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By now, you should already know that the second issue of Cheshire Crossing is out. If you did not know this, you are probably not signed up for the e-mail alerts, something you should rectify at once.

Now about the new issue, let me just say: wow. I thought the first issue was good, but this just blows me out of the water. There is more action, more drama, and lots and lots of fantastic dialogue. Weir has really stepped up his game here, and it’s very hard to feel sad that Casey and Andy is on hiatus when it results in this.

Go read it. Then read it again. Then read issue one, before you read issue two again. If you feel up for it afterwards, I’m commenting with spoilers behind the cut.

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I realize that this is no longer topical, and that I should have written this back in September when I first thought about it, but I’m still going to write a short review of The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck Companion.

The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck Companion is, obviously, the companion piece to The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck. The Companion collects all the B- and C-chapters that Don Rosa has written since finishing The Life and Times, and also includes a couple of other stories which contain glimpses of Scrooge’s life before Duckburg.

The stories themselves are by and large as good as I remember them. The Cowboy Captain of the Cutty Sark and The Dream of a Lifetime are high points in humor, The Vigilante of Pizen Bluff brings the action, and The Prisoner of White Agony Creek and Hearts of the Yukon the drama. I am especially pleased to finally have my hands on Hearts of the Yukon, it has been missing from my collection for far too long. The Sharpie of the Culebra Cut and Of Ducks, Dimes and Destinies are amusing reads there and then, but otherwise unremarkable. I was a bit miffed to find that Last Sled to Dawson was not included in its entirety, only the flashback to Scrooge’s youth was printed. While I understand this decision, as the bulk of that story has nothing at all to do with Scrooge’s youthful adventures but deal with the consequences of them instead, it was still a bit disappointing to suddenly have the middle of the story thrust upon my on the new page, without any form of introduction. I thought it might be an error at first, but further examination of the index page revealed that it was only intended to be an excerpt.

As with the collection of the original twelve chapters, each story is accompanied by commentaries by Don Rosa, where he explains some of the background for the story, what inspired them, and what sort of research he did while working on them. They also include guides to find the hidden D.U.C.K-dedications. These pages are as interesting a read as they were in the original, and frequently add to the appreciation of the story, retroactively like.

The design of the book is obviously made to fit in with the original collection. It uses the same colors, the same fonts, and the same layout, and to my untrained eye it seems to use the same kind of paper. I appreciate consistency, so I mark that as a plus. I very much like the front cover, even if it is an amalgam of two previously made posters. Scrooge in front of the falling coins bearing his likeness from various stages of his life is a nice parallel to the cover of the original collection, with Scrooge in front of pictures in a photo album.

All in all, this book is well worth a read, and a definite must for anybody who owns the original collection.

As I have mentioned before, the comic Count Your Sheep is cute, funny and sad. Extremely cute, very funny and sad to the point of heart-break.

Adrian Ramos somehow manages to juggle these, so that even when it’s nauseatingly sweet, there’s something to laugh at, and when it’s gut-wrenchingly funny, there’s still a melancholy and sad feel to it. All these things in the same comic, which is actually pretty rare in my list, where strips are often one, sometimes two, but very rarely all three.

In a way, I feel that today’s strip really embodies the whole series. To have constantly present undertones of sad and cute in funny is one thing, but today’s strip doesn’t need undertones. It is funny. I laugh at the punch line. It is cute. I find naive little Katie adorable. It is sad. As I laugh and adore, it hits me that they’re a poor family living in a leaky, old house, and I cry inside.

I have neither biscuits nor beer, but in my book, Ramos deserves both.

This is why Count Your Sheep is Highly Recommended.

You know, for a city famous for its rain, and pretty much naught else, Bergen has surprisingly few safeguards in place too keep the sidewalks from becoming rivers. My soaked socks are prepared to testify to this.

I have lost weight. I know this, because my belt no longer properly holds my trousers up. This means I have to stop and pull them up every thirty seconds or so, and that I still end up with thoroughly wet cuffs.

What really cinched the morning though, was the bus driver, who was standing at the bus stop, only a meter or so ahead of the shed, waiting for a light which had just turned red, and still refused to open the door and let me in.

Oh what a glorious day.

Shut up.

Well, November has officially begun, and we all know what month that is, don’t we?

I’m not doing it this year. I did it last year, finished it too. It was fun, it was stressing, it was exhausting and in the end I had some stuff I actually feel pretty good about. Y’know, in the midst of loads and loads of crap.

But I’m not doing it this year. At least, I don’t think I am. I just don’t feel I have the time, what with school and all. See also the part about how it was stressing and exhausting. I have done no planning, have no Idea what I would write if I were to change my mind right now, so I consider it unlikely that I will. Even if I do find time to write, I would rather spend it working on what I made last year, making that better.

Though it would be somewhat fun to just start where I ended last time and see if I could get some plot out of it. What I have so far is essentially a 50000 word introduction.

…

Damn, in the course of writing this post I’ve gone from “not this year” to “Well, we’ll see if there’s time.” This can’t be healthy.

There are currently two comics on the web I follow fanatically, eagerly awaiting every new update, and wishing that there’d be more than one strip per day. One of these is Narbonic. The other is Get Medieval.

Now, I pretty much expected this for Narbonic. The story there is currently in its climax. Everything so far has more or less been building up to this, the grand finale before the comic ends. I’m on the edge of my seat to see what happens next, and based on the rest of the comic’s run, I fully expected to be.

Get Medieval, on the other hand, that took me a bit by surprise. Thinking about it, though, I’m not sure why. Get Medieval is a very good comic, well drawn, very well written, never misses an update, has good and consistent characters, is frequently accurate and always funny. In short, it is a solid comic, that ought, by rights, to make it’s creator tons and tons of money.

Well, as much money as you can make from comics, anyway.

But I never really though of it as a pins-and-needles kind of strip, until I suddenly realized how much I ached to see what happens next.

Form here on, there will be some spoilers, but everything that follows can be summed up as “read Get Medieval“, so if you haven’t yet, why don’t you just go do that instead of continuing.

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The intensive Academic Writing class has ended, leaving me with a bit more free time than I’ve had this last month. My linguistics class, aka the interesting one, has started, making me think about conlanging again. And Loki has started posting stuff about his work again over at his blog.

All this made me open up my own map again yesterday, for the first time since July. Back then, I redrew it completely, from scratch, and promptly forgot about it once I started working on the graveyards. So when I opened it again yesterday, I realized two things. 1) I’ve been making plans for the wrong map for the past week, and 2) I hate this map.

Seriously, I hate it. I hate the look and the layout and the colors and the shapes! Had I a printer I would print it out, just so I could crumple it up and throw it out the window. I cannot understand why on Earth I decided to replace my old map with this offal.

That is, I could not understand, until I opened my old map and discovered how immensely poorly drawn it was.

As a result of this, I’m throwing it all out. I’m redrawing, much larger, based on the old map, not the new.

In the spirit of the fresh start, I’m also throwing out the conlang fragments I’ve posted about in this category. It wasn’t really going anywhere anyway. I’m hoping the linguistics class will prove inspirational and educational for when I’m trying that again.

I’m feeling good about this.