Irk

I'll start this off by saying that I'm a religious guy. In fact, as religious guys go, I swing rather conservative. I like rock, your hair can be whatever length and color you want, and dudes with earrings only bother me in that it seems so 80's now, just so you know. This isn't something I bring up here often because, given the overall attitude of the site, there's no real way to make it thematically fit. Still, I am.

That's a preface for what I've got next.

I don't think people should generally be persecuted for their beliefs. The second someone else's religious rights are infringed upon, they come closer to infringing upon mine, and I don't want that. Still, if there's anyone worthy of reviving the practice of feeding people to the lions, its the people of Westboro Baptist in Kansas.

I would just like to say, on behalf of Christians with half a brain or more everywhere, "No, He doesn't."

That is all.

Would You Like a Kidney, Too?!?

Ugh. It's unpleasant, I tell you.

A week...or...*ahem*...two ago, my wife instigated a cleaning of our bedroom, a task which we hadn't undertaken since we got married. That meant that her crap and my crap were sitting in piles on top of the dressers and everything else in what had become a rather cramped sleeping space.

Well, to her credit, she did an amazing job getting everything out of the room on her own and putting her stuff back in an orderly fashion. My stuff was a bit more difficult. I mean, the majority of my stuff is comprised of 6 boxes of comics. That's 5 small ones and one long box roughly the size of three of the others. The mandate was I needed to separate out what I wasn't going to keep, you know, cut the fat.

You have to understand the relationship I have with comics. I've loved them since I first got my hands on one. I was intrigued by them before I ever actually owned one. Once I had some, I needed more. My first major comic purchase was a grab bag set from the JC Penny or Sears catalog. I read through all 25 comics in about two hours. Some weren't so great. In that set, though, I was simultaneously introduced to Storm and Gambit (X-Men) in a lackluster issue that also happened to be Gambit's introduction. It's varied in price between $15 and $50 since then, and, at least as far as I'm aware, is the one that's potentially most valuable. Especially of the ones I'd consider parting with. I have a couple others that would be more difficult to part with because of who drew them. My idols take priority over monetary value (unless it meant...not being able to eat or something, I guess).

So I took yesterday and, fighting everything in me, managed to pick at least half of them out for removal. HALF! It wasn't easy. I had to part with a few issues I wanted to keep for one reason or other in favor of others that were just drawn better. That included some issues with covers by the aforementioned idols with content between the covers by someone else. There's a particular Uncanny X-Men issue with a cover drawn by Madureira that falls somewhere in the lead-up to the Onslaught super-crossover that I ended up getting rid of that I purchased in the first place based on merit of the cover alone. There are some others that I bought because I thought they'd be worth something and now I don't care if they actually are enough to hold on to them.

By the way, if you're interested I've got some comics that might actually be worth having in my cast-off pile. Send me a list of things you could be looking for and we'll talk (the bulk of this is from 1996-2000).

Anyway, parting with these comics was kind of like seeing an old friend move away, never to return. The only difference being, I'm going to try and sell my old friend on Ebay and make some of that green back (did you know I had a $40 a week comic habit at one point? I'd KILL for that kind of disposable income now!)

Nothing to Contribute

I've been removed!

Ever since Cricket started his Blog (listed above on the Nav Box as "Order/Chaos"), I've been given the ability to "contribute" to his blog. I didn't really realize what this meant until last week, which didn't matter, because I was content to post smarmy replies to whatever he wrote. I was logging in to post something just a second ago, only God knows what now, and I noticed an absence in my "Dashboard" (the workspace on Blogger). I thought, "hmm...That's odd. That's where Cricket's blog goes." So I popped on over there to take a look and...that list that had me on it as a contributor was gone! I've lost my priviliges! I squandered the time I had!!! It's gone and it hurts so much!

...I may be dramatizing 'cause I forgot what I was really going to post. Heh...

By the way...

Just so you know, as long as this blog is in the rantspace, you can also comment on what we have to say. It might be good to hear from you all, so feel free to say something!

Stall the Overhaul

Or should I call this "Extreme Make-over: The I-don't-wanna Edition"? So hard to decide.

Anyway, as Cricket pointed out to me (and hinted at in some post now lost to time and our all-but-forgotten forums), our site is probably due for a bit of a face-lift. The thing is...I'm not feeling it. Sure, I could probably get into looking at a slightly different page lay-out. I just don't want to go through the hassle of making the HTML work. Again. See, I CAN do it, but I'm not very good at it, so it takes forever. And that's after we come to an agreement on what we want it to look like in the first place.

Really, I'm hoping just to move a couple things around and throw up a new background or something. That'd be do-able, no?

Jungle V.I.P

Well, I've been working at the U of O for just a bit more than a month. I'm REALLY enjoying it. I don't know what I'm doing, yet (I would if I did the same thing during the summer as I do during the year...or at least in the same quantities), but I'm starting to get a handle on it. I tend to dress up a bit, you know, shirt, tie, that bit, and everybody seems really impressed with it. It's kind of strange. Anyway, since school started back today, I finally have people coming in, so it isn't just me, the librarian and...well, I don't know what the woman I work with's position is exactly, but she's the one I answer to most of the time. I haven't figured out if that's by the structure of the chain of command (so to speak) or if it's just by her design, but I don't really care either way. I'm not wearing the blue vest and that's enough.

And you've probably noticed, by this point, at least, that our rantspaces have changed a bit. Well, in order to simplify some of the nonsense we go through, we've started using blogs to post. We'll see how it works, but I think it was a good idea. If not...well, it wasn't MY idea. Cricket thought of it.