Five months and counting

We’ve just passed the five month mark since this whole COVID-19 thing kicked into high gear. My last day in the office was Thursday March 12. I took Friday March 13 off and, at that time, wasn’t even sure if we were going to be allowed to work from home the following week. Well, we were, and I’ve been working from home since. At the end of May, it looked like we might have to come back in August. That got pushed to September, and has now been pushed to October 5. Meanwhile, I never even got a chance to clean out my desk, so it’s probably still cluttered with a desk calendar stuck at March 12, a few boxes of granola bars that likely expired a month or two ago, and random scribbled notes from whatever I was working on in March. (The wasted granola bars bother me more than they probably should.) It seems like we’ve been living in a state of denial through this whole thing, where we’re always a month away from reopening everything, but that date keeps getting pushed back.

I’ve really been missing my trips into New York to visit The Met and MoMA. The Met is supposed to be reopening on August 27 for members and August 29 for the public, and MoMA plans to open on August 27. I don’t think I’m ready to go in to New York yet though. I’m not ready to deal with NJ Transit, Newark Penn Station, the NYC subway, or all of the extra stuff that would be involved in getting into and moving through the museums. But I’m tempted to give it a try. I spent a little time last night thinking through it, but couldn’t really come up with a plan that sounded like it would be both safe and fun.

One thing that’s probably a bright spot is how well the S&P 500 is doing right now. It’s at a new record high, which should probably make me happy, given how much of my retirement money is in S&P 500 index funds. But it’s a little unnerving for some reason. Maybe I just don’t know how to process good news? Or I just don’t trust anything that looks like it might be good news?

I have a bunch of other stuff I wanted to blog about, including some tech stuff and some comic book stuff, but I should really stop now and plop myself down in front of the TV and relax for a bit.

Comic Book news, good and bad

I saw today that NYCC has finally canceled their con for this year. It had been obvious for quite some time that they’d have to do that, but I guess they had some insurance or other bureaucratic issues to deal with before they could officially announce it. I’m sad I won’t be able to go this year, since last year’s con was so much fun. (And, thinking about it, last year’s con was my last real vacation. Oh well.) They’re going to be doing some stuff similar to SDCC’s Comic-Con@Home event. They’re running something called Metaverse this weekend (Aug 13-16), but I don’t think that’s specifically meant to be an NYCC replacement. I think they’re going to do another event in October when NYCC would actually have happened.

The Metaverse event has some curious stuff going on, including “digital meet and greets” where you can pay, for instance, $137 to chat with Karen Gillan for two minutes. Or just $22 to chat with Greg Capullo for three minutes. As much as I like Karen Gillan, I don’t think I’d pay $137 for two minutes of her time. I might, though, pay $22 just to have Greg Capullo yell at me for three minutes. I’ve seen him on con panels, and he’s always high-energy and quite amusing. I could ask him to do his Todd McFarlane impression for three minutes. Or ask him to name his ten favorite metal bands. Anyway, that’s fun to think about, but I’m not going to do it. I took a look at the panel schedule, and there are a few panels I might want to watch. Not as many as there were for SDCC, but a few.

In less positive news, it looks like there was a bloodbath at DC yesterday. The comic book industry is in a strange place right now, and I wonder what the fallout from these layoffs will be. Are they going to be cancelling a bunch of titles too? My August Westfield order was for six DC books and two books from other publishers. Only two of the DC books are ongoing titles. The rest are minis or one-shots. I could easily be down to zero books pretty quickly if DC starts cutting back.

I still don’t really like the idea of giving up on monthly printed comics altogether, but it looks like I might not be able to justify buying them for much longer. I’ve been waffling on this for a long time. Coincidentally, it was two years ago today that I got my first Westfield shipment, after starting to order from them again. Between all the problems with monthly books right now, plus the ongoing problems with the postal service, it might be time to give up and go mostly-digital. It bothers me a bit to do that though, since the only (legal) place to get digital mainstream comics is Comixology, which is owned by Amazon, so I’d just be making Jeff Bezos even richer than he already is.

I should probably give up on mainstream comics altogether and just buy indie books straight from the creators. (Speaking of which: there’s a new Girl Genius graphic novel Kickstarter.)

Comfort Food

Looking at the “on this day” widget here on my blog, I see that I haven’t acknowledged my Dad and Gloria’s shared birthday in a few years, so I should go ahead and do that today. Happy birthday, Dad and Gloria! I did want to do something today to honor my Dad’s memory, but I couldn’t come up with much. I could probably have taken a drive up to the cemetery, but with the pandemic restrictions, I’m pretty sure the restrooms would be closed, and I really can’t take a drive that far without a pit stop. I guess the restrooms are open at the Turnpike service areas, so I could have managed it, but, well… I didn’t. (And maybe I’m a little afraid of the Turnpike service area restrooms…) I also noticed an entry from this day in 2004, about honoring my brother Pat’s memory.

Thinking about honoring Dad, Gloria, and Patrick gets me thinking about food: lasagna, pizza with extra cheese, rice and beans, burgers, potato salad… I’m probably going to have a small salad and a veggie burger for dinner though. Maybe I can have a beer tonight too. That’ll be something. I haven’t had much to drink at all during this pandemic. I bought a bottle of red wine in March, and had a few glasses during the first few weeks of the lockdown, but that’s been it. I still have half the bottle left. And I haven’t touched any of the beer in my fridge. I should probably toss the wine. A half-empty bottle of wine that’s been sitting out on a counter for five months is probably not worth drinking at this point. (I do have one of those vacuum caps on it, but those aren’t perfect.)

It’s probably good that I’ve been sticking to my diet and staying away from alcohol these last few months. I’ve been thinking about Tina Fey’s sheetcaking skit from SNL a bit lately. Costco stopped selling sheet cakes at the start of the pandemic, apparently, but they might be back now, at least in some stores. But I’m not going to drive to Costco and buy a sheet cake for myself. Definitely not.

I’ve been spending a lot of my weekend time reading and watching stuff that I’d put in the “comfort food” category. I’m currently watching Trollhunters on Netflix, which is a pretty predictable cartoon, and easy to binge-watch. I’ve also recently finished watching Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts on Netflix, which is also a fun and easily bingeable cartoon. I’ve been watching some old Bugs Bunny cartoons on DVD too. On the comic book front, I’ve been reading some fairly random stuff, most of which is pretty light reading. I started the second Complete Peanuts collection last week, for instance. Nothing says “escape from reality” like Peanuts strips from 1953!

I don’t honestly know if there’s a point to this post, but I felt I had to write one this weekend, and it’s almost 5 PM on Sunday, so I might as well get it done. I think that writing it helped me work through some stuff and amused me, if nothing else. If you’re reading this, I hope it amused you too.

 

Comic-Con@Home, day four

Well, today is the last day of Comic-Con@Home. I attended two panels today, one on Will Eisner and the 80th anniversary of The Spirit, and another on Jack Kirby. I’ll admit I zoned out a bit during parts of both of them. The Eisner panel was hosted by Danny Fingeroth. I went to a similar panel hosted by him at NYCC in 2017, so there was a lot of familiar material in it. The other panelists were Denis Kitchen, Paul Levitz, and Dan Schkade. I’m very familiar with Kitchen and Levitz, and they were both on that 2017 panel, but I’d never heard of Schkade. His perspective, as a younger creator, was interesting. He does a strip on Webtoon called Lavender Jack, which I should probably start following. (Of course, I’m already following a couple of other strips on Webtoon, but I haven’t actually gone over to the site or opened the app to read them in months…)

And the Kirby panel was a “Kirby 101” panel, meant to be an introduction to Jack Kirby. That’s absolutely a worthwhile thing to do, but I’m not really the target audience for that, having already read plenty of Kirby comics and gone to several Kirby con panels. (I’m definitely not a Kirby expert, but I’m at least at the “Kirby 201” level…) Anyway, both panels were fun to watch, but I did zone out during both and found myself scrolling through Twitter on my phone and looking at links to other stuff. If I were actually at an in-person con, I’d probably have paid more attention. Going to a couple of good solid comics-related panels is always a good way to close out a con.

I’ve been curious about the economics of this virtual con, and about how much damage canceling the in-person con will do to the Comic-Con organization and to the San Diego economy in general. This clip from a local San Diego TV news report, from when the cancellation was announced, has some pretty big numbers in it. And this article talks a bit about some of the behind-the-scenes stuff involved in dealing with hotel cancellation fees and other financial stuff. And here’s a recent TV clip about the cancellation. I’m really hoping things work out and they get to have a real con next year (even though I probably won’t be able to go to it).

I tried to do my part to help with the economic situation, by spending some money at the virtual con, but I didn’t manage to spend that much. While they included a virtual “con floor” as part of Comic-Con@Home, it was hard to navigate and honestly kind of useless. There’s not really a good way to simulate the experience of wandering a con floor, browsing all the cool stuff and making a bunch of ill-advised impulse purchases. I bought a t-shirt from the official store, and I bought some Rob Hanes comics from Randy Reynaldo. That’s it though. I thought about picking up some stuff from Two Morrows, but every time I think about doing that, I remember how many books and magazines about comics I have sitting around the apartment, unread, and I realize that adding more to that pile isn’t a great idea, even if they’re really good books and magazines. (Ditto for Hogan’s Alley. I keep thinking I should subscribe to that, or at least buy some back issues, then I realize that they’ll just pile up, and I’ll never read them.)

Anyway, it was a pretty good con, given the circumstances. My mood has been up and down for these last four days, and I can’t say that the virtual con has had the same brain-resetting effect that a real con often has on me. But I had some fun getting lost in panels about comics and TV and books and movies, and I guess a little escapism is the best I can hope for out of a stay-at-home long-weekend vacation in the middle of a pandemic. (Speaking of escapism, I also read through most of The Escapist series this weekend too. That was fun.)

Comic-Con@Home, day three

Today is Saturday, and day three of Comic-Con@Home. I did all of my usual Saturday errands and chores this morning, and settled in to enjoy con stuff around lunchtime.

I’m continuing to watch a lot of panels. Yesterday, I watched panels about DC, Marvel, Ray Harryhausen, Jack Kirby, and Netflix’s Dragon Prince. I’m not too excited about anything that DC and Marvel are doing these days. There’s a bunch of stuff that I’m curious about, and might pick up when it gets collected, but nothing that I really want to pick up in single issues as it comes out. Both DC and Marvel and doing big crossovers right now, and I really can’t get enthusiastic about picking up stuff like that anymore. It’s too much of a pain to keep track of all the issues, and it’s too expensive if you buy them all. And they rarely come together as well as you’d hope. The Harryhausen panel was fun. The Kirby panel was Mark Evanier’s usual Kirby tribute panel, this time with Alex Ross as a special guest.

I watched last night’s Eisner presentation this morning. That was a little weird. It was mostly just Phil LaMarr reading the nominees and winners. I realize that there’s not much else they could do, all things considered. It would have been cool if they could have found a way to do it live, and bring in the winners in real time for acceptance speeches. The Hall of Fame inductees did get to make speeches, and I enjoyed Maggie Thompson’s speech. (And I might have teared up a bit. Don and Maggie’s CBG was a big part of my formative years.) It might have been good for them to acknowledge and apologize for the voting glitch they had too. Anyway, here’s a list of the winners. There’s a lot of good stuff in there. (Most of which I haven’t read yet.)

So far this afternoon, I’ve watched another DC panel, a Saturday morning cartoon panel, and an Inglorious Treksperts panel. And there are a few more I’ll probably watch before the end of the day. The Trek panel was fun. The guys from the panel have done a bunch of “Starship Smackdown” panels at past cons, and I’ve gone to several of those. I honestly didn’t realize that they’d started a podcast. I should probably subscribe to that.

Overall, I’ve been having fun with the con, though it’s bittersweet, knowing that I probably won’t be able to attend a con in person any time soon.

Comic-Con@Home, day two

My first day of Comic-Con@Home went pretty well. I watched a total of six panels, which is probably a bit more than I’d get to at a real con. I complained yesterday about not being able to watch the Star Trek panel on my TV. That was the only one that was blocked in that way, so I watched all the others on my TV, from my couch. So that’s definitely more comfortable than typical convention center folding chairs. (Edit: this is probably why I couldn’t watch that Trek panel on TV.)

I didn’t do much in the way of creatively simulating a con environment, or doing anything special to get me in the right “con mood,” though I tossed a few ideas around. I remembered there being a “comic con jukebox” episode of Paul Dini’s old Radio Rashy podcast, and I think I found the entry for it, but the audio file itself is gone. That would have been fun to listen to.

I’m starting out today pretty much the same way I started yesterday: still getting up at 6 AM and eating my usual boring breakfast of cereal, a banana, and coffee. I had some ideas about getting creative with breakfast on my days off, but they went down the drain when faced with my usual morning pre-coffee headache. I did manage to find an old San Diego con shirt to wear today, from the 2002 con blood drive.

Here’s a list of the panels I watched yesterday:

  • Star Trek Universe — As I mentioned yesterday, the Discovery table read was a bit weird, but fun. The stuff about the new Lower Decks show looks interesting. I kind of want to watch that now. And I skipped out on most of the Picard stuff, since I still haven’t seen the first season and didn’t want anything spoiled. I should really give in and sign up for CBS All-Access, but I’m still being stubborn about that.
  • Oddball Comics — This was probably my favorite panel. It was really just Scott Shaw!’s usual Oddball Comics slideshow, which I’ve seen several times before. I guess the familiarity of it was comforting. And it’s the kind of panel that translates well to YouTube. it’s just Scott talking over a slideshow. I do miss the audience laughter, but it’s still a really fun presentation and it really took me out of my own head for a while.
  • Humanoids Legacy — This was hosted by Humanoids, so it was of course a promotional panel to some extent, but it was still a good discussion of the history and influence of Humanoids, with a few really good creators, including Mark Waid, Brian Bendis, and Mark Russell. I bought this Humanoids Humble Bundle yesterday too. I already have two copies of The Incal, so I don’t really need a digital copy, but it can’t hurt. And I don’t have most of the other stuff in the bundle, and a lot of it looks pretty good.
  • Twenty Years of Harry Dresden — This was a one-on-one discussion with Jim Butcher. It was pretty low-key, but enjoyable. I’m four or five books behind with the Dresden series, but it is a favorite of mine. I need to get back to it and catch up.
  • Bugs Bunny’s 80th Anniversary — This was a promotional panel by Warner Bros for an 80th anniversary Bugs Bunny Blu-ray set, but it was a lot of fun. The panel included three voice actors who’ve all voiced Bugs. And it included Jerry Beck and Leonard Maltin, who are both quite knowledgeable about animation history. The Blu-ray set is coming out in the fall, I guess. It looks interesting, but I’m not sure I really need it. I tend to buy a lot of DVD and Blu-ray sets that I never get around to watching.
  • Superhero Kung Fu Extravaganza — This is another one that was kind of comforting to watch. This is the 23rd time Ric Meyers has run this panel. The online version is a lot different from the in-person ones that I’ve attended, for a number of reasons, but it was still cool to see that he’s keeping this thing going. The in-person version generally lasts two hours (or more) and features a whole bunch of movie clips. For the online version, he obviously has to limit himself to stuff he can get permission to put on YouTube, so it’s mostly promo clips from recent movies. I’m a bit interested in the new Enter the Fat Dragon movie, though maybe not interested enough to buy the Blu-ray. (Again, I need to remember how many Blu-rays I own that I haven’t watched yet, including stuff I’ve bought based on recommendations from previous Kung Fu panels. For instance, I’m looking at a DVD set of Donnie Yen’s Kung Fu Master TV series that’s been sitting on my shelf for at least ten years.)

I have eight panels on my schedule for today. I’ll probably watch five or six of them. Meanwhile, it’s a rainy morning in Somerville, but I should probably still try to get out for a morning walk.

Comic-Con@Home, day one

Today is the first day of my short vacation, “attending” Comic-Con @ Home. I started the day with a number of vaguely creative ideas in my head about how to simulate actually being at a San Diego con. I didn’t actually execute on any of them. I did wear my WonderCon 2019 t-shirt though, so that’s something.

I’m currently watching the Star Trek Universe panel, my first panel of the con. I knew that the panel was going to be prerecorded, and I’m OK with that, but they’ve also done a couple of other things I’m a little disappointed with. First, they turned off comments on the video. I know that YouTube comments are often terrible, but allowing comments would have made it feel more like a real event, with other real fans in the “room”. They also blocked it from being watched on Apple TV or TiVo, so I’m stuck watching it on my computer. I guess that’s a copyright thing, but it’s still weird. If I wanted to make a copy of the panel, it would be way easier for me to do that on my computer than on my Apple TV or TiVo. Oh well. They’re in the middle of a table read of a Discovery episode right now, which is kind of fun, but also kind of pointless. It would be really fun at a live con, but, prerecorded, it’s kind of boring, to be honest. They’re getting into a Q&A now (with questions that they must solicited in advance, I guess). One nice thing about prerecorded video is that I can pause it if I need a break, and I can skip past any boring parts. I’m going to get back to it now, and see if I can single-task for awhile and just watch the video and relax, without having a bunch of other tabs open and switching back and forth to other stuff.

getting ready for Comic-Con @ Home

Comic-Con @ Home has officially started. And I’m done with work for today, so I’m now officially on vacation. There’s not much going on tonight that I’m interested in, so I really won’t start “attending” the con until tomorrow. Looking at old blog posts from today, I see that in 2008 on this day I was getting ready to leave for San Diego the next day. And I see that I didn’t go in 2009, so I guess 2008 was my last year until I lucked out again in 2012. And I know 2012 was the last time I went. So I guess it’s kind of cool that I get to participate, to some extent, this year.

The souvenir book for this year has been posted as a free PDF. And they have a bunch of other PDFs posted here, including a do-it-yourself badge and some door signs. So if you want an official SDCC restroom sign, you can print one out. I’m slightly tempted to do that, but that would just be silly. They also have an odd selection of recipes posted here. Pretty much all of those are… a bit much. But hey, it’s all in fun.

I’ve been trying to think of things I can do to make my Comic-Con @ Home mini-vacation feel more like a real vacation, and I’m not coming up with much. I’ll probably spend tomorrow morning just reading comics and relaxing, then watch some panels in the afternoon. That’s good enough for now, I guess. Maybe I can get some Mexican food. That’ll help.

One aspect of SDCC that definitely can’t be recreated at home, in NJ, is the weather. We’ve been having a heat wave this week, with temperatures in the 90s and high humidity. And we’re currently in the middle of a thunderstorm that’s caused my electricity to blink out twice so far. Meanwhile, San Diego is in the low 70s and partly cloudy. Well, hopefully, I won’t lose electricity (or internet) entirely. That would make for a pretty rotten con!

Audible adventures

I’ve been trying to get through the audiobook of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. I bought a copy from Audible several years ago, with Joe Morton narrating. (I don’t remember why I bought it. It might have been free, or on sale for 99 cents or something.) I started listening to it in June, as part of my Great American Read Goodreads group. It was going fine, but some time in mid-June the Audible iOS app started crashing on me. It would work for maybe 30 seconds, then crash. I contacted Audible support about it on Twitter, and they said it was a known issue and they were working on it. A month later, though, the app is still crashing on me. The Audible app on my iPad still works, though, so I’ve been using that to listen to it. It’s a little inconvenient, but not really a problem.

So the point of this blog post isn’t to complain about Audible, but rather to discuss some of the alternative ways of listening to Audible books that I found while trying to work around my little problem. I thought a few of them were interesting, and the whole topic ties back to my post on iOS audiobook players from 2015. That post was mostly about DRM-free audiobooks. For Audible, I assumed that their files would be DRM’d and not really usable outside of the official app, but it turns out that there are a lot of options.

First, there’s a page on the Audible web site listing most of the ways you can listen to their books. One thing I noticed right away is that it’s still possible to link iTunes and Audible and listen to your Audible books in the Apple Books app. (A long time ago, this was the main official way of listening to Audible books. You’d link your iTunes account to Audible, download the books, and then sync them to your iPod. This was before Apple started selling audiobooks themselves, and before iOS apps were a thing.) So I went ahead and did that, but, as you can see in my screenshot, the version that comes down to iTunes is broken up into chapters differently from the Audible version, and the chapters aren’t labelled in any way that would let me figure out where I left off in the official Audible app. (I also brought up the iTunes version in Undulib on my iPhone, and that worked and at least showed the chapter numbers. But there are about 150 “chapters” in the iTunes version and 25 chapters in the actual book, so having those numbers doesn’t really help.) So, anyway, pulling Audible books into iTunes is probably a reasonable thing to do if you haven’t already started the book and need to figure out where you left off. But the Apple Books app is also probably less user-friendly than the Audible app, so there’s no real reason to do that, unless you’re unable to use the Audible app for some reason.

Another possibility I stumbled across is OpenAudible. This is a shareware product that lets you download books from Audible and convert them to MP3 or M4A. I initially thought that this meant that they were working around DRM somehow, but, going back to the Audible site, I see that they do apparently support downloading their books in MP3 format and transferring them to a generic MP3 player, via an app called AudibleSync. So I guess that OpenAudible is probably just taking advantage of whatever mechanism AudibleSync uses. So maybe it’s not doing anything too shady. (I haven’t tried it.)

Finally, I realized today that I also own a Kindle version of Invisible Man, so downloading that to the Kindle app on my iPhone would let me also download the Audible version and listen to it that way, with the Audible Narration feature. I will probably give that a shot, as the Kindle app seems to know where I left off, and I guess that would let me go back to listening to it on my iPhone.

I don’t have an Audible subscription, but I do own about a dozen Audible books, most of which were either free or bought on sale for a buck or two. (And I haven’t listened to most of them.) So if I can’t ever get the Audible app working on my phone again, at least I now have some other options!

Audible
Books
Kindle
Twitter
Undulib

thinking about Comic-Con

I’m continuing to torture myself by looking at the “on this day” widget in the sidebar of this blog, and the “on this day” view in my Day One journal. The last time I went to SDCC was 2012, and it was going on right now! (And, looking at my journal, I see that, two years ago today, I went to the library and checked out a couple of books, and also went to a Somerset Patriots baseball game. Sigh. Eventually, I’ll be able to do those things again…)

I’ve got my schedule all planned out for Comic-Con @ Home next week. I’ve bookmarked about 35 panels total, from Thursday through Sunday. I’m not sure how many I’ll actually watch, but I’ve got plenty to choose from. I think it’ll be fun. I’ve also been getting myself in the mood a bit by reading some stuff that’s related in some way to the con. I read some issues of Rob Hanes Adventures last weekend, which I bought directly from Randy Reynaldo at that 2012 SDCC I mentioned above. (I’m not sure why I let them sit in my “to be read” pile for so long. It’s a fun series, and the issues are all basically “done in one” stories.) I plan on checking out his virtual booth this year, and maybe picking up all the issues that have come out since 2012.

And I also recently read an Usagi Yojimbo trade paperback. I didn’t buy that particular volume at a San Diego con, but I have bought a number of past volumes directly from Stan Sakai at cons, and I usually see him in San Diego, either at his booth or on a panel. I haven’t heard anything about Stan doing anything for Comic-Con @ Home, but I do know that he’s supposed to be on Mark Evanier’s Groo chat this Thursday, so I’ll probably watch that.

In less pleasant comics-related news, the Warren Ellis thing that I’ve mentioned previously has kind of blown up, with a new website going up this week aggregating the stories of many women who say they have been “targeted and manipulated” by Ellis. The website is… a hell of a thing. It even includes a bar chart graphing the number of women he was involved with per year, from 1999 to 2020. (Peak year: 2009, 22 women.) There’s some coverage of it on The Beat and in The Guardian. I joked about burning my CBLDF t-shirts recently, after the Brownstein thing. I’m not really ready to burn my Warren Ellis comics, but I think I might feel a little differently about them now. I’m not really sure that Ellis ever really understood what he was doing? Or understood how much he was hurting people? I don’t know. I can’t really see him as a super-villain or evil genius. I mean, he was clearly being dishonest with people. (You can’t have 22 girlfriends at once without lying to several of them, at least, I think.) I said in my previous post that I wasn’t sure how to feel about this, and I’m still not. This is all outside my areas of expertise…

Anyway, I need to keep this stuff out of my head and concentrate on positive stuff. Like the fact that NJ is still in the green on the CovidActNow map. (One of only three states in the green! Hope more states join us soon!) Or the fact that there are new Stargirl and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episodes coming out this week!