The option of getting Netflix on my PS3 finally prompted me to hook the thing up to the Internet. It's odd, now that I think about it, since I was playing Moos and WarCraft modem games way before online gaming was socially acceptable; but now that it's actually cool, I'm about the one person in my demographic who never bothers with it. Basically, I'm dedicated to whicever is the most uncool application of the available technology.

Anyway, now that I actually am on the PlayStation Network, and still having no real interest in online gaming (possibly because I'm about the only person I know who even owns a PS3), it doesn't exactly feel like a whole new world. Although I did discover that I can download Final Fantasy VII for $10 — and since I seem to have lost my original discs and all my saves from, like, nine years ago, I'm considering it.

I also downloaded a demo of Star Trek: D-A-C, to see if it was worth the $10. I'm torn: On the one hand, it is a good way to waste some time; but on the other hand, I've been doing a fairly good job of wasting time without any additional financial commitment. Plus, it's a game that was designed specifically to be played online, but since I don't do that, I'd probably only use it for the single-player mode.

And I'm sure the fact that this is where my mind is is probably a symptom of ongoing inability to do anything actually productive with my free time. But, you know, you go to war with the army you have.

I now have Season 1 of Earth: Final Conflict on DVD.

This is a big deal for me. ( One I'll talk about it for a really long time! )

New Vertigo. I tried really hard to keep the weekly update schedule, but I failed. I am at the point where I can turn out a panel every hour or so, and I've subscribed to a ton of NPR podcasts that I can listen to and thus feel like I'm not wasting my time.

I had a nasty headache all day today, but it got noticeably better just as I was getting off work. I'm trying not to read much into that.

So when Fox puts its new episodes online, it does it with an eight-day delay. Which is apparently so that if you missed, say, the season premiere of House because you were covering a school board meeting, you can't watch it until the day after the second episode airs. Because they're jerks.

Vertigo is officially back to weekly updates, with an Exciting Cliffhanger that will factor heavily into whatever plot I make up to explain what's going on. I'm going to try to start updating on Fridays and Mondays again, just like in the good old days.

I'm slowly learning how to be efficient with the comic, too. This morning I made a giant drawing of Outer Space University, something I've been dreading ever since I came up with the design. Every time I draw it, the thing comes out slightly differently, and I've purposely avoided showing the whole thing in detail because, among other things, the design never really made sense. Given all that, it came out pretty well.

Plus I'm learning how to reuse panels without looking like I reused them, through a highly creative application of flipping, rotating and zoom. I think that's also drastically improved the comic's professionalism.

Vertigo's back! It's now hosted over at Smack Jeeves — which is an excellent service, by the way. The only drawback is they already had a (discontinued) comic called Vertigo; so now I announce the launch of Vertigo: A Space-Comic — a very cleverly retitled vision of the future.

Now I'm going to focus on taking less than four months to get the next comic out.

So at about 11 p.m. yesterday night, I got this annoying throat cold. I think I'm blaming Old Threshers.

I always feel like I've wasted my days off — weekends, vacation days, whatever. I mean, I could be using the time to do something creative, like finish one of the 133 fics and stories I've got half-done or that Vertigo comic I've been working on for three months now. But the whole point of a day off is not having to do anything, so I mostly just watch TV and stuff.

I just finished reading Forty Days of Rain, by Kim Stanley Robinson. ( The short review: Don't. )

Now I'm reading The Dreaming Void, by Peter F. Hamilton. So far, I still don't understand half of what's going on, but it's about five times as interesting. I guess this means I should stick to picking up random books at Prairie Lights and buying them based on how I like the first page and a half instead of going with authors I know and whose work I've liked in the past. Go figure.

One of the nice things about my job is that occasionally you can socialize with famous people. In the sense that you hover around them taking their picture and occasionally get to ask them a question or two. Like groupies.

Anyway, today started with an odd, impromptu argument about the Obama Administration's campaign to wipe out the rich. This afternoon, I had a discussion about the advisability of direct democracy in city government. I find myself torn between my naturally argumentative nature and, my journalistic duty not to be opinionated and my interest in not ticking off my coworkers or boss.

I also think I need to read up on the Peloponnesian War — which I was happy to learn, I know how to spell. This is mainly so I can accurately relate Socrates' criticism of direct democracy; I could probably just use California, since it's more accessible, a closer analogy, less elitist and has the added advantage of bashing the liberal Left Coast hippie types; but there was a guy a few days ago who actually pointed to California's referendum system as an example of good government, so maybe being so esoteric that nobody knows what you're talking about is the way to go.

So July is basically hell month at work, since we had one huge project after another with escalating demands on our time; now it's all over, and I'm trying to figure out what to do with myself. (It doesn't help that I'm basically broke, too.)

I've been trying to get back into writing. I actually got out about a page and a half this weekend — which is about as much as I've done in the first six months of this year, so...yeah.

I want to finish some of my fanfic. The problem is I started writing most of them in high school, and I haven't played the games in years. (I don't even seem to own a copy of FF8 anymore.) But I'm thinking I need to get in the habit of finishing things.

And now, a rambling critique of a show I've never seen and hasn't even aired yet.

I'm finding the press about Stargate Universe more than a little confusing. From what I can tell, it's a cross between Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek: Voyager. And apparently Robert C. Cooper thinks Voyager failed because everyone got along so well. Which is funny, because Atlantis suffered from a lot of the problems that did in Voyager — namely, the producers had no idea where they were taking the show throughout most of its run — and since Voyager ran seven seasons and only the last two were really consistently bad, I think it actually came out ahead. And if anything, Universe seems like a step toward the Voyager approach, since it sounds like they're playing up the planet-of-the-week idea that was supposedly why every other Trek series was inferior to DS9.

The cynic in me says they blew most of the potential that Atlantis had, and now they're overcompensating. Then again, I stayed with Atlantis to the end, it was a major letdown, and it's possible now I'm just bitter.

So about a month ago, I decided to give up on caffeine. Since I don't drink coffee or tea anyway, mainly this consisted of switching from Pepsi and Coke to a combination of Sprite and cranberry juice. (I haven't literally combined them; although I am somewhat curious now.)

And now, I'm doing a meme.

1) Post ten of any pictures currently on your hard drive that you think are self-expressive.
2) NO CAPTIONS!!! It must be like we're speaking with images and we have to interpret your visual language just like we have to interpret your words.
3) They must ALREADY be on your hard drive - no googling or flickr! They have to have been saved to your folders sometime in the past. They must be something you've saved there because it resonated with you for some reason.
4) You do NOT have to answer any questions about any of your pictures if you don't want to. You can make them as mysterious as you like. Or you can explain them away as much as you like.

( Although I totally forgot I had most of these. )

I may be the only person on the planet who saw Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen and thought of The Dark Knight. (Though I would note that it wasn't a favorable comparison.) Really, though, I can't recall the last time I've been so disappointed by a movie I had such low expectations for.

I have a new computer. It's very fast. And shiny. And I'm still figuring out what to do with my old one.

I really need a hobby that doesn't involve writing, and The Sims 3 don't seem to be filling the void. (It's kind of fun, but it seems to suck up even more time than Sims 2, which was already pretty bad.)

In the mean time, this seems like a really cool idea. Although it kind of reminds me that my generation will have to wait another decade at the minimum before we can watch anyone go to the moon for real.

Apparently, just before James Buchanan left office, he said to Abraham Lincoln that, if Lincoln was as happy to be entering the office as Buchanan was to be leaving it, he was a very happy man. …Which is kind of a dick thing to say, considering a third of the country had already seceded by then. And that Buchanan's policy toward the South was basically to get out of town before the shooting started.

Yeah. So I celebrated Independence Day this year by watching a History Channel series on the Presidents. They weren't exactly in order; they started with John Quincy Adams and went through Lincoln, then skipped to Carter and went through George W. Bush (the series was made in 2005), then started back at Washington. It wasn't bad, given that it went through history at a rate of about one minute per year. ("…And then James K. Polk agreed on the border with Canada and took half of Mexico, making the United States a truly continental nation. Next!")

And today I watched the second episode of John Adams – the one in which they declare independence. The scene that really gets me comes when the Continental Congress has just passed the independence resolution; there's a long moment when everyone just sits there, with a look like, "What the hell did we just do?" It's really kind of amazing to consider, of all the possible things that could have happened after the colonies declared independence, the United States becoming the most powerful country on the planet would probably have seemed like a crazier idea than…I dunno, a single European currency or something. And looking back at how much of a mess that first 90 years or so was, I really have no idea how we pulled it off.

Though I have a theory — one that, incidentally, has to do with The Star-Spangled Banner. It bugs me when someone argues for replacing it as the national anthem with America the Beautiful or something — partly because I don't like America the Beautiful, but I also think The Star-Spangled Banner is the perfect example of what makes America what it is. For better or worse, we're a country defined by conflict — we rebelled against Britain for independence, then four score and five years later we rebelled against ourselves. The narrative kind of breaks down after that — I think that's maybe why they call the Civil War the last battle of the American revolution. But the imagery in The Star-Spangled Banner just fits perfectly — somehow, inexplicably, the conflict strengthened us, to the point where even the people who stick Confederate flags on their cars will tell you how awesome America is. (And the ones who actually believe are…probably harmless.)

I finished my collection of the 50 state quarters today. It's very momentous.

It all started sometime in high school, when somehow I came across one of those big books with holes for all the quarters but none of the actual coins. I'd actually been collecting the quarters for a little while by then, because...well, I collect stuff. As time went on, it actually became a test of my self-control, since there was plenty of stuff I could use the change for; not spending it was a show of restraint.

I'm having a hard time remembering whether the like three dollars I had at the time was actually that much money, or it's just a really sad statement about how much self-control I have when it comes to spending money. Anyway, I kept it up, and now I've got $12.50 in collectible coins that might be worth, like, $50 in a hundred years or so. And a $2 bill that I picked up along the way.

Now I need to find something else pointless that requires virtually no effort to collect.

So I can make it from Mt. Pleasant to Lincoln in pretty much exactly five hours. Which is odd, because it took me about that long to get from Iowa City to Lincoln, and that trip is about 50 miles shorter. And if anything, I'm driving slower. There's like a wormhole somewhere along Highway 63 or something.

So for basically my whole time growing up, there was this weird empty expanse west of the Barnes & Noble on O Street. Now, not only have they added a parking lot the size of a football field and a giant Hy-Vee (and where were those when I was growing up? Next thing I know, they'll be replacing my old house with one.) Now I see they're building a new street, too. Apparently they were just waiting for me to leave.

So I'm taking a long weekend to go home to Lincoln. It's only the second vacation I've taken; the first one was a slightly shorter long weekend in which I went home to Lincoln. I've got eight additional vacation days to use this year, and have tentative plans to visit Washington D.C. this August (because, you know, I understand our nation's capital is quite pleasant that time of year); but I'm really going to need to save up some money at some point.

I'm not sure what the logic was of restarting Vertigo with a series of strips way more complicated than anything I'd tried before. Then again, this might be the most consistent I've been about writing anything all year.

( Part the third. )

Eventually I should get like a site or something. Especially since the old strips aren't online anywhere anymore, and the plot won't really make sense without them. Not that it does right now anyway.

( Bam! )

I made such incredible progress on Vertigo that I had the first strip out before I'd quite figured out what the story was. Then when I settled on the story, I discovered I needed to design four new outfits and two new characters for the second strip - some of which were easier to draw than others. And I still managed to get it done in a week. So that's promising, although I didn't manage to do much else this week. And especially today.

Vertigo returns! - after a very minor four-year delay. This comic features more new special effects than the entire series of Galactica 1980. (Trust me, that was hilarious.)

( It is consistent with the space-groove. )

Sometimes it feels like the space community is out to kill my childhood. I mean, demoting Pluto was bad enough, but now NASA is planning to go to Mars (in like 25 years), and I can't even really enjoy that because they're dumping the shuttle for some Apollo throwback.

Not that I don't get the reasoning. It just seems like the big picture is skewed.

( The very long explanation. )

I managed to clean most of my apartment this week. Well, most of the floor. And some of my table space. This has been an ongoing problem for me, since I'm a total pack rat and my apartment has basically no storage or filing space.

I also made progress on Vertigo - and Knights of Ivalice, randomly enough. I actually bought a ruler this week, which helps a lot (with Vertigo, I mean); especially since I had the brilliant idea to start the new comic with a giant space battle between really hard-to-draw spaceships.

The marketing for the new Star Trek movie has focused heavily on mass appeal: You'll like this movie even if you aren't a shut-in who's memorized the Klingon dictionary and can recite the optimal matter-antimatter intermix formula for the Enterprise's warp core! (It's 1:1, by the way.) This makes obvious sense from a marketing perspective, since by early 2000s the franchise had lost basically everyone who wasn't a hardcore fan (and quite a few people who were); but it also fuels a certain dismissiveness of what made Star Trek popular in the first place.

( Some vague spoilers. And lots and lots of words. )

I've found I can write more easily in university libraries. But not public libraries. So I can credit my post-secondary education for that, I guess. (Maybe I should go to grad school.)