Shades of Blue

Updated the Comics listings

Changed the comics links to more accurately reflect what I'm reading these days. Questionable Content definitely deserves your attention, but what I really want to talk about at the moment is the comic I just discovered last night, Copper by Kazu Kibuishi.
    Copper is an absolute delight. The art is probably my favorite of any of the comics I link to, and the characters are beautiful. Copper is the titular character, a young boy/young man who is always accompanied by his dog, Fred. Copper is the gentler and calmer of the two, generally optimistic but sometimes troubled, particularly in the earlier stories. Fred is the cynic of the pair, he who frets and worries, and together with a slim supporting cast including the mysterious girl with funny shades, they put on a dependably awesome show.
    My only gripe is that it only come out online once a month.

Links Updated

Killed links to a bunch of inactives, including Binary, who passworded his site. Killed Seraphim, 'cause as much as I like him, I hate his 'blog, should have killed Jake/Blandus, kept Mr. Cook because I needed to point out that he posted a poem by Britain's bard of imperialism in response to the London bombings, updated the link to Sam despite the fact that he hasn't posted all summer, swapped out Halfway House for Amber, added Val, and probably should have added Lee but didn't. Sorry fatso. :)
    I would predict more house-cleaning in the weeks to come, except for every time I predict something on here, I don't do it, so I'm not predicting more house-cleaning.

Can't Level Up Fast Enough

I feel kind of like I used to feel about the time that I quit playing Everquest. At that time I was trying to wrap up the semester, and starting to spend a fair bit of time with the girl I would end up dating in a few months, along with a few other things I can't remember, and all the people I had been playing with were now several levels farther along than I was. The whole point of Everquest is to play with other people, of course, and as anyone who's ever played any online game from Counter-Strike on up knows, most people playing online are horrificly annoying. I'd managed to find a small group that I hung out with, one in particular, and I logged on one evening and realized that the guy I played the most with could kill monsters my level with two hits and didn't get any experience or anything out of playing with me. I hung around for a few months anyway, but it was just a matter of time from then on until I quit.
    I'm starting to feel the same way about 'blogging now (but Metzger, you quit months ago. Shut up, that's not the point). The point is more that I don't spend anywhere near the amount of time online that I did my senior year at Hillsdale and my first year out, which was probably the top of my 'blog career. Krupa, for instance, seems to be leveling up at a rate far outside my limited powers at this point, which is not to say that I'm giving up 'blogging any more than I already have, it's just that this is a conversation in which my participation is hugely limited, and that affects my enjoyment of it.
    On another note, Typepad appears to have re-vamped its interface in the last few months since I posted to be more accessible to the computer illiterate, which means that I can't seem to edit my html without going into a seperate window and when I try and add nice normal links it ruins the html coding unless I go change it. I found their "Adding links for idiots" button, but it's a really inconvenient interface. Sam, do you know there's a switch somewhere that I can use to turn off their damn auto-coding??

Summer's almost gone

Well, I wrote a nice update on where I've been and "hey, I'm back" kind of generic post, but I lost it when the internet at work; crashed. Suffice to say, I've been back in Michiana since March, and things are going pretty well.

Just got back from a very nice evening of gaming, over at Ian and Aeriel's place. McDouce and The Man and I have been having a very nice summer of gaming; ever since Dan started crashing at their place, we've been playing about once a weekend on average for a little more than a month, and it's been good. Tonight was a nice cap to the that period, at least for me. Ian made a nice pasta dish, I brought the beer;, and we split the games down the middle. Ian opened by dominating at Risk Godstorm because Dan and I both played way too conservatively, then Dan pulled out a nice stealth win at Munchkin Fu, and I finished the evening with a 14-point win on Cities and Knights of Catan. Sad to see Dan heading back to Miami now. Ah well, on the upside, I did infect his mind with this and with The Game (I just lost).

Check over at the secondary for a brief highlight of my DVD binge over the 4th of July weekend.