Tag: comics

Electronica

I’ve finally done it. After resisting for years, I’ve bought an iPod.

Unfortunately, I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet. Our music collection is on alenxa’s computer, which is old enough that its USB port is USB 1.1. This hasn’t been a problem until now, since she syncs her iPod with Firewire. Little did I know that the latest generation of iPod only supports USB. I charged it this afternoon, and started the initial sync this evening. So far it’s about 1/3 through.

At least future syncs won’t be so bad.

In other news, I’ve found myself in the middle of an online firestorm twice this week. Safari for Windows and a relaunch of the Flash comic book.

Weekend Antics

Friday: Finally watched The Legend of Zorro (the second one with Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones). Much better than I expected, even if they did play fast and loose with history. Odd moment when alenxa recognized one of the actors as Ben from Lost.

Saturday: Mostly trying to catch up on my website. (Lots of new stuff in the last couple of weeks.) Ran some errands. Dropped by the local comic store for Free Comic Book Day & picked up several books, including a BSG book which is supposed to be a prequel, but which I don’t dare read until we’ve gotten a bit farther along in watching the show. Also felt I ought to buy something, and not just grab the free stuff, so I picked up (and read) a JLA book I’d been meaning to read, Syndicate Rules. It’s a sequel to both JLA: Earth-2 (in which the Justice League meets their mirror-universe counterparts, the Crime Syndicate of Amerika) and JLA/Avengers, which I finally read a few weeks ago after picking the series up at Wizard World LA. Much better than I’d been led to expect by some of the reviews.

Sunday: Went out to see Hot Fuzz, figuring Spider-Man 3 was guaranteed to still be in theaters next week. Great fun. Keep your eyes open: Once he arrives in Sanford, no detail is wasted. I liked Shaun of the Dead better, but I think that’s largely because the genre conventions being spoofed were more straight-forward: Zombies vs. a combination cop-buddy/horror/action film.

It was amazingly clear out, since it was the first day of Santa Ana winds (though they died down by midday). I seriously considered driving up into the hills to find a nice viewpoint, but after the movie, a late lunch, and some errands, it was running late enough that we just went home.

Vacation: Week 1

Long story short, alenxa needed to use up some vacation time, fast, so we ended up taking two weeks at the end of March.  Unfortunately, we didn’t realize until later that our tickets for Wicked were smack in the middle (tonight, to be precise), which meant no two-week trip because I didn’t want to go through the hassle of trying to exchange the tickets.

We’ll be going to Las Vegas next week.  This week was mostly hanging around, not having to go to work.

Saturday: Helped andrea_wot move into her new apartment.  Later drank my annual Murphy’s Stout in honor of St. Patrick’s Day.

Sunday: I went to Wizard World LA.  My con report got linked on The Beat.

Monday-Wednesday: Expeditions to Halloween Club (Katie’s planning a new costume for Comic-Con) and Fry’s (new video card).  Hooked up the spare monitor my brother gave us when he moved to Florida.  Discovered our current switch setup couldn’t handle more than 1024×768 without serious ghosting.  Back to Fry’s for a new switch. Watched several more episodes of Battlestar Galactica season one.  Invented a drink: 1 shot mango rum, splash of orange liqueur, fill the rest of the way with 1 part pineapple juice, 1 part cream soda, leaving room for a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

5 Minute Wait!Thursday: Disneyland — for the first time in maybe 5 years.  There are definite advantages to visiting in the off-season, during a weekday… like the 5-minute wait for Pirates of the Caribbean.  Thankfully, the changes to align it with the movies were minimally invasive, and the last view of Jack Sparrow demonstrates some seriously impressive motion capture.  Some other nice updates to Haunted Mansion and Jungle Cruise.  The new “wildest ride in the wilderness!” recording at Big Thunder Mountain, however, is a travesty.  Splash Mountain and the train were closed.  They seem to be piratifying Tom Sawyer’s island.  Pirates, Indy and Big Thunder kept breaking down, but we still managed to hit all three (some of them twice).  It was odd to see fruit carts all over the place.  It’s actually possible to eat mostly healthy food at Disneyland now.  Finished off the day with dinner at the Blue Bayou.

Friday: Took the car in in preparation for the road trip.  Then spent the rest of the day hanging out at home.  I mostly worked on my website, while Katie mostly tried out new games.

Now I’m looking at the pre-trip to-do list, trying to figure out how I’m going to get everything done in the next two days and go up to LA tonight and get together with friends tomorrow.  (And yes, “post to LiveJournal” is on the list.  One item to cross off!)

Organizing Comics

I finally got around to reorganizing my way-too-many boxes of comics. Mainly I had a bunch of stuff on the top layer I hadn’t looked at in months and a bunch of stuff in the middle layer I kept dragging out, but I also found a bunch of comics I don’t want to keep anymore…

…including my entire Transformers collection.

I’m giving my friends first crack at those, and the rest of it (including the stuff left over from the last few clean-out rounds) is up on my website.

If you’re interested in any of the following (or anything at the above link), let me know:

List of Transformers comics up for grabs

Weekend Thoughts

Rain should not fall at an angle more horizontal than vertical.

Whoever came up with the idea for a warning chime to let you know your headlights are still on is a genius, and has saved my car battery many times over.

It doesn’t take much rain to screw up freeway visibility. I could swear I’ve driven in heavier rain and been able to see better.

Our apartment complex suffers from the same problem as UCI: no one bothered to build in decent drainage. Fortunately that’s only been a problem with the sidewalks so far, and not, say, parking or storage.

What the heck is “white whole wheat” flour? It sounds like raw Twinkies, or wild tofu, or Sweet ’n’ Bland. Is it a 50/50 blend or something?

If you run a Persian restaurant, and advertise belly dancers, no one really cares whether the dances are authentic. On that note, Caspian is very loud, at least on Saturday nights. But the food’s good.

The web is a stranger place than you think. Yesterday I was looking at website referrer stats, and discovered a link to our Comic Con photos on a site that specializes in super-heroine, uh, “fantasies.” I.e. dressing models up as superheroines and then, shall we say, reversing the process. Apparently with rope often involved, though that’s almost classic if you’ve seen any 1940s-era Wonder Woman. They had a page full of links to people’s convention photos, focusing on cosplayers.

Just how do they fit Christmas lights into the box? I’d rather let the cord tangle up and then untangle it next year than go through the exercise in frustration that involves trying to get them all into the plastic framework, only to have them pop out, not fit in the box, etc. At least when you untangle them to put them up, you get something out of it: pretty lights on the tree (or window, or roofline, etc.) All you get from carefully placing each light in the frame is a box you’re going to put away and ignore for 11 months, and you can get that much more easily just by jamming the string of lights into the box in the first place.

Webcomic Condensation

A few months ago, I read six or seven webcomics on a daily basis. These days it’s down to two: Something Positive and Queen of Wands. And looking at my bookmarks list, the only other one I feel a desire to catch up on is Real Life, which, now that I’ve been reminded of it, I can’t figure out why I stopped reading. Fortunately a quick trip to the archives shows I’m only three weeks behind…

… okay. *ahem* These days it’s down to three webcomics…

(Bring in… the comfy chair!)

Anyway, I’ll probably head back to Sluggy Freelance once they finish the current interminable Dimension of Pain story. I stopped reading about two months ago and the last time I checked it’s still going.

Catching up

This morning alenxa asked me if I’d posted anything on comic book time (the effect by which Superman and Lois Lane are roughly the same age now as they were in 1938). I’d actually started writing about it a while back, but never finished it.

Around lunchtime I took a look at the Drafts folder on my keychain drive, and I found it — a lot shorter than I remembered, and a lot more recent. I also found an epic I had written ages ago based on another of our conversations — one wondering about the dearth of sci-fi art films. This thing is several pages long, deals with defining sci-fi, fantasy, and related genres, and doesn’t even get to the art film issue, and predates our group blog by several months. In fact, it’s old enough that the first line starts off, “My girlfriend and I were having a conversation about movies….”

There was a footnote about popular derision of science fiction vs. popular consumption of it that I thought was worth posting on its own, although since it dealt with top movie grosses, it needed a bit of updating. This piece of weblog history can now be seen at Viewing the Impossible.

I dashed off some thoughts on several other half-finished pieces (including the time issue), as well as a new one I’d been thinking about while drifting off to sleep last night (or maybe drifting off to consciousness this morning). I figure on finishing and posting them over the next few days. Maybe I’ll start breaking up the epic and post that too. With a new opening line, of course!

Current Mood: creative

You know you’ve picked the right person when…

I was just looking through web traffic statistics for K-Squared Ramblings, had just finished reading the top 20 search terms people were finding us with, and started on the list of individual pages linking to the site. I muttered “Ah, direct hits,” and then, at the same time, alenxa and I both started saying “Krakow! Krakow!” (old “Calvin and Hobbes” joke).