Category: comics

end of vacation, end of year

So it’s back to work tomorrow, after my week-long vacation. Looking at my “things to do on vacation” list, I didn’t do any of them. Which is fine. I did a few things, including updating my MacBook to Big Sur, sending out my Christmas cards, reading the entire Locke & Key comic book series, and, um… replacing the battery in my smoke detector. Yeah, I know those aren’t big accomplishments, but hey, it was supposed to be a vacation, right?

I’ve also been doing a lot of end-of-year thinking and planning. I got a few end-of-year things done this week, and there are a bunch more that I’m still working on. One thing, of course, is figuring out which services/subscriptions to keep and which to cancel, and whether or not I should be signing up for anything new right now. So the rest of this post is going to turn into yet another rumination about all that stuff.

For video, I added Disney+ recently, and also Hulu, via their $2/month Black Friday deal. So now I have Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and Hulu for video services. I’ve been thinking about canceling my traditional cable subscription, but I still haven’t done that. It’s looking like my cable bill might go up by $20/month in January, so that’s pushing me more in that direction. I’ve been experimenting with using my Apple TV more and my TiVo less, and figuring out how to get some of the stuff I like on regular TV without a cable subscription. I can get most (or all) of the PBS content I want from the PBS Apple TV app. And I can watch clips of the late-night shows on YouTube. So that’s probably fine.

For music, I’ll probably let my Apple Music free trial turn into a paid subscription when the trial is up. I’m actually using it a lot.

For comics, I do intend on dropping my Westfield subscriptions at some point, but I haven’t done it yet. For December, I would have had just three comics on my order, but I added a couple of graphic novels. That might be my last order, or I might hang in there for two more months. I have a couple of series I’d like to complete before giving up on print comics.

I’ve also been thinking about some financial stuff. Specifically, I’ve been assessing my credit card situation. I signed up for the Apple Card recently, as I’ve probably mentioned here before. I don’t like some things about that card, but the cash back for Apple Store purchases makes it worthwhile. Now that I’ve had it for awhile, I think I’m a little more OK with it than I initially was. Even though I can’t download transactions from it directly into Quicken, the process for saving a QFX file and importing it into Quicken isn’t that bad. And the Apple Card is better about privacy than most other cards, so maybe I should consider using it for more stuff.

Meanwhile, I switched my AmEx card from the Green card to the EveryDay card earlier this year. That was a good decision, since the Green card annual fee was going up to $150/year, and had mostly travel-related bonuses. The EveryDay card has no fee and has extra bonuses for everyday stuff like groceries. So it’s almost like I knew the pandemic was coming, when I switched back in February. I’ve certainly spent a lot more money on groceries this year than I have on travel.

I’ve been spending a heck of a lot of money at Amazon this year too, so that’s got me thinking about signing up for the Amazon Prime credit card. That gives you 5% cash back on Amazon purchases, which would have gotten me as much as $100 this year, depending on which purchases are eligible. But if I get that card, then I’ll have a total of five cards (Citi MC, AmEx, Macy’s, Apple, and Amazon), which might be too many cards. Maybe I should drop the Macy’s card. I’ve ordered a few things from them online this year, but not nearly as much stuff as I’ve ordered from Amazon.

I’m a little worried about how opening multiple new credit cards in one year might affect my credit score. But, then again, I’m not planning on borrowing any money any time soon, so I probably shouldn’t care about that. I don’t know. I guess it’s good to have enough free time and enough money to mess around with all this stuff.

audiobooks, comics, and iOS apps

It looks like we’re right in the middle of our second wave here in NJ. There are a few bright spots, but I think, overall, it’ll get worse before it gets better. So… happy Thanksgiving, I guess?

I spent my Thanksgiving alone in my apartment, but I probably would have done that this year, even if we weren’t in the middle of a pandemic. I also spent Black Friday alone in my apartment, and will likely be spending today and tomorrow home alone too. If the pandemic was over, I’d probably have gone into NYC at some point this weekend, but that’s out of the question now. So I’m definitely feeling a bit of cabin fever. But I’ll get through it.

I managed to get the Audible app on my iPhone working, somehow. After last week’s trouble, I’d pretty much given up on it, but I decided to take another shot. I don’t really know what I did to get it to work, but, well, it’s working now. Though I should say that I haven’t actually tried to listen to anything yet, so I don’t really know if that’ll work. But at least I can launch the app and poke around in it without having it crash.

And I still haven’t decided what I want to listen to next. I started listening to a BBC adaptation of War and Peace some time ago, and I should probably get back to that and finish it, but I haven’t been in the mood for anything like that. I should probably listen to one of the Big Finish Doctor Who audio dramas instead. (Neither of those requires Audible, though, and I’d like to find out if the Audible app is really fixed or not, so I may try something from my Audible library instead.)

Meanwhile, on my iPad, I wanted to read a comic last night and tried to launch Comic Zeal, which is the iOS app i use for reading DRM-free comics. It crashed as soon as I opened it, and I couldn’t find any way to get it to work. I didn’t want to delete and reinstall it, since that would also remove the 4 GB worth of comics that I had loaded in to it. Comic Zeal hasn’t been updated in about four years, so I’ve been expecting that it would eventually stop working. I assumed that iOS 14 had finally killed it. But, then, after deleting it and reinstalling it, it does seem to work again. Of course, that killed all the comics I had in there, so I decided that maybe I should just try another app.

I’d picked up iComics at some point, when it was on sale or something, maybe last year, but hadn’t tried it out at all. I looked at the app store, and I saw that it was updated to work with iOS 14 a couple of months ago, so that seemed like a good bet. So I’m going to try to switch over to that. Dealing with situations like this always reminds me of how annoyed I am about the file system on iOS. On a normal computer, I would have been able to just drag and drop the files from Comic Zeal over to iComics. But, with iOS, if you can’t launch an app, then there’s really no way to get to that app’s files. So I had to go through the work of figuring out where the CBZ files were for the comics I wanted to load, pull them down from OneDrive to my Mac, then copy them over to the iPad. That took quite a while.

One nice thing about iComics over Comic Zeal is that it exposes its files via the Files app, so I think that means that I could access them even if I couldn’t launch the app. I’ve played around with iComics a bit now, and I think it’s good enough for me, but it definitely doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that Comic Zeal had. It’s a shame that the developer on that one seems to have given up on it.

I see that the developer for iComics started working on a new version in January of this year. But, of course the pandemic (and other stuff) got in the way, per this blog post from mid-year. He just posted a personal update a few days ago, coincidentally. He’s only written three blog posts this year, but they’re pretty lengthy and interesting. I, on the other hand, have written 93 posts so far this year, according to my stats. And most of them are probably dumb and boring. But that’s OK.

So, anyway, I guess I’ve got my audiobook and comic book situations figured out for now, so if I’m in the mood to listen/read this weekend, I’ll actually be able to do that. I have no clue what I really want to do for the rest of the weekend, though. I was pretty restless yesterday, for a while, and couldn’t decide what to do with myself, and started to get a bit annoyed with myself. Then, I didn’t sleep well last night. I guess I’ll get something for lunch soon. After that, maybe I’ll try to settle down and read something. Or take a walk. Or a nap. I guess it’s good that I have options.

The second wave, and other bad news

We’re definitely seeing a big second wave of coronavirus cases here in NJ. I’m glad I’m still able to work from home, and I guess I’ll be doing that through to the end of the year, at least.

Meanwhile, my local House rep, Tom Malinowski, who seemed to have won reelection, has seen his lead shrink as more votes are counted. (No shenanigans here; it just seems like more Democrats voted early and more Republicans voted late.) I hope he hangs on to his lead; he seems like a good guy. (While his opponent seems like kind of a jerk, to be honest.)

And also meanwhile, there has been another wave of layoffs at DC Comics. I think I’m actually going to give up on buying new DC books in 2021. I opted out of ordering any of the Future State books on this month’s Westfield order form, so I only wound up ordering 3 books total (one DC and two Dark Horse). And that might be my last Westfield order, unless I can talk myself into adding some more books from smaller publishers, like Dark Horse and Image. It’s not worth paying the shipping charges for just 3 or 4 books a month. And I’m far enough behind in reading that I should probably take a break anyway. I’m a little worried about the health of the market for regular old monthly comic books at this point. (But I need to keep reminding myself that it’s not my job to prop it up by buying a bunch of books that I don’t have time to read or room to store.) I might sign up for Comixology Unlimited at some point next year, but I have enough books piled up to keep me busy for quite some time, even without that, so I should probably hold off until I’ve put a dent in the backlog.

So that’s my bad news overview for the day, I guess. Obviously, the coronavirus stuff is the most important of these three items. I’ve been trying to get my head straight and prepare myself for the rest of the year, assuming I’ll just be working from home, and celebrating Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year alone in my apartment. (I might have been doing that anyway this year, even without the pandemic, but it would have been nice to have some options.) I’m realizing now that 2020 is going to be a full year without an in-person comic con, a trip to the Met, or MoMA, or… anywhere, really. I have a week’s vacation scheduled for early in December, and I guess I’ll just be sitting around in my apartment for the week, catching up on my reading. That’s not such a bad thing, I guess. I’ve got a job, and an apartment, and my health isn’t too bad, and that’s more than a lot of folks can say.

NYCC, days three and four

After watching a few panels on Thursday and a bunch on Friday, I wound up mostly doing other stuff yesterday and today. This is one of those areas where there’s a big difference between actually being at a con, compared to just watching panels from home. If I was actually in New York, at Javits, I would have gone to more panels, even if I wasn’t that interested in them, purely because I was there. At home, given the choice to watch a panel that I’m not that excited about vs. binge-watching season one of Star Trek: Picard, well, I opted to spend most of my spare time watching Picard. I’ve now seen the whole first season. Plus all of the Ready Room episodes on YouTube. And maybe a few episodes of Greatest Discovery. And maybe I also read some reviews from tor.com. Basically, I kind of overdid it on Picard.

My viewing was briefly interrupted by this horrible truck parade that came through downtown Somerville. The linked article says “hundreds of pick-up trucks, SUVs,” and so on, but it was really more like a few dozen total, mostly pick-up trucks and motorcycles. They made a lot of noise, but there really wasn’t much to it. The BLM marches we’ve had in Somerville are generally better-attended, though they make less noise and take up less space, since they’re all on foot.

The combination of all that Trek with the truck parade convinced me to give Biden a few bucks so I can watch this Trek the Vote to Victory thing on Tuesday.

Back on the subject of NYCC, I did watch and enjoy the panel on Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal, and was happy to learn that there are new episodes airing right now, and more coming. If I hadn’t watched the panel, I wouldn’t have known about the new episodes. I had thought that Primal was a “one and done” kind of thing, and really didn’t expect any more. I’ve already watched one of the new episodes, and it was great.

And the Animaniacs panel was great too. I think I’d heard mention of the new Animaniacs show some time back, but had pretty much forgotten about it. Turns out, it’s going to start up on Hulu on November 20. Of course, I really don’t want to sign up for a Hulu subscription, but I’ll keep an eye out for a Blu-ray release or if they put it up for sale on iTunes or whatever.

There are a few more panels I might watch tomorrow or later in the week, but I think I watched all of the ones that I was really interested in. Now, I have to try to get used to the idea of “going to work” tomorrow. Weird, though, that going to work looks almost exactly the same as being on vacation. I’ll be waking up in my own bed, and I’ll be spending most of my time alone in my apartment, staring at a computer screen, just like a did on my time off. (The trick is that I have to try to do productive work that somebody will pay me for, while I’m staring at the computer screen.)

I guess things are going to stay this way, at least to some extent, for quite some time. The latest word from Dr Fauci is that we probably won’t get back to “normal” until the end of 2021. Which probably means no NYCC or SDCC next year either.

NYCC day two

Today was the second day of the virtual NYCC. I spent a lot of time today watching panels. I didn’t really have anything else to do today, and there were a bunch that I was interested in. I might as well just list them out, with some notes:

  • Adam Savage’s Favorite Cosplay Show & Tell – This was a fun little “show & tell” with Adam Savage showing off some random stuff, including a couple of spacesuits. He’s always fun to watch.
  • Ready Player Two – This was a conversation between Ernest Cline and Wil Wheaton, about Cline’s new book, the sequel to Ready Player One.
  • Twenty Years of Harry Dresden – And this one was a conversation between James Marsters and Jim Butcher, about the Dresden Files. (Interesting that both this one and the Cline panel involved a conversation between an author and the actor who does his audiobooks.)
  • Lewis Black’s Rantcast – This was basically an NYCC special episode of Black’s Rantcast podcast. It was funny, of course, but also surprisingly touching. He was reading letters from fans ranting about stuff they missed (and didn’t miss) about the usual in-person NYCC.
  • Batman Beyond Cast – A discussion with Will Friedle, Kevin Conroy, and Andrea Romano.
  • In Conversation with Scott Snyder & James Tynion IV – This was the only actual comic book panel I saw today. Honestly, I didn’t get much out of it, since I’m not currently reading any of the Batman books that Snyder and Tynion are working on. I may eventually pick some of them up, but not until I’ve caught up on my backlog. (Or at least put a dent in my backlog…)
  • SYFY’s Resident Alien – A panel with Alan Tudyk and other folks involved in this new series. They showed the first ten minutes of the first episode, then did a Q&A. I’m a big fan of the comic, and I’m a little concerned with how different the show seems to be, based on what I’ve seen of it so far. I’ll give it a chance, when it airs in January, but I can’t say I like the direction they seemed to be going in, from those first ten minutes. (I think part of what I didn’t like might have been a misdirect, but I’m not sure.)

I won’t bother with links. If you want to watch any of these, you should be able to find them on NYCC’s YouTube page.

Impulse purchases are always part of the con-going experience. Yesterday, the Trek panel got me to run out and buy Picard season one on Blu-ray (though I was going to do that eventually anyway). It did not convince me to sign up for CBS All-Access, but they’re gradually wearing down my resistance on that. Today’s panels pushed me in the direction of a few purchases, none of which I’ve actually pulled the trigger on. I almost ordered some of the Dresden audiobooks, but I held off. Ditto on a Batman Beyond Blu-ray set. (If I could have found that on sale for a bit cheaper, I would have bought it.)

I haven’t reviewed tomorrow’s panel schedule at all. I’m hoping I can find a few comics-oriented panels to watch. So far, the con has been heavy on promotional panels for books, movies, and TV shows. (Actually, not many movies, now that I think of it. Mostly TV shows. The movie industry has pretty much shut down for now, it seems.) I’ll have to do all of my usual Saturday chores tomorrow, so I’ll probably be busy until around lunchtime. But I’ll likely fill the afternoon with random panel watching. And I should be able to relax all day Sunday and enjoy whatever they have going on for that day. Then, it’s back to work and the “real world” on Monday. Sigh.

NYCC day one

Today is day one of NYCC, or Metaverse, or whatever we’re supposed to call it now. Much like SDCC, it’s all virtual this year. They’re really trying to make it a full con experience, which is nice. There are a bunch of panels streaming on YouTube. I took today and tomorrow off from work, just like I did for SDCC, and I’m trying to get into the con frame of mind, as much as I can. I watched the Star Trek panel earlier today, live, and just finished watching the recording of the Doctor Who panel. (I had a doctor’s appointment today, so I had to break out of the con mood for a couple of hours mid-day to take care of that, and missed seeing the Who panel live.)

I’m not sure which panels are being done live vs. prerecorded, but according to this article, about 25% of them are supposed to be live. So that’s cool. They’re all being streamed “live” at a specific day and time, with the YouTube chat window going, so that helps thing feel a bit more “live”, even if it’s just a prerecorded panel.

The article linked above compares Metaverse to SDCC@Home and DC FanDome, and how NYCC is trying to learn from what worked (and didn’t work) from those two events. And here’s another article about Metaverse, and the evolution of virtual cons. I’d be really happy if we can go back to having in-person cons next year, but I’m not optimistic. If there are in-person cons next year, I probably won’t want to take the chance on going to one, unless, by some miracle, this country actually gets its act together enough to get COVID-19 under control so large gatherings are safe again. I suspect that cons will still be mostly virtual through at least the first half of 2021.

The Star Trek panel was fun. I’m still resisting the urge to sign up for CBS All-Access, but I might break down and do it soon. Lower Decks looks like it’s a lot of fun, and I’m guardedly enthusiastic about season three of Discovery. I picked up the first season of Picard on Blu-ray today, so I’ve got that to watch now. And I guess I can wait a while on Lower Decks and Discovery, since they should both come out on DVD/Blu-ray eventually. (I already have the first two seasons of Discovery on DVD.)

I actually bailed out of the Star Trek panel a bit early, so I missed the announcement that Captain Janeway will be returning in the new Star Trek: Prodigy show on Nickelodeon. I’ll probably watch that one as it comes out, since it’ll be on “normal” TV and I can TiVo it.

There are a couple of more panels I will probably watch tonight, including one on The Expanse, and one on the Sandman audio adaptation. There’s really not much going on today that’s actually related to comic books, which is a bit of a bummer, but there’s more stuff tomorrow.

NYCC, masks, and other stuff

It’s almost time for NYCC, though this year it’s going to be a virtual event called Metaverse. I’ve gone to NYCC a bunch of times, and have been on a roll recently, going in 2017, 2018, and 2019. Alas, I’ll just be watching from home this year. I really wish we could have gotten this COVID thing under control by now, but nope. I haven’t looked closely at the panel schedule yet, but I’m taking off Thursday and Friday next week so I’ll be able to watch some stuff and simulate the con experience a bit, like I did for the San Diego con a few months back. This whole “staying home all the time” thing is starting to wear on me.

I know I still need to take COVID-19 seriously though. Our president’s inability to do so may have been the start of a super-spreader event here in Somerset County. That’s probably an exaggeration, but it’s still not good.

It’s been really hard to process news this year. And the news of Trump’s infection is particularly hard to process. It’s not surprising news, really, given his disdain for mask-wearing and all that. But it’s hard to fit all this stuff in your head and figure out how to react to it and how to deal with it. This column from Politico has a pretty good take on it all. And Nick Kristof’s column in the Times is useful too. (Reminder: wear a mask!)

…and now I’m starting to go down a rabbit hole, reading stories on the Politico and NY Times sites about Trump’s condition. I need to stop doing that, and maybe go out for a nice walk. Maybe ending up at the coffee shop where I can get a nice cappuccino and a pastry. (Which I will bring back to the apartment, of course, because actually eating/drinking at the shop is still too scary. Sigh.)

Sunday stuff, and Legend of Korra

After taking a sick day on Friday, I felt a lot better yesterday, but was still taking it pretty easy. I read some more Buffy comics, and also started watching The Legend of Korra on DVD. I thought I was even better this morning, but then had to cut my usual Sunday walk short because I started getting tired at around the 15-minute mark. So I guess today will also be mostly Buffy and Korra and hot tea and maybe a nap or two.

Avatar and Korra both started streaming on Netflix recently, so there’s been a surge of interest and popularity for both series. I’d watched Avatar some time ago, when it was streaming… somewhere. I don’t really remember. I know I didn’t watch it when it first aired, and I know I don’t have the DVD set. But I never got around to watching Korra. I got interested in it early this year, and bought the DVD set from Amazon. At the time, it wasn’t streaming anywhere that I had access to, and the DVD set was less than $20.

When Netflix got both shows, I started seeing a lot of references to them on the web, so that reminded me that I hadn’t gotten around to Korra yet, and now seemed like a good time to start watching it. Generally, there’s a dearth of new shows coming out right now, for obvious reasons, so there’s been a lot of articles and podcasts that are mining old ones. I listened to a Pop Culture Happy Hour episode on Avatar recently that was pretty good. I was going to link to a few more articles here, but one of them turned out to have a big spoiler in it for something I haven’t gotten to yet, so I think I’m going to avoid reading any more Korra articles until I’ve finished the series.

Anyway, I finished “book one” yesterday, and I’m really enjoying the series so far. It’s got a bit of a steampunk feel to it. Steampunk definitely had a peak at some point, maybe around the same time this was originally airing, so I might have rolled my eyes at it then, but now it seems kind of cool again. It’s kind of amazing what they did with this show, on what I assume must have been a fairly limited budget. I’m not sure how well it holds up over the next three seasons, but it’s well-respected enough that I assume it continues to be pretty good, at least.

sick day, more Buffy comics

I went on a Buffy comics kick back at the end of 2019, reading through Buffy seasons eight and nine, Angel & Faith season nine, and some miscellaneous one-shots and mini-series. I finished up in December, but now I’m getting back into it. At the time, the Dark Horse stuff was out of print, so it was a little hard to come by. I’d purchased a full run of Buffy season ten off eBay in December, but had just left it in my “to be read” pile, until now. Well, I’ve been feeling sick all week and finally gave in and took a sick day today. So I’m reading Buffy comics. And I’m really liking season ten.

The current holder of the Buffy license, Boom Studios, has finally started reprinting some of the Dark Horse stuff. So I can now buy Buffy seasons 11 and 12 right from Comixology. (Season 11 is on sale for 40% off right now, so I already bought that.) They’ve also reprinted Angel season 11, but, annoyingly, haven’t done Angel & Faith season 10 yet. Mind you, I have a ton of stuff from the Angel & Buffy Humble Bundle that I bought in 2016 that I still haven’t read yet, but I really want to ready Angel & Faith season 10. Both the trade paperbacks and individual issues from that run are scarce and pricey. So I guess I’m going to have to wait for it to get reprinted. (It’s funny how sometimes I can have hundreds of comics and books to read, but the one thing I want to read is the one thing I can’t get…)

Anyway, finishing Buffy season 10 will probably take me a while, and getting through that may be enough to get me off my Buffy kick again. Meanwhile, I’ll keep an eye out for Angel & Faith back issues on eBay.

Oh, and back on the subject of sick days: one nice thing about the pandemic is that I haven’t gotten a cold in six months. I guess that long run has been broken, since I seem to have something very much like a cold right now. I often get one at the change in seasons, and this week is the week when I finally switched from shorts to long pants, so I guess this is the official transition from summer to fall, so it makes sense.

six months

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we’re just hitting the six month mark on this whole COVID-19 thing here in the US. March 12 was my last day in the office. I took March 13 as a vacation day. Then, we started working from home on Monday, March 16. And my company is still working from home, with plans now to return to the office in November, with managers coming in two days a week and the rest of us coming in only one day a week. This is probably the fifth “return to office” plan we’ve had. The last one had us all returning in October, two days a week. I’m not complaining or criticizing; no one is having an easy time figuring this thing out, and I’m glad my employer hasn’t forced us to come back too early. But it seems like, through the whole pandemic, we’re always just about a month away from returning to “normal,” but we never quite get there. I’m only now really starting to see that, and thinking about things I could be doing differently, treating work from home as “normal” rather than “temporary”. So that’s all a lot of wind-up to say that I finally broke down and ordered a new USB headset for home use. (There’s still one sitting on my desk at work, but they haven’t allowed us to go back in and clean out our desks. I put in a request to do that, but I guess it’s stalled somewhere, since I haven’t gotten a response to it.)

I ordered the headset from Best Buy, since they had it in stock to ship right away, while Amazon still has a one-month wait on USB headsets, at least for the model I wanted. That turned out to be a bit dangerous, since it also led to me poking around in their Blu-ray selection, which led to me buying four Miyazaki SteelBook Blu-rays, plus the 25th Anniversary Ghost in the Shell Blu-ray SteelBook, and pre-ordering the Weathering With You Blu-ray SteelBook. I’m not particularly attached to SteelBooks, but they do look nice, and the Miyazaki ones were only $18 each. (Apparently, they’re also $18 at Amazon right now.) The Ghost in the Shell one was also only $18. Weathering With You was more expensive, but still reasonable. So now I have a bunch of new anime discs to watch. (Even though most of them are movies I’ve already seen multiple times.)

Yesterday, I watched a bit of DC FanDome and some of NCSFest. This second day of FanDome was done differently from the first day, last month, where they actually had a schedule, kind of like a real con. This time, they just dumped all the video content out there at 1 PM Eastern time, and left it up until 1 PM today. So you could watch whatever you want, whenever you want. The content was really a hodgepodge of random stuff. I’m pretty sure most of it was recorded at least a month ago. And there wasn’t really much content around the actual comic books. But I did watch a nice panel discussion with Brian Bendis, Gene Yang, and Dan Jurgens, talking about Superman. The feeling I’m getting out of DC Comics right now is that they’re really hitting the brakes on a lot of stuff and pulling back on things. I think that a lot of the FanDome content was prepared before the layoffs last month, so it’s not really reflecting the actual state of things at DC right now. I’m not really sure what DC is going to look like at the end of this year, but it’ll probably be a lot different from the way they looked at the beginning of this year, before Dan DiDio left, and COVID-19 hit, and all the layoffs happened.

NCSFest was done as one long live stream, via YouTube. They had a number of panels, interspersed with announcements of the Reuben awards. The whole nine-hour stream is available to watch on YouTube now. If you wanted to find a particular panel, I guess you could check the schedule, then do a little math and fast-forward to it. I watched a bit of the “From Panels to Publishing” panel, some of the Jim Davis panel, and some of the Mutts panel. All of them were fun to watch. Cartoonists are generally pretty cool, chill, funny people. NCS is really a professional organization, so the content isn’t necessarily geared towards fans, or towards self-promotion, more towards actual cartoonists. For me, that makes it even more fun. But if you don’t want to hear Lynn Johnston and Patrick McDonnell talking about what brand of ink they use, then it’s probably not for you.

I guess that’s my ramblings for today. There’s maybe not much value in any of this for anyone else, but writing these posts helps me get through things. Tomorrow starts another week of sitting alone in my apartment, staring at a computer screen, trying to do my job without going nuts. If random blogging about comics and anime helps, I’m going to keep doing it.