alfvaen | Stultiloquence

Man, it seems like just posting about the things I've been worrying about, the darker thoughts in my mind, seems to have made me feel better about it. Not to downplay any expressions of support and sympathy from my friends, either. Or the healing properties of humour--I spent over an hour after my post giggling to "Texts From Superheroes". Or maybe I'm just getting bipolar or something, who knows.

So, for instance, I have been trying to work on my superhero campaign, at least a little bit each day. I'm still struggling with worldbuilding questions. I'm mostly familiar with the state of the Marvel Universe in the 80's, but the rest of the family is more familiar with the recent Marvel movies...so which do I go with? I'm leaning towards making it more like the movies, though with some tweaks...no need to go crazy with a ridiculously overpopulated Marvel universe from the start, at least. Because they're starting out in Edmonton, the biggest question is whether Alpha Flight exists; at the moment I'm thinking not, if only so that they don't get too much subsumed or overshadowed. Quite frankly, I'm creating most of the heroes and villains out of whole cloth, so if I wanted I could probably toss Supergirl and Dr. Tachyon in there if I wanted to. After all, I've already decreed that the Faeries that Simon's character has been training with are actually more like the inhabitants of Wonderland. This is literally the first time I've tried to run a full campaign, after all these years, so it'll be interesting to see what comes of it...if anything.

In my big Marvel Unlimited comics reread, I've reached the end of 1978, on the outer fringes of my original reading. This would be the time when I wasn't buying comics yet, but my brother was. I certainly remember the early Star Wars comics; the early Claremont X-Men comics mostly from the later reprints, though I do still have, somewhere, an old tattered copy of X-Men #102. I also remember having the last comic of the original Korvac saga, Avengers #177. There's still gaps in the Marvel Unlimited collection--I'm particularly frustrated at the severe lack of Defenders, which I often enjoyed more than the Avengers--but I'm getting a solid foundation in the central titles, at least. They recently added a bunch of Luke Cage/Power Man and Iron Fist titles, doubtless due to the new series being out, and I enjoyed them a fair bit more than I expected. Interested to note that Sabretooth seemed to have first been introduced in Claremont's run on Iron Fist, with hints about his relationship to Wolverine that I don't recall being revisited until years later, during the Mutant Massacre.

I've been reading less nonfiction than usual recently, with the comics perhaps taking up the slack. My "to-read" shelf has gotten larger than usual, with over a hundred things on it, mostly next books in series or authors I wanted to remember to try. My current reread is the Dark Tower series, into which I inserted the new one, The Wind Through The Keyhole. Apart from that, my current selection procedure rests on an attempt to keep gender parity between my authors. My wife and I were comparing our reading lists, and noticing that she reads more female authors than male, while I read more male than female...despite the fact that my to-read shelf is split approximately equally. So I'm conscientiously trying to keep them 50/50 (apart from my rereads, which will have to average out over the longer term, perhaps). A lot of the books with female authors on my shelf are urban fantasy, and I'm afraid I may have glutted on that a little bit, so I have to try to spread it out between the other genres.

I did pick up a nonfiction book up recently, Sarah Vowell's Unfamiliar Fishes, at least partly because it was mentioned on a podcast I was listening to recently, since it was already on my shelf. I'm sure I bought Vowell's books (I have this one and The Wordy Shipmates) after recognizing her name as the voice actress for Violet in The Incredibles. I'm not entirely sold on her book yet, though; it's a history of Hawaii from contact with Europeans until, I presume, their becoming part of the United States. It's not really in my normal wheelhouse, and my atheist nature is a little uncomfortable about the missionaries at the heart of the story, so we'll see how I do with it. I have some more regular science books sitting around for later...or I may just switch to one of them, since I'm not as strict about maintaining my one-book-at-a-time rule for nonfiction as I am for fiction.

Nicole and I mostly-sorta caught up on TV, managing to finish last year's "Agents of SHIELD" season a few weeks before the new season started. (Let's ignore the 11 episodes of Season 2 of "Outlander", shall we?) And we've kept up with the current season, as well as "Big Bang Theory" and the first new show we're trying, "Designated Survivor". Interesting to see Kiefer Sutherland as someone a bit more mild-mannered than Jack Bauer...but we'll have to see where they go with the plot. I suspect it will probably lean more towards "24" than "The West Wing", but we can hope that maybe we'll get a little of both... We're also planning to try "Timeless", and maybe that sitcom with the guy who has a girlfriend in 1775, but I guess we'll see. We don't want to get too much on our plate, or we'll just ditch the less compelling ones the way we did "The Expanse", "Minority Report" and "Blindspot" last year. Oh, and "Supergirl" will be starting up again soon, too, and we've been watching that with Luke and Jinian. With Simon, we're just starting Season 5 of "Buffy" and Season 2 of "Angel". Still no plans to sign up for Netflix or anything.

On my own watching, I am in Season 4 of my "Babylon 5" rewatch, just having wrapped up the Shadow war and starting on the Earth thing; halfway through the first season of "Glee", which is still keeping me entertained; several episodes into the Eleventh Doctor on "Doctor Who", and not finding it too annoying yet; a few episodes into the first season of "Torchwood", and still trying to figure out if I like it or not; and close to the end of the first season of my rewatch of "Star Trek". I keep thinking of more movies I want to watch too, either old ones like "The Shining" or "Taxi Driver", just to see what the fuss was about, or newer ones like "Limitless" or "Source Code" that I missed in the theatre. Plus, who knows, actual newer ones in the theatres someday, maybe? Seems like there's about three that we want to see that come out in November.

Still listening to several podcasts, too. I'm trying to keep up with the Night Vale people; I kind of enjoyed their second podcast "Alice Isn't Dead", and their third one, "Within The Wires", is growing on me a little bit. Those ones, coming out twice a month, are easier for me to keep up with these days than the weekly ones, since my commute isn't all that long, and I like to listen to music sometimes too. In listening to the "Mission Log" podcast, discussing Star Trek episodes, I was still managing to outpace my Star Trek rewatch, so I decided to try skipping forward to when they started on TNG, since I remember most of those better. I forgot how dire some of those early episode were, though. Similarly, I'm still a year behind or so on "Writing Excuses", and I'm not even doing much writing to put any of this stuff into practice.

Still trying to keep up with a bunch of webcomics, too; mostly it's pretty easy. It's the ones I'm trying to catch up with that are more work. I finally decided to make a concerted effort to read "Homestuck", which I'm given to believe is actually finished, and also to make a push on the long-running "Schlock Mercenary", so I've been trying to read 20 strips a day for each of them. The end is in sight, now. I'd already managed to catch up on "Dr. McNinja", which is apparently winding down too. At this rate I'm going to need some new long-running webcomic to catch up on, or I won't know what do with those extra minutes of my day...