When I got into comics in the fall of 2000, it wasn’t too long until I walked backwards into Vertigo Comics. For anyone that doesn’t know, Vertigo Comics was an imprint of DC where they put all of their “Adult” titles. In comic parlance, adult means boobs, blood, swears, and big ideas.

Think if HBO only did lurid genera stuff. It’s everything EC Comics ever wanted to be, but that’s another story for another day.

Vertigo is gone now. Phased out this year – after it’s near decade long death-throws – for the new DC Black Label. (At least for now.)

It took me longer than I’m proud of to realize that all the comics I was collecting at the time – Transmetropolitan, Preacher, and The Invisibles – were from the same publisher. After that, I would buy books because they had the Vertigo name on them. It was a name that implied taste. (Or lack there of, depending on who you asked.)

So time has gone on and Vertigo, before it was finally killed of, re-collected most of their series into large volumes that make up two to three of the ones I already have. Some of these series I’ve either never fully finished getting: 100 Bullets, Y The Last Man. Or I’ve had some volumes damaged from over use: Transmetropolitan, The Invisibles. So I’ve started to buy the deluxe volumes and getting rid of the old.

And of course I can’t just bring these into the house and put them on the shelf, I have to read them first. Which has been really nice to re-read some of my favorite stories. I finished Transmetropolitan – even though not all the deluxe volumes are out for that – and I’m currently working on 100 Bullets. Which I never actually read all of. I’m still in stuff I’ve already read, but I’ll be getting to “new” stuff soon. So that’s exciting.

It’s been nice going back through these hard, little nuggets of angry tales. If anything, it’s kept be for doomscrolling through the news.

So I hopped onto my browser to add a book to my have read folder in GoodReads, and it took me an hour to do that because I kept getting sucked into Facebook and Reddit.

Yeah… Social Media. Super productive. yeah…

Taking a break from the Internet for a while.

That’s a thing right?

It’s the first of the month, and I think I’m moving into a phase technology phase and will be rebuilding this site. There’s a few things on the site that I’m not 100% happy with, and the entire point of building your own blog from scratch is to be 100% happy with the outcome.

I’ve been in an artistic phase, with lots of research of modular synths, but I can feel the next phase starting to raise. Mainly because I’m not in a place where I can pull the trigger on building my rig, so I’d like to move into something I can actually action on.

This week is going to be a lot of pulling things together to start building test sites, and building some things out for my D&D campaign.

Note: I’ve been quiet on here lately because I’ve been reading a lot of news and the current cycle has been the most horrifying in a while, and it’s been hard for me to actually do anything. But I’m trying to pull out of it.

The good thing about this blog is that I’ll have a log of how this all went after the fact. Which is why I think this place deserves some care.

All email is processed, moved into its correct folder or deleted outright. In the last two days I have gone through thousands of emails that were of no consequence and only distracted from the mail I actually needed to see. This is why people hate email and are intimidated by the internet in general.

I probably should have something more clever to say about that, but I’m tired. Will be back online tomorrow after a good nights rest.

Note: while I was typing this, a new email came in… It’s been processed, but I think that says more about this situation than I could.

Still hacking away at the email. In the late 00’s there was a term called “bacon” that was spam that you signed up for. It fell out of usage quickly but it applies here. I have tens of thousands of bacon emails that I’ve had to sift through. I have uncovered and processed some actionable emails from my burner email address that I never check.

I’ve also installed even more email filters in Gmail so I should actually start seeing actionable things easier from that account. But Gmail makes it just tedious enough to make filters that you don’t want to do it all the time. So I might be back in this boat in a few months. We’ll see. Google makes this a bit of a moving target.

In my two main email accounts I get a lot of junk. I don’t really clean it out or even check one of my accounts. This is ironic because I’ve taught email productivity professionally for years.

The shoemaker’s kids go barefoot, and all that.

My Inbox is at a massive number – which I will not share with internet – and I’m currently downloading all of my mail into Apple’s desktop email app. I was going to use Outlook, which I know a lot better, but Google has blocked all of the features that make that application useful. In fact, the Apple app was able to use some basic organization features with Gmail that Outlook couldn’t.

Once the download is complete, the great email purge and reorganization begins. I will post updates.

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ve been looking a lot at modular synths. However, the thing that interests me the most about them isn’t their utility as an instrument, but the DIY community that has always been with them. I’ve always wanted to get into that level of electronics, but have never had a good application for learning those skills.

Even though I was a fire alarm installer, I wasn’t building the components directly. It was a lot of cable pulls and wiring things directly to prebuilt junction points.

So while I may never make any good music, I might make some interesting modules that could make good sounds if only I knew what the hell I was doing.