Posts made by Vorpal

.... iiiiiiiiinterestink!

Well, I went to Ecuador on the news that my mother wasn't doing too well. She passed away on the 21st at 8 pm on the dot. I've lost my mother and my aunt in a space of two months.

She was pretty much holding on until I got there. Three days after I arrived she became non-responsive and basically withered away in the blink of an eye.

Fuck this year. Seriously, fuck it hard.

@Auspice said in RL Anger:

It's a shitty week for this stuff. I'm just hours (hopefully) from release from the hospital and I got notification that my grandmother was being rushed in (...on the opposite side of the country...) due to a heart attack.

2016 can go die in a fire, for real.

I'm so sorry, and I agree.

So my mother is on oxygen now. I had initially planned to come to Ecuador for Christmas and spend it with her, but now I'll be going next week.

I'm going to see my mother for what will likely be the last time of my life.

I remember the look in my mother's eyes when I showed her the green card in person. She was so happy. She said to me "We can have Christmases together again." We thought we had time.

There won't be any more Christmases.

My aunt died last month. In one sweep, this year has taken the two people who were basically mothers to me.

Fuck 2016.

I'd totally play that

Me: "Is this for anesthesia?"
Patient: "No, this is for Rob."
Me: "...."

@Arkandel Tim is around, but...

I can't spoil it for you. He's being prepped for a major role in what will happen in Rebirth. He can't be with the Titans right now for some very valid reasons but...

Trust me, he's getting a lot of love as a character. You're just going to have to pick up some titles.

@Arkandel The best I can tell you is that Rebirth is essentially a 180 from the direction they were taking with the New 52. Instead of running away from the legacy, stories and relationships that built up the characters, Rebirth more or less is working towards bringing them back. I really do recommend you get yourself a copy of Rebirth #1- the one Johns said he'd refund you if you didn't like it. What happens in that issue basically sold my skeptical ass on the idea behind Rebirth completely, and so far the execution has been living up to it.

Then, you have a miracle. Greg Rucka walked away from DC when Didiot gave away Wonder Woman: Earth One to Grant Morrison after having promised it to Rucka in exchange for some grunt work. RUcka swore he would never work with DC again after that.

And then the Finch run of Wonder Woman happened, which has gone on record as being the worst Wonder Woman run since the Khaniger days... and Didio must have performed some satanic ritual and signed away his ballsack, because Greg Rucka has come back and is basically in full control of the Wonder Woman book. And it's good.

The Teen Titans ended this month after a five year run that was an abomination at the hands of Lobdell and then "Amazons Attack" Pfeiffer. The book is Rebirthing in October and it actually looks like a lot of fun. The Titans book (not the teen titans... sounds confusing but it isn't, the Teen Titans are basically the Wolfman era Titans minus Dick plus Damian. The Titans are the classic Titans) is very good, too.

And then you have The New Superman, which follows the equivalent of the Chinese Superman. Three issues in, I'm loving every moment of it.

They also brought Marv Wolfman in to write a Raven mini series that takes place between the end of the Teen Titans book and the start of the new Teen Titans run. Issue one shows Marv has still got it.

It's a very rare moment right now. A lot of what DC is doing right now is good. I haven't said those words since, maybe, 2009... maybe even longer. I'd say enjoy it while it lasts- Marvel is currently doing not-so-hot with their Civil War II fiasco, which is bogging down the entire line with its gloom, doom and haven't-we-done-this-already?

I suspect Marvel and DC are like the Graeae from Greek mythology. Except that, instead of an eye, they pass a brain back and forth between them. Marvel had a great comic run in the past few years, now it must be DC's turn.

I really wish they would learn to share, though. When was the last time the two of them were putting out consistently great stuff at the same time?

So... four months down the line, I am faced with a problem I haven't had in over... well, more than six years: Choosing which DC comics to subscribe to without it being too expensive, because suddenly too many of them are actually good. For the first time in... forever. Rebirth really did turn out to be what they promised it would be.

Well... so far.

So this happened. And my drawing, writing and MU*ing have taken a hit. Rrrr.

Damnit, I keep meaning to visit this place and maybe applying, but life keeps crapping on me.

Tonight. I will log there tonight.

When a conversation with a co-worker over e-mail essentially devolves into us sending each other pictures of people wearing extreme rococo wigs.

South African tenor Johan Botha, one of the greatest Wagnerian tenors of this generation, has died of cancer at the early age of 51. Your 40s and 50s are usually the prime of your life when you're an opera singer, so we were basically robbed of the best of his music-making, which promised to be even more spectacular.

The Vienna Opera is flying the black flag upon hearing the news.

Goddamnitm, 2016.

Can this year fucking stop already? We're running out of celebrities at this point.

Can someone go check to make sure the protective pentagram around Angela Lansbury, Carol Channing, Betty White and Aretha Franklin is still holding?

@SG OH GOD, THE VOCAL FRY.

When I had voice students during my last year of my Masters, I had to fight uphill to get the teenage girls to drop the goddamned vocal fry because it will wreck your voice.

I love some of the stories that get shared on my FB page.

This one is no exception. In fact, this may be the thing I've loved most, ever, while also being horrifying:

"So, last week, something pretty tragic happened in our household. It's taken me until now to wrap my head around it and find the words to describe the horror. It started off simple enough - something that's probably happened to most of you.

Sometime between midnight and 1:30am, our puppy Evie pooped on our rug in the living room. This is the only time she's done this, so it's probably just because we forgot to let her out before we went to bed that night. Now, if you have a detective's mind, you may be wondering how we know the poop occurred between midnight and 1:30am. We were asleep, so how do I know that time frame?

Why, friends, that's because our Roomba runs at 1:30am every night, while we sleep. And it found the poop. And so begins the Pooptastrophe. The poohpocalypse. The pooppening.

If you have a Roomba, please rid yourself of all distractions and absorb everything I'm about to tell you.

Do not, under any circumstances, let your Roomba run over dog poop. If the unthinkable does happen, and your Roomba runs over dog poop, stop it immediately and do not let it continue the cleaning cycle. Because if that happens, it will spread the dog poop over every conceivable surface within its reach, resulting in a home that closely resembles a Jackson Pollock poop painting.

It will be on your floorboards. It will be on your furniture legs. It will be on your carpets. It will be on your rugs. It will be on your kids' toy boxes. If it's near the floor, it will have poop on it. Those awesome wheels, which have a checkered surface for better traction, left 25-foot poop trails all over the house. Our lovable Roomba, who gets a careful cleaning every night, looked like it had been mudding. Yes, mudding - like what you do with a Jeep on a pipeline road. But in poop.

Then, when your four-year-old gets up at 3am to crawl into your bed, you'll wonder why he smells like dog poop. And you'll walk into the living room. And you'll wonder why the floor feels slightly gritty. And you'll see a brown-encrusted, vaguely Roomba-shaped thing sitting in the middle of the floor with a glowing green light, like everything's okay. Like it's proud of itself. You were still half-asleep until this point, but now you wake up pretty damn quickly.

And then the horror. Oh the horror.

So, first you clean the child. You scrub the poop off his feet and put him back in bed. But you don't bother cleaning your own feet, because you know what's coming. It's inevitable, and it's coming at you like a freight train. Some folks would shrug their shoulders and get back in bed to deal with it in the morning. But you're not one of those people - you can't go to sleep with that war zone of poop in the living room.

So you clean the Roomba. You toss it in the bathtub to let it soak. You pull it apart, piece-by-piece, wondering at what point you became an adult and assumed responsibility for 3:30am-Roomba-disassembly-poop-cleanups. By this point, the poop isn't just on your hands - it's smeared up to your elbows. You already heard the Roomba make that "whirlllllllllllllllll-boop-hisssssssss" noise that sounds like electronics dying, and you realize you forgot to pull the battery before getting it wet. More on that later.

Oh, and you're not just using profanity - you're inventing new types of profanity. You're saying things that would make Satan shudder in revulsion. You hope your kid stayed in bed, because if he hears you talking like this, there's no way he's not ending up in prison.

Then you get out the carpet shampooer. When you push it up to the rug - the rug that started it all - the shampooer just laughs at you. Because that rug is going in the trash, folks. But you shampoo it anyway, because your wife loved that damn rug, and you know she'll ask if you tried to clean it first.

Then you get out the paper towel rolls, idly wondering if you should invest in paper towel stock, and you blow through three or four rolls wiping up poop. Then you get the spray bottle with bleach water and hose down the floor boards to let them soak, because the poop has already dried. Then out comes the steam mop, and you take care of those 25-ft poop trails.

And then, because it's 6am, you go to bed. Let's finish this tomorrow, right?

The next day, you finish taking the Roomba apart, scraping out all the tiny flecks of poop, and after watching a few Youtube instructional videos, you remove the motherboard to wash it with a toothbrush. Then you bake it in the oven to dry. You put it all back together, and of course it doesn't work. Because you heard the "whirlllllllllllllll-boop-hissssssss" noise when it died its poopy death in the bathtub. But you hoped that maybe the Roomba gods would have mercy on you.

But there's a light at the end of the tunnel. After spending a week researching how to fix this damn $400 Roomba without spending $400 again - including refurb units, new motherboards, and new batteries - you finally decide to call the place where you bought it. That place called Hammacher Schlemmer. They have a funny name, but they have an awesome warranty. They claim it's for life, and it's for any reason.

So I called them and told the truth. My Roomba found dog poop and almost precipitated World War III.

And you know what they did? They offered to replace it. Yes, folks. They are replacing the Roomba that ran over dog poop and then died a poopy, watery death in the bathtub - by no fault of their own, of course.

So, mad props to Hammacher Schlemmer. If you're buying anything expensive, and they sell it, I recommend buying it from them. And remember - don't let your Roomba run over dog poop"

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Apoopcalypse.

@Arkandel I rationalized most of BvS away as Batman still recovering from a face-full of the latest Joker experiment, so throughout most of the movie he was trippin' balls while trying to keep up with what was going on while trying to ignore the wall-spiders that were singing at him.

And suddenly I wrote a better movie than Goyer did. It even accounts for the blatant Injustice tie-in.

Level 17

One of these days I will catch enough Pikachu to turn Lightningrat into a fucking Raichu.

One of these days.

Well, it's too late for that!

@Thenomain

You have a very funny definition of 'up in arms.' If by 'up in arms' you mean having fun by poking at the holes in what was clearly an incredibly rushed movie (six weeks for the screenplay) , okay, I'm up in arms.

But by the regular definition of the expression, I'm not. I'm only puzzled at the bad choices in the movie, especially since they make a character who has been an established competent bad-ass staple of the DC universe look like she'd lose her head if it weren't attached to her body.

Which, honestly, is hilarious if you know anything about the character. Since you don't, I suggest you look it up and then you'll see just how hilariously bad it is.