Category: comics

New Year’s Day 2019

It’s 7am on New Year’s Day, and I don’t have anything big planned today, so I might as well get started on my traditional New Year’s Day blog post. I’ve been doing this for several years now. Here are some links to the last few posts:

Weight, Sleep, and General Health

My general health was been OK this year. I had blood work done a few weeks ago, and it looks very similar to 2017’s blood work.

My weight has been pretty steady for the last few months. I was 140 on New Year’s Day last year, and I’m 135 now. I’ve been steady at 135 for a while now, +/-2. Last year, I wrote “I can’t see myself dropping to 135, but we’ll see.” Well, I did drop to 135. This year, I’ll say that I can’t see myself dropping to 130. If I do, then that might actually indicate a problem. My doctor this year actually asked me if I wanted to put on a little weight, or if I was OK as-is. I think I’m fine, but if I drop another 5 pounds in 2019, that might be a problem.

I’m still using Lose It every day, and recently paid for a lifetime subscription.

I’ve been doing OK with exercise, relying on the Apple Watch to keep track of things and give me a little nudge now and then. I got a new Series 3 Watch for Christmas, so I’ll likely be sticking with that. My move goal was 440 for a while earlier in the year, but has been adjusted down to 390. I generally hit that goal 5 or 6 days per week.

Sleep is still an occasional problem. I did OK (but not great) last night, and I’ve had a few bad nights recently. I still use Sleep Cycle to track my sleep. I’ve cut back on caffeine a bit, but probably not nearly enough.

I’ve been meditating on and off this year. I had a little streak going back in October, but I stopped again and haven’t started back up. When I do meditate, I’m using Insight Timer. I’ll likely stick with that. I want to get back to meditating regularly. If Bill Gates can find time to meditate for 10 minutes a few times a week, so can I.

My vision is continuing to go downhill, though I haven’t had anything really bad happen yet. (Given my family history, I’m kind of expecting that I’ll be legally blind at some point in my 60s, though maybe I can avoid that.) I went to my eye doctor earlier this month and got a prescription for progressives, so I’ll get that filled at some point this month and see if I can get used to those, and if they help me with computer work and reading. We have a vision plan at work now, starting in 2019, so I can at least get those at a discount.

My hearing is also going downhill. I haven’t seen a hearing doctor yet, though I plan to do that in 2019. I’ve been following advances in hearing aid tech, so I hope that, if I need a hearing aid, I can at least get a good one that works with my iPhone and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.

I signed up for AARP last year too. I’m hoping I can get some useful information out of that in 2019. I’m trying to be proactive about aging, from both a health and finance standpoint.

Work

I hit the five-year mark at SHI in January 2018. I spent a lot of time this year working on a project related to Microsoft’s Partner Center, so I got to do a good bit of C# programming this year, and got to play with a few things in Azure, so that was good. This year, we should be opening a new warehouse, so that’s going to keep us busy, with related projects.

I, once again, got a very good performance review from my boss this year. I’m not going to get too specific, in case any coworkers stumble across this post, but I’m doing well.

Professional Development

I didn’t do any structured professional development this year, really. I watched a few Pluralsight courses, mostly related to specific stuff I needed to learn for work. Looking at my Goodreads history, I see that I read a handful of programming-related books this year:

Wow, that’s actually a longer list than I thought it was going to be. Some of those aren’t really programming books, like “Hit Refresh,” Satya Nadella’s book, and some are just short ebooks, but it’s still enough that I feel like I put some effort into keeping my skills sharp and staying current.

Finance

I did a quick year-end finance review over the weekend, and it’s a bit depressing. Any gains I had for the year were soundly wiped out by the recent stock market plummet. But, ignoring that, I can at least say that I have things in order. I did a little bit of reorganization in 2018, including moving some money from my legacy Merrill CMA account to a new CMA Edge account, where I can do my own trading online. I invested some money there into a couple of Vanguard index funds. I read John Bogle’s The Little Book of Common Sense Investing in May, and I’ve tried to reorient my finances in a more “Boglehead” direction, though I still have a lot of old-style mutual funds. I also made an attempt to book a session with an independent financial advisor, but failed to find someone who looked good and was willing to take on a new client. I should probably try again in 2019, since I really should have someone else look at things, given my age and the somewhat haphazard state of my portfolio.

Reading

According to my Year In Books on Goodreads, I read 106 books this year. A lot of those are actually short stories, short ebooks, and comic books, but I did read a fair number of novels this year too. I participated in a Great American Read group on Goodreads, and read a number of books that were outside my comfort zone. I posted about that in November. I’ve finished a few more TGAR books since then (Lonesome Dove, The Lovely Bones, and Lu), and started To Kill A Mockingbird, which was the winner of the TGAR poll.

I should note that I used my local library system a lot more this year than I have in previous years. I’ve used it for physical books, ebooks, and audiobooks. I’ve visited both my local branch, and the larger Bridgewater branch multiple times. So I’m thankful that we have such a good library system here in Somerset County.

As to comic books, I posted in December about my current indecision about sticking with Westfield for buying new comics, or maybe just giving up on buying new monthly books for awhile. I think I’m probably going to stick with Westfield for a few more months, at least, but I’m not sure. The reading pile is getting too big again. I’m pretty sure that I’ll stop buying monthly comics at some point this year though.

Looking at my Goodreads 2018 list again, I see a lot of Batman and Batman-adjacent stuff this year. Probably my favorite comic book read of the year would be Warren Ellis’ The Wild Storm series.

In terms of general reading goals for 2019, I want to (finally) read a couple of books on meditation that I bought early last year, Search Inside Yourself and 10% Happier. I also want to read this book on “finances after fifty” that I bought last year. I don’t have any specific goals related to fiction reading. I have a bunch of books piled up that I’d like to read, that I didn’t get to last year, including Ready Player One, and several other science fiction novels. I put off some of my genre reading in favor of TGAR books last year. I’m glad I did that, but I’d really like to get back to some SF. My “want to read” list in Goodreads has 308 books on it right now, so I’ve got plenty to choose from.

Summary

I’m skipping over a few things I could include here, but it’s now almost 10am, and I have a few things I want to do today, since it’s stopped raining and it’s reasonably warm out. So this post will be a little shorter than last year’s. Maybe I’ll write some follow-up posts over the next few weeks.

end-of-year comic book indecision

It’s getting near the end of the year, so I’m probably going to be posting a bunch of end-of-year review stuff over the next few weeks. Today’s end-of-year thoughts are all about how I’m buying comic books. I posted back in July and August about my decision to stop buying most of my comics from my local comic shop and switch back to Westfield Comics. Westfield has been fine, but I see now that I’m falling far enough behind in my reading that I’m probably going to have to give up on buying monthly books again and take a year or two to catch up.

It’s tricky deciding when to jump off the bandwagon though. I kind of like the idea of finishing Warren Ellis’ The Wild Storm series in print. There are six issues to go on that, so that would keep me buying monthly books until the middle of next year. Also, Tom King intends on writing 100 issues of Batman. So if I decide to keep following Batman through King’s whole run, I’ll be buying monthly books all through 2019 and into 2020. Of course, if I fall far enough behind on Batman, then it gets cheaper to just buy the collected trades rather than the single issues, and I can see myself doing that. I think I’m about 12 issues behind right now. (It’s easy to fall behind on a biweekly series.)

And I should probably consider the advantages of giving up on print and just sticking with digital. There’s a lot of things I don’t like about the way digital comics are sold/rented, but there are some serious advantages too. Looking at how much I’m spending on comics, I could actually sign up for ComiXology Unlimited, Marvel Unlimited, and DC Universe, and still be paying less per month than I’m currently spending on print comics.

Black Friday

There was no repeat of the Christmas music incident last night, so I got a good night’s sleep (or at least as good as I can manage these days). So I may actually be in shape to do a few of the things that I was too frazzled to do yesterday. However, it’s still very cold out: 12° this morning. And Raritan Valley trains are running about 30 minutes behind schedule right now. So, combining those two factors, going into NYC today might be a bad idea. I’m not going to completely rule it out, but I’m definitely not heading out to the train station right now to stand outside in the cold for a half-hour, hoping the train eventually shows up. If I see the trains get back to normal, and if it gets up into the twenties, maybe I’ll go in later.

I started my online Black Friday shopping yesterday, and I think it might be amusing to list out some of the stuff I bought, yesterday and today.

  • I picked up some random comics on Comixology, from DC’s big Black Friday sale. I got Batman: White Knight, which I’ve heard a lot of good things about. And Tales of the Batman: Gene Colan Vol. 2. I really liked Colan’s run on Batman, back in the 80s, after he left Marvel for DC. And I got Grant Morrison’s Wonder Woman: Earth One Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. I generally like anything Morrison does, so I’m pretty sure I’ll like these. (These were $5 each.)
  • I bought Blade Runner 2049 and Isle of Dogs from Vudu. I hadn’t previously bought any digital movies from Vudu, but with the whole Movies Anywhere thing, I can buy from Apple, Amazon, or Vudu and the movies show up in all three libraries, so it makes sense to buy from whichever service is cheapest. (I was originally thinking about going out to see a movie today, but I think that, instead, I’ll likely stay in and watch one or both of those.)
  • I picked up Fantastical 2 for iPad for $3. (It’s regularly $10.) I’ve been using the iPhone version for years, but never got around to picking up the iPad version.
  • I bought a $100 iTunes gift card for $80 from Costco. It seemed like a good deal.
  • This morning, when I went into Lose It to log my breakfast, I got a popup offering a deal on a lifetime subscription. I’m always a bit leery of lifetime subscription deals, but I’ve been using Lose It for five years, and renewing my premium subscription every year, so I went ahead and paid $75 for a lifetime sub. Since I did that in-app, that came out of my iTunes account, nicely using up most of that gift card I bought last night. (Maybe I’ll pick up another $100 card today.)

And here are some things I’m looking at today:

  • Pluralsight has their usual Black Friday sale going on, where you can renew your subscription for $200 instead of $300. I’ll probably do that again this year. I don’t get a ton of use out of Pluralsight, but I guess I get enough that it’s worth the $200.
  • Jetpack has a 30% discount off all plans for Black Friday. I’m currently only using the free Jetpack services on this blog, but I could step up to their “personal” plan. About all that really gets me, beyond what’s in the free plan, is site backups, but that could be useful.
  • Apple’s Black Friday weekend event has started. As usual with Apple, it’s not that compelling. But it might be worthwhile for me, since I was looking at getting some new Apple stuff anyway. On the iPhone front, they only have deals on iPhone 7 & 8, and I was thinking about the XR, so I’ll probably skip those. Their Apple Watch deal is for a $50 Apple Store Gift Card when you buy a Series 3. That’s not much, but might be a good deal for me. My current watch is a “Series 0,” so a Series 3 would be a good step up. I can use the $50 towards my eventual iPhone purchase.
  • I’m thinking about picking up a second Sonos One speaker, either from Sonos directly, or from Amazon or Costco. I get a fair bit of use out of the one I bought earlier this year, and it would nice to have two, for stereo. I don’t know if I really need that, though.
  • It’s not exactly a Black Friday thing, but a friend of mine has a story in this anthology about… cannibalism. On the one hand, I’d like to support him, on the other hand, I don’t much like reading about cannibalism. But hey, it’s only $4 for Kindle.

Since I started writing this blog post, I see that the NJ Transit delays are now at almost an hour, so things on that front are definitely going in the wrong direction. And the temperature is up to 22°, so that’s going in the right direction, but maybe not far enough to motivate me to spend much time outdoors today.

a little more on Stan Lee

I feel like I need to add a second post with some links related to Stan Lee’s passing.

Stan Lee

I was sad, but not surprised, to hear about Stan Lee’s passing today. He’s been in poor health for a while, and he was 95 years old. The NY Times has posted a surprisingly length obituary. I took a look at my Twitter timeline this afternoon, and it was full of people posting about him, both comics industry folks and, well, everyone else. I could link to a bunch of other stuff about Stan, but I’ll limit myself to one more thing: Paul Chadwick’s Stan the Mensch blog post from 2010. Just a little story about Stan being kind to a fan; look around the web today, and you’ll find a bunch more like it.

John Rogers

I was going to write a post today about how I failed, yet again, to get tickets for next year’s San Diego Comic-Con. But then I saw the news about John Rogers passing away. I hadn’t ever met him, but he’s been president of Comic-Con for the whole time I’ve been going to it (and/or trying to go to it). Thinking about it now, he seems to have kept a pretty low profile over the years, considering his position. So there’s not much I can say about him. But the con has brought me so much joy over the years, and I’m sure his work was a big part of that. So, thank you for your work, John, and rest in peace.

Batman: TAS on Blu-Ray

I’m tempted to pick up the new Batman: TAS Blu-Ray set, but it’s a bit expensive, and I probably won’t get around to watching it anyway. I have the first season on DVD, which I bought many years ago, and probably haven’t watched that yet. (Of course, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen every episode of the series, more than once, back when it was on TV.)

Lazy Sunday

I had tentative plans to go in to NYC for the Frankenstein exhibit at the Morgan today, but it turned into one of those mornings where I couldn’t quite talk myself into getting all my stuff together and heading for the train station. Instead, I finished reading a big Avengers hardcover, then spent way too much time writing a review of it on Goodreads. I’m kind of in a mood to read some more Marvel stuff now, so I might spend the afternoon reading Avengers vs. X-Men, which I have in Comixology.

DC was really pushing their new DC Universe service at NYCC last weekend; every DC-related panel started with the DC Universe trailer, and the service got mentioned a lot in some of those panels. I’ve alternately been talking myself into and out of signing up for the service. On the one hand, I’m a long-time DC fanboy, so there’s probably lots of stuff there I’d like. On the other hand, I still have a huge pile of unread comics and graphic novels that I haven’t read yet, and DVDs and Blu-rays that I haven’t watched. And I haven’t watched the most recent season of any of the Marvel shows on Netflix. So I already have a lot of superhero content to consume, that I’ve already paid for. But at $75/year for the service, that comes out to $1.44 per week, which is less than the price of a single comic book. So… maybe.

I’ve been curious about the game Stardew Valley since I heard it discussed on an NPR podcast a couple of months ago. (Here’s the article that they mentioned on the podcast. And here’s another NPR article that makes me wonder what kind of Stardew player I’d be…) I was kind of hoping that the game would have been available for the Apple TV, since I have a game controller for my Apple TV that I never get to use for anything. But no. It’s available for most other platforms, including Mac, PC, PS 4, Switch, and XBox One. The only game console I currently own is a PS 3, so I’m out of luck there. I could buy it for Mac or PC, but I was looking for something I could play on the TV. I saw an article a few days ago announcing that it was coming out for iOS, so I had some hope that would include Apple TV. Still no; just iPhone and iPad. And I saw that Minecraft for Apple TV has been discontinued for lack of players. So if Apple TV can’t support something as popular as Minecraft, it probably can’t support any big, interesting, game. Oh well. Maybe I should buy one of the current-generation video game consoles, but I just don’t think I would use it enough to justify the price. (I was really hoping Apple TV gaming would take off at some point.)

I didn’t make it to the big Doctor Who panel at NYCC last weekend. I’m sure it would have been fun, but it sounded like it was going to be very crowded and I was too tired to deal with that. The full panel is up on YouTube now, on the official Doctor Who channel, so I’ll have to watch that later. I watched the first episode last week, and liked it enough that I’m looking forward to this week’s episode. I don’t get BBC America, so I get the episodes through iTunes, which means I don’t get it until tomorrow. I’m not liking this new Sunday night schedule for the show. When it was on a Saturday night schedule, I could watch the new episodes on Sunday afternoon. Now I have to wait until Monday after work. Well, at least it gives me something to look forward to after work on Monday.

OK, so this turned into a long rambling post, it’s almost noon, and I’ve killed my entire Sunday morning reading comics, listening to music, and writing pointless reviews and blog posts. Eh, there’s worse ways I could have spent the morning. Time for lunch.

NYCC 2018 haul


So I did give up on the idea of going back to NYCC today. I checked out of my hotel in the morning and went straight home. Here’s a photo of my modest haul from the con. Mostly trade paperbacks out of discount boxes, plus one Warren Ellis series, also out of a discount box. (Also, a signed Zorro novel by Peter David and a signed Motor Girl omnibus from Terry Moore.)

I think one of my main takeaways from this con is that I’m too old for a full four-day con in NYC. Especially if I’m not staying overnight for Sunday night. The thought of checking out of the hotel this morning, going down to the con, then having to come back to the hotel, pick up my bags, then get back to Penn Station and take the train home in the evening was a bit too much for me.

On the plus side, I get to enjoy a little of the Somerville street fair today, and watch the Giants game!

NYCC day three

Since I wrote up posts for days one and two, I might as well write one for day three also. As planned, I did in fact spend most of the day at the con, arriving a little after 10am and leaving a little after 6pm.

I wandered the floor for a little while in the morning, before it got too crowded. And I went through Artist’s Alley again, and stumbled across Terry Moore. I bought a signed copy of Motor Girl from him. (And that’s really all I bought, unless you count overpriced Javits food and coffee.)

I went to several panels today. The first was a “Coffee and Comics” panel, with a pretty random assemblage of people, including DMC (from Run-DMC), Larry Hama, Amy Chu, Sean Von Gorman and Ming Chen (from Comic Book Men). They did, indeed, talk about coffee a bit. But mostly they talked about comics, so that was fun. (There was a Will Eisner panel at the same time as that one, and I would have gone to that one instead, if I’d been paying more attention to the schedule. But I’m glad I went to the Coffee & Comics panel.)

Next, I went to a DC World’s Finest panel. (It didn’t have anything to do with the old World’s Finest title. It was just a random panel name.) They had a variety of creators at that one, similar to the previous night’s All-Star panel.

After that one, I went to the DC Superman 80th panel. I was expecting that to be more of a historical overview panel, as these anniversary panels often are, but instead it was a conversation between Brian Bendis and Frank Miller about Superman (moderated by Dan DiDio, as many of the DC panels were.) It was actually very interesting to hear the two of them talk about Superman. I’m now a little more interested in Miller’s upcoming Superman project, given some of the stuff he said on the panel.

I stayed in the same room after that one for the Adam Savage panel, which is the only non-comics-related panel I went to. He showed a trailer for Mythbusters Jr. and talked about that a bit. He also talked about cosplay and stuff like that. And he spent about half the time answering questions. I’ve seen him live a couple of times before, and he’s always great. Very energetic, funny, and kind.

Lastly, I went to a Brian Bendis spotlight panel. I had meant to go to a Tom King spotlight, but they switched up the schedule, so the Bendis panel was moved from earlier in the day. (I’m not sure what happened to the Tom King panel.) Anyway, that was also pretty cool, but the end result is that I saw a lot of Bendis over the last couple of days. I haven’t actually read any of his DC work yet, but now I’m looking forward to some of it.

I guess that was only four panels, but it seemed like a lot. I was going to go back to the con for a StarTalk All-Stars panel at 8pm, but I’m too tired for that.

Looking back, I seem to have gone to a lot of DC panels this weekend. I haven’t gone to any Marvel panels, or really any panels from any other publisher. That wasn’t intentional, and some of that is just timing. But a lot of that is that I’m not really that interested in anything coming out of Marvel right now. I’m interested in a few things coming out from Image, Dark Horse, and other smaller publishers, but there weren’t any panels related to them that were convenient for me to attend.

I’m writing this on Saturday night, unsure about whether or not I’m going to actually go back to the con on Sunday. I have my badge, but there’s not much I’m interested in tomorrow. I’ve seen just about everything I want to see on the show floor. And there aren’t any must-see panels tomorrow. There’s the big Doctor Who panel at MSG, but that’s probably going to be crazy. There are probably people lined up for it already.

So I may just check out of my hotel tomorrow morning and go home. Or I might get a second wind, and/or remember something I want to buy, or whatever. (Or I might just want to delay re-entering the real world a bit longer, since I see we apparently now have a horrible new addition to the Supreme Court? Sigh.)