Dear Sister Person Book Club: The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

Dear Sister Person,

You are welcome. Very, very welcome. I figured that I could only add to the torture for so long before we abandoned our venture to read books together, and Gini Koch nearly made me want to kill you, to be honest. (No matter what you say, the Glorious Darcy books were in no way in the same awfulness caliber that Touched by an Alien was.) So reading Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane was definitely a welcome reprieve for me, as well.

The Pull List for November 26, 2014

Again, for this week (and for the rest of this year, probably), I'll continue to produce my pull list like this here. I'll be changing up formats at the first of the year, though, and by then, I'll have my digital comics pull list set up and I'll have found a comic shop where I can get physical copies. Anyway, cool story, bro, here's what's up for this week.

The Pull List: Spider-Woman #1 Review

I'm going to go ahead and reveal to you that this post right here? It is going to be a fucking rant, filled with as many expletives as I can muster, as much fury as I can call down from the heavens. It may not even be coherent, and I could not care a single bit less.

Because really.

WHAT. THE. FUCK. IS. THIS. SHIT.

Spider-Woman #1 Regular Cover
Via Marvel Comics

Also, yes, there are going to be spoilers.

The Pull List: Wonder Woman #36 Review

Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh.

I didn't have high hopes for this one, guys. I saw the cheesecake cover in Previews and discovered that the writer, Meredith Finch, has only written for Zenoscope Entertainment. You know, the publisher of the masterpieces that are the various GFT (Grimm's Fairy Tales) series.

(Oh, and there are no spoilers here, since I didn't get pissed off enough to include any. So feel free to read away!)

Happy Birthday, Sister Person!!

Today is my lovely sister's 28th birthday!

Happy birthday, Stefers! Go on over to her blog and show her some birthday love!

The Pull List for November 19, 2014

So, as you may know, the next few weeks are going to be absolutely ape-shit crazy, so I'm not going to be able to put as much effort into The Pull List as I'd like. I have so much packing and tossing and selling and donating to do that I might just cry, so I'm going to revert to my old way of doing this for the next little bit: blurb for a few and then list the rest. Hopefully, once we get moved, everything will settle down? Please?

The Pull List: Drifter #1 Review

I don't know if it's this way in every comic book shop around the U.S., but in the last few I've frequented - including the current one at which I work - whenever a new Image comic comes out, people take notice. I guess with the success of The Walking Dead and Saga, both of which have issues that are worth well into the multiple hundreds of dollars, customers just want to be ahead of the game, especially if they are big time collectors. We even have one customer who wants every single Image first issue of anything, even if he never picks up the rest of the series. For me, however, I have the privilege of testing the waters prior to purchase, so I don't always have to worry that all of the issues will be gone by the time I am able to make it to the store. When I picked up the first issue of Drifter, though, I had the feeling that I was reading the beginning of something that was going to be very successful.

I Have the Worst Luck with Cars, Part XVIII: The Fourth Is Rubber

This weekend brought with it the celebration of the fourth year of my marriage to Three, a wonderful human being that I am privileged to know and love. And, of course, since it's us, our anniversary also involves a car's minor destruction.

I suppose this requires a bit of back story. Without delving too deeply into specifics, Three has been looking for another job for a few months now ... well, when he can, which is pretty much never, since he was given no vacation or sick time when he took this new job back in April, but it wasn't until a few weeks ago that anything came up. Then, an old friend gave texted him, letting him know about a job opportunity in South Carolina. Three, desperate to change his situation, sent his resume over and nailed an interview on November 15. Coincidentally, that date is also our anniversary, so we decided to make a trip of it. After all, the company interviewing him was paying us for our gas and for our hotel room.

So, there we were. His interview had gone well*, we'd just eaten some exceptionally good Indian food, and were headed back to the hotel to watch some sort of movie when BAM. Out of nowhere, a big curb jutted out into what appeared to be a driving lane. The car was knocked around, and when I pulled to a stop - because of COURSE I was driving - Three jumped out to examine the damage.

The Pull List for November 12, 2014

Well, if I thought last week was bad, this week isn't looking too much better, at least in terms of volume. Now, like I said in yesterday's review of The Humans #1, things were a tad bit disappointing in terms of quality, and I'm hopeful that this week will return to the usual greatness.

The Pull List: The Humans #1

It is not very often that I don't at least finish a comic. As a matter of fact, I don't think that there has been a single time - that I can recall, which is, of course, a huge "if" statement - where I have read up to a certain point and thought, "You know what? My life would be better if I just stopped reading this." And then I picked up The Humans.

Pastime Paradise

Siiiiiiiiiigh, I wish I could be at the concert tomorrow. This will have to do. 

Harley is DONE.

Can I say how happy I am with how this turned out? Onto Poison Ivy as Demeter!

Superwoman (Where Were You When I Needed You)

Well, we were supposed to leave today. I actually just stuck out my lower lip and sniffled a bit.

Signed, Sealed, Delivered

Summer Soft

I don't know why, but it seems fitting that my 300th post would be as Non-Thing-ish as just posting a single Youtube video. 

The Pull List for November 5, 2014

I am so intimidated by this week's pull list. I ... I just may cry. But it all looks so good! I'm going to try and keep summaries and reactions a little bit shorter than usual, but I make no promises on some of the ones that I'm really looking forward to reading.

Boogie On, Reggae Woman

Sir Duke

I Have the Worst Luck with Cars, Part XVII: Siiiiiighhhhh.

Via Monumental Network

So this weekend, I was going to go to Washington, DC, to see none other than Stevie Motherfucking Wonder (that's his real middle name, by the way), and I cannot express to you how excited I was about it. Number one, I'm a huge fan of the man, and I'm pretty sure that I've listened to Songs in the Key of Life about a million times ("Sir Duke" is my favorite song off the album, although "Summer Soft" is a close second), so attending a concert that is all about it? Hell, and may I say, yes. Number two, it has been over two years since Three and I have gone on any kind of vacation, and based on the last year - God, this past year has been awful - we deserve some R&R. It wasn't even going to be extravagant: we were going to be staying in a house (for free) that is owned by a friend's family, and we were splitting the total cost with another couple. The most expensive part of the trip, of course, was the ticket price, but hey, we expected that. It's Stevie Motherfucking Wonder, in case you forgot.

And then, because how else would this end, two of our tires decided that they no longer wanted to be a part of this world. The front left tire went flat, and Three used our spare until that went flat due to an unintended detour into a construction site. After he bought an air compressor and used it to fill the flat tire (that spare was of no use now), he put that back on, but the other tire somehow developed what I kept calling a rubber hemorrhoid (I have no idea what the actual term is). Three said that it was pretty much a sign that the tire could burst at any moment, so yay.

For two weeks, we tried to get replacement tires but every place that Three called didn't have our tire size or they were just ludicrously priced. Things just got down to the wire and we simply had to buy new tires, which ended with us spending nearly $300. On the plus side, our tires are really nice - and green! - but they were the only ones the tire place had in stock, since they'd just that day had a huge sale on all of their stock, leaving only the most expensive tires for us.

Long story short, we no longer have the money to go see Stevie Wonder, so in effort to keep my spirits high, in addition to daily Mass Effect* challenge entries, I'll be posting videos of Stevie Wonder's songs through the end of this week. My friends are still able to go, so we'll be there in spirit, but ... suuuuuuuuuccckkkk.

* If I'm late on these, I'll just do a double or triple post, I think, but I'll try to keep on track. I don't want to have another Buffy issue where it takes me almost two months to do a 30-day challenge. That was ... embarrassing.