I was counting on this review to determine if I was getting soft. I’d say the answer is a resounding “no”.

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(From Goblins. Click for full-sized perceived insults.)

This is a review that I was trying to avoid for a long time.

Oh, I’d heard of Goblins. I’d seen it hover near the top of webcomic ranking sites like Buzzcomix and TopWebComics in late 2008 and early 2009, and I’d seen the effusive praise given it elsewhere. Goblins was one of three comics constantly in the top three spots on Buzzcomix when I was trying to push my own comic Sandsday on there, before the site went belly up for good. Two of them, Girl Genius and Fey Winds, got reviews on this here site. Sure, I reviewed Fey Winds because its Buzzcomix description made it sound like a poor man’s Order of the Stick, but isn’t that a fairly apt description of Goblins as well? All I knew about Goblins was that it turned the traditional “they’re-evil-and-that’s-that” portrayal of D&D goblins on its head by portraying a campaign from their perspective, and that’s a minor aspect of OOTS‘ exploration of the genre.

No, something led me to actively avoid reading the comic, something that made me actively ignore this comic that gave every sign of being but a shadow of OOTS‘ greatness. Had I continued doing webcomic reviews, it would have been a long, long time before I even considered taking on Goblins. But no. Goblins ended up being the runner up in the semi-recent “Webcomic March Madness” tournament. Oh, I hadn’t reviewed either of the winners from either year Comicmix held the tournament, but I already had plans to review Gunnerkrigg Court and Erfworld, and the runner-up the year before was some super-obscure comic called Gronk that more than anything else probably shows how far the tournament came along this year, and I was determined to add at least one comic to my review pile from the tournament.

Let’s hope this doesn’t mean I find myself reviewing Misfile in a year’s time.

The big difference this year, of course, was that the tournament attracted the attention of big-time webcomic creators, and few pushed their comic harder in the tournament than Goblins‘ creator. I’m fairly certain that’s the only reason the comic made it so far. Certainly that’s the only reason Goblins would knock off OOTS in the semifinals, because Goblins was plugging itself in the tournament while Rich Burlew wasn’t even acknowledging its existence and OOTS‘ own fans were ambivalent about pushing it in a tournament with a cash prize (which the top two creators ended up donating to Child’s Play anyway) so soon after the comic’s Kickstarter success. (Yeah, when the other half of the final four is Homestuck and Gunnerkrigg Court, it’s a little late to start worrying about taking away a spot from a comic that needs the exposure more.)

Oh, I gave it time. I sat through years and years and years of comics holding out hope that by late 2008 the comic would improve to the point it would deserve the praise heaped on it. I sat through every excruciating “joke” from the comic’s early storylines. I sat through the incomprehensible fight scene that didn’t have anything to do with the rest of the comic (and still doesn’t have much to do with it). I sat through the flying deus ex machina. I sat through all the contrived, out-of-nowhere discussions of D&D racism. The fair-warning page at the start of the archives says that the very earliest Goblins pages date to 2001, but it reads like someone just discovered OOTS (or hell, even DM of the Rings) and wanted to jump on the bandwagon with their own comic mocking D&D. At this point we’re looking at the homeless man’s Order of the Stick.

Maybe, I thought, it’s unfair for me to try to assess this comic fairly when I’ve already been exposed to and become a fan of OOTS. Maybe all I see is the stuff I’m already familiar with from OOTS and I just dismiss it because of that. Hell, maybe if I had read Goblins first, I wouldn’t find OOTS all that impressive because I’d find everything to be a retread of stuff I’d already read in Goblins. Or maybe not. Considering a good chunk of the point of this comic could be distilled into a single scene of OOTS‘ Start of Darkness prequel, I doubt reading Goblins first would ruin my enjoyment of OOTS. (Seriously. Read pages 9-12, maybe 9-15. 4-7 pages of a print-only OOTS book encapsulates everything you could get out of early Goblins.)

The comic went through Cerebus Syndrome before the encounter set up on its opening pages was even finished. When that happened to OOTS, it remained a humor comic that happened to advance a plot at the same time for quite some time, and even when the plot moved to the fore it continued to use humor to add levity to a situation. With Goblins, what humor remains seems horribly out of place, the vestiges of the early jokes (like a goblin named “Dies Horribly” in nonstop panic mode after being named by the clan’s fortune teller) clashing oddly with the serious plotlines. Remember how I was worried about being able to get through Gunnerkrigg Court‘s drama after its first few chapters? With Goblins, that feeling never went away. I dreaded every time I went to continue my archive binge. Part of it was the drama I had to deal with, part of it was that I was guaranteed to run into something that made me facepalm.

Oh, the comic did improve, becoming simply the poor man’s OOTS, but that’s not saying much. The main characters, who end up forming an adventuring party of their own, became much more fleshed out, and from some of the early jokes the comic picked up themes of predestination and what makes a leader. But it still didn’t improve enough to overcome its early issues, and those issues sometimes threaten to bring down the whole enterprise.

It’s 2008 and Thunt still can’t draw a comprehensible fight scene. And he’s not afraid to drop massive infodumps. And the bad guys are almost cartoonishly evil (though Goblinslayer does seem to subscribe to the Tarquin school of fame). And the comic runs into the same pacing problems afflicting most comics releasing a single page regardless of content density with every update, somewhat more self-awarely than, say, the Court but compounded by Thunt’s propensity to jump between somewhat loosely connected plot threads, which itself is compounded by those pacing problems. Even updating twice a week, I bet the comic advances its plotlines at most as much as Fey Winds does/did in the same time span. The comic takes a year and a half to play out a single battle, admittedly the rough equivalent of OOTS‘ Battle of Azure City, but that played out in substantially less time.

And if that wasn’t enough, I have just two words for you: Goblin! Boobies!

And then… there’s a moment where the paladin-goblin Big Ears is cornered by this big goon with this huge weapon that apparently is incredibly evil. So the goon brings down the weapon on him, and he starts to get up, and the weapon’s glow gets brighter and brighter until it becomes this complete wall of text explaining the history of the weapon. Thunt literally pulled an entire page of pure exposition out of his ass to save this character.

Do you see why I was dreading every time I went back to the archive binge?

I do begrudgingly admit that Goblins has some reason to exist, but that’s not saying much. At this point, Goblins‘ biggest issue has to do with its update schedule and how slow its plot advances, especially since a lot of its other issues ultimately tie back to that one. For example, Thunt tries to juggle three or more plotlines at a time (as many of two of which are only barely connected with the main plot and have been dragging out their promise of a resolution and tie back to the main plot for a long, LONG time now), and the update schedule already means one group is going to be in the spotlight for an extended period while the others fade to the background and wait their turn, and none of them are going to advance very much.

Yet the comic just finished six uninterrupted months with one of them, the adventuring party that attacked the goblin camp at the start of the comic, to the point that Thunt had to put up a blog post reminding people of the plot he was returning to, the one immediately preceding that uninterrupted stretch. That group has itself been in a dungeon crawl with its own alternate universe doppelgangers since February of last year, which you really just want to get to the end of while it’s happening. It doesn’t help that the adventurers are the comic’s least interesting protagonists, not because of their origin as joke antagonists, but because of the way their characters have evolved, especially Minmax, who started out as a buffoonish parody of overly-“optimized” characters (like a poor man’s Pete from Darths and Droids), but has since become merely a well-meaning dimwit, and it just doesn’t mesh well, especially his weird pseudo-romantic subplot with the yuan-ti travelling with them. (Not that the other group is much better; after all, Saves a Fox practically verges on Mary Sue territory.) Meanwhile, we’ve barely seen the alleged main cast at all in the two and a half years since that aforementioned protracted battle ended.

Hell, just last week Thunt posted some filler and announced he would be doing more of it next week and at the end of each month, while admitting his update schedule is already too slow to advance the story at any reasonable speed, suggesting he’s running into the same problem that afflicted Dresden Codak: his art takes too long for his own good. The fact that at least he’s updating twice a week instead of only once only means that his artwork isn’t as good as that of Fey Winds or Dresden Codak, or as detailed as the latter. In effect, he’s getting the worst of both worlds.

So in the end, while Goblins does have some redeeming qualities, ultimately it’s the sort of comic I wouldn’t have been surprised to see John Solomon target, and it’s certainly a far cry from the greatness that is OOTS. It has been an utter chore to get through, and when all is said and done I’m just glad to be done with it.

Could the SEC Launch Its Own Network?

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Back in 2006, six months before Da Blog started, the Big Ten announced a lucrative TV deal that included a partnership with Fox to launch a network entirely dedicated to the conference. Although the Mountain West had started its own network, the spectacle of a BCS conference doing so, combined with the piles of money associated with it, made many wonder if such networks would become the wave of the future, one that had to be concerning for ESPN. And one conference that seemed almost certain to take that plunge was the king of college conferences, the SEC, whose own deal was coming up for renewal fast. Instead, ESPN paid off the SEC to the tune of over a billion dollars, and combined with the most-distributed syndication deal in sports history, complete with the branding of “SEC Network”, it seemed as though the SEC didn’t need to launch an actual SEC network.

In the years since, though, the Pac-12 and the University of Texas have announced the formation of their own networks, and they have proven so lucrative that the SEC has started having second thoughts. One might wonder if the SEC added Texas A&M and Missouri last summer as a pretense to reopen its TV deal and get a do-over on the whole network thing.

This would leave just the ACC and Big 12 as the only true major football conferences without their own networks. The ACC just extended its deal with ESPN without launching a network; presumably they felt that the SEC wouldn’t do it, but with the SEC now potentially starting a network in their backyard, combined with their new bowl agreement with the Big 12, they may now be screwed. Their football power is already substantially behind the others; now it may be permanently relegated to second-class citizen status. The Big 12 is largely hamstrung by Texas’ desire to have their Longhorn Network, rendering it too fractured and weak outside its biggest programs for a conference-wide network. That might not be a game-breaker, though, given the power of Texas and the aforementioned bowl agreement.

College Football Promotion and Relegation Revisited

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When a nationally recognized site, through no fewer than three writers, comes up with an idea previously thought up by some unknown faceless blogger somewhere, and one of their own writers had raised the same idea earlier apparently independently, that’s probably a good sign the idea is a good one.

Such is the case with a promotion/relegation system for college football. Can you blame SBNation for devoting an entire week to the concept, given the madness that has been the past few years of conference realignment? Or their DawgSports blog for raising the same idea last year? You can imagine how piqued my interest was given my own promotion/relegation system that came before any of them; it’s especially interesting that their “relegation week” came the same week as the SEC/Big 12 alliance, which led many people to wonder if this was the first step towards college football condensing into four major conferences with a pseudo-playoff structure between them. Naturally, my idea differs from both sites’ proposals in a few ways:

  • I proposed only two conferences on the top level. This puts a number of very high-profile programs at risk of relegation to a lower level, but I like the notion of two semi-national conferences featuring all (or most of, or at least nothing but) the teams that college football’s engine runs on playing against each other in a guaranteed high-caliber showdown each and every week. It would basically be a licence to print money for schools and networks (to the point every single team could sign a Notre Dame-esque national contract with a network or ESPN), a bonanza of great games and classic match-ups for fans, while still maintaining the sanctity of the regular season and everything traditionalists love about college football. Win-win-win.
  • That said, given the inherent inequity of a pro/rel system I can see the argument to bump up to, let’s say four conferences on the top level – which also increases the number of teams that can offer recruits the opportunity to play on the top flight, now or later, and allows us to also maintain the maze of nonsensical bowl tie-ins (including bowls with potential relegation implications). This oh-so-neatly matches the number of major conferences the SEC/Big 12 alignment potentially presages condensation to as well. We can institute a four-team all-champion playoff, or we can put in a 12-16 team “Champions League”.
  • These two conferences would each consist of 12 teams… without divisions. Each conference would play a complete round-robin, leaving them at most one non-conference game, which should be enough to maintain any rivalries outside the conference. Those games would be meaningless in the overall scheme of things, but isn’t that what a lot of people liked about pre-BCS college football rivalries anyway? If a team somehow didn’t have a single non-conference rivalry, they could schedule the typical guarantee game.
  • Once you get past the top five levels of English soccer (the Premier League, the Championship, League One, League Two, and the National Conference), each subsequent level contains multiple leagues. The way it works there, the number of teams in each league is constant, with the borders between the leagues determined by what maintains the balance, not by rigid geographical boundaries like in the SBNation plan. Conference realignment could play out naturally, as a result of the needs of numerical balance between conferences on the same level. (The sixth level of English soccer has two leagues, the Northern and Southern Conference. The seventh level has three, the Northern Premier League, the Southern League, and the Isthmian League, each of which splits into two sub-leagues on the eighth level. Beyond that, the distribution of leagues becomes decidedly more haphazard and ad hoc, not quite as nice and neat, though the FA has been trying to reduce the 14-league ninth level down to 12, matching the six-league eighth level.)

With that in mind, let’s consider a possible structure with four conferences at the top level, extending down to NAIA. Despite the future suggested by the SEC/Big 12 alliance, I killed the Big 12 and brought back the ACC because there aren’t a lot of West Coast leagues directly below the top level, while there’s a glut of eastern and southern leagues. I’m not going to mention any teams, only the conferences at each level; conference names should be assumed to broadly reflect geographic area, as many conferences are likely to change names. Also assume that conferences at the top level contain 12 teams each, as does each subsequent level with four conferences; conferences on lower levels may have fewer teams.

  • Tier 1 (BCS): Pac-12, Big 10, SEC, ACC
  • Tier 2 (FBS): Mountain West, MAC, Conference USA, Big East
  • Tier 3 (FCS Tier 1): WAC, Missouri Valley, Sun Belt, CAA
  • Tier 4 (FCS Tier 2/Division I): Big Sky, Southland, Pioneer, Ohio Valley, SWAC, Big South, Patriot, Ivy or NEC
  • Tier 5 (Division II): Great Northwest, Rocky Mountain, Lone Star, Great American, Mid-America, Northern Sun, Great Lakes, SIAC, Gulf South, CIAA, South Atlantic, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Northeast Ten
  • Tier 6 (Division III Tier 1): Northwest, American Southwest, IIAC, MIAC, WIAC, CCIW, OAC, SCAC, Centennial, Middle Atlantic, New Jersey, Empire 8
  • Tier 7 (Division III Tier 2): SCIAC, Heartland, Upper Midwest, Midwest, Northern Athletics, MIAA, Atlantic Central, Old Dominion, Presidents, NCAC, Liberty, NESCAC
  • Tier 8: All NAIA schools and conferences

The teams assigned to each conference are left as an exercise for the reader; you may refer to my older post for assistance. Feel free to fiddle around with the conferences and their placement as well, keeping in mind that since these conferences no longer have anything to do with conferences for other sports, the actual conferences involved may be very different. For example, what conferences exist on the Division II level may just have four levels all on their own.

What The SEC-Big 12 Bowl Agreement Reveals About the Future Shape of the BCS

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Apparently the SEC wants their own version of the Rose Bowl, because they have announced that they have reached an agreement with the Big 12 that will pit their respective conference champions against one another in a New Year’s Day bowl game.

That’s right. Their conference champions. I didn’t even think they could do that outside the confines of the BCS.

The first thought I had involved the structure of the BCS bowls outside the playoff. It had sounded like the BCS would be adding two more bowls to the BCS collection, while this move contracts the number of bowls needed to capture all the BCS conference champions, especially if, as other reports suggest, the ACC and Big East make the Orange Bowl their own champions’ bowl. But one thing this does is allow the BCS to at least attempt to officially give second tie-ins to the BCS conferences. If there are two “champions'” bowls, that leaves four bowls completely free for any second tie-ins to be distributed among, the ACC and Orange Bowl aside. Assuming the new SEC/Big 12 bowl is the Sugar Bowl, you could see a situation where Big 10 plays SEC in another Florida bowl (the Cap One or Gator), Big 12 goes to the Cotton Bowl, and Pac-12 goes to the Fiesta Bowl (with all other spots being at-large). Alternately, Big 10 could play ACC in the second Florida bowl while SEC goes to the Orange Bowl, which keeps the ACC from being faced with the choice of sending their to Texas at the nearest or officially becoming second-class BCS citizens. Conversely, if the SEC/Big 12 bowl is the Cotton Bowl, you could see some tie-in do-si-do with Big Ten-SEC in the Cap One or Gator and Pac-12 v. Big 12 in the Fiesta.

The bigger question, though, is what this means for the four-team playoff the BCS honchos just agreed to. If they simply pick the bowl tied-in with the conference of the higher-seeded team, that will be at least one and possibly both of the Rose and SEC/Big 12 every year. They could take advantage of the tie-ins to have backup if both semifinals would go to the same bowl, but I think they instead create two tiers of BCS bowls and inoculate the Rose and SEC/Big 12 from ever being semifinals unless one game pairs both conferences’ champions (or a pairing of both champions is possible in the semis without being 1 v. 2). It’s worth noting that in the tie-in structure that splits up SEC and Big Ten to different bowls above, each of the four remaining bowls would have about the same chance of hosting a semifinal, assuming the Big Four conferences are equally likely to produce a playoff team.

More to the point, if this had been in place when the BCS honchos met I think it would have changed their plans, and it may yet end up changing them long-term. A format that preserves the Rose Bowl matchup looks more palatable to the SEC and Big 12 if they can get the same deal for their own bowl, with far more sinister implications for everyone else. It’s easy to see this as the starting point for a plus-one that turns these two bowls into de facto semifinals, suggesting the dream of 16-team superconferences is not quite dead yet. That could change the landscape of college football tremendously over the next few decades, potentially signalling the death knell not just to the Big East but even the ACC and independence for Notre Dame. College football is entering the next act in its evolution, but the final act hasn’t arrived by a long shot.

Because sometimes, you just can’t beat overkill.

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(From MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck. Click for full-sized red alert.)

For me, one of the most confusing parts of Homestuck came shortly after I started reading it (as in, at the exact time I wrote and posted my original review of it), when Karkat voiced his worry that, by skimping while creating it, he “gave your whole universe cancer”. That much I could follow, at least as a pun on his astrological sign. But then he claimed that Jack Noir quite literally was the cancer (as opposed to, say, the bomb actually called “the Tumor”), alongside a preview of his “Red Miles” attack on the universal frog from the end-of-act flash, and he lost me there. Jack Noir is a game construct, one Karkat himself worked with in his own session, who showed every desire to carry out the most important action he did in the kids’ game – kill the Black Queen and take her ring – in that session. What, exactly, changed that turned him into the cancer afflicting the kids’ universe while he himself was in the Medium?

There may be a clue in the revelation that the “Red Miles” attack – which has been compared to swollen blood vessels in a tumor – is, in fact, a power inherent to the ring itself, not any of its prototypings in the kids’ session, indeed something the Draconian Dignitary can carry out when the ring can’t be prototyped at all. If the original Red Miles attack was in some way emblematic of Noir’s status as the cancer, perhaps that suggests that that status is in some way related to his possession of the ring – and perhaps it also points to what that way may be. Perhaps in sessions from cancerous universes, Noir is successful in obtaining the ring, while in non-cancerous ones he isn’t; perhaps the ability to use Red Miles is only available in cancerous universes; perhaps both, or something else entirely. Certainly there’s no reason to think the Scratch magically erased the universe’s cancer in any way.

A quickie, I know, but I wanted to point out something that might be more insightful than it seems.

And the winner for baseball’s new Wild Card games is…

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…TBS!

At least for the next two years until the new contract kicks in. Not exactly a surprise, given how much of the postseason it airs already, including any tiebreaker games.

What is a minor surprise is that TBS is trading in two Division Series games for this, which will go to MLB Network. What sort of division series games isn’t clear at the moment – will they be early games, or will MLBN take on a similar role to NBA TV and air games TBS doesn’t have the space for, which used to air on TNT? If the latter, given the way the Division Series schedule is laid out now, MLBN would get a Game 1 or 2 and a Game 3 or 4 from the weakest series, but the latter is dependent on two series not ending in sweeps, and the press release doesn’t suggest that the number of games MLBN gets is in any way dependent on the length of series. Are we in for another change to the Division Series schedule, perhaps with the first two games of both series taking place on the same two days? And will local carriers be able to pick up MLBN games, or will they be exclusive broadcasts with fans of the local teams needing to get MLBN to see the games? If the latter, that’s a humongous leap forward for MLBN; these games could be considered completely ignorable otherwise.

Not updating the Sports TV Wars count because it’s basically a gap-filler until the new TV contracts can be penned out in full.

Zach, if you’re not going to include the red-button panel on the RSS feed, at least provide an alternate feed with just comic links.

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(From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Click for full-sized reality.)

I don’t have much more to say about Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal than I did back in March. I was trying to avoid saying too much about it then, to avoid giving away too much about the review now, but what is there to say? It’s a modern The Far Side crossed with xkcd, to the point that, while the comic I reviewed in March may have been xkcd–like, I have since found a number of comics in the archive that are out-and-out the same as an actual xkcd comic; compare this SMBC, only a year old, to this xkcd. But that’s not necessarily a knock against it, and in fact I’m about to say something that may come off as blasphemous:

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is, in fact, a better comic than xkcd.

xkcd is the vanilla ice cream of webcomics (much as I hate how “vanilla” has become synonymous with “plain” when it isn’t, it just doesn’t change the color of ice cream): it’s safe, inoffensive, and wholly middle-of-the-road and unremarkable. It plugs out a new comic three times a week without affecting much of anything whatsoever. In this analogy, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is more like chocolate ice cream: just as middle-of-the-road, but with significantly more flavor. Zach Weiner isn’t afraid to go with off-color humor in every other webcomic, make his opinion on religion very, very clear, or be far nerdier than almost any xkcd comic I’ve ever read. SMBC simply has more bite than xkcd ever had, and the result is that it’s more consistently funny than xkcd. Few comics have had me giggling as much as SMBC did while I was reading it.

But when I started reading it as it came out, I found that there, it had the same problem as xkcd. It doesn’t provide enough bang for the buck for me to consistently follow it every single day. Often it’s just a single panel, or a short progression of panels, and there just isn’t enough there to make an impact.

This may partly be because the comic is read better several at a time, but it may also be because the comic is pretty hit-and-miss, and may in fact have declined in quality just within the last year. It may also be a comic you can’t have too much of. Certainly if you’re the sort who hates Ctrl+Alt+Del, there’s certainly ammunition here for you, as the vast majority of comics will generally hit one of a few points: jokes about naughty bits, religion, academia, “graph jokes”, and at least for a while, out-of-order jokes, with the chronologically earliest panel moved to the end to change the experience of the comic. So you could say the comic is repetitive and that Weiner falls back on a few crutches.

On the other hand, it is a daily comic, so you probably can’t fault Weiner for resorting to those crutches, especially since it’s a strict gag-a-day comic with no continuing characters or storylines, meaning for all its repetitiveness, it can still shift topics on a dime. Besides, it still has those moments of humor that can reach a higher level than xkcd. I wouldn’t say SMBC is for everyone – if you get offended by certain sorts of jokes about God and religion (especially Christianity), SMBC isn’t for you, and the same goes if you’re offended by jokes about certain parts of the human anatomy. If neither of those weeded you out, and you happen to already like xkcd, I’d give SMBC a shot and see if it’s right for you.

That may sound like damning with faint praise, and you may have noticed that this post reads substantially shorter than other recent reviews. Well, I never liked xkcd that much, though my opinion of it has softened as time has gone on, to the point that I’ll admit that SMBC never quite reaches the sublimity that the occasional xkcd comic can. As such, I find I don’t really have an opinion about SMBC that much and I’m not confident of the opinion I do have. I’m conflicted about it, because I certainly enjoyed it, but I’d certainly never read it on a regular basis. It’s not really for me. Maybe if it’s for you, you’ll enjoy it and have a new favorite comic, but I’m going to go back to reading Order of the Stick, becoming addicted to Questionable Content, and trying to finish Erfworld before it comes back from hiatus.

I originally published this without a title and realized it just a few seconds too late, and now I’m too pissed off about it to come up with one.

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(From MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck. Click for full-sized diamond ring.)

Is it possible that the Condesce/Betty Crocker is actually, or at least about to become, a sympathetic figure?

She wouldn’t be the first post-Scratch troll to have doubts about her race’s culture, or even the first to do so while gleefully embodying it (let me introduce you to a little someone named Vriska). Even if it were merely an “enemy-of-my-enemy” situation, the very notion of allying with her against anything, even the specter of Lord English, would be a pretty substantial change from most of the bits and pieces we’ve gotten from Dirk and Roxy (and to some extent, Doc Scratch), which have portrayed her as nothing less than the absolutely ruthless, genocidal ruler of Earth.

The first sign of this came in the intermission, when Rose suggested that “the forces opposing these players are clandestinely working toward the same goal as we are”, embodied by the Courtyard Droll destroying the post-Scratch Battlefield, a move which on its face, suggests that the Condesce would be trying to completely screw over the post-Scratch kids while inadvertently helping the pre-Scratch ones. Even then, though, I wondered whether the Condesce knew that the pre-Scratch kids would be arriving and was intentionally setting the stage for their arrival. Rose’s dialogue seems to suggest this as well, while also suggesting she might have nefarious motives, perhaps trying to turn the pre-Scratch kids against the post-Scratch ones.

But then there’s the information we’ve gotten about her pre-Scratch counterpart from Aranea, the spider-troll Jake met in the previous sub-act who has since been confirmed to be the pre-Scratch version of Mindfang. Although Meenah has come off as a complete asshole in her interactions with Roxy and John, Aranea paints a more nuanced picture, especially in her conversation with Jake. Apparently she had no interest in becoming the ruler of pre-Alternia, mostly out of not wanting the responsibility associated with it, and it was fleeing that responsibility that led her to discover the game. As Aranea tells Terezi, it was her plotting that allowed the others to survive in dream bubbles, as opposed to facing complete oblivion, upon the Scratch, and she rejoices when she realizes she’s in a dream bubble, since “it means my plan worked”. It’s apparently the first dream bubble she’s ever been in, and Aranea is “gather[ing] a small group of travellers for a meeting” to “orient [her] to the afterlife” (presumably including Jake, Terezi, and possibly Dave, Karkat, and maybe even dream-Roxy), telling Jake: “She’s not all that 8ad though. Well…….. When you really get to know her. And when she’s unarmed. Which is…….. pretty much never, now that I think a8out it.”

Now there are obviously some substantial differences between the pre- and post-Scratch trolls, as evidenced by Aranea herself, who’s very much unlike Mindfang (let alone Vriska), though she does tell Terezi she fantasized about being someone like Mindfang. What’s more, even the bits and pieces we’ve gotten haven’t painted the most flattering picture of Meenah; in fact, one could argue part of the reason she may have abdicated the throne was because she felt the planet was too nice (which might also explain her willingness to play the game). But the reason Aranea cites is one you would expect to hold up across the Scratch, especially considering she (and possibly Feferi) probably had the most unchanged upbringing of any of the trolls. It’s entirely possible our Condesce once had little interest in ruling and the responsibilities that go along with it – maybe even less, given how much more stressful it must have been in the world Scratch molded. Perhaps Meenah’s plan was little more than to allow the pre-Scratch trolls to survive in ghost form after the Scratch, even if it involved (as seems most likely) killing them all first – an approach that seems to be in keeping with the Condesce destroying the battlefield, disguising assistance, even altruism, as opposition.

If the Condesce was always a reluctant ruler, you can imagine how she might have reacted to being pressed into a few more centuries of rule, right when she thought she didn’t have anyone to rule anymore, and you can also see why, as evidenced by the most recent comics, she’s apparently surrendered her ring to the Draconian Dignitary, the significance of which isn’t quite clear (it has no prototyping orbs so it grants DD no physical power), but could be seen as her performing her own abdication in an odd shadow of pre-Scratch Noir killing his Black Queen. If her pre-Scratch counterpart wanted, as seems apparent, autonomy without responsibility, you can see how she might still chafe over having to follow Lord English’s orders, and how Jake’s grandma might have seen taking the English name and imagery as a good way to piss her off. (It’s also worth recalling Scratch’s explanation that “[t]he Condesce will be rewarded with the power and immortality her new service entails, and punished by the grueling slavery for which it is synonymous.”) Perhaps she would love nothing more than to gain some sort of revenge over Lord English, something his nigh-unlimited power makes seemingly impossible, but which the new session may give her an opportunity for.

Aranea has suggested that Jake is destined to, not quite destroy, but at least defeat Lord English; if this is intended to refer to Jake in particular it’s an odd choice that it would be anyone from the post-Scratch kids’ session, given how little we’ve been with them compared to the others, but I’m getting the sense that the final battle that is starting to take shape is going to take several groups to bring English (who’s fast becoming the face of the enemy) down. I wonder if we might see Jake being approached for the Condesce’s more direct assistance against English, with Dirk and Roxy being vehemently opposed and Jane in favor, with the others potentially split as well.

This doesn’t quite explain the Condesce’s behavior in relation to Earth, and it’s worth wondering how much of her behavior has been to keep English off her back. Perhaps there was some aspect of conquering worlds that she did enjoy, an aspect English gave her the capacity to continue to engage in. But it’s also worth wondering if there are more elements to her rule not unlike the destruction of the Battlefield – namely, recalling Roxy’s claims that she wants everyone to play the game, even if only to further her nefarious whims. That would explain why the game files were left completely unprotected on Crockercorp servers, and it might even explain the drone attacks against Roxy and Dirk, to goad them into playing the game. It doesn’t quite explain the assassination attempts on Jane, as she’s quite enthusiastic to play the game already and the attempts might run the risk of succeeding (depending on how much the Condesce knows), but it’s possible that it’s an attempt to present a face to English of working against them… or some other force we haven’t become acquainted with yet.  (Or maybe it’s Roxy, but given what we now know that would just make causality crawl into a corner and die.)

And given what we’ve also learned about the Condesce’s power, it’s also worth wondering if we should look back at Act 6-2 and determining how many of God Cat’s actions were made as the Condesce’s proxy…

Catching up with the state of Kickstarter

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(From xkcd. Click for full-sized recursive fundraising.)

You know Kickstarter is catching on when Penny Arcade and xkcd are talking about it.

How big has it gotten in the time since I stopped keeping track? According to Wikipedia’s top-ten list, there are now five million-dollar Kickstarters, two of them finishing after I stopped, plus two more top-ten projects that finished earlier this month (which apparently had PA‘s help towards the end), plus another ongoing project that’s cracked the ten-million-dollar barrier. Wikipedia isn’t even keeping track of ongoing projects that would make the top ten like they did when the OOTS drive was ongoing, only the highest-grossing ongoing drive (though that may just be the only project slated to cross the threshold). The project when I was tracking drives was a little over $350,000; now it’s more than twice that.

Before, the main categories that contributed the highest-grossing projects tended to be Design and Technology, and to a lesser extent Film and Video. Now Games seems to be fast becoming another big-money category, maybe more than any of the others. Much as I’d hate to say it, I’d say this is definitely the Double Fine effect, not the OOTS Effect, at work; even the benefits to the Comics category aren’t really webcomic-specific any longer. OOTS may have raised more money than anyone thought possible, but Double Fine is completely reorganizing the economics of independent video-game production, and I suspect you’ll see, if you haven’t already, a bunch of people with nothing but a dream and a vague concept start Kickstarters they have no business of doing, possibly with the sole aim of “getting rich quick”.

Which brings us to the concern both of these comics seem to have. Kickstarter does not enforce the completion of any project promised; several people have noted that it’s a mechanism based on trust. The beauty of it is that, so far, people have trusted each other and delivered on that trust, and paranoia about the worst of human nature hasn’t borne fruit. But it’s easy to wonder whether people might read stories about the Double Fine crew or Rich Burlew becoming millionaires on Kickstarter and getting the wrong idea, that they can just beg for money and rake in the dough, or even whether that’s already started. I’d like to remain cautiously optimistic, and I’ll check in in a few months to verify my suspicions, but it’s hard not to wonder whether Kickstarter might not be submarined by its own success.

Could CBS Sports Network add NFL programming, including Sunday morning pregame?

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NFL Network reporter Jason LaCanfora is headed to CBS, in all likelihood trading places with Charley Casserly, who has appeared on NFLN’s draft coverage. That’s all well and good. But arguably the lead was buried in this piece on the move:

La Canfora also will work on the CBS Sports Network cable channel and cbssports.com. CBSSN, says [Sean] McManus, “will relatively shortly be doing greatly expanded NFL programming” — with a Sunday pregame show “a possibility.”

NFL studio programming is huge for ESPN and a big pipeline of content for NBC SportsTalk. CBS Sports Network doesn’t do much of any NFL programming, aside from maybe a fantasy football kickoff show. Creating NFL-focused programming is a good way to fill out the programming day and attract eyeballs unlikely to come for any other reason except Jim Rome. It furthers CBS’ quest to build CBSSN with sports talk and big names if they can’t do it with games.

That CBSSN would be considering a Sunday morning pregame show is a surprise, in part because NBCSN’s future pregame show was announced alongside their re-upping of their agreement with the NFL, and so you would think that CBSSN starting a pregame show would be negotiated similarly. But perhaps this is related to an idea I had: CBS and Fox competing with NFLN, ESPN and NBCSN by giving their existing pregame shows a second hour on cable. The NFL Today would start on CBS Sports Network before moving to CBS, which would do much to build CBSSN’s cachet, while Fox NFL Sunday would hold its first hour on FX, possibly a Fox Sports network if Fox decides to start one. Then both cable networks would switch to fantasy football shows for the last hour (though Fox might do that only if they started an all-sports network) while the actual pregame shows played out on broadcast.

I would expect CBS to announce any expanded NFL programming sometime in August, maybe even within the next month, and we’ll see how it plays out from there.