I have a couple of posts coming up that will relate events from the past month, and I think it’s time for a few more web comic reviews soon.  I also am planning on updating the non-blog parts of this site, possibly incorporating a lot of that content into the blog’s layout theme.  And then I should probably revive the Sadlibs site.

As always, people can comment here on what they think of the blog, the rest of the site, etc.  I’d appreciate any feedback.

If you can see a picture below, then I’ll be able to include those during the ride.

First up, I’ve had Shaenon Garrity’s comic Narbonic listed on my comics recommendation page for quite a while, but haven’t had her in the sidebar.  She has several strips that she’s done online, som in collaboration with others.  This seems like a good time to list her, as she has a new strip that started 2 weeks ago, called Skin Horse.  I’d give a description of the strip here, but it’s a bit hard to categorize as yet.  There’s certainly a sci-fi element, and it’s humorous like all her work, and this one is rather surreal so far as well.

Next, I had heard about Questionable Content for a while, but just started reading it about 4 months ago.  It took about a month to get through the 1000 strips.  Jeph Jacques (pronounced ‘jacks’) is the writer/artist, and he lives in Easthampton, an adjacent town to me.  The strip is sort of romantic-comedy-slice-of-life-indie-music-fan type stuff, if that makes any sense.   It also seems to take place in a world just a little different from our own, as there exist little sentient robots known as AnthroPCs.  The strip has well-written characters and is often really funny.  The strip also spawns various T-shirt designs, which Jeph sells on the site.

Last, but not least, is Templar, Arizona.   Spike is the name of the artist, and she is wildly hilarious.  This strips cracks me up to no end much of the time.  The setting of the strip is a fictional city in a sort of alternate history Arizona.  The rest of that world might resemble ours, but not so much Templar.  This is another comic with excellent characters, whose personalities contrast with  each other greatly, but where details of the city and backgrounds are very important as well (so don’t just pay attention to the people).  I actually discovered Spike a few years ago when she had a different strip running on Girlamatic, and have been following Templar almost since it began.  Besides her wonderful writing, I love her art style – lots of heavy lines and subtle sepia tones over grayscale.

No, you aren’t crazy.

In any case, it seems to be all done now.  Welcome to my new old site.  

First, one of the referring sites to my site was the blog of a somewhat famous person.

It turned out that, in comments about Mooney going to the midwest to speak, someone remarking on Michigan made a reference to using one’s hand as a map, and linked to this image, which I created a few years ago.

Second, I noticed that, among the top web searches that lead to hits on my site, some of the search phrases for a few months running were variations on “Michigan hand map.”

Third, though this might not be related to that image, for multiple months other referring sites were image searches.

I tried entering “Michigan hand map” on google image search, and I was hit #16. Strangely, if you do just “Michigan hand,” there seem to be more actual hands, but mine isn’t in there. At least, it isn’t in the first 200 hits.

As for the blog feed, I’ve added an RSS 2.0 version for those who can’t read Atom (they’re both linked in the sidebar), and I’ve started publishing the full content of the posts in the feed, rather than the first paragraph or so, because links didn’t seem to be coming through. Hopefully they will from now on.

If anyone desires, say, an RSS 1.0 feed, let me know.

Welcome to my weblog. I decided to do this because I thought it would be fun, for one, and might be a good way to provide news about me and interesting links, etc. without having to send lots of e-mails to lots of friends and family members.

That said, I don’t know how often I’ll post here. It probably won’t be every day, but we shall see…