Too damn sleepy to add commentary, but to make up for that, this time I have progress pics, plus a pic of my new haircut (sadly, the lighting does a poor job of showing off the coloring). I am trying to focus less on, 'Oh, gee, an enormous blob, and a slightly less enormous blob' and more on, 'Eeee! I can actually /see/ the difference!' The old pics were from the 26th of April. The new ones were taken on Friday.

( Numbers and pics. )

Widescreen edition of Master and Commander, the Simpsons Movie. I'll pay for shipping, and no, you don't have to take them both. First replies get it - I'll grab mail addy from whoever claims them later.

It is incredibly lame to have the outcome of an extremely lengthy, hard-fought battle where one side manages, after many hours, to force the retreat of the other side completely reversed at the last minute because Retreating Side has a West Coast heavy-hitter log on, and all the East Coast heavy-hitters are already exhausted and have to go to bed.

Just saying.

Some people may remember my reviews on the Radical Comics Caliber and Hercules, both titles which I enjoyed mightily. Well, now I've decided to give another of their titles a try. "Hotwire: Requiem for the Dead." The art is fantastic, which appears to be the norm for Radical, and I think its possible that some of you may recognize the author's name. Warren something-or-another, I dunno.

( Not really all that spoilerish, but cut anyway. )

So in summary, I like it, I'll definitely be buying issue #2, and with 28 pages of beautifully colored art and only four pages of ads (five if you count the inside back cover) for $2.99, I recommend it to anyone with an interest in unusual setting cop stories or the Cyberpunk/dark near-future genre in general.

Okay. So apparently reading Final Crisis #6 right before going to bed leads to a crazy mix-mash of dreams/nightmares. Considering Final Crisis #6 reads like a crazy mix-mash of dreams/nightmares, this shouldn't be shocking.

(Seriously. When one of the moments used to slow the pace of a book involves the three Flashes, something's gone weird.)

This brings to mind a comment made by one of the guys who works the counter at my comic store a few weeks back, when he realized that Morrison was behind both Batman RIP and Final Crisis: "What, did DiDio just hand the keys to the DC Universe over to a crazy Scottsman and say, 'Here, have fun, and don't worry about scuffing it up'?" My answer (after a Google session confirmed that Morrison is, indeed, from Scottland and not England) was, "That's about what it looks like."

In other news. That Batman: Battle for the Cowl ad at the end. Well, you guys know what portion of it has this little fangirl excited. The thing is, in those style ads, supposedly just about everything is a clue, from where the characters are standing to what each character is looking at to everything else, and the fact that his raised hand covers the good part of his face is a bad omen. I can not even guess what most of the other stuff means, although I'm pretty sure the Batman-with-guns is Deadshot, especially when you consider that he once tried to set himself up as a Batman-replacement.

( The actual ad-image behinc cut. )

Edit: Poking around the interwebs, it looks like just about everyone but me seems to htink Batman-with-guns is Jason Todd (except for the ones who think he was the Demon Bat). The two more generic looking Batmen are probably Tim Drake and Dick Grayson.

Righto. Because I don't have enough random things eating my time, this weekend, on an impulse buy, I picked up a computer game called "Fashion Solitaire." Because, of course, I know sooooooo much about fashion. You have these dolls that you have to dress, and a deck of various clothing items. Like with most solitaire games, you can only access certain items, and the rest are covered up until you uncover them. Meanwhile, the fashion models themselves has various desires concerning what they want to wear. The object is to dress the gals with stuff from your deck while matching as many of their desires (colors, items, etc) as you can. Of course, since you only have a few open cards from a shuffled deck, you can't always match things up quite as well as you might want, a fact which tends to lead me to doing things like giving models very, very clashing accessories in order to hit their 'want' colors. After each round, you pick a favorite outfit, and then after you've picked six favorites, you have a clothing line completed. Yay!

A nerfed version of the game can played on the web for free, but it's missing a lot of features: http://www.mylifetime.com/fun-games/games/dress/fashion-solitaire

So. Anyway. I would show you the godawful stuff I've been coming up with, except that I can't get into my photobucket account. Ohwell!

One of the things I've come to love about the DC comics universe is its generational aspect. That is, the way hero names and legacies get picked up and carried on from one generation to the next, a fact that doesn't always require the death of the previous name holder (see: multiple active Flashes, Wildcats, etc), although it usually calls for the incapactiation of a previous nameholder, temporary or permanent. After awhile, though, you can't help but notice the way DC seems to use this method to slowly introduce more ethnic and gender diversity in what is largely a white male hero population. Pretty clever, that! I'm not here to defend or condemn the practice, but just to look at as many examples of it as I can dig up. Some people can't stand replacements - me, I tend to have my favorites in each group, and sometimes they're the new guys, and sometimes they're the old guys. Often, I like one better than the others but still like them all enough that I'd want to see everyone active, even if I realize that's not always likely.

I'm going to be using a list of JSA members and JLA members, and probably at least look over the Titans members, mostly because in the DCU, just about everyone ends up in the JLA, the JSA, or some team with 'Titans' in the name at some time or the other, and bring up a list of characters who were replaced with "more diverse" versions. In some cases, the replacements were, themselves, replaced, but still, I'll include them. This isn't really an exhaustive list or study... just me poking around Wikipedia for awhile, and giving my thoughts on some of the characters.

The fact that I'm putting this up on MLK day is complete and utter coincidence.

( The list behind cut! )

Okay. I missed lots. I know I did, mostly because I got tired of making the list. Anyone else have any to add on?

Grabbed from invisiblemoose

1. OPEN PAINT
2. CLOSE YOUR EYES
3. DRAW A CAT

:(

First sentence of each post from each month. I'm only going with public posts for this.

Jan: It's 2008.
Feb: So I went to Sheetz to grab me some breakfast this morning, and came out with a knock off.
March: The earliest Discworld novels were based off of Prattchet's RPG experiences.
April: The Hypothetical AU Meme: Take any one of the fandoms you know I write in, and give me a type of AU (space opera AU, pirate AU, superhero AU, Ancient Rome, etc).*
May: "Not including the animals PETA spayed and neutered, the group had possession of 1,997 dogs, cats, and other “companion animals” in 2007.
June: No public posts were made this month! D:
July: The (mostly) spoilerless verict: Pretty good.
Aug: ... but for some strange reason, I find this page to be one of the creepier comic book pages I've seen in awhile.
Sept: With honorable mention to Superman Beyond 3-D, which is getting delayed for the same reason as Last Will and Testament.
Oct: Clearly, there is something villainous about combining the colors of green and purple, and no good can come of it.
Nov: After having irritated myself all to heck by reading Rodimus Prime's wiki entry, I am badly in need of recommendations for good Rodimus Prime fic, possibly AU or post-series fic or something, where in he gains/regains command and stays in charge.**
Dec: Rather than starting out on the Enterprise or with the Enterprise crew, like most episodes, The Devil in the Dark starts with a team of unfamiliar miners during a watch change-over.

* Also, I suck, because I never responded to ANY of these.
** Never did get my fic-rec. :( I did, however, get a comic drawn in MS Paint by invisiblemoose