Where’s He Been?

I know, that’s the question you’ve all been asking yourselves for the last two months.  I’ve been busy, ok?  Well, more lazy than busy, but you know how it goes.  Strangely enough, I found less motivation to post here after I got laid off than when I had my job.  So yeah, lazy wins.

Here’s the recap of my last couple months:

• I got laid off.  And yes, I was that guy being escorted out of the building with my box of cubicle crap under my arm.  And then walked through the Market with said box.
• My wife and I went to Austin, which I wrote about here.
• I continued writing and looking for work.  Yee-ha.
• Battlestar Galactica aired its final episodes.  This made me sad, probably because I made it a point to watch them completely in my cups.  Ron Moore told us that robots are probably going to evolve and kill us all (I think).  On the other hand, I might be related to Chief Tyrol.
• I still kept looking for work.
• Lost kept getting better every week.
• Twitter exploded in popularity, to ridiculous levels.
• I got a job, literally one day after my severance ran out.  So, I got paid for two and a half months to not work, then got a raise, and didn’t miss a single paycheck.  Everything’s coming up Milhouse.
• I designed my first website/WordPress template.  How’s it look?
• The Lost finale blew my damn mind, as Cuse and Lindelof did it again, bringing us Dexter’s girlfriend’s ex-husband as Jacob.  And Locke is….something else.
• We went to New Orleans for out long-delayed honeymoon, and subsequently, I’ll never stay at a W again.

So it’s back to work, and back to reviving the blog.  See you in the cloud, people.

Back From the Dead.

Just like these guys, I’m making a comeback.  My new job has a serious amount of downtime, so I figured, why not revive the world’s greatest blog, and get my stats back up to a mind-blowing 20 views a day?

Look out, fools, ’cause here I come.  To tide you over until my first official return post, here’s ninjas.  And soccer.

Miscellany for April 2.

Ok.  I’m attempting to climb back on this horse, here, and get back on a relatively regular schedule with this thing.  Between classes, trying to find a job in this horrific economy, and trying to teach myself Adobe Creative Suite in a very short period of time, the blog has fallen by the wayside.  I know you people have been dying for new material, so how can I deny you any longer?  So, I’ll at least try to collect some random thoughts and items on a daily basis.

I have found a little time to get some back issue comic reading in here and there, finishing the two X-Men crossovers, Operation: Zero Tolerance and Messiah Complex, the latter of which led into the current storyline in the X-books.  Spoilers ahoy!  Zero Tolerance, honestly, was pretty boring, with an awfully simple and easy wrap-up.  But I enjoyed Messiah Complex, with the fragmentation and breakup of the X-Men at the end, with Xavier being shot by that wack job Bishop, and Cable being handed the responsibility of the future of the mutant race in baby form.  Cable always been one of my favorites (really, him or Jamie Madrox), so I’ve always enjoyed crossovers and arcs that feature him, like the X-Cutioner’s Song from the 90s, or the upcoming Messiah War with Stryfe.

I also ran through Final Crisis and Secret Invasion, DC and Marvel’s big recent “event” crossovers in their respective universes.  For the uninitiated, Final Crisis dealt with Darkseid taking over the Earth via the Anti-Life Equation (trust me, I’m really simplifying), and what was the final wrap-up of the event that started a few years ago with Identity Crisis.

FC and most of its lead-ins were written by Grant Morrison, which, if you’re familiar with comic writers, means that it was a cluster-F of ideas and minor characters.  While he’s one of my favorites, and I do appreciate his ideas and the fact that he loves to bring oft-unused characters to starring roles, the tradeoff is usually complete and utter plot disarray.  I had to go back and use Douglas Wolk’s Final Crisis Annotations just to begin to comprehend what was going on.  I’ll tell you this much; someone major does die.  Kind of.  But not really.  You know how it is in comic books.  All told, though, I definitely enjoyed it more than Secret Invasion, written by the other insanely prolific, bald writer, Brian Michael Bendis.  SI was pretty anti-climactic, with the Skrulls invading Earth after having infiltrated it for months, if not years.  I was hoping that Iron Man would be revealed as a Skrull, explaining why he’s been acting like a complete douche for the last couple years, but, alas, he was just revealed as incompetent, being replaced by Norman Osborne in the end.  This leads into the current Marvel event, Dark Reign, with Osborne essentially taking over national security for the US.  Gee, I wonder how that’s going to work out.  So, Final Crisis wins out in the end, just barely.  They definitely had better covers:

In other comic tidbits, local comic shop Capes Comics uploaded a couple pictures to the internets yesterday;  following the Green Lantern theme, here’s one:

Awesome.  I want them all.

I’ve become hooked on Blip.fm, which allows you to choose from thousands of songs and “Blip” them to your Twitter account, allowing you to share and stream music to all your followers.  It’s somewhat crack-like.

Speaking of Twitter, I tried out TweetDeck about a week ago, and besides the web interface, there’s no turning back.  I’ve tried Twitterrific and Twhirl, but TweetDeck really tops them all.  It allows you to group who you’re following into separate columns, making it easy to keep up with everyone.  It has a built-in URL shortener (no tr.im yet, unfortunately) and all the usual features of a stand-alone Twitter client.

For April Fool’s Day, the A.V. Club did a Taste Test feature on a cookbook quickly becoming notorious, Natural Harvest: A Collection Of Semen-Based Recipes.  Yeah, it’s real.  No, I won’t even show you the cover; while it looks harmless, after reading the title of the book, it takes on a different appearance.  The article spawned what may have been the most juvenile, asinine and childish comments section to date over there.  It was also hilarious.  “That’s what she said” has never been used to greater effect.  A warning – it’s some of the most NSFW language you’ve ever seen, so watch out.

That’s about it from here; the weather still sucks (we’re supposed to have more snow on Sunday, what a crock) and I still don’t have a copy of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.  Somebody get on that, ok?

See you next time, peepholes.

The Gadget Roundup for March 26.

Here’s some stuff I found in the last couple weeks, enjoy!

In T-shirt news, apparently there’s been a big rise in Ghostbusters/Pac-Man mashups.

Here’s one from Glennz Tees.  $19.95.

And this one from Busted Tees for $20.

io9 had a link to a Costa Rican t-shirt artist known as Tony Aguero G. producing some great sci-fi designs.  Here’s my favorite:

Check out all his designs over at his Threadless page.

In more Pac-Man is blowing up news, these stools put the ghosts to work for you.  These were created for an exhibition at the Japan Society in New York by architechtural firm Atelier Bow-Wow (fantastic name).

via Engadget

Finally, someone has decided to redesign the standard power strip.  As you can see from the slightly disturbing picture above (seriously, what’s with that cat?) Movable Power changes shape to allow for space, or when you have those bulky rectangular AC adapters that only fit at the ends of a normal power strip.  Below is a shot of all the possible configurations.  Only a design for now, but hopefully we’ll see this in stores soon.

LaCie has created a line of key-shaped USB flash drives to keep you from losing them.  Definitely a great idea, I personally hate having something else to carry around with me.  $10 from LaCie.

The TapGuard from Guyot Designs fits any widemouth water bottle, such as Nalgene or Sigg, and filters up to 95% of unnecessary chemicals out of tap water, allowing to refill your bottle anywhere you like.  $16.50.

I know this is not a gadget, but it’s a great bag.  The Fossil Redmond Duffle Bag is $298.

And finally, again, not in the gadget sense, is the Adidas Originals SL 72.  Gorgeous.  $65 at Zappos.

The Most Interesting Man in the World.

I know I’ve been heavy on the videos here, but this stuff is too good to pass up.  For those of you that haven’t seen any of the new Dos Equis ad campaign, well, just watch:

So he’s God, right?