn’t seen before. xkcd occasionally dabbles into humor or innovation, but not enough to keep me coming back; even its innovations don’t really strike my fancy, and its humor isn’t that funny. Still, I might give it another shot at some point down the line, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a newfound respect for the most popular webcomic on the Internet.

Pot, meet kettle.

by

(From Questionable Content. Click for full-sized fangirlism.)

For those of you wondering if Claire had some special quirk that would cause even her… whatever-the-hell-relation-the-guy-with-the-robot-hand has to her… to find her weird, wonder no longer.

Nope, it’s just the old “what would happen if you encountered yourself” trick rearing its ugly head, as Claire proves to be every bit as gaga over Hannelore’s dad as the other guy.

Now I can’t help but wonder if we’re going to be subjected to a week of repeating the same stuff we got when the other guy first showed up (maybe even to the word), or if we’re instead going to learn enough about Claire to realize how different the two are after all, or if the subject is just going to be dropped as a one-off gag.

At the very least, the lack of a robot hand suggests that Claire’s interest is far more academic, perhaps seeing Mr. Ellicott-Chatham more as a great scientist than a great inventor. Perhaps, instead of a repeat of the other guy’s first appearance, we’re going to get a repeat of one of Claire’s own establishing character moments, with a refocused target. That may hint that Claire may come out of it as a more interesting, potentially lasting character than the other guy.

And hey, if it keeps us from getting Yet More Marigold, I’m all for that.

(Hey, get off my case at forgetting the other guy’s name. It’s semi-late, I have a morning class, I can’t be bothered to look it up, I’m a little antsy about another comic going up, I’m just trying to continue The Streak, and yesterday’s Girl Genius post made me forget how long QC can be in height so now I’m just trying to fill out the page. Yes, that’s probably too many excuses.)

If I’m posting on Girl Genius of all things, you know I’m desperate to continue The Streak.

by

(From Girl Genius. Click for full-sized battering ram.)

Oh, Girl Genius, your mastery of puns is unmatched! Of the many, many jokes to be seen in webcomics over the past two days, surely this one has produced the most laughs, enough to power a living steampunk (oh I’m sorry, “gaslamp fantasy”) castle! Truly you will be seen as one of the greats in your command of webcomic humor, one whose secrets generations of cartoonists will only be able to hope to unlock!

Seriously, was there any point to this beyond making a lame, groan-inducing pun? Is there really any significance to the castle being attacked by a gigantic ram as opposed to a big block of wood other than “tee hee, you thought we meant it one way and we really meant it another!”

God, I’m spending too much time on a lame pun in a comic I don’t even read enough of to properly grasp what’s going on just because I’m trying to fill out the page so the comic image doesn’t spill over into the next post…

Requiem for a lost summer

by

In less than a week, school will start up again for me.

I had all sorts of ambitious plans for the summer. As it turned out, no thanks to the Webcomic Overlook (and a fairly ambitious Homestuck post I’m trying to write), I couldn’t even get any webcomic reviews in – I couldn’t even catch up on Ctrl+Alt+Del like last summer! – and now I probably won’t be able to get any in for most of the rest of the year. I might sneak in a couple of reviews of Erfworld and VG Cats at some point, and maybe eke out a Girls with Slingshots review at some point down the line, but that might be it for the foreseeable future.

In all likelihood, I’m going to drop the streak sometime soon, and in fact posting on Da Blog could hit an all-time low for the next eight months or so. All the posts on Da Blog are going to involve football, the sports TV wars, OOTS, Gunnerkrigg Court, or Questionable Content for the remainder of the year. I’m still going to try to get a project off the ground, but I had been hoping to be so far along with it that I could say with confidence that the end of The Streak wouldn’t matter. Needless to say, that did not come to pass.

I may have mentioned before that I’m about to hit a series of classes that will involve some hardcore work that needs to get done, more even than I’ve otherwise encountered at school up to this point. Regardless of anything else, I would expect posting on Da Blog to come to a near-complete halt in April through early June, and if nothing else I would hope to high heaven I can at least get this project off the ground by then.

God I’m so pissed off at myself. This was going to be an absolutely critical summer for the future of Da Blog, and it may have actually been less productive than other recent summers. What the hell is wrong with me?

Is Google the cable company of the future?

by

Amidst a television landscape of authenticated streaming, pointless restrictions on online viewing, inflated sports rights fees, a-la-carte debates, cord-cutting debates, five-dollar ESPNs, and contentious carriage disputes, a technology giant that originally made its money on the technology responsible for all of this is about to give a bunch of ordinary people in America’s heartland a taste of the future.

Google is about to launch its new Google Fiber project in the Kansas City area, and it provides a glimpse into how what we now know as a cable provider might look in the future. At first glance, it’s offering a standard TV/Internet bundle, but Google seems to see it as substantially more than how you might be seeing it, that it’s not clear where the TV ends and the Internet begins, if it does at all. In addition to an HD-ready “TV box” and network connectivity, Google is also offering a “storage box” with two terabytes of DVR storage (including the ability to record eight shows at once) and other functionality, as well as a free Nexus 7 tablet (advertised as “your new remote” while also touting the ability to share your TV viewing with friends), a free 1TB Google Drive account, and the chance to buy a Chromebook on top of everything else. (I’m guessing either the TV or storage boxes will come with Google TV as well; Google is promoting Netflix integration with the service. It’s also possible to just get the network box and Google Drive account without the TV hookup or anything else.) According to Google, its gigabit Internet speeds are 100 times the norm in the industry – enough, it believes, to completely revolutionize the Internet experience – and it claims to be able to deliver HD with zero compression.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the rollout of Google Fiber, though, has to do with the process of getting it. Part of the reason why cable companies tend to have effective monopolies – and why the “last mile” problem in installing fiber-optic networks has been so intractable – has to do with the nature of the technology and the expense of laying down wires across a large urban or suburban area. Google, by contrast, decided to save money by only building its network in areas that wanted it enough to justify the expense. So it divided the two Kansas Cities up into 202 “fiberhoods” and gave each one a threshold for pre-registrations it had to meet for anyone to get Fiber installed. To sweeten the pot for anyone who would normally be uninterested, Google has even offered Internet service at typical broadband speeds for a one-time $300 construction fee (payable in $25 installments for the first year), and completely free thereafter. Google is also providing full service to community buildings in each fiberhood for free as well. As a result, 180 of the 202 fiberhoods met their respective thresholds before Sunday’s deadline, nearly 90 percent of all the fiberhoods Google identified.

There is a massive Achilles heel in Google’s pitch, as right now its TV lineup has some glaring omissions – most notably, the Fox and TimeWarner cable networks (including the Turner networks and HBO) as well as AMC. One wonders if those companies are trying to slow down what could prove to be a massive disruption to their business model, though Google did recently get the Disney networks, including ESPN, on board. By forcing neighborhoods to pay first before Google will connect them, it could also leave poorer neighborhoods out in the cold. Still, if it works (and many in the old guard are skeptical), I wonder if this could prove to be a paradigm shift in the cable industry, one pointing to a future of blurrier lines between TV and Internet, one where the infrastructure needed to bring both technologies into the future becomes cost-affordable by building it only in the places where it’ll be most profitable, and thus one where that future, one that blows the massive potential of the Internet wide open and where TV as we know it today ceases to exist, becomes a reality.

Hey, when you do a comic like this on a day that a webcomic blogger who’s also a sports fan needs to continue The Streak, this is what results.

by

(From xkcd. Click for full-sized sports calendar.)

I’m sorry, I’m gonna have to call bullcrap on this.

People are talking about basketball deep into April, yet switch to baseball all the way until the Finals roll around? Also, I’m afraid American football is likely to be nearly as if not more prominent than baseball in October.

And what about those countries that aren’t as into soccer? Where’s baseball in Japan, hockey in Canada, or Aussie football in Australia? And is this specific to team sports? Where’s auto racing, golf, or tennis?

Judging by the bonus text, I suspect that what Randall really needs is a cheat sheet for the names of teams in each sport, but I can see how that’d be an unwieldy reference with 30+ teams in each American sport, to say nothing of college sports… and even in soccer most leagues have 20 teams in them…

Update on the state of my laptop

by

So I finally got my laptop back, and not only was my hard drive either reformatted or replaced, I actually got DOWNGRADED to Windows XP instead of Windows 7, EVEN THOUGH WINDOWS 7 CAME WITH THE COMPUTER. Oh, and the sound is crappy, the power cord is being finicky all of a sudden, and the W key is loose on an allegedly new keyboard, making me wonder if the only reason the hard drive needed reformatting or replacing is because they screwed it up.

Honestly, I’d much rather have gotten a brand new laptop, and I have a feeling that could be the main thing dominating my Christmas list. I might be able to reinstall Windows 7, which might fix a number of those issues, but I’m worried it might cause a host of new ones, given the options staring me in the face.

In the meantime, I’ve brought back the donation button to try to help raise funds for such a computer. If I get Windows 7 back and I’m satisfied with how I do so, I’ll probably take the button off.

Apologies if I don’t get Ysengrin’s species right. It’s damn near impossible keeping everything straight in this comic.

by

(From Gunnerkrigg Court. Click for full-sized unsettling thoughts.)

I’ve been more than a little puzzled at how both Antimony and Ysengrin have been treating Coyote’s revelations in this chapter as only a “theory”. Certainly the way Coyote explained his secret would be consistent with his attempting to explain something that’s just an idea of his, but I get the sense that Coyote firmly and solidly believes every word he said, and more to the point, that the audience is supposed to as well. Merely by referring to it as “[his] great secret”, Coyote seems to have been trying to give the impression that he’s presenting facts, things that he knows or has learned, not merely things he’s theorized about – and at the very least, he would seem to be in a better position to know such things than either Antimony or Ysengrin.

I can sort of see Antimony’s position, considering she didn’t sign up for a semi-lengthy lecture on Coyote’s worldview. Ysengrin’s reaction, though, is more interesting; there’s some evidence that his disagreement with Coyote is more a result of denial, a refusal of what Coyote’s “theory” would imply about Coyote or himself, not necessarily having an actual reason to dispute it. And that plays into something that seems to be intentionally puzzling: his turning on and attacking Antimony.

On the surface, Ysengrin turned on Antimony as a result of a perceived slight that he took as Antimony taking Coyote’s side, a slight so minor that the only sane interpretation I would have of it would be the complete opposite. But then you start to wonder why this came in the same chapter that the theory itself was given. Now consider how Ysengrin turns on Antimony: he becomes utterly feral, far more animalistic than almost all of the creatures of the forest have heretofore been, going completely dialogueless immediately thereafter. Finally, consider this comic, where Antimony is shaken that Ysengrin just acted in a way totally unlike how he’s acted before, while Eglamore considers it perfectly in character.

Is it possible that it’s not a coincidence that Ysengrin acted this way immediately after Antimony learned Coyote’s secret? Is it possible that, on some subconscious level, she started seeing Ysengrin as just an ordinary wolf, so that’s what he became? Is it possible that Coyote has led Antimony to start seeing the creatures of the forest more like the members of the Court do? While it would certainly meet the challenge Robert A. Howard set for the Court, it would do so in a way that still paints the Court, in a sense, as the bad guys, a way that suggests that the entire conflict may come down to mind over matter. In any case, Antimony’s sudden reminder of Coyote’s homework assignment suggests perhaps she thinks that just might be the case, and perhaps it’s only in that moment that she started to take what she’d just learned seriously, as more than just “Coyote’s funny little theory”.