Waffle

There are still a lot of books from Books that are going, part 1 and Books that are going, part 2 that haven't found new owners yet. Just ask about any of the books. Also, I'm a wee bit behind with shipping some them out because I had to buy shipping boxes for the ones that had to go overseas. I'll get to it, soon enough. Meanwhile, the next big cull from my media collection consists of CDs and DVDs, split over two posts, because the list of CDs is very long. Here's what I've got to offer. As before, I am giving them away, all you need to pay for is the shipping if I have to mail them out.

Anime
Hayao Miyazaki: Princess Mononoke and Howl's Moving Castle. I like Miyazaki, but those two movies did nothing for me. Both are region 2.

Music
Deep Purple: Bombay Calling. Live DVD from the early days after Steve Morse joined in 1995. A good performance with an extended stage set and some early stabs at new songs that would end up on their next album Purpendicular, but filmed in an unexciting manner and with poor sound quality. Also, the opening seconds of the first song are missing, which is papered over by including a press conference before the start. You'll still like this if you're a Deep Purple completist, but it's a very flawed release, more of an official bootleg. Region-free.

TV series: Doctor Who
I have the following Doctor Who DVDs to give away.
William Hartnell, the First Doctor: The Dalek Invasion of Earth.
Patrick Troughton, the Second Doctor: The Tomb of the Cybermen.
Jon Pertwee, the Third Doctor: The Claws of Axos.
Tom Baker, the Fourth Doctor: The Ark in Space, The Robots of Death, Horror of Fang Rock, Pyramids of Mars. All Region 2.
Peter Davison, the Fifth Doctor: Earthshock, The Caves of Androzani.
Sylvester McCoy, the Seventh Doctor: The Curse of Fenric, Ghost Light.
All Doctor Who DVDs are BBC editions and are Region 2 + 4, except the Fourth Doctor ones, which were reissued in the Netherlands with (optional) Dutch subtitles and in Region 2 only.

Next up, CDs! I have really done a major cull with the CDs, and it helped that as I reorganised them a bit after pulling the first few dozens out, a whole teetering stack of them came tumbling down. I really do need to get rid of even more of them.

Would you believe that Wikipedia long had a policy which says that plot summaries - a core part of encyclopedic coverage - are something that Wikipedia was not? After this misbegotten thing was changed to a weaker version - which simply said they were highly discouraged without other content - goodbye any articles discussing the plot of the work from cited sources - there's now a movement to restore the ARRGHUTTERIMBICILITY version.

Don't believe me?

They're currently voting on it.

The old version they want it changed back to says:

Wikipedia is not....

...

* Plot summaries: The coverage of a fictional work should not be a mere plot summary. A summary should facilitate substantial coverage of the work's real-world development, reception, and significance. See also Wikipedia:Manual of Style (writing about fiction).

This option is leading, beating out slightly more sensible wording, and the option of deleting the whole misbegotten thing. Evidently, Wikipedia wants plot summaries are to be officially declared to be useless in themselves - even what Wikipedia is not - unless someone writes lots of analysis which most readers aren't interested in.

Pity that they're also the most useful part of an article for someone trying to find out about a fictional topic they aren't familiar with.

Another Caption Contest / me showing off my extensive collection of Victorian engravings!

Today's may be familiar to some of you, but let's have a little fun with it anyway

As always, I've uploaded a full-resolution scan to Wikipedia, as I believe in free art. Also, if you're reading this under Reinder's comic, you'll have to click on he link to the post to see the image.

-Adam Cuerden

Today's image, like the last two, is from my collection of the works of Sir Walter Scott.

...So, what might this scene in the novel be about? Do we really want to know? Evidently so: Put your captions in the comments!

(As always, if you cannae see the image, click on the link to go to the blog proper)

Have a pretty good set of entries so far, and I'm hard at work getting everything prepared. It's supposed to go up on Thursday - may, in fact, go up in a couple parts starting on Friday: You'll understand why when you see it.

The cutoff's going to have to be Wednesday, 9pm GMT.   That's 4pm EST, 3 pm Central, and so on and so forth.

I'd like a bit more on science, if possible - as a biology major, evolution is something near and dear to my heart.

As before, you can reach us weither by commenting in this post, or by sending an e-mail to waffleblog@gmail.com

You will need:

1 Rabbit
1 Bouillon Cube. Lamb for preference, chicken will do otherwise.
4-5 parsnips
Rosemary (fresh, for preference)
Some butter

Preheat oven to 180°C / 350°F. Sear your rabbit in a hot frying pan in the butter to seal in the juices, then transfer to a roasting pan. Add about an inch of water mixed with 1-2 bouillon cubes. Slice both ends off the parsnips, then cut in half lengthwise and add to the water. Sprinkle rosemary on top. Place in the oven, and allow to cook about 90 minutes.

No salt is necessary. The tears of your children at being served Easter Rabbit will be sufficient, and provide a delicate flavour.

Goes well with: Lamb of God; Garlicky mashed potatoes.

Three times now, my request to close my AdSense account and pay out outstanding amounts has been met with a response saying (in Dutch) that they cannot comply because there is a hold on my payout. After the first time, I went into my account and went through all the reasons they cited for such a hold: was my tax information complete and up to date (no, but it is now), did I put a manual hold on the payments (of course not, and there was no indication that Google had any reason to think so), did I enter a PIN (Yes, I did, in 2005, and as near as I can tell I don't have to enter it again)?

As best I can tell, all should be clear to wind up my account like I want to because I do not want to put something as harmful as the new version of AdSense on my website. So I can't tell why Google is making it so difficult for me to do so. To be continued, I'm sure.

Waffle will be hosting the 23 April edition of the Skeptic's Circle, a blog carnival dedicated to science and skepticism. Please send any submissions (blog posts and the like) to waffleblog@gmail.com or leave them in a reply to this post.

Rocr.net had 211051 pageviews in February, coming from 9586 unique visitors measured on a by-month basis. The pageviews are up 70,000 compared to January but the uniques have contracted a bit, by almost 300. The ROCR re-runs on Drunk Duck earned 7110 pageviews, which is about the same as they did in the two previous months.

The Chronicles of the Witch Queen website and the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan archive on Modern Tales earned about 23,000 pageviews together, based on statistics from Project Wonderful (making this a very rough guess, but MT/WCN's internal statistics are less useful for month-by-month data).

In all, my little empire earned nearly a quarter of a million pageviews in the past month. Most of the extra pageviews were earned by paid advertising, because while there are plenty of opportunities for free publicity, such as joining topsite lists, contributing to forums, exchanging links or simply asking for a mention and a link, they involve putting in time and effort that I cannot spare at the moment. It's hard enough for me just to write and draw the comic at the moment.

Next month, I will know if the paid advertising was cost-effective. I spent about $ 100 out of pocket, so if I made more from that in February through Webcomics World, I'll be doing good. Beyond that, it's simply nice to have my comics read by many people, so if end up making a modest loss, I won't cut my advertising altogether, though I probably will reduce the budget again.

I am somewhat concerned about the drop in uniques on ROCR.net, though these will be offset by new readers in places where I can't really count them. The uniques are a measure of my longer-term readership and therefore the longer-term health of the comic. So I will try some advertising on new locations, and if I do find the time, to put some work into unpaid publicity like joining a topsite. Targets for next month: 12,000 uniques, 1/3 million pvs.

Below, if this works right, is John Cage's 4' 33", in a lavish production:

[Edit: Evidently not. Just click here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUJagb7hL0E - We'll wait for you to come back.]

I'm sure there are many things that could be said in Cage's favour. I cannot actually think of them, but I'm sure they exist. However, I myself see this performance as a sign of the complete atrophy of quality control in the modern classical music scene, where pretending to like the indefensibly pretentious and awful is sufficient, and actually liking music a sign that you are hopelessly unhip.

Perhaps one could make this work. For instance, you could suddenly break into Rick Astley after three minutes, treating this with all the respect it deserves. You could announce afterwards, "Well, wasn't that nice. I'm sure we can all feel very cultured now, now that we actually convinced ourself that something so stupid was worth putting on and paying all these highly talented men and women to be here for. Right, let's remind these people what good music is. Pull out the Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto scores from last night's concert." You could break into one of Gilbert and Sullivan's songs poking fun of pretentiousness.

Just don't break into any more songs by John Cage.