Category: comics

Heat Wave

We’re in the middle of a heat wave here in New Jersey. And I haven’t been doing well with it. I started feeling bad Wednesday night, then had to call in sick on Thursday. I already had Friday off for Juneteenth; if I didn’t, I would have had to take another sick day. It’s Saturday now, and I’m feeling a little better, but honestly, just doing my laundry has pretty much exhausted me.

I had my groceries delivered from Whole Foods today. It’s been a while since I’ve done that. (I think the last time was in March.) I definitely wouldn’t have had the energy to go over to ShopRite today. (Well, I probably could have managed it, if I had to, but I’m better off resting, I think.) I didn’t leave the apartment at all Thursday or Friday. I might try to venture out briefly today, maybe to get a croissant from the bakery or something like that.

I’ve been thinking about why I’m sick and whether or not I could have made any different choices on Wednesday that could have prevented this. We had an IT Town Hall meeting on Wednesday at work. It was a 90-minute in-person all-hands meeting. I wore a mask, but there were likely a lot of germs going around. Then, later, we had an “ice cream social.” That was outside; they got a couple of ice cream trucks to set up on the patio. I got in line for that, but it was so hot I gave up and went back in. Someone had left a birthday cake in the break room, so I had a slice of leftover cake instead. So now I’m wondering if I picked up the cold from the town hall meeting, the ice cream thing, of if the leftover birthday cake did it. And I’m wondering how much the heat had to do with it.

Honestly, I’m wondering if I can do large (or relatively large) in-person stuff at all anymore now. And/or if I should avoid any kind of shared/leftover food that might have germs on it. I guess it’s good that I gave up on NYCC this year. Garden State Comic Fest is happening today in Morristown. I’d been thinking about going to that. It’s much smaller than NYCC, so I was thinking that I could probably survive it. But I’m definitely too sick for it.

Meanwhile, at work next week, I’ve got continuing fallout from the big project that went into production a couple of weeks ago. I think I’m managing that well. We also have an “agile transformation” project going on. We had an in-person training class on that on Thursday that I missed. And we’ll have two more in-person classes next week. I’m hoping I can make it into the office, and get through those in one piece. But I’m worried about it. Of course, I probably know more about agile and scrum and all that stuff than the people who are running the classes. But I need to show up and engage and figure out whatever hoops the new management wants us to jump through.

To refresh my memory on Agile, I started reading Clean Agile by Robert Martin last week. It’s not bad, so far. I read Clean Code a couple of years ago, so I’m familiar with Uncle Bob’s writing style and his various quirks. His style probably isn’t for everyone, but I’m OK with it. I’m curious to see how far we really go with agile at work this time. There was a big push for scrum a few years back, and we never really did it right. It’s easy to be cynical about this stuff. I hope we “do it right” this time, or at least close enough to right to be useful rather than just an additional layer of meetings and paperwork, but we’ll see.

I also started reading a fairly random book by John Maxwell recently. There was a push at work a while back to learn and embrace the Maxwell leadership style. This was back when I was still a manager. I haven’t heard much about it lately, but then again, I’m not a manager anymore. I noticed this book in my Kindle library, and decided to give it a try. I acquired it in 2009. apparently. It must have been a freebie. I have no memory of buying it, and it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing I would have spent money on. It’s a self-help book on achieving your dreams, which is definitely not something I’m worried about right now. I’m just hoping to make it through the day, one day at a time, at this point in my life. But the book is interesting enough, in the sense that it’s giving me some insight into a mindset that isn’t my own.

I guess I’m taking a break from the Wheel of Time right now. I finished Crossroads of Twilight about a week ago. I think I’m going to try to read New Spring next. It’s a prequel novel, and was published after Crossroads of Twilight, so it’s next up, if I’m reading in “publication order.” It’s also a lot shorter than most of the main WoT books, so that’s nice.

Well, I guess that’s enough rambling for now. It should get up to 97 later, so I should probably give up on getting anything else done today. Time for a nap, maybe.

priorities, part two

OK, a quick follow-up to this morning’s post:

  1. I watched nearly all of the Roland-Garros men’s final. It was fun! Spoiler: Alcaraz won.
  2. I took a break from tennis at 10 AM to walk over to the Somerville farmers market, and bought a bunch of stuff, so that was cool.
  3. And I got myself into the NYCC ticket queue at 10 AM too. When I came back from the farmers market, I was still in the queue. I didn’t get out of the queue until noon. At that point, all ticket types were still available. I briefly considered buying a four-day pass, but then I saw how much it would cost: $250. (And that’s before whatever taxes & fees they add on.) I could afford it, I guess, but since I was on the fence about going at all, the price kinda pushed me over the edge into “nope” territory.
  4. And, at some point, I realized that I also wanted to watch the Phillies/Mets game from London today. That was set to start at 10 AM, and I thought about maybe switching back & forth between tennis and baseball, but honestly the tennis was good enough to keep my attention, so I stuck with that. I thought about watching the baseball game later, from my DVR, but I’ve already seen the headline to this article, so I know the outcome, which makes me a little less enthusiastic about watching it.
  5. And I usually like to make some progress with the Wheel of Time on Sundays, so I should take some time this afternoon and do that. So that’s likely what I’ll be doing for the next hour or two.

So, for anybody, who wanted to know more than anyone needs to know about what I’m doing with my Sunday, you’re all set now.

priorities

I normally try to take it easy on Sundays. I get most of my chores done on Saturday, so I can rest and goof off on Sunday. I don’t usually have much of a plan on Sunday. I realized this morning, though, that I have a few conflicting priorities. They’re all basically leisure priorities, so I’m not complaining, but I thought it might make a fun blog post.

First, there’s the Roland-Garros Men’s final. That’s starting at either 8:30 AM or 9 AM, depending on who you believe. The NBC/Peacock coverage starts at 9 AM. But the Roland-Garros app says it might start at 8:30. I tuned into RG radio a few minutes ago, and they were airing a repeat of a previous match, so that’s no help. I guess I’ll tune into RG radio at 8:30 and see if the match has started.

I resubscribed to Peacock recently, since they had a deal where you could get a one-year sub for $20. I assumed they’d have more coverage of Roland-Garros than airs on NBC, but they really don’t. I guess that’s all just on Tennis Channel.

My second priority is the Somerville farmers market, which runs from 10 AM to 1 PM today. I have a few things I want to get there today. I also know that there’s going to be a tent there collecting donations for the people displaced in last week’s fire, so I want to give them some money too.

My third priority is the NYCC ticket presale, starting at 10 AM today. I’d kind of decided to give up on NYCC entirely last year, after getting COVID right around the same time that NYCC started. I’ve found myself considering it again though.

And finally, the Pathfinder campaign that my brother tried to put together in 2023 fizzled out, but someone else who was going to participate in that has decided to take the bull by the horns and organize a D&D campaign, so I’ve been invited into that. They had a “session zero” last week, which I missed, because the info got sent out on WhatsApp, and, while I was on the chat thread for it, I’d turned off notifications on WhatsApp a long time ago, due to spam. I think they’re probably doing a session today, though I’m not sure. I feel like I should reply to the WhatsApp thread and see if I can get in on it, but since I missed the “zero” session, I’d be a little behind the curve. And since it’s D&D instead of Pathfinder, I’d be dealing with a slightly different set of rules. I’m not sure I have the mental energy to deal with it right now.

So, wow, even typing all of that up tired me out a bit. It probably makes sense to prioritize activities that involve interacting with other humans, since that’s probably better for my mental health than sitting in front of the TV. But I’m not sure I have the mental energy for any of that. I think I’ll turn on NBC at 9 and watch some tennis, then head over to the farmers market at 10 or 11, depending on where we are in the tennis match.

And maybe I’ll click on the NYCC presale link at some point, and get myself in the queue, just for yuks. Maybe it’s better to just stay out of it though.

I started thinking a bit yesterday about the idea of “listening to my body.” I took two naps yesterday, mostly because I just felt like I had to. As I get older, I think I need to pace myself and be more careful about things. I shouldn’t feel guilty if I decide I need a nap, or take a day off, or whatever. I need to think about keeping myself healthy, overall, for the long run, which, at this point in my life, probably requires more napping that it used to. And fewer comic-cons.

Bah, humbug

It’s the last day of the four-day Thanksgiving weekend, and I’m having mixed feelings about things. I realized today that this is my longest stretch of time off from work this year, except for my five days off with COVID, and that definitely doesn’t count as a vacation. And I haven’t done much with the time.

It’s been a mostly relaxing four days. I had a bit of a wobble yesterday, when they started playing Christmas music here in Somerville, too loud, and I started getting the shakes. I’m half-kidding about that, but the multiple “Christmas music playing all night” incidents here on Main Street have definitely scarred me a bit. So any holiday spirit that had started percolating up in me was quickly tamped down.

I’ve read some actual, printed, standard size, physical comics this weekend. I haven’t touched my “to be read” comics box in quite a while. From my notes, it looks like I might not have read any “real” comics since… Halloween 2021? (That can’t be right.) Well, either way, it’s been a while. (I’ve read some digital comics this year and last year, and some physical graphic novels, though.)

I read all twelve issues of Brian Bendis’ Legion of Super-Heroes run earlier in the weekend. I’d been looking forward to that. It was… OK. I was disappointed with certain aspects of it, and found it overall a bit frustrating, but there were some fun bits. I guess that, if I want to read Legion comics like the ones I read when I was a kid, I should just go back and re-read those.

Today, I read the first six issues of Warren Ellis’ The Batman’s Grave series. I’ve always really liked Ellis, but I haven’t read anything by him since mid-2020, when all the… unpleasantness came to light. At that time, I’d already bought about half the series, and was pretty much committed to buying the rest of it. I don’t think he’s done any comics work since this, so this might be his last long-form comics work? It’s pretty good, honestly. I’m a big Batman fan, but sometimes I get tired of of the character. I don’t think I’ve read any Batman books since this one, around two years ago. (And I notice I mentioned “Batman fatigue” in my review on that one, so I’ve really been cutting back on the Batman stuff, apparently.) Anyway, I’m finding this series a lot more satisfying than the previously-mentioned Legion series. It’s a lot of fun, with some nice banter between Bruce and Alfred, and some great art from Bryan Hitch.

I just googled Bryan Hitch to see if I was spelling his name right, and found out that he’s one of the founders of Ghost Machine, a new comics company that I was vaguely aware of, but hadn’t paid any attention to. It looks interesting, but of course the last thing I need is more comics!

The search also turned up some news about the recent casting of the actor who is going to play The Engineer in the next Superman movie. Again, I was kind of vaguely aware of this, but hadn’t given it any thought. I’d forgotten that The Engineer was created by Ellis and Hitch. I imagine the movie folks will want to play down Ellis’ role there. I can’t say I’m too excited about the movie, but maybe it’ll be interesting. It’s been hard for me to work up any enthusiasm for DC-related movies lately.

And, as usual, that search got me off track from whatever it was I was meant to be writing about here. I think I was going to mention that I had drowned out the Christmas music yesterday by watching Netflix’s Bodies mini-series. I was going to mention that it’s based on a comic that looks interesting, and that I’ve added to my Amazon wish list. I noticed that the comic isn’t available digitally, which is kind of unusual. I have no clue why that is, but I may give in and buy a physical copy at some point.

I’ve noticed that reading comics this weekend has caused me to add a bunch of other comics to my wishlist, and has also moved me to buy a handful, via Amazon/Comixology. Some of that is from books related to the ones I’m reading, and some is from seeing stuff in house ads in the comics, and thinking “oh yeah, I wanted to buy that.” I think the problem here is that I went (mostly) cold turkey on new comics in mid-2020 or so, and that’s when these books I’m reading came out. (And Amazon has some big sales going on this weekend, so I can get stuff cheap.) The Legion books led me to Future State: Superman, which was on sale for $3. The whole Future State thing is one of the reasons I stopped buying comics. I wasn’t opposed to it, per se, but it made for a good jumping off point. But for $3 for a 400+ page book, why not give it a try? I also bought N.K. Jemisin’s Far Sector collection for only $2. I’d actually wanted to pick that up, but just hadn’t gotten around to it. I saw a house ad in one of the comics I read today, so that reminded me, and got me to check the price on Amazon. I also bought a few more books that were on sale for $2 or $3. I don’t feel too bad about any of that, since I’ve bought so few comics this year. Still, my Comixology “to be read” list has 239 items on it right now…

It’s 1:30 PM right now, and I don’t hear any Christmas music outside, so I might be lucky, and yesterday’s music was just a one-time thing  for Small Business Saturday, and not a daily thing that I’m going to have to put up with until December 25.

no more Comixology app

It was announced recently that the Comixology app is going away, and the Kindle app will be the only way to read comics purchased from Amazon. I kinda knew this was coming, of course. But it still seems worth making note of it and blogging about it a bit.

Earlier this year, the layoffs at Comixology were big news, and in early 2022, the revamped Comixology app (based on the Kinde app) was also big news. Amazon has been slowly absorbing Comixology, like a gelatinous cube, oozing slowly down a dungeon corridor. (I tried to get ChatGPT to give me a few funny sentences comparing Amazon to a gelatinous cube, but it didn’t give me anything worth including here.)

I haven’t been reading a lot of comics lately. I’ve been spending most of my leisure reading time working on the Wheel of Time books. I just finished the fifth book, The Fires of Heaven. I started reading the series in March, so it’s taken me about eight months to get through five books. Not bad, really, considering their length and my limited reading time.

But it’s really killed my Goodreads reading goal for the year, which was 75 books. (I’ve only read 28.) I’m thinking about devoting the rest of the year to reading comics. I read two interesting graphic novels this weekend: one from Harvey Pekar and one from Alex Ross. Very different viewpoints in those two, but I noticed that they both briefly mention Sacco and Vanzetti, which makes me think that my next read should be Rick Geary’s book about them, which I bought from him at a con around ten years ago.

I own all three of the aforementioned graphic novels in hardcover, so I haven’t had a reason to open up the Comixology or Kindle app this weekend, but I should do that soon, before they shut down the old app for good, just to make sure I understand what’s going on, and don’t lose track of anything.

Sandman and ChatGPT

I was watching a video on YouTube yesterday, with Neil Gaiman and a few other folks talking about Sandman, and reminiscing about the early days of the comic. It was fun, and it got me thinking about doing a Sandman reread. There’s a podcast about Sandman called Endless, and they’re going through a reread of the book right now, so I could follow along with that while I’m reading.

And that got me looking for a list of the original Sandman issues, with story titles and artist names. The Wikipedia entry has a lot of info, but no complete list of issues. The DC Universe Infinite page shows all the covers, and has all the art teams, so that’s probably good enough. But I thought it would be fun to ask ChatGPT, and some related chatbots, to give me an issue list and see what I got.

Here’s the prompt I used: “Can you give me a list of all 75 original issues of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comic, with creator credits and story titles? Format as a table or list.”

And here’s the results:

  • Bing – gave me a table. On my first try, it gave up at issue 8, and told me “and so on up to issue 75.” (So it knew it was giving up!) On my second try, it got up to issue 31, and then just gave up. (And it took a long time to get that far.) Interesting feature: you can open a table from Bing in Excel.
  • Poe, “web search” bot – gave me a numbered list, but lost track of what it was doing after issue 25 and started repeating itself. Then gave up at list item 50. Definitely the worst result I got.
  • Poe, “assistant” bot – gave me a numbered list. Stopped at issue 72.
  • Poe, Claude-instant-100k – gave me a table. Gave up after issue 66.
  • ChatGPT 3.5 – Returned a table. Got all the way to issue 75, but, double-checking it, I see that a lot of it is wrong.

So I guess my conclusion is that this isn’t a great task for ChatGPT or similar chatbots. ChatGPT was the only one that returned all 75 issues, but it got a bunch of stuff wrong. I didn’t check the other results too closely; they looked right, as far as they went. But I just went back and looked again, and they’re all not quite right.

I like the Bing feature that lets you open a table in Excel. None of the other chat interfaces make it easy to do anything useful with the table. I managed to copy & paste the table out of ChatGPT, but it was a bit of a hassle. I’m really surprised that, with all the fancy tech behind ChatGPT, they don’t just have a simple “export to text / Markdown / PDF” button for chats. (Maybe there’s a way to do that, and I just haven’t stumbled across it yet.)

So, anyway, that was all probably a waste of time. I should spend less time screwing around with chatbots and more time reading comics.

Master Keaton

I’ve been thinking about Master Keaton a bit lately. I noticed that all ten volumes of the manga are listed as being banned in a certain school district in Texas, based on this article. I haven’t actually read the manga, but I’m having trouble figuring out how a manga about an insurance investigator could be problematic. (Well, it’s manga, so I’m sure there’s something…)

I have all the DVDs for the Master Keaton anime. I bought most of them in 2006, but have still only watched the first three. I’m thinking about re-watching those first few, and then going on and finishing the series.

And I poked around a bit today to see if the manga was still in print. It is, but apparently only in paperback and not digitally. As I was looking at that, I noticed that apparently Right Stuf is shutting down and getting merged into the Crunchyroll store. Right Stuf has been around since 1987, and I’ve bought a bunch of stuff from them over the years, but nothing lately. That’s partially because I have too much stuff to watch/read so I shouldn’t buy anything new, and partially because I can usually find what I’m looking for cheaper at Amazon. I always feel a little guilty buying stuff at Amazon instead of a smaller retailer, but I often do it anyway.

Returning to the subject of the Master Keaton manga being “banned,” I just dug into that a bit more by searching for it here, and apparently it had previously been classified as OK for middle school students, but has been reclassified as only for grades 9+. So maybe that’s not so bad. I remember the anime as being fine for all ages, I think, but maybe the manga is a bit more violent. Still, I’m sure most middle school kids in America have seen much worse.

some random links

I’m continuing to feel better today (see previous post), though I’m still not enjoying the “Paxlovid mouth” side-effect. I’m currently masking it with some apple juice.

I spent some time at the computer today, paying some bills, and catching up on some miscellaneous stuff I was neglecting while sick. I thought I’d put together a link post, with a few random things I stumbled over today.

  • The Coronavirus Still Doesn’t Care About Your Feelings – from The Nation. I don’t really have anything to say about this, but thought it was relevant to my current situation.
  • The cult of Obsidian – from Fast Company. I’ve mostly given up on Obsidian, and have decided to remain with Evernote for now. But I still think Obsidian is interesting, and I may return to it at some point. I’m a little interested in maybe picking up David Sparks’ Obsidian Field Guide, now that it’s out, though there wouldn’t be much point in that, if I’m not going to use Obsidian.
  • I just saw the news that JHU in Manhattan has closed, via this interview at The Beat. I’ve been going to JHU since back when it was in A&S Plaza. So that’s got to be back in the early 90s, since it was only called A&S Plaza from 1989-1995 (per Wikipedia). I always liked that store, both before and after Jim Hanley retired. Mind you, I haven’t been there in a while. I can’t really remember the last time I was there. In more recent years, I’ve been more likely to stop by Midtown Comics, mostly just because I’m more likely to pass by there on my way to or from Penn Station.

I’ve skimmed some of the news coming out of NYCC, but there’s not much that caught my eye. I looked at the Harvey winners, and there’s some interesting stuff in there. Having just spent a week at home, sick, you’d think I would have done some comic reading, but nope. I didn’t really have the energy for it earlier in the week. Then, on Wednesday, I decided to start watching Only Murders In The Building, and that kept me out of trouble from Wednesday through Friday. (I watched one season per day.) I should probably talk myself into doing some reading today and tomorrow, but I’m still not sure I have enough energy for it.

NYCC, football, booster shots, and other stuff

It’s Sunday morning, and I’ve got a bunch of assorted thoughts kicking around in my head, so I’m going to try to write a rambling blog post, and see what shakes out.

NYCC

NYCC is next weekend. I’m not going this year. And I’m not even enthusiastic about watching any panels from home, really. I looked at the schedule of what would be streaming via Popverse, and there’s not much that looks interesting to me. I’m pretty sure that NYCC 2021 was the last time I went into NYC for anything. (Leaving out the time in 2022 when I passed through on my way to Albany.)

It’s also occurred to me that I haven’t really taken a vacation this year, and we’re getting near the end of the year. I’ve used up a fair bit of my PTO time this year on sick days, but I could still take a few days. I should probably do that. I don’t need to have a plan to do anything specific, but it would probably be good for my mental health to check out from work for a bit and go for some long walks or something.

TV and TiVo

I see from my “On This Day” widget that I bought my TiVo eight years ago. I keep thinking about finally getting rid of it and pulling the plug on cable TV entirely, but I’m still hanging on to it. I only get the basic broadcast channels through cable now, but that’s still useful for stuff, including football, news, and a handful of shows.

Meanwhile, I talked myself into signing up for NFL+ yesterday, mostly because it was 50% off, and because I kinda wanted to watch the Jaguars/Bills game from London this morning at 9:30, and it’s only on NFL Network. So now I’ve got subscriptions to both MLB.TV and NFL+. At some point, I’m going to have to cull some of these subscriptions. I’ve got Netflix, Peacock, Paramount+, and the Disney+ bundle, plus Apple TV+ from my Apple One bundle, and Amazon Prime Video.

The Giants are doing pretty bad this year, by the way, and I usually lose interest in football if the Giants aren’t doing well, but I still haven’t given up hope this year just yet.

COVID and flu shots

I got my COVID booster and flu shot yesterday, COVID in the left arm and flu in the right. My right arm is fine today, but the left arm hurts a lot. It was bad enough overnight that I couldn’t put any weight on it, so every time I rolled left, I got a stab of pain. That made for a rough night.

I’ve noticed that all of the “ceremony” around COVID shots is basically gone now. The person who gave me the shots didn’t ask for my vaccination card or ask me to sit around CVS for 15 minutes afterward. And the old CDC V-safe program was shut down earlier this year, so I won’t get all of those fun text messages this time. So I guess we’re in the phase now where we’ll just be getting a yearly flu shot and COVID shot together every year, and it’ll be no big deal. Oh well.

Social media

Like most sane people, I’ve almost entirely given up on Twitter now. I’m mostly using Mastodon and Threads. I’d hoped that most of the people I followed on Twitter would move over to Mastodon, but that didn’t happen. A bunch of the tech folks moved to Mastodon, but most non-tech folks (and news orgs) have moved to Threads instead. That’s not great, since Threads doesn’t have any third-party clients, and will probably eventually have ads and a bunch of other dumb cruft, but it’s good enough for now, I guess.

Right now, I’m listening to Sleepy Hollow on XPN, and Julian Booker, who used to post the playlist to Twitter, is posting it to Threads. So it’s that kinda stuff that’s probably going to wind up on something like Threads rather than Mastodon, and I guess I need to deal with that.

In theory, Threads is eventually going to support ActivityPub, so there will probably be a way to consolidate my Mastodon and Threads browsing into a single third-party client at some point. (Assuming Meta isn’t pulling a Lucy/football thing and lying to us about ActivityPub support…)

Speaking of Lucy/football stuff, here are a couple of fun takes on that from today’s Foxtrot and an older Off The Mark. And, while I’m posting comic strip links, I liked today’s Cul De Sac too!

wellness day

I’m taking today off from work, as a “wellness day.” (Insert eye roll here.) Wellness days are a new thing at work. We get two of them each year. They’re just like regular PTO days, except there’s a whole separate workflow to request them, and you’re supposed to use them to work on… your mental health, or something like that. I don’t understand these things. But I’m grateful for the two extra vacation days, I guess.

San Diego Comic Con is this weekend, and once again, I’m not there. I thought I’d maybe spend some time today looking at the news coming out of the con, and I have, but there’s not much of interest to me. Due to the writers and actors strikes, a number of panels and appearances have been cancelled. I guess that actually means that there’s more room for actual comics stuff at the con, so that’s cool, but honestly I’m not really following comics news right now either.

I picked up a few interesting bits from browsing the #SDCC tag at Mastodon, including learning that Phil Foglio broke his foot. (Which reminds me: I have a bunch of Girl Genius comics in PDF format I bought in 2020 that I still need to read…)

I started the day with a mental list of things I might like to do today, and of course I’ve done almost none of them. I did do a few semi-responsible things, like finally make an appointment for an overdue oil change, and clean up some stuff in Evernote, and stuff like that.

I also read a few chapters in The Shadow Rising, the fourth Wheel of Time book. I seem to be reading this one more slowly than I did the first three. I’m still really enjoying it, but I’ve been choosing to do other stuff on weekends more often, so I’m usually only getting through one or two chapters at a time, rather than reading 10 or 20 over the weekends. According to Wikipedia, it’s the longest book in the series, so I guess I’m going to be working on it for a while, maybe the rest of the summer.