dreamcatchings: (misc: sadness shield)


I promise I'm alive. It's just sort of been 100 degrees or over for about two weeks now and that plus weird working schedules with switching days off and working OT has pretty much depleted all my energy. I'm down to not giving a shit about much of anything and sort of faking everything. I'm doing what I can to get by currenrly. I'm hoping to shake this soon, but we'll have to see what happens.

dreamcatchings: (fringe: blinded with peter science)
I know it's been a while since we had a 100 Things post, but I've been otherwise occupied with the crochet and with reading the Hunger Games books. I'm about done with the last one, though, so I should be able to full speed ahead on comics. I've decided that it's best to read or re-read material prior to making a 100 Things post. Also I was originally planning on talking about the various series that spin off of The Books of Magic, but they're actually pretty awful so far. I don't even want to finish them much less write about them.

With that said, someone should help me pick what I read next.

List:


  • The Boys (at least the first few story arcs)
  • Exiles (first full Marvel run)
  • Ultimate X-Men (full run)
  • Concrete (full run)
  • Animal Man (N52 1st TBP)
  • Justice League International (N52 1st TPB)



This is a very short of list of things. Feel free to suggest others because I might have it.
dreamcatchings: (Default)
I know it's been a while since we had a 100 Things post, but I've been otherwise occupied with the crochet and with reading the Hunger Games books. I'm about done with the last one, though, so I should be able to full speed ahead on comics. I've decided that it's best to read or re-read material prior to making a 100 Things post. Also I was originally planning on talking about the various series that spin off of The Books of Magic, but they're actually pretty awful so far. I don't even want to finish them much less write about them.

With that said, someone should help me pick what I read next.

List:


  • The Boys (at least the first few story arcs)
  • Exiles (first full Marvel run)
  • Ultimate X-Men (full run)
  • Concrete (full run)
  • Animal Man (N52 1st TBP)
  • Justice League International (N52 1st TPB)



This is a very short of list of things. Feel free to suggest others because I might have it.
dreamcatchings: (firefly: find your genius thing)
As anyone on my FB knows, I've been working on a crochet project for my dad for Father's day. It's a VW Camper Van, which seems a little crazy to be sure. I'm not 100% happy with it, but I think it looks good. Plus I think he'll really enjoy it.

Lots of pictures so here's a cut )

The dimensions aren't exact but it's about 15 inches tall, 8 inches wide and 14 inches long.

I'm not completely happy with. I wanted larger wheels, but finding two inches buttons was a pain enough. Also they had to be glued on because I positioned the tires after rather than before assemble and there was not way to sew them on. The stars are felt stickers. They should have been sewed. It needed more stuffing but after two and a half bags I was tired of it. There's a bag of beans in the bottom for weight.

Still. It came together rather well.

I would make more, but I'm not sure what I would even charge if someone wanted one.
dreamcatchings: (Default)
As anyone on my FB knows, I've been working on a crochet project for my dad for Father's day. It's a VW Camper Van, which seems a little crazy to be sure. I'm not 100% happy with it, but I think it looks good. Plus I think he'll really enjoy it.

Lots of pictures so here's a cut )

The dimensions aren't exact but it's about 15 inches tall, 8 inches wide and 14 inches long.

I'm not completely happy with. I wanted larger wheels, but finding two inches buttons was a pain enough. Also they had to be glued on because I positioned the tires after rather than before assemble and there was not way to sew them on. The stars are felt stickers. They should have been sewed. It needed more stuffing but after two and a half bags I was tired of it. There's a bag of beans in the bottom for weight.

Still. It came together rather well.

I would make more, but I'm not sure what I would even charge if someone wanted one.
dreamcatchings: (firefly: find your genius thing)
Before I really begin I just want to say that my original plan was to talk about all the series that involve Tim Hunter at once. This was before I saw everything that would encompass. Yes, I know about the original limited series, the proper Books of Magic series, the Books of Faerie as well as a vague knowledge that there were some other titles out there. Once I started going through the digital comics collection I found, I realized that there were entirely too many books to consider in one discussion. Moreover it became clear that some of the offshoots were completely different stories about different characters or even completely different facets of Tim. As such it only made sense to break things down a bit, and the logical point was to take Tim's introduction to magic and his halting, stuttering, tragedy filled first steps into magic on their own. I will admit that when I was reading these, I started with the LS, then read the Children's Crusade storyline (after a brief hiccup involving me going from the LS straight into the proper run wherein I discovered that all those weird allusions to other stuff they made were from CC so I backtracked) before launching into the main series anew.

This wasn't the first time I had ever read BoM although it was the first time that I was lucky enough to be able to get my hands on all the issues. I only vaguely remember when I got the TPB containing the LS. It would have had to have been sometime during high school. Thanks to my English teacher I was completely and utterly in love with both Sandman and Neil Gaiman. As such I was sort of on a quest to find and devour every Neil Gaiman related thing I could get my hands on, which I'm sure is how I found the BoM LS. I know that I got either the first or the second BoM TPB when my father dropped me off at college for orientation/classes. I know that because I took it to the dance mixer some of the girls on my floor dragged me to, and since I just sat there reading it instead of dancing like an idiot I was chided a little by the upper class men supervising the event. It should come as a surprise to no one that I went to a dance and read rather than be social when I didn't know anyone.

I had always wanted to get more of the TPBs and finish reading the series. It was just one of those books that didn't demand my attention, though. It was quiet and somber so it was sometimes easy for me to forget about. It also had the misfortune of not being entirely written by Neil Gaiman. Had it been I'm sure I would have found ways to get it all much sooner. As it was I eventually put the other TPBs on my Amazon wish list and then promptly forgot about them each and every time I made an order. Once they fell out of print I removed them from my list assuming that was that. This occurred during my mostly out of comics phase so it was a lot easier to accept. So you can imagine how excited I was when I got back into comics and discovered all the BoM comics in that beautiful digital comics cache I had. I won't lie. There were times when I was reading the series that I honestly considered stopping because I just didn't feel like the series was at all worthy to is LS predecessor. In the end, though, it pulled together, and I am really glad that I read it because it contains worlds inside of it.

Books of Magic *possible spoilers* )
dreamcatchings: (stv: keep talking)
Before I begin actually covering this run of the LSH (get used to the acronym because the title is completely too long to keep typing out) I need to talk a little bit about my history with it because that's going to impact my reading of this version. Over the years, I've read quite a bit of LSH stuff. I have some of the LSH DC Archive books for the really old stuff. I have the complete L.E.G.I.O.N. aka Five Years Later run, which features adult versions of the LSH. I also have the run for the "SW6" LSH. Then I have the Reboot run after Zero Hour. (If you're not a follower of LSH this is probably where you're really confused. This stuff isn't really important, and I'm hopefully going to double back to examine each run in its own entry so don't worry all that much about it at the moment. This is basically just to establish my cred with the comic.) I also have quite a bit of the Post-Infinite Crisis run although I'm missing chunks of that and anything newer. I started reading about these characters in the SW6 spin-off of Legionnaires when it came out way back in 1993. I've been collecting on-going runs and back tracking for others ever since.

To sum up, I've been around a while and read a wide berth of stories and versions of these characters. I care about them enough to keep enduring DC's never ending quest to create something that makes sense? I'm not exactly sure what DC is doing. To be quite honest, they don't need to go through these endless permutations. The LSH is removed enough from the normal DC continuity that as long as you keep their own history straight and avoid senseless time travel (I'm looking at Brainy and XS here) then there's not much you can screw up. Sometimes I think that LSH is one of DC's throw away titles. They assume that either no one is reading or no one cares so they just toss people at it and tell them to have fun and do whatever they want. I'm up for new and exciting versions when they're done right, but I feel like you also need to be respectful of the crapton of history you're inheriting before you just destroy it all on a whim.

Despite a lot of praise that people I know have heaped on the Threeboot run, I wasn't that impressed. I think that a lot of this stems from the fact that I went into it carrying so much LSH baggage of my own. Like I said, I'm all for alternate realities, new versions, etc. If anything I prefer when things are drastically different than the base reality. For example I am in love with Marvel's Age of Apocalypse event, but I was disappointed with how closely their Ultimate universe mirrored the default 616 universe in some ways. (More on all of that to come later.) So I am not anti-reboot or alternate reality or anything like that. Sometimes you end up creatively painting yourself into a corner, especially if you're not paying attention to the history, or everything's just so jumbled that you need a clean slate. It happens. I'm down. Just do it right. Threeboot did some things really right, and it handled others completely wrong.

LSH Threeboot *possible spoilers* )
dreamcatchings: (wash: find one way)
Just a few days ago I finished reading the Children's Crusade crossover story on my Kindle. Despite being a Books of Magic reader (via TPB years after it was published), I had never actually heard of this story arc. I knew nothing about it until I was reading a website that had an article about some of the top story arcs not collected in TPB form. As a side note a lot of them were DC. That's understandable as DC has been pretty notorious about making things hard to get. They're improving, though. Not only when it comes to releasing things as TPBs but also with digital. This is very off topic, but I just bought all of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing run digitally through comiXology for 99 cents as issue. It's a great price considering the cost of the TPBs. It also means that at some point I'm going to be talking about Swamp Thing here in more depth than what I'm going to hit at in this entry.

Anyway we're going back to the topic of the entry now. I just sort of wanted to lambaste and extol DC in the same paragraph because that's fun for me. It's also going to be the theme of this entry so everything sort of works together in ways that I had not originally foreseen or planned. Bad me for not doing that on purpose, but I just very recently finished a rather large cup of coffee so it makes me a little spastic.

The Children's Crusade story arc was a Vertigo crossover, which might mark the first and only one of its kind. It was presented in Children's Crusade #1, Black Orchid Annual #1, Animal Man Annual #1, Swamp Thing Annual #7, Doom Patrol Annual #2, Arcana Annual #1, and Children's Crusade #2. As previously stated it's not available as a TPB or at least it wasn't when the article I was reading was written. (For those of you interested in these sorts of things, the article in question is here.

Children's Crusade *possible spoilers* )
dreamcatchings: (esotsm: heartlost)
Strangers in Paradise seemed like a good place to start this project considering that I just finished reading the series less than a week ago. This is the first time I had ever read it. I should have read it ages ago. I was always interested in the idea of it. I had heard good things about it, after all. Not from any of my friends because the great age of my comic reading spanned from about the age of 8 to 17. This meant that all of my comic reading friends were either ones I had converted or boys in my classes. Let's also step back a minute and consider that once I moved to Indiana from New Orleans, I was in a fairly tiny school system. My graduating class was made up of 131 people. Unless we had new people move in, I was interacting with basically the same people from grade 5 through senior year of high school. Most of the boys in my grade who read comics were into either the same ones that I was or they read other super hero books. Wizard became the primary way that I was introduced to new material unless I happened to stumble onto it in the comic book store as the owners of the comic books stores I frequented were notorious for ignoring the little girl mooning over the new comic selection and rummaging through their back issues.

So it was that I first read about Strangers in Paradise all those many years ago in Wizard. I vaguely recall being somewhat interested in it, but not enough to seek it out. I was young. I had a very limited amount of money, and a pretty big comic book habit as it was. I sort of put it into the back of my mind as something I would inevitably pick up someday, and, if fact, through the years I would occasionally think about it. It was one of those things, though, where I never really saw it. It was never prominently featured at my comic book stores. By the time I was in college, I was barely even going to comic book stores. I never saw it at the bookstores. It just sort of slipped away.

Then I became friends with [livejournal.com profile] wanderlustlover, and I was reminded of Strangers in Paradise because she has icons of it and mentioned it in several posts. Still I never thought to seek it out. It just elevated itself in my mind as something I should read. While [livejournal.com profile] wanderlustlover and I have differing tastes in some areas, I still highly value her opinion. This was the first friend I'd had that had mentioned Strangers in Paradise.

I'll be honest. I still haven't bought the series. Once I had my Kindle Fire and had figured out how to get it to read cbr and cbz files, I went looking for more digital comics to put on it. I was fortunate enough to find a source to download the complete Strangers in Paradise series. Even after I had done that it took me a little while to get around to reading it, and I had to take some breaks in order to read other things.

I did finish it, though. I powered through the rest of it last weekend.

Strangers in Paradise *possible spoilers* )
dreamcatchings: (paige: drunk smile)
I thought I might make it a little easier on myself by going ahead and making a bit of a list. This isn't a strict list of things that have to be covered. It's more just me giving myself a go to in case I don't have anything on the brain at the moment. I'm also totally open to recommendations/suggestions/requests.

I'm going to go ahead and say that on some of these I am going to have to reread before I can discuss anything about the topic in question intellectually.

Comic Books:

The Strangers
The Maxx
X-Men 2099
The All New Exiles (Malibu)
Amethyst
Clan Destine
Cloak and Dagger
DV8
Doom Patrol
The Invisibles
Fables
Hellboy
Freshmen
Generation X
LSH -- This one is going to take awhile and may need to be broken up into the different runs.
Teen Titans
Mutant X
Power Pack
Runaways
New Mutants -- Again this one might be spread out for the different story arcs.
Thunderbolts
Umbrella Academy
Uncanny X-Men Annual 8
X-Factor (older)
X-Force (older)
Astonishing X-Men
BtVS Season 8
X-Men Unlimited
Strangers in Paradise
The Books of Magic


Comic Story Arcs:

New Mutants: Demon Bear
Fall of the Mutants Crossover
The Children's Crusade Crossover
Asgardian Wars Crossover
Legion Lost
Sandman: The Wake
Sandman: The Doll's House
Brood
Inferno Crossover
AoA -- This is going to require more than one entry.
Phalanx Covenant Crossover


Comic Characters:

Meanstreak
Halo
Katana
Eric Draven
Dazzler
The Comedian
Husk
Longshot
Archangel
Havok
Marrow
Spiral



Comic Creators:

Neil Gaiman


Comic Movies:

Sin City
Scott Pilgrim vs the World
Watchmen
Hellboy
Kick Ass

100 Things

Apr. 17th, 2012 10:46 am
dreamcatchings: (jono: my hero)
Inspired by seeing this on my flist a la the great [livejournal.com profile] mizzmarvel, I've decided to go for it.




{Take the 100 Things challenge!}


I miss seeing (and writing) long posts of substance albeit rambling most of the time in my case. Plus I just miss words. I used to be so addicted to words that I couldn't live without them. Then my center fell apart, and I just sort of stopped with the words. It was like I couldn't manage them anymore. I've been trying to make the journey back to my words, and I think this might be a good way to go about it.

I debated a little about the topic, but I think that "100 Comic Books, Story Arcs, Characters, Creators, Movies, etc. I Find Value In" should work out pretty well, especially since I've recently started getting back into comics. (I want to add that the other topic I was considering, which may get written up at some point, was 100 Letters I Will Probably Never Send. It's a pretty self-explanatory concept, but I wasn't sure it would be as accessible to outsiders as the comics theme.)
dreamcatchings: (inception: as big as you want to)
Digital comics I currently have (an imperfect list):

Sandman: Complete Main Run
100 Bullets: 1-83
Batman: Dark Victory, Gordon of Gotham, Gordon's Law, The Long Halloween, Turning Points, Year One, Joker Last Laugh, Jokers Asylum, No Man's Land, The Killing Joke, The Man Who Laughs, Switch
Birds of Prey: v1 and v2 complete I think
Books of Magic: complete run with most of the spin offs
Clandestine: 1-5
DMz: 1-33
Fables: various
Hellblazer: 1-100
Hellboy: TPBs 1-6, various Crossovers, Third Wish, The Island, various one shots, Weird Tales 1-8
Abe Sapien
Amazing Screw-On Head
B.P.R.D: The Dead, Plague of Frogs, The Black Flame, Universal Machine, Dark Waters, Hollow Earth and Other Tales, Night Train, The Soul of Venice, There's Something Under My Bed
Hellboy Jr: Gets a Car, Halloween Special
Abe Sapien: Drums of the Dead
Mystic Arcana
Preacher: 1-66
Strangers in Paradise: complete
The Walking Dead: 1-78
Transmetropolitan: 1-60
Wanted: 1-6
Watchmen
X-Men: Days of Future Past
From Hell
The Girl Who Would be Death LS
Johnny the Homicidal Maniac
Maus
Squee
dreamcatchings: (Default)
Digital comics I currently have (an imperfect list):

Sandman: Complete Main Run
100 Bullets: 1-83
Batman: Dark Victory, Gordon of Gotham, Gordon's Law, The Long Halloween, Turning Points, Year One, Joker Last Laugh, Jokers Asylum, No Man's Land, The Killing Joke, The Man Who Laughs, Switch
Birds of Prey: v1 and v2 complete I think
Books of Magic: complete run with most of the spin offs
Clandestine: 1-5
DMz: 1-33
Fables: various
Hellblazer: 1-100
Hellboy: TPBs 1-6, various Crossovers, Third Wish, The Island, various one shots, Weird Tales 1-8
Abe Sapien
Amazing Screw-On Head
B.P.R.D: The Dead, Plague of Frogs, The Black Flame, Universal Machine, Dark Waters, Hollow Earth and Other Tales, Night Train, The Soul of Venice, There's Something Under My Bed
Hellboy Jr: Gets a Car, Halloween Special
Abe Sapien: Drums of the Dead
Mystic Arcana
Preacher: 1-66
Strangers in Paradise: complete
The Walking Dead: 1-78
Transmetropolitan: 1-60
Wanted: 1-6
Watchmen
X-Men: Days of Future Past
From Hell
The Girl Who Would be Death LS
Johnny the Homicidal Maniac
Maus
Squee
dreamcatchings: (esotsm: heartlost)
March has been a bit of a hard month. It's been long and stressful to a certain degree. I've been switching my schedule around about every week for one thing or another. My mother had to have cataract surgery done in both eyes, one of my tires went completely flat, an issue with ordering from a restaurant still hasn't been resolved almost a month later, and my department is moving buildings. This last one is probably the biggest because it requires not only the physical move but also a new wardrobe as well as coloring my hair back to something that passes as "natural" instead of green.

The moving process was done today. I wasn't there. I work the late shift so my boss suggested I just take today off and work next Wednesday instead. We have a weirdly running pay week. I had to say my goodbyes to a building and people I have worked with Wednesday night. Over five years. I spent over five years in one building save for some projects here and there. I worked with some people for that entire duration of time. I had to say goodbye to that building, to those people on Wednesday. A number of them are not people that I hang out with outside of work. They are work friends, work family. It feels like I will never see them again. That opens a hole up in my chest.

And there are things that a friend mentioned to me that I don't know what to make of, which always bothers me.
dreamcatchings: (Default)
March has been a bit of a hard month. It's been long and stressful to a certain degree. I've been switching my schedule around about every week for one thing or another. My mother had to have cataract surgery done in both eyes, one of my tires went completely flat, an issue with ordering from a restaurant still hasn't been resolved almost a month later, and my department is moving buildings. This last one is probably the biggest because it requires not only the physical move but also a new wardrobe as well as coloring my hair back to something that passes as "natural" instead of green.

The moving process was done today. I wasn't there. I work the late shift so my boss suggested I just take today off and work next Wednesday instead. We have a weirdly running pay week. I had to say my goodbyes to a building and people I have worked with Wednesday night. Over five years. I spent over five years in one building save for some projects here and there. I worked with some people for that entire duration of time. I had to say goodbye to that building, to those people on Wednesday. A number of them are not people that I hang out with outside of work. They are work friends, work family. It feels like I will never see them again. That opens a hole up in my chest.

And there are things that a friend mentioned to me that I don't know what to make of, which always bothers me.
dreamcatchings: (got: dany heart loss)
My heart hurts. I feel lonely and isolated and disconnected. Once again I've done it to myself. I've sort of systematically been sabotaging relationships with my friends to the point where I've pretty much alienated everyone. Then I reached out to someone I was close to years ago and was sort of rebuffed. So now I just feel adrift. I'm leaving people behind before they get the chance to cut me off because I'm convinced that they will. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy when you're being as asshat though.
dreamcatchings: (Default)
My heart hurts. I feel lonely and isolated and disconnected. Once again I've done it to myself. I've sort of systematically been sabotaging relationships with my friends to the point where I've pretty much alienated everyone. Then I reached out to someone I was close to years ago and was sort of rebuffed. So now I just feel adrift. I'm leaving people behind before they get the chance to cut me off because I'm convinced that they will. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy when you're being as asshat though.
dreamcatchings: (illy: bored now)
Things are going pretty well. New position is so much less stressful although getting used to the new schedule still has me thrown for a bit of a loop while I get used to it. Then there's the fact that our IT department didn't install everything on my computer properly, and I can't do parts of my job because of it. That does worry me, but my boss knows that I've been emailing them every week for a month. Mostly because I put him on the email chain. He even emailed, and they ignored him too. Excellent.

Going out of order, I decided on a forum setup for the game I had been talking about. I am currently working on building it and all the various things included in setting up a forum game. You can actually see if here and feel free to give me feedback. I've mostly just been trying to figure out how to make someone else's CSS behave since I have no idea how to write my own.

The best (and worst) thing about the new position by far is that one of my co-workers is about on the same level of comic book geek as I am so we spend a good bit of time talking about them. He has a tendency to read things I don't so I've been learning a lot about Captain America. He's also a really big DC fan. I have hit and miss DC knowledge. All his talk about the new 52 perked my interest, though, and I actually pre-ordered eight TPBs yesterday: Legion of Super-Heroes, Legion Lost, Teen Titans (Scott Lobdell FTW hopefully), Animal Man (per co-worker's suggestion), Birds of Prey (ZOMG, thank goodness someone is using Katana because I loved her in Batman and the Outsiders forever and ever ago), Justice League Dark, Justice League International (one word: ICE!) and Suicide Squad (Harley Quinn, nuff said). We'll see how they are.

Also thanks to our conversations, I ended up buying the comics edition of Collectorz as well as the app that turns my phone into a bar code scanner.

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dreamcatchings: (Default)
Sara

July 2012

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