Free Comic Book Day 2010

One day per year, my friends.

One day when the veil between the normal and the geek grows thin, when traffic between these realms is made possible and entities from either side pass over and frolic among the unlike.

One day for the feeble breath of a dying paper-based industry to cry out in despair and harsh judgement of a generation which has moved on to electronic media.

One day for parents who have long abandoned the daily trials of dragging superhero plot lines and futile quests for holographic, short-packed collector's edition cover art to share these joys and burdons with their young.

Free Comic Book Day is tomorrow, my friends.

Find a store, grab some printed material and promotional awesomeness and share the bliss with your children or, if you lack your own, with the children of some parents who won't likely press charges.

There will be kid-friendly stuff in addition to the awesome stuff.

I'd expect some Iron Man stuff from Marvel and some Batman stuff from DC, but smaller publishers use this day as an annual showcase for their work.

Traditionally, I also buy a couple of comics to support the store hosting the event. I look for comics which will never be made into movies and will never have associated toy lines clogging the aisles at Target.

A comic book store on a Saturday is a magical place. Step carefully, respectfully into the domain of the geeks. It will not disappoint.

Oh, and seriously . . . Don't wear a black t-shirt to a comic book store unless you've earned it.

They can spot a poser like a continuity error.

Prime Candidate

When I first heard about Amazon Prime, I'll admit I didn't see the appeal.
Amazon has always shipped for free, in my mind anyway. For well over a decade they've delivered just about everything to me for free as long as my order was over $25, so I delayed ordering until my shopping cart was over $25 and then waited a few days for my stuff to magically appear.
I imagine it was much like the magic of fire brought to primitive people, or magical boxes which could capture an image and the associated soul. Over time, my internet-hardened standards became more jaded. My very connection speed improved past a frenzied 56k speed-boosted dial-up into an always-available multiple MB connection and the change removed what remained of my patience. My sense of wonder failed as well. The magic of the whole purchase, wait, acquire process was revealed as a cheap parlor trick, loud noises and flashing lights meant to frighten with no real guidance from the ancestor spirits.
I no longer remember the contents of my early orders from Amazon.com, only that the boxes were delivered amid the loud popping noises of the Earth's crust hardening, cooling like a car engine resting at last in a crowded mall parking lot. And avoiding mall parking lots was definitely one of the major benefits of using the internet for purchases.
Long ago I became used to going online for book purchases and electronics and clothing and, in some cases, food. I also became accustomed to spending $25 or more in order to get stuff shipped for free.
Amazon Prime has changed me.
I can't walk into a brick and mortar store anymore without checking for competing prices online and wondering if I can wait for shipping. And Amazon Prime has removed the $25 minimum and replaced it with free two-day shipping. It actually removed a restriction and added a benefit.
I have to tell you, internet: One time, I ordered a book from Amazon from inside a Barnes and Noble because I didn't want to carry a newly purchased book to the car.
For four dollars I can upgrade the two-day shipping to overnight. This is as close as a human can get to having internet superpowers.
With great power comes great responsibility, though. One time I accidentally ordered a paperback through the one-click purchase feature on my Amazon iPhone app. It isn't that I didn't want to read it. I'm sure I will. I just didn't need it in two days and felt pretty bad about having Joel (our UPS guy) drive down our street to deliver a single paperback. Oh, also I've learned the UPS guy's name. Because I see him a few times a week now. He's kind of like my sidekick in my battle against the forces of not having anything to read. He acts unenthusiastic about it, but I can tell he appreciates it.
My ability to read people is apparently undiminished by my never leaving the house.

I Don't Tell You How To Do Your Job . . . .

. . . Okay, maybe I do, but this isn't about that. It's about a work-related conversation:

Me: Where do you keep that policy template I sent you?

Someone completely unimportant: Oh! I hid it! Click on this icon in the taskbar, and then you should see it.

Holy crap! You have like a billion things crammed in here!

Well, yeah. I like my desktop clean.

But it makes working impossible.

Just a little . . . harder . . . I guess. I just hate a cluttered desktop.

How is anyone supposed to find anything?

Look at your desktop! It's a wreck!

My icons are sorted by date, file type and project.

But you can't see the background picture!

Cramming everything into this little double arrow icon isn't cleaning. When you tell your child to clean their room and they just push everything into the closet and wedge the door closed, do you call the room clean? Is that how you parent?

I'm having the network team kill your internet radio.

Family Time

NetFlix was hooking us up very well, actually, until season five.
Most afternoons we'd gather around the television in the living room under a too dense mat of cats and watch, together, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
I had watched the entire series on my own while I waited on Shana and Gwynyth to finalize our move and rescue me from the horrible hotel I was living in.
But this was different. This viewing prompted discussion not only on the proper method for dispatching a vampire but on human relations and the role of women in society and the correct verbing of nouns. That is what most Joss Whedon works are about, after all.
And then, after we'd slogged through the first couple of seasons with their hyena people and preying mantis monsters, NetFlix failed.
Season 5, disk two, LONG WAIT.
But we couldn't skip it, right? I mean, I know everyone was in a hurry to get to the musical episode and everything but even the preying mantis episode gets mentioned again. Watching episodes out of order is just bad form.
So, after gazing at our suddenly unsatisfying DVD collection and dreading even a brief break in what had become a family ritual over the course of about a month, I did the reasonable thing.
Amazon.com delivered the Complete Chosen Collection of seasons 1-7 the following day, and balance was restored.
We have since started watching Angel, the Buffy spin-off, since none of us had seen it and Firefly was disturbing and complicated and difficult to explain, not to mention really, really dark at points.
But Angel is only five seasons, and on the other side of that is a glaring abyss of non-Whedon. Bad TV is way worse than no TV.
We aren't the type of family that sits around and puts together quilts, really, but sharing an experience, especially with discussion, has become a needed part of our evening.
I'm not hooking cable back up, though.
There is entirely too much crap television.
Maybe I should pick up some fabric squares and thread, just in case.

Fun With Statistics

And when I say "fun", I kind of mean "mind-numbing horror".
While the numbers aren't well-published, over 100,000 people go missing annually in the US. This number does not reflect abductions by family members, victims of natural disasters, or any case where people have a pretty good idea where the missing person might have gone. This number is people who just vanish.
Further, it does not include people who, for whatever reason, aren't on "the grid". Homeless people and illegal immigrants are rarely reported missing, though empirical evidence would suggest a higher likelihood of just such a disappearance among these populations.
It is possible that some of these missing people just made a break for it, started over, severed ties, but there is no way anywhere near 100,000 could make that happen.
Please feel free to check these numbers on the FBI website. I'm not posting a link to a government website. That gets a person on a special list, probably.
Anyway, we can extrapolate from the over 100,000 "just missing" cases annually that an additional 50% go unreported from communities which historically don't report these things. Wait. That's too high. Let's go with 20%. I personally think it could equal the number of reported cases, but lacking evidence we will use a safe and reasonable number.
If we agree that 120,000 people can just freaking vanish in 2009 in one of the wealthiest nations on the planet, I think it is frightening enough.
This breaks down to .04% of the total US population, just gone, every year.
Statistically, 32 people from my graduating class in high school have just disappeared.
Most of these cases get little publicity for a couple of reasons. The first is that it is common enough to not really be news-worthy. The second is that as the majority of these people are never found it makes us feel less safe, unsettled.
In more remote areas, the number of people who vanish is even more terrifying. Millions of people vanish in Africa annually. Some are the victims of war. Some will turn up again years later in refugee camps. But there are a lot of people vanishing in more peaceful areas of the continent as well.
While the numbers are harder to dig up, and even harder to verify, there are a lot of people doing population studies in Africa right now. How sustainable are the resources available for the surviving population? How much sprawling wilderness should be converted to farmland?
And these studies aren't limited to the human population, either.
In the Serengeti National Park, poaching is still an issue impacting animal survival, as is the availability of drinkable water and foraging area.
Unchanged, as near as we can tell, for millions of years is the rate of loss to large predators. Annually, and concentrating on adult herd animals, .05% of the population is lost to predation.
The rate is close enough to our own .04% loss to beg the question, could something unknown be culling the human herd?
Is it possible human predators are making this large an impact on our own population and leaving no forensic evidence of violence?
I don't personally believe people are smart enough as predators to pull off that particular trick.
All this is just numbers and extrapolation and fantasy, sure. But reality meets a dark place among these statistics.
I think I'm calling off my research project now.

Unnatural

I've been fairly regularly freaking out lately.
Since moving to South Carolina, I've been doing my best to come to terms with the differences between Columbia and Houston.
At the moment, the most noticeable thing is that it is freezing. Wait.
Literally freezing. Outside. Sometimes during the day.
Our driveway ices over. With ice.
Trees change colors seasonally. I'm so used to pines and live oaks whenever I pass a section of forest with great sweeping swaths of crimson and gold leaves, my first thought is that there is some disease -- Tree Blight, perhaps -- eating the forest.
And what's weirdest is that I pass sections of forest all the time.
There is a state park a couple of miles down the road.
Since moving here, without even entering the woods themselves, I've seen foxes, otters and (believe it or not) beavers, just running around outside like they own the place.
These creatures are endemic to zoos.
Everything I know about the natural world clearly puts these creatures in the "zoo and plastic toy" category along with lions and unicorns. But they run wild here. And sometimes down the middle of the four-lane road closest to our house.
Thankfully, the humans who live here generally drive more slowly than an otter runs.
The point is, if I wanted to watch Animal Planet I wouldn't have canceled cable TV.
When I was growing up in West Texas, wildlife had the decency to stay outside of town.
Of course, the desert creatures that live in West Texas wouldn't, as a rule, want anything in town. You couldn't buy liquor there unless you drove to the end of town east of the train tracks. I'm not sure animals are big drinkers, anyway. I actually don't know much about what animals want, I guess.
The safe thing to do, given my lack of knowledge about their motivations, is to assume they are hostile. That's not just safe, really. It's the American thing to do.
I've been researching the latest in snare technology. Oddly, aside from the substitution of polyester cord, there has been startlingly little advancement in snaring in the past eleven thousand years or so.
Don't we have some kind of task force looking at this issue? Where the hell are my tax dollars going?
It is a sad, sad day when I have to pepper my yard with snares designed in 500BCE by Proto-Europeans.
Why don't we have inflatable snares? Disposable ones? USB-powered snares, maybe?
Sometimes I think it is no wonder we are losing the war on nature.