Hey Kids! It's Comics!

I was twittering away this evening, and sent someone the names of some of my favorite Webcomics, but without the links due to the 140-character limit. This bothered me enough that I'm dusting off this old thing to post some of those links. We'll see how this goes.

First up: Girl Genius. (http://girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php)

Phil Foglio wrote and/or drew some of my favorite comics from the 80s, and the mad genius behind this series, or more appropriately serial, belongs to him and his wife Kaja. It's the story of a girl discovering that she is Heir to Power, set in a Steampunk Europe ruled by mad-genius "Sparks" who create and, to a degree, control the steam-powered technology that makes things run. Madcap adventures, daring heroes and heroines, sidekick hijinks, giant (and tiny) robots, and SCIENCE!

Next: Gunnerkrigg Court. (http://gunnerkrigg.com)

A comic that started (so far as I can tell) on the Web, the story begins with the heroine (and sometime narrator) entering school at Gunnerkrigg Court, and encountering an increasingly complex and sometimes disturbing mix of technology, mythology, magic, and interpersonal relationships. I've bought the first two published volumes of this in book form already, which should be enough to get you to take a look.

Questionable Content. (http://questionablecontent.net/)

More of a cross between a comic strip and a sitcom, QC is mainly about a bunch of twentysomethings (give or take a few years) centered around a coffeeshop near a college, somewhere not unlike Massachusetts where the artist/writer/musician resides. (He has also recorded several tracks as Deathmøle, the band several characters are in.) Added bonus: He has Twitter accounts for most of the characters and occasionally posts exchanges among them in addition to the story in the strip. Not always "family-friendly", but none of them have quite grown up that much anyway.

El Goonish Shive (http://egscomics.com/)

EGS, named after its creator, Dan Shive, is a combination of themes from manga and anime, superhero comics, magic, alien technology, high-school dramedy, and squirrels. It's better experienced than described, and it gets better all the time. Bookmark it, peruse it, then when you start to wonder why this character does that, go to the beginning of the series and read the whole thing. Early strips are not polished, but the characters soon take their own shape.

The Phoenix Requiem (http://requiem.seraph-inn.com/)

One of the most visually striking things on the Web, the tale centers around a young woman in a somewhat-alternate Europe, studying to be a doctor, and a handsome stranger, who apparently can't be killed. Spirits, ghosts, and threats from both paranormal and natural sources abound. Well-written, beautifully painted, with a haunting quality to both.

Family Man (http://www.lutherlevy.com/)

Historic fiction, set in Germany during the Enlightenment, around a young scholar denied a degree for heretic leanings, hired as a lecturer at a more forward-thinking university through a friend with a mysterious past, and the handsome, strong-willed daughter of his new employer. More subtle and thoughtful than most modern works, it almost feels like an adaptation of something Thomas Jefferson might have read, but it's the work of a young artist from Portland, Oregon, Dylan Meconis. If this description interests you, you won't be disappointed.

Dicebox (http://www.dicebox.net/)

A story that might have been a space opera, but is instead a character-driven story concerned less with the things that happen to the characters than with how they deal with them. Less "Doc" Smith, more James Tiptree, Jr. (alias Alice Sheldon). Intriguing, in multiple senses.

Templar, Arizona (http://templaraz.com/)

Set in present-day Arizona, just not the one you could actually go to. A young man, half-Korean, leaves his home and attempts to make his way in Templar, leaving behind clues pointing toward Seattle. He meets some odd people, works at his writing, and things become just a little more off-kilter all the time. Displaced Nile worshippers, clay-themed diners, guerrilla urban renewal, prostitutes' unions, movements around extreme sincerity or personal Eugenics... if you've ever taken one step too many when climbing stairs, the experience is not unlike what you think you know coming into contact with Templar's occupants.

That ought to keep you busy for a while. Oh, yes... I can't let you go without telling you about

FreakAngels (http://www.freakangels.com/)

but the less I tell you about that, the better. If the name Warren Ellis means anything to you, at least when it comes to comics or movies, then you really ought to be reading this comic already. Updates most Fridays, unless one or the the of the lads are not quite feeling up to the task, but well worth then wait when it does come. Tell you what: Go to the site, start at the beginning, and read. The longer it goes, the weirder it gets, and the more wonderful as well.

Twittering away

Well, although I've not been particularly diligent about adding to this page, I have been posting the occasional bit on Twitter. It finally occurred to me that the "widget" option might have something to do with me, so I added my twitter feed to the sidebar over there. Go ahead, take a look. It's mostly things I post in response to other people's tweets, but occasionally I do just have a thought that I want to keep around somehow. Twitter seems, for the moment, to be a way to do that. Who knows how long it'll be around, but I like its way of doing things.

If you're not sure whether you want to be part of the Twitter crowd, do what I did: when someone you already read has their Twitter feed on their page, go to their Twitter page, then bookmark that page. Eventually I had a couple dozen people I was "following" without following them, and the day came that I just had to post a reply to one of their posts, so I joined up. The way I look at twitter: it's like being at a big party that never really ends, you get to overhear part of a lot of conversations, and if you want to add your voice, you can. This doesn't mean that anybody else has to listen, but that's life.

Catching up (short version)

Well, since I've been getting some requests to catch up from old friends, I thought I might try to sum up where my life's gone since... oh, the 20th century.

So.

There was high school, then college (with art and theatre and a case of Yukon Jack), then the Science Fiction section at Powell's Books, then the nursery in Burns, then working for the Burns schools (including the OYA facility), then the Crane Elementary library, then getting married to Rosemary, and that pretty much brings us up to date.

For every one of those "then"s, you can figure on a variable amount of time spent at the ranch. That's where I'm working now, driving back and forth between Hines and Drewsey every day like an idiot, and trying to get a grasp of how a ranch is actually run. I don't know if I'll ever really get it, but I'm trying.

Whenever I'm not working at being a rancher, I'm either working on making our house a better place to live, fixing somebody's tech problems, or reading blogs and webcomics in bed.

So... how about you?

The lives of the cowboys...

Well, today started out as a fairly ordinary day. Out of bed, kids to school, off to work at the ranch. We were sorting calves out (some to ship out tomorrow, some to keep around for a while, some to sell now) and had gotten not quite halfway through when one of them jumped, kicked out a hind leg, and hit Mom in the jaw, knocking her out, splitting her lip, and loosening some teeth. She came around quickly, but with no memory of what had happened, and spitting blood.

Dad and I got her up on the four-wheeler, and took her in and loaded her in the car, and Dad took her to town to the hospital. Turned out her nose was also broken, and the doctor recommended sending her to an oral surgeon right away. This meant a two-hour ambulance ride, since the car was acting up on the way in. Now I'm waiting to hear that the surgery's done and that they'll be ready to head back tomorrow.

So, in the morning, I'll be heading out to do everything that they normally do in the morning: feed the horses, make sure everything has water, feed the calves, then check for any sick critters in the fields. Ah, the glamorous life of a cowboy...

As the hard drive rotates...

Well, I've resuscitated my older iBook (Blueberry flavor, cute but slow, and much lower resolution these days) and one of these months I'll dissect the late, lamented iceBook and transplant its hard drive (and hopefully its Combo drive) into this one. If I'm feeling really brave, I'll try to reflow the solder on the power connector so it won't randomly go dead on me. If I was also feeling rich, I'd invest in a new battery, but brave is much more likely.

In other computer news, the monitor and keyboard for our family PC (ugh) both went belly-up, so we bought a new LCD monitor (which we use at a lower resolution than its optimum, but nobody but me seems to care), and borrowed a keyboard. The DVD burner we got last year also finally gave up the ghost, so we got another, and we all have some sort of MP3 player and cell phone and yada yada yada. I just bought a LCD screen for the oldest kid's laptop, so now I'll have to figure out how to get that apart. Ugh again. At least we got most of the rassafrassin "service contract" back, which will help pay for the screen it didn't cover. Grr.

It's spring and most of the cows have had their calves, so now we're beginning to brand and move 'em out. Yee ha.

I've been mulling over some thoughts of creating some sort of comic story. More on that if and when.

Two birthdays and an anniversary behind us, four birthdays to go, and a maddeningly wide array of special occasions that call for massive expenditures on nothing of any importance. Family life is existing...

Computer guy without a computer

My laptop, after having four motherboards replaced, finally lost the ability to start up at all. Right after the last motherboard's ninety-day (!) warranty ran out. Sigh. So, now I'm contemplating salvaging what I can from the corpse and selling the rest for parts, probably to a site that sells parts for computers that develop problems like mine. Needless to say, I am not at all happy about this.

Life on the fringes

No, this is not exactly a typical day, but it's typically the way things end up happening. I'm on the cordless phone, with tech support for the phone I'm holding in front of me, trying to make it work the way it's supposed to, while my own phone there on my belt just sits there patiently waiting for the trip home. I'm up on the fence because there's next to no cell phone signal there, so I kept having to enter codes, then wait for the phone to get enough of a signal to tell me that, yes, it still thinks it's roaming, no matter which home area the support line tries to put it into. As of this writing, it still insists that it's roaming, and additionally will neither send nor receive calls to either its current or former numbers. There is the way things should work, and there are all the myriad mysterious ways things do (and/or don't) work. The former, of course, is all the support staff has instructions to cover. The latter is what my life, by and large, is made of.