Posted on by mwhybark

Oh yah

chop chords to ‘We Like tha moon‘

Lyrics:

We like the moon
Coz it is close to us
We like the moon
But not as much as a spoon
Cos that’s more use for eating soup
And a fork isn’t very useful for that
Unless it has got many vegetables
And then you might be better off with a chopstick

Unlike the moon
It is up in the sky
It’s up there very high
But not as high as maybe
Dirigibles or zeppelins or light bulbs
And maybe clouds
And puffins also I think maybe they go quite high too
Maybe not as high as the moon
Coz the moon is very high

We like the moon
The moon is very useful everyone
Everybody like the moon
Because it light up the sky at night
And it lovely
And it makes the tide go
And we like it

But not as much as cheese
We really like cheese we like zeppelins
We really like them and we like kelp and we like moose
and we like deer and we like marmots
and we like all the fluffy animals
We really like the moon

(all ’cause of this blort post)

Posted on by mwhybark

New server

The box came in, I plugged it in, attached the drives, and booted up. After the pain and struggle of the last month, it’s a relief to have a Mac-like experience again. It got here in the nick of time too – traffic is going crazy again, who knows why. Google seems to present me as the best resource for a certain sort of turkey stuffing that employs a food that has a name similar in meaning to ‘inverse-black stronghold meatpatty.’

Google: ‘white castle stuffing‘

Posted on by mwhybark

Comics criticism

I’d hoped to link to the online version of the Ellen Forney story at Tablet today, but it’s still not up, which makes me think that probably it’s an error, and may never show up. So, you’ll just have to live with that. The transcript starts running tomorrow, with pictures!

I mentioned offhand to a friend that it would be neat to see a line of republications of the serious comic criticism books that have appeared in the US over that past fifty years or so, and he asked me what I meant. So I went and poked around and found that to my knowledge, historical surveys aside, I meant more or less five books:

Krazy Kat, the art and life of George Herriman, by Patrick McDonnell

Winsor McCay, by John Canemaker

Comics and Sequential Art, by Eisner

Comics as Culture, by Thomas Inge

The Comic Stripped American, by Arthur Asa Berger

There are some other books that didn’t get on to the list – I was excluding Fantagraphics’ comprehensive republications of giants such as Kelly, Herriman, McCay, and Schulz as well as the wonderful Smithsonian surveys of golden-age books and dailies assembled by Bill Blackbeard in the, uh, seventies, I think.

I also did not suggest the McCloud books (as they remain in print and are likely to for the foreseeable future), and I did not suggest books dealing with non-US or European traditions of the form, due to personal ignorance.

I’m also aware of scattered instances of serious critical evaluations of comics outside of the CJ over the past few decades; I assume there has been serious growth in academic writing about comics as well over the same period of time. Anyone have some suggestions to make this a better list?

Feel free to suggest histories and surveys; I left them off because there are so many, including some that are both well-researched and include sensitive critical analysis.

Posted on by mwhybark

Blog traffic linkdump

I won’t be able to follow up on the blog traffic prediction ideas for a while, so I’m linkdumping a bunch of stuff on blog traffic here as research material.

Traffic Patterns: weekday traffic versus weekend traffic. Blogs look like every other site family I’ve ever seen, and reflect the fact that there are more people using the internet during weekdays than on weekends.

The Tipping Blog: Microcontent News on meme-spread via blogs, with reference to The Tipping Point.

Blog Traffic: how to draw it.

Traffic Doesn’t Matter: Seth Godin, saying outrageous stuff. Personally, I say treat everything the man writes as suspect. But he’s always thought provoking. Note: He is a TypePad user: expect some bogus marketing book on blogs from him by spring, if not earlier. This entirely unfair, but I worked for man once who tried to live, eat breathe and think ideas from Godin’s oeuvre: it sucked.

The majority of the sites I found were entirely focused on the idea that increasing your traffic is a Good Thing. None appeared to treat it as a problem to be solved, at first glance.

A corollary to this is that for ten years now it’s been apparent that the internet itself, both in terms of data and users, has been in a state of rapid growth. In a way, all you really had to do to predict growth was to develop and present an organic website, which is what many of the ‘how-to’ guides recommend. Obviously, it’s time to move beyond that set of advice.