Restart
This isn’t my first attempt to do the whole blog thing. But I think most of the other attempts have been too narrowly focused to accomplish everything I’d like to do with a blog. I occasionally blog on my myspace site, and still post political stuff at Democratic Underground, but I thought this time around I’d create a blog that might encompass a wider range of topics than I’ve so far managed.
I almost called this blog Randomeyez because the topics I cover here will most definitely be random. Thoughts for the day, peeks into my daily life, observations about film, television, or music, philosophical musings on the state of the world as I see it, life in general, and, of course, stuff about my writing and the Infinity Project as a whole.
We’ll see how it goes.
I think today I’m going to start out talking about web comics. Thanks to StumbleUpon, I managed to run across several new ones I thoroughly enjoyed. Now besides the obligatory Order Of The Stick, I have several others bookmarked. OOTS is a AD&D-based comic that is both tribute and spoof in equal measures. Anyone who’s spent his or her share of time bent over a table rolling dice and scrawling weapon doodles down the side of their character sheet will certainly “get” the jokes. Sometimes spoofs cross the line, at least from my perspective, but OOTS shows a definite love for the game along with some choice ribbing about its conceptual failings.
Besides OOTS, my new favorite is Impy and Aevy. (Don’t worry…I’ll include some links at the end of this post so you all can check it out). Just today I found Striptease and Punch an’ Pie. So far I think I like Striptease better, but I haven’t gotten very far in either one, so I can’t say for sure.
Striptease is about a comic book artist and his friends and doesn’t so far feature the talking animals and other weirdness of the other strips I enjoy. But it’s cute, and fresh, and, well, I’d kill to have a comic book artist as a member of my posse. Then maybe Infinity Project graphic novels wouldn’t be such a pipe dream.
<sigh>
Sluggy Freelance is fun too, in a twisted way, but I’ve more or less stopped following it for now. Maybe after it builds up another backlog I’ll spend some time catching up.
Another recent find is superdickery.com. As much of an old-time comic book fan as I am, I was choking back howls of laughter while thumbing through the site last night. Some of those old comic book covers are gut-twistingly funny.
On to other things. For the past couple years, since before I got my handy little ipod shuffle (a wonderful toy for listening to audio-books, though probably not quite so convenient for listening to music, though it does suffice well enough) I’ve been working my way through Lois McMaster Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan novels. Without a doubt these books are among the best the sci-fi end of the speculative fiction continuum has to offer. Her fantasies–particularly the Curse of Chalion and its first sequel, are wonderful examples of how epic fantasy can be done right without having to resort to the intellectual cannibalism that seems to pervade the sub-genre these days. Her world building skills are paramount, and her characters live and breathe in the reader’s heart and mind.
Okay. Done raving about that.
What else do I have? Hmmm. Netflix. Yeah. Netflix. A great way to discover TV serials that you never bothered to watch the first time around, or never caught more than a few episodes of. So far my wife and I have introduced ourselves to several shows we’ve grown to enjoy. It’s great to be able to watch a couple of episodes a night of a particular show without once having to deal with the “BUY ME” commercial crap. We’ve done the Dead Zone, Gray’s Anatomy, The Closer, and the latest incarnation of Doctor Who. We tried to figure out why The Sopranos was so popular, but whatever it was, we didn’t get it. We moved on to Desperate Housewives and found a winner. I quickly described it as a twisted little soap opera. Not that soaps aren’t twisted to begin with–I just thought Desperate Housewives twisted the other direction…bent more towards reality. Sure, it’s a strangely warped reality, but, then again, so’s the real reality.
I also took the opportunity to use their “Watch Instantly” option to catch up on the last season of Xena, which I’d originally missed. Sure, the show was goofy sometimes, but it remains one of television’s best forays into heroic or epic fantasy to date.
Ah, fantasy. My first literary love. How far we’ve come from The Hobbit. My stepmother started this addiction, you know. She read the first several chapters of Tolkein’s original masterpiece to me, then just stopped. I already liked to read, but had, up until that time, pretty much stuck to stuff aimed at my age and grade level. The Hobbit was the start of everything, though, and it wasn’t long before I’d swallowed it whole, then devoured the whole LOTR saga and went grubbing for more.
Let’s just say I was a voracious reader. That’s hardly a suprise. Like most authors, I love to read. And I’m fairly omnivorous when it comes to literature, though I must admit that I prefer genre fiction. The real “literary” stuff tends to bore the crap out of me. I live real life…I don’t particularly want to read about it. Most “literature” involves people going through crap designed especially to make the reader feel like shit about life in general.
Woo-hoo.
Bleh.
I want entertainment, originality, and characters I can feel for. If the hero is someone I’d just as soon see fall down a well I’m probably not going to like it. If a character’s main claim to fame is how big an asshole he can be… I’ve got better things to do. Good fiction to me includes such diverse elements as action, drama, suspense, romance, and humor. I don’t need it to be intellectually stimulating, just emotionally fulfilling. If it can manage both, all the better.
Okay. Enough about that. Here are links to my favorite web-comics, as promised.
One more thing. If you haven’t quite figured it out by now, I’m not much of a snob. I like what I like and I accept that others will have different preferences than I have. One of the most obnoxious things about the internet is the raging multitude of anonymous and semi-anonymous jackasses with nothing better to do than take aim at things that are, frankly, none of their business. Those who attempt to gain stature at the expense of others really need to examine their approach to life. Or get a life. Whichever.
Not that there isn’t a lot of good snark to be found out on the web. Given a few moments, I’m sure you, dear reader, would be able to find multiple sites devoted to mocking someone else’s hairstyles, clothes, tastes in music, favorite films, sexual and romantic preferences, and any number of potential vulnerabilities. Slicing people open and pouring salt into emotional wounds is a loser’s game. Life can be hard enough without some insecure asshole poking at you to make him or her self feel better about his or her own sucky life.
Yeah, there’s a lot of good snark out there. You just won’t find it here.
