Showing posts with label back to the salt mines. Show all posts
Showing posts with label back to the salt mines. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 07, 2009

The Life-Changing Miracle Of Blah Blah Blah

The first day back to work after taking time off is always painful...especially when you return to discover that three new projects have been dumped on you in your absence.
Oh well.
Other than that it didn’t take long to get back in the grind.
A lot of people, including my boss, are taking time off this week to be home with their kids. Personally I think that having your kids home from school would make you want to spend more time at work, but that’s just because I haven’t experienced the life-changing miracle of blah blah blah.
Scott has taken this week off for that purpose, and he and the family are off camping somewhere, so there’ll be no Riff Trax night this week.
And that’s pretty much all that’s going on.
Which is to say that I’m too lazy to write a proper post.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Actual Birthday

Though we had the party on Sunday, today is my mom's actual birthday, so I demand that encourage all Threshold readers to join me in wishing her a happy 70th.
I'm back in the salt mines today after taking a post-trip recuperation day yesterday.
Only 37 pieces of mail in my inbox, and no voicemails, so that wasn't too bad, and I'm already back in the familiar routine.
Tonight is Riff Trax night, so I most likely won't be posting anything. Tomorrow I have my eye appointment and then a solid night of TV watching, so don't hold your breath waiting for a post.
Honestly, why would you hold your breath anyway?
I may post something Friday. I'm planning to punk out on the candy-giving by going to see a movie or something (either The Changeling or Zack and Miri Make a Porno). The neighborhood kids will still get candy from me - I'll either leave a bowl outside the house or give candy to my neighbors to hand out on my behalf - but I just don't feel up to the bother of answering the door and keeping the little bastards scamps from wriggling their way into my house to check out my TV like they kept trying to last year.

Thursday, January 31, 2008

What Day Is It?

I’ve found myself having trouble figuring out what day today was.
After being off for two days and then returning to work, part of me thought it was Monday, though another part of me was convinced that it was Friday.
Stopping at the comic shop on the way home to pick up my new comics only added to the confusion.
My eyes handled the return to work pretty well; driving directly into the sun this morning wasn’t pleasant, but it also wasn’t the hellish nightmare that it had been on Monday morning, so that was a plus.
The only real problem is that I haven’t been able to wear my Gentle Molding lenses for days, so my vision has been receding to its previous levels. It’s not quite there yet, resting instead in a sort of hazy middle ground in which I have to wear my glasses to see any significant distance, but unable to see near objects when I do wear them.
One of the more unpleasant aspects of my recovery from ill-health is that my nose is no longer stuffed up, which is good, but my sinuses are constantly draining, which is bad, or rather, gross, as I essentially have snot running down my throat all day long.
On a more pleasant note, I completed my first major piece of documentation today and sent it out to a rather large group of people. So far the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.
(That I’ve only gotten feedback from one person is neither here nor there.)
Last week when I went to the comic shop I noted something that made me laugh, though it didn’t occur to me to take a picture.
Today it was still there and it did occur to me to take a picture, albeit a really crappy, blurry picture (which pretty much only Scott will appreciate), as can be seen below:




The sign is in response to the recent much-maligned (and rightly so) Spider-Man story in which Peter Parker (Spider-Man) makes a deal with the Devil that retroactively voids his marriage to Mary Jane (AKA MJ) in exchange for restoring his beloved Aunt May to her normal (fragile) level of health after she was hit by a sniper’s bullet intended for Peter.
Not wanting to say anything more about that story than I have, I will say that the sign has a very good point, in that Spider-Girl is an existing comic that has pretty much all of the elements that Joe Quesada claims that Spider-Fans have been clamoring for, which was, ostensibly, his motive for undoing Peter and MJ’s marriage.
For the uninitiated – which is pretty much all of you except Scott – Spider-Girl is a comic set in an alternate universe in which an older Peter and MJ are still married and have a teenaged daughter who inherited her father’s powers and has taken up the family business after Peter retired from his web-slinging career.
It’s very much like old-school Spider-Man.
And I mean it’s seriously old-school – writer Tom DeFalco once titled a story “If This Be My Destiny!” – which in many ways is a good thing, as it touches on most of the same themes that Spider-Man used to before the character actually progressed and grew up and the Editor-In-Chief decided that he needed to regress and go back to the way he used to be, because, after all, the fans were demanding it.
But that’s rather the point; there was no need to go back to telling old-school Spider-Man stories in the main Spider-titles, as those stories are already being told in Spider-Girl (and Ultimate Spider-Man and Spider-Man Adventures...).
Of course, the one big problem is that it’s Spider-Girl, and if there’s anything that we can learn from comics – particularly Spider-based comics – it’s that girls are icky.
Thus, even though it presents exactly the kind of stories that Quesada claims the fans want to read, Spider-Girl doesn’t count, because it’s about a girl. A girl who isn’t just a piece of hyper-sexualized eye candy. And who wants to read something like that?
Also, it has that whole icky Peter and MJ being married thing, which is such an impediment to great storytelling. Much more of an impediment than, say, being a shitty writer.
But whatever. The whole point is that the sign is funny (because it’s true).
(In case you can’t read it, it says, “Peter & MJ? Still married! Aunt May? Dead and buried! Mephisto? Not in this book! Spider-Girl. Not magic, just makes sense.”)