Trippin' Down Memory Lane

Well, I had a busy weekend.

Rather than getting to use my preferred method of dealing with vacation time (which involves me lounging around the house) I left town, and went back to Pensacola. The prime reason for the timing of this trip was the marriage of one of my good friends, and a former Corps Cadet that I at one time taught. If you don't know what a Corps Cadet is, that's all right. Corps Cadets is basically a young adult education program at the Salvation Army.

Anyways, Abyss (as he's known on the net) got himself hitched at one of the historic churches in the Pensacola area.

Which means that I didn't take my two boys. After all, I don't see the intelligence in letting 2 youngsters destroy a 175 year old church. My pocketbook couldn't afford it.

Anyways, the trip was quite nostalgic (and yes, that is a real street in Pensacola). I got to saw a number of folks that I went to church with back in the day, as well as a visit to my old place of employment.

There wasn't a whole lot of SF involved in the weekend, but I did purchase my very own copy of Old Man's War by John Scalzi. I had initially checked this novel out of the library, and subsequently enjoyed it so much that I then purchased its two sequels.

Well, I was re-reading the sequels, when I realized that I had yet to get the first one so I could re-read it as well. So, this trip I had a great reason, as I only took a single novel (Noami Novik's His Majesty's Dragon) and I had that finished by Sunday morning.

In other fun news, an up-coming cover of Teen Titans is definitely not aimed at the teen market. At least not directly--as I personally find it not obscene enough to count as porn, but too pornographic to count as all-age appropriate material.

I mean, there's tongue action going on there. Tongue-action! You rarely see tongue action even on the television screen.

It's not necessarily a bad precedent that this is setting, but it's a bad image for all of us comic-book geeks. We get enough odd and "knowing" looks without this type of covers being at the forefront of what passes off as mainstream comics.

This isn't some little indie comic company, this is DC--one of the two most powerful icons in the industry.

All that aside, there is a great number of really fun things going on these past few days.

The first, for me personally, is that I've found out that there will be a Jackson Comicon this year.
On July 19th and 20th at the Regency Hotel and Convention Center; admission will only be a one dollar. Geeks can't beat that. A con at a decent price; especially with the cost of gas these days.

Other great news, is that Simon Haynes is now allowing anyone to download the first novel in his Hal Spacejock series. Go here and get it, you'll be happy that you did.

And speaking of novels, the web store front www.echapterone.com has a good number of the Star Wars novels as eBooks (available as PDF, LIT and PDB files). Sadly, they have Digital Rights Management (DRM) on their eBooks; which as everyone knows (or should) DRM merely punishes those users who actually go about and purchase licenses to the "protected" media. Alas, and here I had hoped for at least a worthy ebook store.

Compare this nonsense with Cory Doctorow who offers his novels unfettered with DRM, or even Simon Haynes (linked above) gives you a straight text file of his novel. Now that's caring about your users.

My last bit of news is that I've finally found a media player which allows for screen shot generation during playback. The XUL Player provides this as a standard feature for their software.

So, now that that is EASY again, hopefully I'll be able to start back up with episodic blogging of the anime that I'm watching. Hey, I'm geeky that way.

Now, I just need to find a tool to yank out the subtitles from MKV files, for when I recompile them for replaying on my Zune. Ah, hassles.