Veteran Insomniac

It’s been awhile since I updated here, and I guess it’s really because I don’t have much new to say. Everything seems a little status quo around here lately. My 50/50 sick/sad spring has manifested this year as an ear infection & general sicky-ness. After a week it seems to be getting a little better, having a plugged ear is just annoying now more than it is painful. Blech.

Emerald city comicon was a blast, except for my camera batteries running out during Shatner’s panel. I picked up some awesome new stuff in the dealer area that I’m going to say I’ll talk about later, but probably won’t, given my track record.  My collection of Civil War is almost complete, I’m only missing two TPBs that I can see. I picked up the first two collections of “Preacher” and it’s amazing, I have up through 8 in just a couple months. I think I’m going to pick up Secret Invasion before I finish up House of M and World War Hulk.

The thing I want to talk about the most I guess is a slew of new gadgets. I finally abandoned the Blackberry platform & switched to Android. My new telecommunications device is a Motorola Droid X, running Android 2.2 & rooted. I initially didn’t see a need to root, but after some research I realized I didn’t really have a good reason to install a new ROM, but I had quite a few to root the thing, which was remarkably easy. It seems that as devices become more and more complex and powerful, the easier they are for those technically inclined to bend them beyond their initial operating capacity. I love the versatility and variety of the apps available for the Android platform, and I could easily see it beating Apple’s for smartphone dominance. Which is good, because all the time I’ve spent with the iPhone has been poo.  Like I do with my other phones, the first thing I picked up for it was an extended battery, giving me around 500 additional mAh with negligible thickness increase. The size difference is so small that even cases designed for the stock version will still fit with the extended battery backplane. Anyhow, the thing is incredibly cool, and I feel now like I did the first time I started using a smartphone; it is that much of a generational gap above my Blackberry Storm. The Storm did prepare me for an all-touch device, and I shed the clicky screen uneasily, like training wheels falling away. Now such a thing seems a novelty.

I’ve also happened upon a Playstation 3, so the realm of high-definition movies on my TV is now open to me, and after a short time of elation, I am now despondent over my pitiful built-in speakers and yearn for a home theater audio system that does these other two media behemoths justice. Indeed, even my book reading has entered the “digital age”, as it were, since I picked up an Amazon Kindle. I love this device and the company that makes it. For me, it is amazingly easy to read a book on, and to organize my collection of eBooks and PDFs. I opted for the WiFi only version instead of the 3g enabled one, which I realized is kind of unnecessary when I can just tether the thing through my Droid & gain access to all three of the “g”s available there. Considering I do most of my reading (and everything else) at home, I saved that fifty dollars there.  There’s nothing I can really say about this e-reader that hasn’t been toted by Amazon itself on their site & through their testimonials, except maybe how easy it is to put your own spiffy screen-saver images onto it.

Let me now back up and talk about the company that provided me this amazing slice of the future. There’s only a handful of places in the ENTIRE WORLD that I’d consider living over Seatte, and Amazon is the one thing none of those places could match.  First, Amazon Fresh. Groceries online seems like a pretty logical thing, given the era, but Amazon fulfilling orders next-day for free, with re-usable packaging that they will come and get from you if you don’t have a place to store it is just stellar. Oh, and you can just toss a bunch of Amazon.com items in there as well? I think this might edge out Netflix as my favorite delivered service. Plus, I don’t end up with a bunch of random snack food from going to the store hungry. Amazon Fresh, you sustain me.

If Fresh weren’t enough to just get you by, Amazon has stepped up their game for a few major metro areas (currently Seattle, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Indianapolis, Las Vegas, New York City/New Jersey, Philadelphia, Phoenix, & Washington, D.C.) by offering “Local Express Delivery” where orders early enough in the day can be delivered SAME DAY for just 8.99 (or 3.99 if you have prime). My Kindle was delivered so fast, the automated job that provisions it for registration hadn’t had time to run yet. Amazon’s shipping won a race vs it’s electronic backend. Seems like a John Henry moment to me.

Amazon (among other things) is truly making my favorite city a veritable paradise for those savvy enough to use all the features offered.

That’s all for now, perhaps there won’t be another four month gap in posts. Probably not.

(Yes, I know it is not Wednesday. It was when I wrote it)

On a pretty solid trip to Portland, for the Oregon Brewfest, we stopped off at Powell’s and went in search of literary treasures. Material for many “new comic book” days to come was supplied while looking in their assembled superhero collections, as I stumbled across a good deal of the Marvel Civil War collections. I realize these are not new comic books per say, but as I only actively follow one line of comic books, I tend to pick up new books on subject of interest rather than chronological imperative. Also, as I have not really gone over it before, a good deal of these Wednesday posts will be regarding the various Civil War pieces I’ve acquired, which hopefully will be all of them.

I suppose I should dedicate the first of these to establish what kind of comic book reader I am.  My knowledge of the various canons of comic books is not just from comics themselves, but from adaptations of classic IP that was rampant during the 90’s that almost universally included “The Animated Series” following a colon. As a child of those times I was acquainted with the majority of mutants, heroes, villains, and henchmen, but not intimately familiar. It was this way until the producers of the host of Saturday morning cartoons wisely re-targeted my demographic as we came into our independent years by creating the superhero blockbuster.  It was really Bryan Singer’s X-Men that found the key balance between what works on the silver screen, and what works inside the printed panel. Comics and their characters had been tugged out of their campy roots and into the mainstream.

It took a few summers of massive CGI and a move into independence for me to pick up comic books again. As it stands, I don’t have a massive selection of books, and I greatly desire to pick up completed story arcs rather than wait through a cliffhanger every month.  As it is, I have enough of a backlog to attempt to make this a weekly post as I go over a piece of my illustrated collection.  First up, Civil War: War Crimes