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April 16, 2005

Wednesday Burns-White: [w] Oh, Quit Playing Your Damned Harp Already, Princess

So, here's the thing: we here at 'snark Europe LLC have been working through Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon at a snail's pace, utter aeons behind broadcast. I know it's over, but I also know that some of you (okay, most of you) haven't been watching it. For those of you about to be spoiled, we salute you.

For the benefit of those who don't know: billyuns and billyuns of years ago, or at least a fair while back, there used to be a kingdom on the moon. The kingdom had a princess named Serenity, and she was guarded by representatives of nearby planets. (Why they didn't extend this courtesy to, say, other planets' satellites? I don't know. No one tells me anything.) Things being as they were, said representatives were all teenagers in sailor suits. Look, no one said it was going to be sensible.

Serenity had it very bad for the prince of the Earth kingdom, Endymion, who had long ago mastered the fine art of combining sheer assholishness with utter blandness. He had four generals, scattered across the asshole/bland spectrum. And then there was a hot chick named Beryl who wanted to mess things up because Endymion didn't want her.

It is, of course, the job of all hot spurned chicks to arrange for the deaths of their beloveds, especially when the chicks have pert poledancer's breasts and nails like porn stars. And the guys are, well, so bland and jerklike that they're not even worth depicting. And have tassels for shoulderpads. Look. Trust me here.

So, Endymion dies, and Serenity is just so distraught that she, um, destroys the moon. And the earth. Because, if Endymion's not around to be prince of the Earth, then there shouldn't be an Earth, so, by extension, there shouldn't be a moon. At least not that moon. If anyone really wants a moon, they can go bother Sailor Pluto and have her install someone on that moon there, or they could if she was in this series.

So, you know, boom.

Some time later, there's Earth again, which means that everyone has to get all reincarnated as teenagers. Except for Endymion, who was always the older man (it is, of course, the job of the guy with no personality to be older and able to go to university in England), and the four generals, who are just, you know, guys, and Beryl, who's just too hot to die.

The teenagers, because that's the way of it, only come to know their past lives in a gradual fashion, so, first, a cat comes along (and not just any cat, a plushie cat who can turn into a six-year-old) and gives them transformation items and is all, "Hey, protect the earth against monsters while dressed up in fetishy sailor suits and diapers." And they're like, okay, but also? Karaoke. Which happens too.

I'm leaving stuff out. Like the whole thing where Sailor Venus -- oh, they're all Sailor Bla, where Bla is some planet except for where it's not a planet -- Sailor Venus is off doing her own thing, totally cognizant of her past life and totally hacked off with the unprofessional attitudes of her fellow sailor guardians, because professionalism is the hallmark of people who fight rubber monsters in fetishy sailor costumes. And the thing where the guy who runs the arcade (and fancies the girl who's Sailor Jupiter) has a turtle ... a turtle thing. He's not a furry, because it's a turtle thing.

weds: Is it still furry if one's thing is for turtles?
eric: Technically? Yes.
weds: Crap. I'm not sure it really should be, though.
eric: Oh, what do you think it should be? Shelly?
weds: Oh, poor Shelley.

Anyhow.

Eventually, Sailor Moon figures out she's the Princess. And the Princess is not desperately happy with the situation; she knows she's capable of destroying the world, but, dammit, she'd quite like to have her boyfriend around again. Furthermore, if she can't have her boyfriend, she's not desperately keen on keeping anything else around, so she'll go about causing severe property damage. This upsets her present-day mortal identity, Usagi, no end; she doesn't like the idea that she can blow up cars, let alone the world, and she'd quite like to get back with her boyfriend too.

Usagi is perky and terminally useless -- all archetypal dizzy, genki teenaged wish-fulfilment fourteen-year-old girl. This places her at considerable odds with her alter ego; Serenity is a mopey, dour sort who draws pentagrams in the air with a sword, blows up cars, then sits around with a big plastic object and plays it as though it might have, once, been a harp. I'm not sure this is the best message to be sending little girls.

(Any moment now, someone is going to ask me why this is totally my favourite show, and I'm going to explain to them that I was actually all about the anime, which also had lesbians, and epic love stories, and pseudobiblical stuff, and Sailor Saturn. They would destroy the world about once every fifty-two episodes, or at least blow up Tokyo, and that was fine. Then, someone would change gender or have a forbidden love or, at worst, fall for a winged horse.)

Anyhow. I am catching you up on this for one reason, and one reason only: I want to complain about Kuroki Mio.

Kuroki Mio is Beryl's shadow, hench, servant, and mirror upon the earth. She manipulates people around her to hate the objects of her hatred, while she maintains a seemingly innocent appearance. Or she would if she could act worth a damn. She is an idol singer, because Sailor Venus's mundane identity is that of an idol singer. She goes to school with Usagi, and briefly attempts to pretend to be her best friend. But, you know, that's all going to go horribly wrong when your real motive is to transparently seduce Mr. No Personality Soldier of the Earth just as soon as he gets back from Cambridge University's highly regarded Plot Device College.

The problem is, I cannot possibly accept that this girl is capable of seduction, because she has the world's hugest mouth. When she talks, her skull flies up off of her lower jaw, angling back and forth in the air against gravity, proving that she is, in fact, half Canadian. When she kisses people, their jaws break.

The picture seriously does not do Kuroki Mio justice. The actress, Alisa Durbrow, must be having her mouth digitally altered to accomodate entire districts of Tokyo. There is no other explanation. No, not one. Not one at all. When the generals of the Dark Kingdom teleport back home from the Earth, they do not simply vanish into the aether; they vanish into her mouth, because it houses multitudes. Multitudes, strawberry Cheetos, most of the Shibuya shopping district, the Dark Kingdom, and the sourcebook I was reading the other night but appear to have misplaced. It is the job of Kuroki Mio to house all that has been lost. In her mouth.

Do you understand? I do not expect the last episode to end with the destruction of Earth, or the salvation of Earth, or the reincarnation of the sailor guardians, or anything involving a plushie cat. No, I firmly believe that, in the last minute or so, Kuroki Mio will declare, skull snapping in the breezes:

And then she shall. And then, they will go back to making sentai the way God and man intended: with masks, lycra, and a complete and total lack of Tommy Oliver.

Scans and screenshots from a soldier's effigy and three-lights.net. Next time on Miercoles Mercredi Mittwoch: why Lunatic Party was the best Sailor Moon hentai doujinshi series ever.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 9:52 PM | Comments (30)

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April 15, 2005

Eric Burns-White: It's been a while...

...but I have to call this one an official "I got nothin'." I'm exhausted, work had a lot of my brain, and I did much writing this week outside of Websnark, and that shit catches up with you.

On the positive side, I'm not writing yet more about word processors. And that makes everyone vastly happier. I mean, vastly.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:15 PM | Comments (9)

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April 14, 2005

Eric Burns-White: The Tao of text creation

So, I've been following the commentary from the Ulysses (and Pages) snarks with a lot of interest, because it says something about the creative mind. Or at least the small sample seen here.

One reader (well, okay, Aeire. Who says I can't name drop?) actively yearns for the screenshot I showed, and wanted a Windows alternative. Any number of folks chimed in with Windows suggestions. Still others brought up LyX, or other such tools, or their own combinations. Some of them talked about the ways they got their value added stuff, or did aftermarket formatting and word counting and the like.

One of them suggested Spell Catcher for my eternal yearning for a thesaurus, and I'm now beta testing it. And yeah, it's fantastic. With it, plus Ulysses, I have exactly what I'm looking for right now. Well, for the days I don't say screw it, fire up Radnor and launch WordPerfect 5.1/DOS.

I'm discovering hidden benefits, too. Because I tend to bounce bits of writing off friends and people, having something that's plain text with some tags is impressively useful. And the project tools are nice and -- more importantly for me -- get the Hell out of my way when I'm not using them.

But I understand the person who'd rather have six emacs windows open. Or the person who uses NotePad or -- when formatting really counts -- WordPad and nothing else. Or the person who swears by BBEdit.

What I find most interesting of all, however, is no one's stepping up to defend Microsoft Word. I don't think that comes from a hatred of Microsoft, either. People aren't extolling Mellel or WordPerfect or even OpenOffice in these threads.

I think it comes down to this -- word processors have been subsumed by office environments, because they had to be. They were too expensive for everyday people to casually buy, so instead they were optimized for newsletters and form letters and mail merges and business reports. In that sense, Pages becomes the ultimate modern word processor -- wholly divorced from the creation of content, wholly focused on the creation of structure. Which is no doubt why it's bundled with a presentation software component in a product called "iWork."

Writing, in the end, is about the words on the page. Or the words on the screen. Or the words in the input box. And it all comes down to the tool a writer uses that will let him get the words he wants in the order he wants most comfortably. I don't see Pages doing that for anyone (though I also didn't think many people would compose in InDesign, and someone chimed in in comments that he did exactly that).

For Office Managers, Word is the product that works more or less the way they want that they know everyone has, so it makes a kind of sense. But it's time that writers realized that Word is a part of Microsoft Office, not Microsoft Studio. Maybe someday, Microsoft or Adobe or somebody will come out with a suite that bundles a program like Sketchbook, a program designed for creative writing, a simple 3D modeler and other simple tools together into a light series of purely creative products. They'll massmarket it heavily to creators, and see if they can't get it on all the notebook computers of young college students in English degree programs. The centerpiece will be software that encourages the creation of words, and nothing else.

And it will fail on so many levels it's not funny. But about the ninth time someone tries it, it'll get it right. In the meantime, it's almost certain I'll try the other eight. That's what I do. I try things.

But in the meantime? I'm buying myself Ulysses and Spell Catcher.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 4:03 PM | Comments (52)

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Eric Burns-White: Some thoughts on the Eisner Nominations

So, I've gone through the Comics Reporter's list of Eisner nominees... and I have to say, I'm okay with it.

Obviously, the one that leaps out at me is the Best Digital Comic category, and just as obviously they're (mostly) not the comics I would have nominated, but that's subjective. The Eagles, back last year, were offensive in their lack of understanding of the medium. These are well picked. Of the ones nominated, I'm pulling for Athena Voltaire, which I think is a fantastic webcomic in every way, though as with most of the adventure comics I read, it's hard to snark it because it's so contextual. If it doesn't take it, I guess I'm going to shoot for Jonny Crossbones, which is definitely worthy.

The other big news is Scott Kurtz of PvP (for all two of you who don't know who Scott Kurtz is) getting nominated for the Best Writer/Artist -- Humor category. I think that's a tremendous validation both of Kurtz and of webcomics (even if they tagged him for his Image connection instead of the web connection) in general, and I think it's deserved.

I also think Kyle Baker's going to actually win, with Phil Foglio getting the outside chance. But just seeing Kurtz's name there makes me feel like our community is reaching out, not just in our own little ghetto (and a nice ghetto it is -- right in between the Science Fiction ghetto and the minicomickers) but in the broader comics community.

So, it's a first step. And it's an okay first step. And with time and greater penetration and understanding, more of what the webcomics community would expect to see on the Eisners list will be.

And then, Narbonic will win awards. Just you wait.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:14 PM | Comments (14)

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Eric Burns-White: A quick screenshot of the fullscreen bits from Ulysses

Here's a quick screenshot of the fullscreen editing mode of Ulysses, talked about in my last snark. I set the font myself (I like the heavier look of it), and naturally I did the actual typing bits as part of a story. But literally, that's all there is to it. You type and the letters appear. No desktop, no other windows, no nothing. Just you and your words.

It reminds me, in a lot of ways, of WordPerfect/DOS. I'd always change the backgrounds off that silly blue to the original black. And there was something I always liked about the amber text screens of old CRT terminals.

Anyway, it works nicely for me. So, sometime before the end of the next thirty days, I really need to track down sixty-something odd bucks to drop on this thing.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:36 AM | Comments (13)

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April 13, 2005

Eric Burns-White: Somehow, the fact that it was written by Germans just makes sense.

So, having had to deal with the end of Pages, I have gone seeking a balm. Something to wash away the sins of presentation that has no concern for content. Something fun and funky and most of all centered on the act of creation, not the act of presentation.

I think I've found it. It's called Ulysses. It was written by Germans.

It calls itself a Word Processor, but in a way that's as much a lie as Pages was. It organizes entire projects, and it strips down to a text editor, more or less, that tracks your word and paragraph count on the fly.

No, it doesn't have a fucking thesaurus either. I despair. But I've got Nisus Thesaurus sitting in Services now. I just wish it was Word Services enabled so I could do on the fly stuff with it the way I can spellchecking.

The projects thing is damn convenient for we who write novels and role playing games. Hand in hand with that is a dogmatic approach to textual creation that borders on the obsessive: there is no way to format the text as you work in it.

Let me repeat that.

There is no way to format the text as you work in it.

That italics up there? You can't do that in Ulysses. Nor change fonts on the fly (though you can change the default document font, thank Christ, simply and easily. Interface adjustment seems smooth). What you can do is type tags -- say, **like this,** and when you've finished the creation of your story or whatever, you can then export it to RTF, Word format or LaTeX, and have those tags convert into formating (so, like this is the result).

In other words, this program focuses on the creation of the words. Once that's done, you're free to export it to something else to make it look pretty.

I can see this pissing people off as much as Pages did, mind. If nothing else, there's no good reason not to leave Command-I for italics in, and just let the save-as convert it to whatever the same way it does tags now. At the same time, it doesn't bother me. I cut my online writing teeth on mailing lists and with ASCII, and even now I write these snarks in plain text with HTML on them. (Pissing off Wednesday because I use <I> instead of <em>, but my theory is I really do mean 'italicize' and it's one letter instead of two and besides, pissing off Wednesday can be heaps of fun!)

And it has the capacity to do fullscreen text editing.

Fullscreen with a black screen and amber text, no less. Like an old terminal, only antialiased so it looks nice on the screen.

My capacity to focus on the text jumped a hundredfold the second I turned that on. I loved it.

Do I love this program fifty euros worth (it retails at a hundred, but I can score an educational discount). Honestly, I think maybe. It fits my brain style, and I can export from it into Word for final polish. If they had an HTML export it'd be a definite. I've also been playing with CopyWrite which has similar features and is about twenty bucks less and also has real command-I italics, but its fullscreen is vastly inferior, and that's enough reason for me to say "nah, I'll grab the one that my eyes and brain really really like, instead."

So, it seems official. Give me a program that's designed to do presentation over content, and I am at the very least nonplussed and at the very most infuriated. Give me a program that sacrifices presentation for content, but with the very basic tools that elevate it about straight text editor, and I'm an extremely happy person. You now have some idea of how my brain works.

And frighteningly enough, I could export to RTF or Microsoft Word format, and then import the finished product into pages to make it really pretty, if I wanted to ever open that program again.

Now, if they'd just put in a fucking thesaurus. Honestly, guys, it's not that far out of bounds....

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:13 PM | Comments (27)

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Wednesday Burns-White: [w] This is how it's done.

OC for Wednesday will not be available due to an issue regarding an event.

See, folks? THIS is how it's done. Not with paragraphs, not with angsting...

This. This is how it's done.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 11:04 PM | Comments (7)

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April 12, 2005

Eric Burns-White: The Yellow Kid From Deliverance

(From Todd and Penguin. Click on the thumbnail for full sized Chee!)

It took me until this strip to 'get' this Todd and Penguin run. I mean, I understood it, and I thought it was well executed, but it was something that just passed me by. "Oh, a Peanuts thing. Oh, a Calvin and Hobbes thing. Neat."

But the Yellow Kid being in the cave? That made me sit up and take notice.

For one thing, it shows some recognition of the fact that comics didn't start with Peanuts. There are many, many, many worlds of comics that Penguin could visit on this trip, and most of them predate the Garfield era by a long shot.

For another, it creates something. A mood, beyond melancholy. It makes me actively interested to see what shows up tomorrow.

And for a third, it creeps me out. But the Yellow Kid has always done that to me. I've always seen him and gotten totally skeeved, and running into him in a cave with his shirt detailing he's been expecting you? Excellent way to promote skeevage.

Of course, the fact that the Yellow Kid is firmly in the Public Domain makes it all the easier to use him in this. It'd be harder for Wright to use Li'l Abner or Pogo here instead, except as a cameo. They're still under full copyright protection, and parody only goes so far. Something like the Greystone Inn run of a few years ago, where some of the absolute classics of comics came through for one or two panel appearances would be as far as you could go. The Yellow Kid, on the other hand? Hell, any of us could do a Yellow Kid comic now.

Wright's got me interested where this trip is going. And that's a cool thing indeed.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:29 PM | Comments (22)

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April 11, 2005

Eric Burns-White: The problem is, we left President Ford and Scientist Hitler too early. That's where the drama was, baby!

(From Goats. Click on the thumbnail for full sized 'No, Mister Hitler, I expect you to die!')

It's not that it's bad. Because the Funny is there. It honestly is.

It's just, I think "Good Hitler vs. Space Hitler" probably would have been perfectly good as a six part series. As we move into part fifteen of seventeen I yearn -- yearn -- for the return of Oliver the chick.

And I'm not a fan of Oliver the chick.

Yeah, they're all named Hitler and they're based on Hitler (with special guest Eva Braun as the one who isn't a Hitler). Yeah, I get that. But... honestly, part fifteen? As it is, I have no idea what was happen in in Goats when we slid into Hitleresque follies. I remember something about lizard suits. And bloody mustaches. I think.

Anyway, it's not bad. I'm just really, really ready for the end of the Hitlers.

Man, how often has that been said in the last sixty years?

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:22 PM | Comments (17)

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Eric Burns-White: It is a slow way to die. Pain would be preferable. All is grey. All is quiet. Help me.

(From Achewood. Click on the thumbnail for full sized legalized euthanasia I can fully get behind.)

I have been to the bead store.

I'm usually a good boyfriend to go shopping with. I enjoy walking with a girlfriend through clothes stores, and giving opinions. I enjoy time with a significant other. I enjoy watching said significant other put on jeans and pose in them. I enjoy poking around WalMart and figuring out table purchasing decisions.

But I cannot. Abide. Fabric stores.

I have an ex-girlfriend -- one I'm still good friends with, and who may be reading this -- who sews. She buys fabric less by the yard than by the hectare. She owns a serger, which is like a sewing machine if sewing machines were designed by the Department of Defense and could fight crime. She made me the best pair of shorts I ever owned.

But she would spend time in the fabric store.

A lot of time. In the fabric store.

Oh, my dear God.

It's got the same level of silent oppression as a library, only there's nothing to read. I know because I desperately read anything I could find, trying to keep my brain operational. I would read the descriptions of patterns. I would read the bits of pattern still out on tables. I would run my hands through bins of buttons trying to be impressed. With, you know, the buttons. Because they were shiny.

It didn't work. My mind closed in on itself. It was like it was choked off from all air, and oxygen deprivation had set in. I'm pretty sure any pre-calculus I had in my head died a slow and horrible death in JoAnn's Fabrics in Ithaca, New York.

This was a regular occurrence, to the point where years later I have a pathological fear of fabric stores. I actually would kind of like to get a couple yards of outing flannel, because that's what Linus's security blanket was. (I learned that in my Fantagraphics Peanuts collection, year two.) Yes. I'm enough of a comics dork that I'd like to get a blue Linus security blanket. I'm not ashamed.

But to do that, I'd have to go in the fabric store. And if I went by myself, my brain would seize up and die and there would be no one to gently lead me back out of the fabric store. I would be there for hours, my eyes glazed over and my mouth slightly open, while poetry and science withered and died in my mind. When I finally would be pushed out the door at closing time I would clutch my new security blanket in fear, because I would not know what car was mine or how to drive it if I found it. I would not know the names of my friends to call them for help. I would lie on the ground right there, and stare into the sky, my outing flannel in hand, and I would try to remember the term we use to describe those points of light in the sky. And eventually the police would find me and they would send me to a place where they would take care of me, and I would get a job that I could do with my hands.

Chris Onstad understands this. The bead shop and the fabric shop are the same place, I'm almost certain. He too has lost brain cells. Roast Beef has lost brain cells.

In the end, I fear I am still inside the fabric store. It is 1992, and the World Wide Web is just something I've heard of coming out of UIUC, and I have created this entire digital world in a desperate attempt to keep my mind occupied. I think I'm writing Websnark, in an office in New Hampshire, where the world is beautiful and spring has come. But really it is winter, it is 1992, and I stand in the fabric store, and the fabric store is consuming me. I will never leave the fabric store. And someday, someone will have the decency to kill me where I stand, drooling, while my girlfriend considers the best flannel to line a new pair of homemade jeans with.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:22 PM | Comments (29)

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Eric Burns-White: I'm not sure what's geekier...

...the fact that I'm pathetically happy there are 4,444 comments as of today, or the fact that I'm writing a post about it.

It's like there's an odometer on Websnark and it all just lined up!

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:19 PM | Comments (12)

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Wednesday Burns-White: [w] By Force of Detail

The thing is, I totally fell for Friendly Hostility on the wrong day. By the time I'd made it through the archives on a fluke, absolutely smitten with Nefertari, some things had gone horribly, horribly wrong in the teapot.

It had been two days since I'd seen

and decided, right there, that I had a new commitment.

Look at the eyes. And the lips. Then you tell me. The banter was just a bonus.

A digression into method seems advisable right now, even though I promised that I would not talk about me. It's bad to go to me. There's only a Sbarro.

Eric's the one with the massive trawl. This is the way of it here:

I have a routine, into which I'm very set, in the mornings. I roll into a sitting position, reach across the room to the desk (the browsing environment you see in Takeover is pretty much it; this is a small room), open a set of about ten tabs (three to five on weekends), and go get caffeine. A little later, I set the remaining bundle (entirely dependent on what's up) off from an LJ filter comprised of feeds to things which are slightly less predictable, or of which I'd like to persuade myself I can stop reading anytime now.

I have to go through the full archives of anything I write about. It's a rule for some of the publications I work with, and it seems like a pretty sensible restriction for my own process anyhow. It might be an artifact of research addiction. It might just be some sort of mental illness, some kind of compulsion; Left Behind 1-12 + The Kids 1-4? You're welcome.

Somewhere down the line, this became an ironclad rule for gal: wherever possible, nothing makes it into the tabset or feed list unless the entire archives can be read through without regret. If something dropped out of that tabset or feed list, it doesn't go back in until catchup has been played. This works against me sometimes -- I can go through years and years of something I hate on the trainwreck fascination, but guilt over not having the time to properly enjoy Wigu means I'm not riding that boat properly yet, say. But, mostly, it keeps my blood pressure, if not down, then at least lower.

That's how it is. Yes, there are the occasional side dalliances: peeks at Under Power, binges on Nana's Everyday Life, that sort of thing. (EDIT: Neither are SFW, BTW.)

(So, you can see why I never picked back up on Sluggy, say; I don't want to read all that back story and beat my head against the Bun-Bun Conundrum. Sometimes you really do just have to walk away, and smile, and nod, and just... retreat.)

The worst part is that very little will actually get my attention. In fact, the traditional methods tend to engender delays; after several years around Iain [M.] Banks fans, for example, I developed a mental block against Phlebas and was completely incapable of considering him. I could not possibly tell you how I came across Friendly Hostility that week; it had to have been unusual. It wasn't a newsbox, it wasn't a recommendation, it wasn't a banner ad or a rant link or a news item or anything like that. I really don't know.

But I'm smitten. And I hope to talk more about it as I go back through it again, and as I keep up with it.

Lines and eyes. That's what it's about, people.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 1:45 AM | Comments (21)

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April 10, 2005

Eric Burns-White: On the Snarking of Snarking

So, the question has come up more than once of how to save Websnark.

No, there's no danger of it going away. Barring catastrophic server failure or the like Websnark's going to keep chugging along. But the point has been raised more than once that it's not exactly what it was last October. There aren't as many thumbnails, and snarks of individual strips. The pace sometimes drops to almost nil, then spins way back up to frenetic. One person asked if it was about to end -- if Gossamer Commons had consumed me. Another mentioned that it was about to leave their daily trawl, but the April Fools post pulled them back. Still another made mention of my rather... emphatic writing style.

And it's a fair question. See, we passed a milestone last Friday. One by definition I didn't mention, but one that bears mentioning, given some of the recent commentary.

When Wednesday came on board, one of the stated advantages was that I wouldn't necessarily need to write something every day now. She could cover. That's not why she came on board, mind. She came on board for the simple reason that I like to read what she writes. I like her essay style. I like her sense of humor. I like her perspective. I still do. I get excited when a [w] tagged post comes through. And... well, it's my stage, so I get to have someone I like to watch perform perform on it.

But there are advantages. I can go to Ithaca and know that whether or not I make it to a web browser, something will appear here. And yet, despite that safety net, I've still written something every day. Even if it's just a "I don't have a post for today" post. Of the past 672 posts, I've written 630 of them.

Friday, Wednesday posted. A meaty post about Cookie Monster, and the fact that it's not the end of the world that he's advocating healthy eating. It was a response to... well, a lot of livejournal comments and the latest PvP sequence. (And for those who think we here at Websnark never say bad stuff about PvP -- I'm with her on it. I thought Kurtz's strip was funny, but I also think it's an overreaction, and the followup strip broadened that reaction further.)

It was a good post. And it was the only post for Friday. For the first time since August 20 of 2004, I didn't post anything at all on Websnark.

Which is a Hell of a record, if you think about it. Exhausted? I still put up an "I'm exhausted" post. And most days (I know, it's hard to believe it sometimes) I put up something with content in it. I mentioned three quarters of a million words over on post 666, and that's true.

And that's a ton of writing. It really is. That's roughly 3,200 words a day, on average, for two hundred and thirty days. In the old, now mostly outdated formula of "250 words per typewritten page," that's 3000 pages. That's three quarters of the total output I produced for Superguy, back in the day, and it took me eight years to do that.

I'm self conscious about Websnark, it's worth noting. The whole "Eric's Piroing out thing" Weds did kind of stuck in my craw, because... well, I don't think I am. I don't think my writing's terrible or that somehow I'm not a writer because I don't manage to write a home run essay or three every day. I think there are days when I suck, because there are. There are days you suck too. There are all days we suck. And now, a small number of people are saying "hey, wait a minute. He's not writing about webcomics as much as he used to. Where are the snarks on individual strips? Where are the biscuits? What's losing him? This isn't what I signed up for." And so I worry about that. How do I give them what they want?

At the same time, comments have skyrocketed. The Philosophical Snarks category's gotten a workout over the past couple of weeks -- this snark's in that category, too -- and I'm getting a monumental number of comments on those posts. With limited exceptions, those comments have been insightful, turning and debating and discussing. I can't think that Websnark's failing, because we're generating tremendous interest.

And on the other side of all of this is the original purpose of this blog, which is to give me a place to write about what catches my eye, and move on. Does it defeat that purpose if I start scrutinizing the daily trawls to find strips I can snark to meet the expectations of others?

I don't know. I honestly don't know what's the best thing for me to do on here. I know I want to keep doing it. But does that mean altering the directions it's evolved into to meet expectations others have? Or not? Certainly the comments I've heard have had meaty criticisms -- ones worth acknowledging and incorporating. (And clearly I need to put a moratorium on italics for a while.)

And the question has to be asked -- given that it's the philosophical snarks that get the most comments, have I subconsciously started biasing towards them because I crave that feedback, even though people would prefer to see webcomics/individual strip-oriented stuff?

For the record, by the by, in the last twenty-five days I've snarked 20 different strips. It's nowhere near the four a day I was doing when I started out, but it's almost not exactly disappeared, either.

(And it's also worth noting -- after 230 days, it's almost certain that people are going to start writing about how you've lost your way, no matter what you're doing. I'm no longer new, or unique, or shiny. It becomes easier to see the flaws in your car after you've driven it for six months and it no longer feels all 'new car-ish.' You might still like said car, but you're not gushing about it any more.)

I haven't provided links to the offsite essays or identified them. In part, this is because I don't particularly want people going and arguing with the people who made those comments. What I want is for folks to discuss and debate these things right here, separate from the personalities who made the comments. The opinions folks have count, and the direction Websnark goes in should be discussed here, I think.

At the same time, what promises can I make, except to try to keep things in mind as I go along? If I read through a week's worth of strips and nothing jumps out as particularly noteworthy, how can I invent note or worth?

I don't know. But maybe you guys do. So think it over.

In the meantime, the current record for days without missing is 230. That day of just not worrying about it felt nice, though. We're now up to day two of the second run. Place your bets now.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:57 PM | Comments (49)