Well, I think it’s time I put the blog back in mothballs again.

The major problem I’m having with it is that it takes a ton of work to update it — even without keeping to a regular update schedule. It still takes at least two days to write up a book review, and that takes up time I could be using to work on other, more interesting projects.

And not that I don’t appreciate all my loyal readers, but doing all that writing for just the five of you is kinda not great.

I still think blogs are a good thing. I think they’re a better way to talk to folks, without having to deal with the various poisons we have to deal with in social media. But it doesn’t change the fact that I’ve grown very tired of fighting my brain to think of new posts.

My main regret is that I’ve still got a tall stack of books and comics I’d love to review for you, and a decent number of RPG characters I think it’d be fun to share. Maybe I’ll be back eventually, if the drive to share some of this stuff gets too strong to resist.

But for now, I’m outta here. I’ll leave you with these important words to live your life by: THE ONLY GOOD NAZI IS A DEAD NAZI.

Hey, here’s some stuff I feel like I shoulda mentioned before!

Bullet Point! Baxter, the foster dog we were taking care of a while back, has now moved on to his Forever Home and Forever Daddy off in the distant wilds outside Marfa, Texas. He’s getting along great with his new big brother and greatly enjoying living in the country, where he gets to snuffle his nose in all the wet cow poop he wants. He’s probably forgotten us already, which is really the point of being a foster, to be honest.

The only thing about the whole situation I’m not happy about is learning that he has to get rattlesnake vaccinations now. Who even knew there was such a thing as rattlesnake vaccinations?!

Okay, here’s another picture of Baxter. He’s a good boy!

And next: Bullet Point! Hats off for Richard Corben, superstar comic artist, who died last week. He did art for Heavy Metal, Meat Loaf albums, Hellboy comics, and a bunch of other weird, glorious, gorgeous projects.

Let’s look at a little Richard Corben art:

Bullet Point! Disney announced a massive buttload of new Marvel and Star Wars movies and TV shows, as well as casting news and photos for their programs, including WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, Hawkeye, Loki, What If?, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Dr. Strange, Guardians of the Galaxy, and more.

Can I just say they really need to slow this stuff down a lot? I like superhero stuff as much as anyone, but I’m really not sure there’s that much appetite for so much superhero content on TV and in the movies. I suspect a lot of mainstream audiences figured “Endgame” wrapped up the Marvel Cinematic Universe nicely, and there’s not a guarantee they want more. Better to release one or two movies, see how audiences react, and go from there, rather than jump to a massive glut of Marvel movies and pray people will care.

Besides, why care too hard about Disney stuff when they’re balking at paying their contracted royalties to creators?

Bullet Point! Hats off for Tom “Tiny” Lister, who died just a few days ago. Like most character actors, he had certain kinds of roles he specialized in — namely, the absolutely terrifying black man — with more than enough skill to subvert those roles, whether for comedy, as Deebo in “Friday” or President Lindberg in “The Fifth Element,” or for pure drama, in his small but massively impactful role in “The Dark Knight” as the prisoner who throws the detonator out of the prison ferry.

I can’t say Lister was the best actor in “The Dark Knight,” because he was onscreen for such a brief period. But he doubtless played the part of the most purely moral character in the movie — a man who uses his fearsome appearance solely to preserve life — and he sold the role beautifully.

Bullet Point! It turns out it’s not a good feeling at all knowing that 70 million people and almost every elected Republican at every level of government believes Nazis are Very Fine People and that democracy must be destroyed.

Is there anyone left out there saying we need to reach across the aisle to these people, to learn how they think? Anyone still saying Biden should pardon Trump for the good of the country? I sure hope not, ’cause anyone still saying nonsense like that is a goddamn idiot.

Probably the only way we’ll ever save this country is to somehow get every Trump supporter in the country stuffed into an unmarked grave somewhere — which means it’s probably impossible to save America, ’cause the only people with the drive to execute that many people… are Trumpers and their fellow Nazis.

As I’ve said far too often: (1) if you’ve got the ability to flee the country, do so as quickly as you can. Save yourself, save your family, save your friends, save a few folks from vulnerable populations and (2) The only good Nazi is a dead Nazi.

So I was expecting November to be busy, but not quite this busy.

We’re fostering a dog ’til sometime around the Thanksgiving holiday. It was largely unexpected — the paper has been running Pet of the Week features for a while, and I expected my primary contribution to the project was taking photos of dogs at the shelter and then writing short blurbs about them. But I’m realistic — I know not every dog can be rescued.

But my sister made some calls to friends and relatives about one specific dog, and when a cousin from the Big Bend area decided he’d like the dog, we ended up agreeing to foster him until we could get him transport down south.

Anyway, this is Baxter.

He’s about three months old, and he’s a handful. We’ve kept my sister’s and brother’s dogs occasionally when they went on vacation, but this is our first time having to raise up a dog from a very young age. We’re trying to get him to learn his name, and how to recognize important words. We’ve taught him to accept being on a leash. We should probably be trying to teach him some commands.

We won’t have a lot of time to teach him anything — he’ll be taking the first leg of his trip to his forever home during the Thanksgiving break (unless we get snowed in, or unless we all get the ‘rona, which is a serious danger right now).

We’ve only had him for a few days, and he’s already very good at annoying me by chewing on my fingers and my shoes and my pants legs. And he’s already got me loving him for his enthusiasm and intelligence and loving, playful nature.

So basically, remember when I said I probably wouldn’t post a lot this month? It goes double or even triple now, ’cause I got this big baby to love on and/or suffer through…

Sweet mercy, my children, I have no idea what I want to write about today. I’ve got books and comics I could review, but I just don’t have the will to do ’em today. There’s nothing political I’m keen to rant about. There’s no comics and geek hobby news I feel enthused about opining about.

But I sure don’t want to go too long without posting anything, right?

Well, I’d threatened when I restarted the blog that I might eventually just post photos I’d snapped — so I guess that’s what we’ll do now, okay?

That’s my brother’s dog, Ciri, who is playful and happy and wiiiiiild to make some mayhem. It’s been too long since I saw her last, and I’m looking forward to seeing her again when it’s safe to go out.

And I’ll get in trouble if I don’t post a pic of my sister’s dog, Willow, who is profoundly sweet and patient, and is composed of far more angles than most dogs are. I wanna see her, too, ’cause I suspect she needs her tummy rubbed.

And here’s a bunch of dice. ‘Cause there’s nothing more photogenic than a stack of dice.

Flamingos from the municipal zoo in Garden City, Kansas. It’s not the fanciest zoo in the world, but it’s awfully nice, if you ever find yourself in that part of the country. And the zoo is located right next to the Largest Outdoor Municipal Concrete Swimming Pool in the whole world. Really!

We get some storms up in our neck of the woods.

From the New Mexico forests at my sister’s house. Not much of a wine drinker, but when the light hits the bottle and the glass just right, you absolutely have to take that photo.

That’s it for now, kids. Y’all have a restful weekend!

Okay, I’ve told you the blog is back, and I’ve told you what’s happened to me over the past few years. So I guess the next question is — what comes next? What does the future hold?

Well, as far as this blog goes — I’m not really sure.

I won’t be able to blog about comics as much as I used to. There are no comics shops in the town I live in now. I can pick up Archie digests at the supermarket, and the local library carries a small number of graphic novels. The closest comics shop is about an hour away — I’ve been in the store once, and it was genuinely the worst comics shop I’ve ever seen. The next closest stores are two hours away — and I deeply dislike the idea of driving for four hours there and back to pick up weekly comics.

Even if I had easy access to a comics shop, I probably wouldn’t buy many. I just don’t have the money for it nowadays. I’ll order a graphic novel occasionally, and if there are interesting comics available for free through Comixology Unlimited, I’ll read those, too.

But a few reviews of older graphic novels probably ain’t gonna cut it for gripping blog content, right?

I can do other reviews, too, of course. I already did quite a few book reviews before, so we’re all used to that. I could do movie, TV, and game reviews — but those wouldn’t happen often, ’cause I nearly never watch movies or TV or play games anymore.

I could rant about politics all the freakin’ time. But I’m not entirely sure y’all would want that, since it would mostly be me screaming about all the people I want to club with crowbars. Because I want to club so very many people with crowbars. I think about clubbing people with crowbars all the time. And while it might be fun for me, I suspect it’d get boring and creepy for the rest of y’all. I’ll try to keep the political rants to a minimum.

(At some point, I’m sure I’ll be posting about COVID-19. I got parents in the high-risk group. I’m nervous as heck.)

I can also post photos. I’ve taken a ton of pix for Instagram, and I sure don’t mind re-posting them here. Plus I could post some of my old poetry, old RPG characters, all kinds of random and quasi-cool stuff. Of course, those aren’t really typical blog fodder — and I hope to post a lot of that on my new personal website, when or if I get it up and running.

No matter what I end up writing about, however, I’ll probably be posting a lot less often than I used to. Not daily, not three times a week. I’m not even sure I want to say I’ll post every week. I have other projects I’m trying to work on these days — like I said, I want to start up a personal website, plus I’m writing a novel, and I try to post essays on other websites, too.

Above all else, I don’t want to get to the point where I absolutely despise writing for the blog, which was definitely the case by the time I quit blogging before. Hopefully, a less frequent blogging non-schedule will help stave off burnout.

So I’ve started blogging again, and I’m sure you’re wondering (yes indeed lololol) what’s been happening with me over the last four years.

It ain’t been great.

I got fired from my job soon after I quit blogging. I’m still not entirely sure why I got the axe, but they’d been working on getting rid of me for quite a while — vastly increasing my workload, trying to get me to do additional work off-the-clock, etc. I figure either my boss decided I was boring and uncool, and decided to unload me for cooler people, or the division as a whole was working to discard workers with more seniority in favor of recent graduates they thought they could underpay.

After that, I was unemployed for over three years. I was able to move in with the folks and have been more than pleased to help them out here and there. Still, I’m in a far worse place than I was before — I’m making less than half what I was making in Denton, most of my belongings are in storage, likely permanently, and the nearest decent comics and book stores are hours away.

(I’ll probably be salty for the rest of my life about having to leave Denton. I loved the holy howling heck out of Denton. A beautiful city, two excellent comics stores and more within driving distance, the best damn used bookstore in existence, and a vast variety of things I could take photos of. I’ll also be salty at myself for not appreciating where I lived and spending most of my time hiding inside the house. I should have volunteered at the music festivals. I should have tried more weird restaurants and coffee shops. I should have taken even more photos than I did.)

And the blogosphere in general ain’t doing too great either.

At some point, blogs got abandoned because we let Facebook and Twitter convince us that social media was the only thing we needed. Most of the blogs in my sidebar have been abandoned, and many others haven’t been updated in months. Some of them are even more depressing. Comics Alliance was shut down. Brian Snell, host of “Slay, Monstrobot of the Deep,” died just over a year ago. RIP, Snell, I wish we’d appreciated you more.

And even then, considering how bad things got for me, considering the dwindling of the blogosphere — it’s still better than discovering that half the country, including people we thought were our friends, think Nazis are “Very Fine People,” doesn’t it?

So yeah, the country is falling to pieces, fascist governments are on the rise worldwide, a global coalition of Russians, Nazis, dumbfucks, and trolls got together and worked very hard to kill off video games, comics, and the Hugo Awards — all to win the favor of a Nazi-loving has-been comics artist and a creeptastic anime voice actor, and a worryingly large percentage of our national population is champing at the bit to start going door-to-door machine-gunning their neighbors.

Nihilism is wrecking the country, the environment, democracy, and the economy — ’cause if you can’t own everything, why not just let the world burn to punish everyone else? — but we’re told that the problem is we’re not being civil and polite enough to the maniacs running our lives.

I don’t know how to fix any of this, but I can tell you I have strong desires to trim down the planet’s supply of sociopaths. It might not work, but I could at least have some fun with my duffel bag full of crowbars, right?

So, in summary, the last four years have sucked. Any way to fix it all? Hell if I know. May as well write some blog posts, right?

It’s been over four years since I shut the blog down, and I regret to inform you that I’m back.

Why? I certainly wasn’t enjoying writing this when I quit, and I’m not under many illusions that I’ll enjoy it more if I start back up again. Blogging is hard work, and it’s incredibly ephemeral, and it’s a distraction from the stuff of real life.

But the world changed all around me and around you and around all of us over the last four years. And I think it’s time to start again.

So again — why do this again? I think it boils down to the simple fact that we all got persuaded that we should give up on blogs and personal websites so we could focus our online lives into social media. And the past few years have certainly shown us that social media suuuuuucks.

Facebook? Zuckerberg and his goons are sociopaths willing to burn the world down for a few extra bucks and a few giggles. Twitter? @Jack is a Nazi, and the only good Nazi is a dead Nazi. Instagram? Listen, I absolutely love Instagram — but it’s owned by Facebook now, and eventually, it’ll turn on us, too.

And the worst thing about ’em? They really are a great way to keep up with your friends. That’s a hard thing to give up, and while I understand people who’ve given up social media so they don’t contribute to the sad state of the world, I know I’m probably not going to be able to quit Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram until it’s way, way too late.

Nevertheless, blogs were — and are — good. And personal websites were — and are — good. They do things that social media can’t do at all, and we never should’ve given up on them.

So I’m starting the blog back up again. Not because I think I can lead other people to start blogging again, but because I want to do it. I hope it’ll be fun. I hope it’ll be a way to improve my writing and my communication skills. And I hope you enjoy what I do.

Friends, I’ve decided to shut the blog down.

As I’ve said more than once in the past, I don’t have a lot of love for this blog. Most days, I really kinda hate it. It doesn’t have a lot of readers, which isn’t that surprising, because almost all I write about is comics reviews, and no one really enjoys comics reviews. The only reason I do them so much is because they’re easy, and it’s much faster to knock out a couple reviews every other day than to do something more complicated.

And even saying reviews can be done quickly, they can’t really be done quickly enough. Working on the blog generally takes a few hours of work, and those hours could’ve been used more productively. Every day that finishing a blog takes ’til bedtime, I have to consider all the projects I could’ve been doing in that time — writing on more fun or substantial projects, reading books, even working on household chores. Those all fall by the wayside because I spend too much time blogging.

It doesn’t mean that I’m not feeling some regret and trepidation about quitting it. I’ve been working on this thing since June 2007, and that seems like a pretty long time to keep a blog active. I’ve written a few things I’m quite proud of, and I’ve always liked the idea of having a platform online where I could break out a good rant if I felt the need. But I also feel that the downsides of working on the blog now outweigh the positives, and it’s time to bite the bullet and shut it down.

I don’t plan on completely shutting it down, honestly — I’ll stop writing on it, but I’ll maintain it. Keeping the domain name ain’t very expensive, and I’d like to keep the site around, partly so the few cool things I wrote will still be around, and partly because I may someday feel like ranting about something. It’s always possible I may want to start blogging again someday, although right now, that seems awfully unlikely.

It’s been interesting to look back and think how much the comics industry — or at least my reaction to the comics industry — has changed over the past eight-plus years. When I started out, I was a complete DC fanboy and read very few books by Marvel. Nowadays, I read relatively few DC books — I’ve still never gotten over the New 52 reboot, and I don’t think the quality of the comics has leveled up to what it used to be. And I read a lot more Marvel books now, because they’re doing a better job of creating the diverse storytelling background that all publishers are going to need going forward.

And it has been really great to see the comics industry catching on — with the occasional neanderthal backslide — that they need to have better female characters to appeal to women readers. It’s also been great to see male readers reading comics with those female characters — great comics are always worth reading, no matter who the stars are. Now hopefully, the industry will step up their game even more on the diversity front. There have been improvements everywhere, but we can’t afford to forget that comics readers come in all ethnicities, all sexual orientations, all gender types. There are ways that the comics industry is pulling the rest of the entertainment world along into the future — I hope they can maintain that march forward.

I will miss getting to read along with y’all as we watch the ongoing robo-tragedy in “The Vision.” I’ll miss reading with you as we follow the fun in “Unbeatable Squirrel Girl,” “Howard the Duck,” “Lumberjanes,” “Spidey,” and “Ms. Marvel.” I’ll miss getting to enjoy the creepy horrors with you in “Harrow County,” “Revival,” and “Alabaster.” I’ll miss discovering new wonders with you in the pages of “Silver Surfer,” “Astro City,” and “Atomic Robo.” I’ll miss following along with you as we learn what finally happens at the end of “Bitch Planet,” “Rat Queens,” and “The Wicked + the Divine.” I’ll miss discovering new and wonderful comics together with you, and watching where the comics industry may finally end up. But I reckon y’all are going to do fine without me reading reviews at you week after week.

So y’all keep spreading the good word about good comics. Read the new stuff, read the old stuff, read superhero comics, read all-ages comics and horror comics and fantasy comics, read literary comics and silly comics. Read comics you love, and evangelize about how great a good comic book is. You’ll be amazed who you can sometimes convert into a dedicated comics fan with the right bit of comics evangelization. But whatever you do, keep reading the good stuff, and don’t be afraid to have fun with your comics.

I’ll see y’all when I see y’all.

Y’all, I’m feelin’ low, and I ain’t got no desire to review comics.

I mean, I can give you mighty quick reviews of the pitifully few comics I picked up last week. The Sandman: Overture #6 is well-written and pretty, but complicated, and if you haven’t been following it, you won’t understand anything. Wait for the trade. Revival #33 is, like the rest of the series, really good, and you can only repeat that so many times before it starts getting dull. American Vampire: Second Cycle #10 is, frankly, something I hope gets wrapped up soon. This was a lot better when it was more personal horror, not focused on vast global conspiracies.

There, that’s done.

I got a trick digestion that only acts up on the weekends. I was already losing money hand over fist — and that was before I just got my house payment jacked up an extra hundred bucks a month. (My folks are already offering to give me money, and I’m already telling them no, because by this point in my life, I should be able to handle my own bills.) My job is very bad and shows no prospects of improving. Yes, all told, those are minor worries, compared to the hardships millions face worldwide.

I really shouldn’t be bothering with this blog. It gets very, very few readers, and I could be spending my time doing more significant and more enjoyable writing. On the other hand, I don’t really want to give up the blog — it’s nice to have a platform I can rant from, even if no one ever reads it.

Plus sometimes it’s fun to write about fun comics. But today is not that day. Today is a day for worrying about jobs and money and ulcers and how slow my Great American Novel is coming along…

I ain’t written anything for the blog in days. Just haven’t had a lot of energy for it. Sorry ’bout that.

I didn’t get many comics last week — just the three that I reviewed on Friday. I didn’t have any other comics or graphic novels sitting around that I felt like reviewing either. There’s plenty of stuff irritating me about comics lately, but they’re not irritating me to the level where I feel like I want to spend an evening writing anything coherent about them.

I’ve had trouble feeling really motivated to work on this blog lately. Reviews, reviews, reviews — what’s there to get interested in, right? And my insights into the comics world are probably not very worthwhile either. And working on the blog three times a week just takes away an evening when I could be working on my Great American Novels.

So why keep writing at all? Well, it’s sometimes a lot of fun to write about comics — even when you’re reviewing bad or mediocre books. And I really like the idea of having an online space where, if I really need to, I can rant about anything I feel I need to.

Plus I’ve actually heard from people who said they liked reading the blog. Most of the time, I feel like it’d be so easy to quit — but when you’ve got a couple of fans, it makes you feel like you’d be depriving them of your glory.

I suppose I shall just have to soldier on — but not today. Probably a bit later this week…