It was such a nice day, I went out for a long walk after dinner tonight. I walked for about an hour. That’s probably the most exercise I’ve gotten since Wondercon in February. I’ve got to try to keep this up. If the weather cooperates, maybe I can get in the habit of doing this every day or so.
Month: March 2006
Samurai Champloo
I finished watching Samurai Champloo a couple of days ago. It’s a great series; nearly as good as Cowboy Bebop. I’m re-watching some of the episodes now, catching some stuff I didn’t get on the first run-through.
AMALGAM is a pretty good Samurai Champloo fansite. I stumbled across it looking for info on some of the music from the show.
NeuNeo/Helios HVD-2085
I’m thinking about picking up this DVD player from HKFlix.com. My current DVD player is pretty old, and doesn’t handle CD-Rs or DVD-Rs (or any variation thereof) at all. I really don’t need the HD stuff yet, but maybe someday it’ll come in handy.
ASP.NET 2.0
Well, it’s been about a month since I’ve done any ASP.NET 2.0 work at home. I watched a few webcasts at work over the last couple of weeks, though, so I haven’t forgotten anything. I played around with the GridView a bit tonight. Very nice. It’s really easy to put a fairly standard-looking and straightforward grid together quickly. I need to go a little deeper, though, and figure out how to do some of the weirder stuff that we typically do with the DataGrid now.
Verizon iobi
I’m thinking about signing up for Verizon’s iobi service. It does a few nice things, such as selective call forwarding, that could come in handy on occasion. I’m not sure if it’s really worth the money though. It’s only $8/month, but I’m not sure I need it enough for it to be worth that. And I’m not sure I trust Verizon to write a PC application that works reliably and easily. The demo looks good, though.
Ziegfeld Classics
They’re showing some interesting stuff at the Ziegfeld this month. It looks like I’ve already missed some good stuff (LoTR and Indy), but there’s more good stuff coming up (North by Northwest, Alien, and Lawrence of Arabia, for example).
X-Men
I’ve been on a bit of an X-Men binge lately. I read Ultimate X-Men volumes 1-7 on the plane trips out to San Francisco and back a few weeks ago. I finished Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men 1-12 last week. I just started reading Chris Claremont’s recent Uncanny X-Men run (starting from #444). And I bought all of the Grant Morrison New X-Men trades on eBay this week.
I’ve been looking at some X-Men sites on the internet tonight, just to see where all the pieces fit, from the Morrison era to the present. Grant Morrison’s site has a list of all his X-Men work. The X-Axis has reviews of Morrison’s run, and much more. The Comics Journal has an interesting article on the “X-Men Reload” event, with a little overview of Morrison’s run, and reviews of the first few issues of Whedon’s Astonishing run and the other stuff that came out at that time. There’s a big index of Morrison-era stuff at Seqart.com. And there’s a review of the entire Morrison run at PopMatters.com.
I enjoyed the Ultimate X-Men books, even though they’re in their own little world, continuity-wise. They’ve gone in some interesting directions, different from the main Marvel universe, but still clearly exploring many of the themes that the X-Men titles frequently play with.
The Astonishing X-Men series was a lot of fun to read. Joss Whedon is great at writing a certain kind of story, basically the same kind of thing he did so well in Buffy, Angel, and Firefly. He handles dialog really well, maintaining a certain economy that still succeeds in establishing character traits and relationships. It’s a lot different from the way Claremont writes, but he’s clearly a fan of the original Claremont Uncanny stuff. John Cassaday’s art is incredible, too, though it’s not quite as inspiring as his work on Planetary.
The new Claremont stuff is fun to read, too, reminding me (of course) of his original work on the title. The Comics Journal review mentioned above really rips into Claremont for his caption-heavy writing and clunky characterizations, but I enjoy it. It’s all kind of obvious and predictable, but it’s fun, and the key characters are all likable. The baseball game at the beginning of #444 is a perfect example; a standard Claremont method of enumerating his cast for the new reader, and sketching out a few of their relationships. Alan Davis’ art on these issues is great too; I’m a big fan of his work on Excalibur from some years back, and it’s nice to see him on an X-book again.
I’m looking forward to reading through all the Morrison stuff. I’ve never been a huge fan of his, but I saw him on a few panels at Wondercon, and I got interested in tracking down some of his work. From some of the reviews I’ve seen of his New X-Men run, it sounds like it ought to be pretty interesting.