You take your wins when you can

[melannen]

I have put a lot of time into this project lately and I am very proud of it:


(Yes, that is all my currently-in-progress podcasts in a neat sequence of 1-15 episodes left.)

(The next few dozen are a bit messier. And then there's the ones I completely gave up on keeping up with but still haven't unsubscribed to that linger at the end.) (The list of ones ones I am caught up with is mostly just embarrassingly short in comparison...)

Anyway if you are interested in My Thoughts on any of those podcasts, just ask! Maybe someday I will rate & review like they keep telling me to.

***

Also I cleaned out my handbag today. Usually it doesn't get too bad because I always clean it out before travelling, but, uh, I guess it's been awhile since I travelled, huh. Here is what was in it:


*Surprise very old, very pulverized eggshell in the outer pocket
*a small notebook, mostly full of small notes
*5 pencils
*5 markers
*14 pens
*a handkerchief
*a pair of fingerless gloves/wristwarmers
*a scarf
*a phone charger & cord
*another bag
*some post-it flags
*a tube of lotion
*my wallet (yay)
*a broken necklace shaped like an owl
*2 small pocketknives and a mini leatherman
*set of nail clippers
*tape measure
*2 2021 pocket calendar/dayplanners (blank)
*out-0f-date closing checklist for work
*scrap of paper with notes on house floorplan
*6 hair elastics
*3 forks
*a rubber stamp of a smiley face
*a keychain ring
*28 cents
*a spout off a tupperware jug
*4 receipts
*1 origami crane
*the instruction booklet for a car-to-usb charger
*a cloth facemask
*24 bize-sized chocolates
*4 gobstoppers
*a comb
*a pair of earbuds

Comments

[grammarwoman]

Starting late 70s to early 90s there's about 15 years of superhero comics I just can't handle the art.

Weirdly enough, that's the era that was my main focus! But UGH, Liefeld and company - do you even know what a human looks like?

[melannen]

I'm not surprised! That's when a lot of people in our generation got into it, especially for the X-Men in particular, and so many of the classic stories and characters and artists are from then.

But it's not even just the Liefeld badness (And the Miller/Lee-esqe stylization that Liefeld was the worst expy of, that became a huge trend starting in the late 80s) it's just something about how pages were put together? I actually first noticed it was something beyond that when a friend loaned me a bunch of the classic Wolfman & Perez New Teen Titans; I don't think anyone uses that as an example of bad art, but my brain just couldn't parse it at all.

I think it's partly that I need pages, idk, to have a sort of solid sense of form and line and negative/positive space? And that period was when things were shifting from the all-manual four-color printing to more modern technologies and methods, which offered a whole much of new possibilities, but a lot of the possibilities they tried first involved going for color! and dynamism! instead of shape and line and depth, and it makes my eyes just sort of skitter everywhere.

I was the right age at that period, and I wanted to be a comics fan, but I was reading Elfquest and shonen and newspaper comic compilations and Archies and wormeaten silver age stuff from my grandparents' basement because the mainline superheroes of the time made my brain hurt.

(I have a related problem, I think, with original-sailor-moon era classic shoujo manga. It's all froth and gradients and my eyes can't figure out what to look at.)