Digital Alterity

1. Masters of the Universe
2. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
3. Voltron
4. Thundercats
5. GoBots

I’m in a game-playing cycle right now.

My interests/obsessions tend to move in rapidly shifting cycles. For weeks, I’ll want to do nothing except read manga, and then I’ll suddenly shift to playing Battle For Middle Earth 2 on my Xbox 360. People not used to the enthusiasm with which geeks tend to devour our current interests are often confused and frightened by the level of single-minded dedication we can display. But honestly, if you watch us over a long enough period of time, you’ll see that we’re actually pretty well-rounded; you just have to change your scope.

I continue to be obsessed with comics (especially super hero comics), but beyond my comics (which only show up at my office every other week), I want to just fill all of my free time up with playing games on the computer. When I’m not playing World of Warcraft, I want to be playing Warcraft 3. I’m enjoying the hell out of interactive entertainment basically.

The dilemma of the day comes in when I think about what I brought to do on my lunch break. I’m reading through Lies My Teacher Told Me, a book about the teaching of American history, and while the book continues to be pretty interesting, I find myself thinking only about how much more fun I could be having if I had brought my laptop or my PSP with me. I’m sure my book will be a fine way to occupy my lunch break, but I’m halfway tempted to just listen to comics podcasts instead.

Basically, I feel just like this.

Because I clearly don’t have enough widgets in my life, I’ve set up an account on Twitter. Want more details on the minutia of my life (until I get bored with it)? Follow me on Twitter.

Blame the whole thing on Penny Arcade.

Are you one of the few friends I have that actually still uses IM? Ever wonder why I’m almost always set to some kind of “away” status? I was pleasantly surprised to find that this article from Joe Kissell explains in excellent detail some of the challenges that IM presents to my way of dealing with the world.

From considerable reading and from personal experience, I’ve learned that introverts have a number of other tendencies. And taken together, these traits may shed some light on why I (and numerous other introverts I know) have a hard time with IM, Twitter, and the like. For example, introverts typically need to concentrate on just one thing at a time, and are often particularly sensitive to interruptions and distractions.

Another typical introvert trait is wanting to compose one’s thoughts carefully before sharing them (either verbally or in writing). Once again, while this doesn’t prevent me from carrying on verbal conversations at a normal speed, it makes rapid-fire online textual conversations rather unnerving. For me, interacting with other people in real time online is just as draining as interacting with other people in person. So my feelings about participating in, say, a lively multi-person chat are about the same whether we’re talking about iChat or a party. I can hold my own in the conversation and it’s generally fine, but because it takes a lot of energy I prefer not to do it very often.

The whole article is definitely worth a read.

My new Mac Pro arrived here at work during my lunch break. The box is now sitting here at my desk tempting me for the next four-and-a-half hours. I don’t know how I will survive the experience.

I’m going to have to bring the car around to the front of the Florida Gym because this sucker is heavy.

For the past year or so, Allyson and I have been in a mad rush toward home-ownership. We’ve been throwing every spare dime into our savings account, and then donning the proverbial sackcloth every time an unexpected expense came in. You see, we really, really hate our current apartment. People steal our plants. Our neighbors are loud, obnoxious, drunken assholes. I’m increasingly too lazy to actually take things up and down the stairs. Our collective focus, our total awareness, was squarely centered on escaping this apartment into a small piece of the world that we could truly call ours.

We were optimistic. We had some money saved up. I got a surprise raise recently. In short, things looked good. I played with some online calculators, checked my credit score, and determined that the banks would almost certainly loan us more money than I actually wanted them to. I ran some further numbers on housing insurance and local property taxes just to figure out the exact point at which we could no longer afford a given house in the MLS listings. We contacted friends about realtors, got some promising names, and generally got pretty damn excited about the future.

Then we called the bank.

On the day before we called, new regulations went into effect in Alachua County, requiring more of a down payment because our housing market is depressed. The fellow at the credit union was super helpful with all this. He gave Allyson some exact figures for what we would need in order to start our home-buying process. Unfortunately, the final number was, for us, an unattainable figure. Screeching halt. Emergency stop. Plans on hold until further notice.

So yeah, upsetting news. It was clearly time to renegotiate our deal with ourself since our Katie-bar-the-doors savings strategy wasn’t sustainable in the long-term. We had put off nearly all big purchases in order to maximize our liquid assets for closing costs, down payments, etc. We were shell-shocked from the sheer effort involved. After some time off to mourn the loss of the house we never actually had, we sat down with our spreadsheets and Quicken accounts to figure out where to go from here. Allyson needed some clothes for job interviews. I needed a new computer about six months ago. We had dental bills staring us in the face so hard it made our molars throb. We reworked our savings strategy to be a lot more reasonable, made a kick ass savings plan that has us ready to buy a house two years from now (unless we need to move to a different county to find a teaching job for Allyson), and even figured out how to buy me a new computer without killing us in the long-term. Responsible adulthood, here we come!

The truly awesome news that comes out of this is that I’m buying a new computer for the first time in four years. The ol’ Powerbook has been showing its age of late, choking on all the background services I have it performing. When my Powerbook was having trouble running a freaking NES emulator, I knew that the time for a replacement wasn’t too far down the road. All of this led to last night, when I placed my order for a brand new Eight-core dual-2.8 GHz Mac Pro. After shamelessly paying $44 for two-day shipping, my new baby should be here by Wednesday or Thursday — just in time for Allyson’s trip out of town this weekend. That should leave me with plenty of time to get settled into my new digital digs without feeling like a bad husband for systematically ignoring my wife in favor of machinery.

Now all we need is the new version of Photoshop for this baby…

Last night, right before I woke up, I had a dream in which I met Joe Quesada, Marvel’s Editor-in-Chief, in a hotel lobby. I explained to him that I saw him at Mega-Con in Orlando, and he kept trying to place who I was. I told him that I was going to work for him someday. I explained to him that I was a published author but that I just recently got back into comics. I told him that I was working on some things now but that it was only a matter of time before I was working at Marvel.

And then I was inexplicably moving into a dorm room at college.

I may not look exactly like Quentin Quire, but I think I at least captured the “disaffected mutant youth” vibe.

I made that “Magneto Was Right” the night before we left for MegaCon. I made my own stencil with a piece of poster board and an exacto knife, and then I carefully filled it in directly on the t-shirt with a Sharpie. For the lettering, I used my lightbox. It only took a couple of hours, and I was really happy with the end result.

Last weekend, Allyson and I went to MegaCon for the first time in several years. We hadn’t gone in a while because we were really underhwhelmed the last time we went, but these days I’m really into comics again, making a trip seem way more exciting than it had seemed in years. When you add in the fact that the half of the Comic Geek Speak crew was going as well, it made a trip pretty close to mandatory.

I went into the con really excited to do some “dumpster diving” in 50-cent back issue bins. You see, Gainesville has a really terrible selection of back issues. The only comic shop that specializes in older back issues is only open twice a week and isn’t really guaranteed to be open even during its posted hours.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Uncanny X-Cast episodes here lately, and Brian had me interested to give the 1980s New Mutants series a try. I decided to put together a run of as many of the first 55 issues as I could while I was at the con. This was my project and my quest. In the end, I managed to put together a run of issues #1 through #55 for $36 — only about 65 cents per issue.

• CGS convention tour t-shirt
• Ultimate Fantastic Four TPB Vols. 2 and 3
• Wolverine: Enemy of the State TPB
• Wolverine: Agent of SHIELD TPB
• Essential X-Men Vol. 4
• Emma Frost: Higher Learning Digest
• Marvel Knights 4 TPB Vol. 1
• Son of M TPB
• Young Justice TPB Vol. 1 (Can’t describe how surprised/thrilled I was to find this one)
• X-Men: Children of the Atom TPB
• A couple of nifty (non-superhero) prints
• Haunted #1, an indy comic about kids trapped in a haunted house
• Wildstorm Revelations (2008 Con Exclusive)
• Killing Pickman #1, an indy comic about a cop who decides to hunt down a satanic serial killer

In addition, Allyson picked up…

• Wolverine: Origin HC
• Daredevil Movie Comic TPB
• Revolutionary Girl Utena: Perfect Collection Vol. 2 DVD set
• Some assorted cute anime buttons, pins, and postcards

I noticed that my Renee Montoya question made it into the Newsarama coverage of the DCU panel. I thought that was pretty nifty.

Overall, we had a great time. It was great to meet some folks that I only knew as names on Internet message boards, and it was awesome to buy so many comics for so little money. And, hey, staying in a really nice hotel is almost a vacation in and of itself.

Back when I got my bike for last year’s birthday, I quickly started riding it to work every day. I had a great time on the bike, but I eventually gave it up because riding to work meant missing out on sitting around with Allyson for a little while on campus before we had to head to our respective jobs. I’m really protective of any time I get to spend with my beautiful and wonderful wife, so I started driving to work with her. I hated myself for it, but spending more time with Allyon by driving the ol’ armored vehicle was the better of two flawed choices.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, we got Allyson a Trek hybrid bike of her very own. We went out on a couple of the trails here in Gainesville and just generally had a great time together. Then, starting this week, Allyson and I started commuting to work together on our bikes. This morning, after making our way to campus, we even had time to chat for a few minutes and get a piping hot cup of coffee from Starbucks. It feels great to save the gas, get some physical activity in, and still get to spend some quality time with the most awesome girl on the planet.

Honestly, though…The best part? Leaving campus every day. Getting off campus in your car at 17:00 is like a scene from Dante’s Inferno mixed with Escape from New York. On the bike, you’re just constantly in motion with no gridlock whatsoever. You can tear down bike paths until you get off campus and onto little side streets that just let you glide right home. My commute home takes exactly the same amount of time with no wasting of fossil fuels and none of the vehicular stress that makes me hate my fellow man. I arrive at home pleasantly tired and in a really positive mood. After a few days of this, you really start to lose sight of why our culture fell so in love with the car in the first place. Simply put, riding a bike is still just as fun as it was when you were a kid. Getting from place to place is a pleasant experience rather than a hateful chore.

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