Clattertron

[dc]I[/dc]t’s back, baby. I know I haven’t had a Friday Six in a spell, so here’s a new one, just because I love you, and because my medication kicked in. Sure.

[ ] Stan Sakai Coming to MSU Comics Forum: As I mentioned in the notes for Monday’s comic (Culture Fit, Part 2), Stan Sakai is the keynote speaker at the 2014 Michigan State University Comics Forum (Feb. 21st, 2014). This is a free event! So come on by. Sakai is known for his great comic series, Usagi Yojimbo.

I’m a fan of the series, so take my advice and give Usagi Yojimbo a read.

[ ] Time to go bye-bye, or boom-boom: Also on the comics front, I started reading the original G.I. Joe comics from the 1980s.

The comics differ from the cartoon show I grew up watching, in that they are slightly more serious and violent (folks actually GET SHOT and hurt). Worth a read, as there is A LOT more Cold War era stuff in the comics than the cartoons.

[ ] Geek Thing of The Week: This Doctor Who Talking Dalek Plush.

Need a pal to watch Doctor Who this Saturday? How about a talking Dalek? It can help you EXTERMINATE loneliness. Speaking of Doctor Who, ThinkGeek has a 12 Days Of Doctor Who Event going on until Nov. 24th (sales, new items).

[ ] Shutterbuggin’: I’m considering building a new website for my hundreds of photos. I would use Comic Easel, making the site function the same way as the Clattertron comics, but with photographs instead. The upside is, I have hundreds of photos ready to go, so the content side is set–giving me plenty of a buffer to shoot/edit new stuff when/wherever.

I used to photoblog regularly on danieljhogan.com, and I’ll confess I do miss it at times. I use some of my photos here, but the max width I can have for a photo in a blog post is 500px. If I used Comic Easel, I could get up to 800px wide or more.

We’ll see. This isn’t a must-do-right-now priority at the moment, but I would rather put my photos on my site than say, Flickr, Facebook, or Tumblr. The first hurdle: coming up with a fun domain name.

[ ] Frodo an’ the Gang: I finished re-reading Fellowship of the Ring this week—my first time doing so since the film came out in 2001.

I enjoyed the book even more this time around, probably because I’ve watched the films several times and have a better grasp of the plot and characters. I watched Fellowship of the Ring right after finishing the book, and the changes were much more clear to me this time around.

I’m reading The Two Towers now, and I’m glad I bought separate paperbacks for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I don’t miss lugging around the phone book-sized omnibus edition.

[ ] You say goblin, I say orc: Speaking of all things Tolkien, while re-reading Fellowship of the Ring I thought I noticed Tolkien used the term goblin and orc interchangeably. I did a bit of research, and found out that yes, he did. Essentially, Tolkien said goblin was the English translation of orc.

Growing up with fantasy inspired by Tolkien, goblins and orcs have always been different races to me–the big difference, goblins are small and orcs are larger (See: HeroQuest). I look at it like this: beagles and pit bulls are different, but they are still called dogs. So, I dunno. It is obvious there are different breeds of orcs in the books, especially the Uruk-hai.

ANYWAY, fantasy. As someone who wrote a fantasy novel featuring swan-men shock troops, I can relate.

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