A word from our sponsor...

As I type this, AdSense is running a couple of political ads on the blog. Which... ick.

That's never happened before as far as I know and I've asked them to filter those out, but I don't know how long it'll take before the filter kicks in. In the meantime, I know nothing about the candidates whose ads are currently appearing and certainly don't endorse them. Maybe they're fine candidates; maybe they're not. All I know is that I don't want political ads on the blog.

Update: This is undoubtedly interesting to no one but me, but I just noticed in the You Might Also Like links below this post that I struggled with political ads last November as well, but chose to keep them going. The difference this time is that one of the ads was of the smear/attack variety and I hate those so very very much.

The Versatile Blogger

This is a post that's way past due, but I wanted to take the time to do it justice. Artist Michael Dean "MD" Jackson was kind enough to tag me with the Versatile Blogger Award and it's a special honor. I struggle all the time with how broadly focused this blog is. Most of my favorite blogs are very specific in their subject matter, even if the subject is just "comics," but I especially like extremely specific blogs like Double O Section, Shanna the She-Devil Blogger, and Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs. I love those so much that I often think about narrowing Adventureblog's range to one genre or medium. If only I could pick just one that I wouldn't get bored with eventually.

I can't, so for better or worse, I'm stuck with a versatile blog. That's why I appreciate someone's creating this recognition and Mike's including me in his picks for it. I appreciate other versatile blogs too. I can't read too many of them before they become overwhelming, but I was able to pull five to mention from my follow list. I'll list them in a minute, but one of the other criteria for accepting the award is listing seven random facts about yourself. So that first:

1. My high-school job was bagging groceries and I was really good at it. As a result though, I'm overly critical (silently so, I promise) of baggers who can't make a paper bag keep its shape and mix items that shouldn't be mixed. Cold items don't go with non-cold items. Detergents don't go with food.
2. In college, I played the title role in The Sound of Music. I also ran the sound for My Fair Lady, which was an even more fun production. But that may have been because I had a minor crush on the girl playing Eliza Doolittle. Or her Georgia accent anyway. (She switched to Cockney for the play, but that wasn't nearly as attractive.)
3. You can get me to do just about anything if you ask me in a Georgia accent.
4. I can read ancient Greek, though I don't understand as much of it as I used to.
5. My first pet was a black cat we found at the garbage dump. He was only a few days old and we couldn't even tell what gender he was yet. We named him Muffit after the robotic daggit from Battlestar Galactica.
6. I was 10 years old when I wrote my first story. It was Star Wars fan fiction and I proved in not only the title, but also in a major plot element that I didn't know the difference between an "asteroid" and an "android."
7. My son has a live dragon living in his room. It's about two-feet long and bearded.

And now for the blogs I'm passing the award to. Mike says that the official rules call for fifteen recipients, but I'm following his example and only choosing five. In alphabetical order:

1. Calvin's Canadian Cave of Cool: I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Brother Cal's already received this award at some point. That guy collects awards like mermaids collect swooning sailors. He deserves it though for being extremely prolific with posts on a variety of subjects ranging from the Cephalopod Menace to Selena Gomez.
2. Lady, That's My Skull: I came to Sleestak's blog thinking it was a comics blog, and with lots of posts on romance comics and space pulp heroines like Futura and Mysta of the Moon, it is. But it's also a lot more than that, including rants about the grocery store where he works and appreciations for Hayley Mills and of course The Land of the Lost.
3. Poplitiko: My friend Alex Ness started this pop culture group blog. Because it's a group blog (and because its theme is as broad as "pop culture," it has a lot of different interests. Just looking at the current page, I see a love letter to enjoying comics with your children; a linkblogging post covering superhero movies, Doctor Who, and Twecon; and Whatever the Opposite of an Ode is to Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson movies.
4. Siskoid's Blog of Geekery: Siskoid does tend to stick to geek-related topics, so he's not as all over the place as some of the other blogs I'm mentioning, but he has a broad range of interests from Star Trek to Kung Fu movies and he crosses genres and media types easily.
5. That F'ing Monkey: I've known blogger Ken O a long time from Steve Niles' message board, so his was one of the first blogs I thought of in creating this list. He's a huge fan of DC's The Flash and talks about the character often, but you'll also find regular posts about his other interests, especially games and booze.

Blogger Trouble

If you're wondering where Wednesday and Thursday's posts went (I sure did), Blogger apparently had a problem early this morning and in trying to fix it, temporarily removed all posts since Wednesday am. They tell us that they're now restoring those posts and expect to be back to normal soon. 

I'm going to trust them and not repost those two items myself.

Update: And they're back. Yay!

Missing the Art Shows?

Just a reminder that I've moved all the images, quotes, and comics-linking to the Adventureblog Annex. It's on my mind because I just threw a bunch of nautical and island stuff on there. And thanks to the way Tumblr does archives, it's much more fun to browse than when that stuff was mixed in with everything here.

The Adventureblog Annex (or, Michael gets a Tumblr account)

And lo, there came a day when I realized that watching TV shows at their regularly appointed time just wasn't working for me. I didn't immediately buy TiVo though, oh no. I started taping everything on VHS to watch later, trying to keep up with six different video tapes while remembering what was on each one. My friends and family told me, "Mike, you really need TiVo. It was made for people who watch TV the way you do." And of course they eventually wore me down and now I love it.

I feel the same way about Tumblr. "I've already got a blog," I thought. "Why do I need Tumblr?" Because, Dummy, it's made for people who blog the way you spend a significant amount of time doing. I don't know why it takes me so long to figure this stuff out.

So, I've started a Tumblr and called it the Adventureblog Annex. The idea is to move stuff there from here that makes more sense on that platform. Namely: The Art Show, Pass the Comics, and Quotes of the Week posts. Stuff that doesn't take too long to look at or read. I've already started loading it up, so you can take a look and get a feel for what it's like. It's a bit random, but I'm hoping that'll be part of the fun.

What that leaves here is original content, which is what I think blogs are best suited for anyway. I may have to pull some features back from some of my other, newer blogs like Amazon Village and Dear Dairy in order to have things to write about [hmm...would I be more faithful to Old Sinner if I did it here?], but I'm going to figure that out later.

In the meantime, I hope you'll add the Annex to your RSS reader or follow it on Tumblr or whatever you like to do. And if you know of great Tumblr accounts that I should be following too, please tell me about them in the comments.

...In with the new

I think I've figured out why I'm not feeling the Newness this year. For me, the New Year started back in November when I went back to work and Kill All Monsters! launched. But it's still a time for goal-setting, so I feel like I should be doing that even if I don't feel like doing it, if that makes sense.

Fiction-wise, the priority is to finish the Kill All Monsters! script. I'm close enough to the end now that I realize I've got some re-writing to do on the earlier stuff. Nothing that Jason and Ed have already drawn and lettered fortunately, but it's going to be more involved than just completing the current draft and typing, "The End." Lesson learned: even on a webcomic, finish the script before you launch. Frankly, had I had the completed script (instead of just a detailed outline) before we pitched to publishers, we would have had a stronger idea about what we were pitching and might have received a more enthusiastic response. That uncertainty was a casualty of also not knowing what format we were pitching: complete graphic novel or serialized mini-series. In the end, it shouldn't have mattered though. I should have had the script done either way.

I won't make that mistake with the next project, which is going to be the pirate/jungle girl story that Jessica Hickman and I want to do. As soon as I finish Kill All Monsters! it'll be on to that. Hopefully I'll be able to at least get started on it this year because there's a second - though very different - pirate story I want to do with Darla Ecklund right behind it.

On the blogging front, the goal for this year is to be more adventurous and try new things. I have no idea what that will look like, but I've settled into a comfortable niche and I need to step out of it occasionally and see what other possibilities and opportunities are waiting. I'm a planner and it's very difficult to leave this goal vague and open, but I'm going to and will consider doing so my first step towards meeting it.

Out with the old...

As I said last year, I love the week between Christmas and New Year. I love the quiet and the time to reflect on the past while planning for what's next.

I'm having a hard time feeling it this year though. I suspect that's because it's been such a strange year, full of challenges, but also victories. On a personal level, my family and I are glad to put 2010 behind us. I was unemployed for seven months (except for writing, but that doesn't pay any bills) and my wife's mom was diagnosed with cancer around the 4th of July. She was gone by the end of the summer.

On a creative level though, Jason and I finally got Kill All Monsters! out (or started anyway) and that's something that we've been working toward for a long time. There's still a lot of work to be done on it, but I'll leave that for tomorrow's post.

Looking back on my goals for 2010, I didn't achieve a lot of them. Looking for work took a lot of time (or at least I'll blame it on that) and there were a couple of comics that I wanted to start writing and never got around to. But launching Kill All Monsters! easily makes up for that. My dream for it is that as the story unfolds, it'll eventually come to mean half as much to readers as it now does to Jason and I. And where those other projects are concerned, I have done some thinking about them and have a better idea not only about what they'll be, but how quickly I can realistically write them. More on that tomorrow too, I suppose.

Robot 6 has also gone well this year. I started contributing to the weekly Food or Comics? feature and that's been a lot of fun while forcing me to stay on top of which comics are hitting stores every week. And this blog continues to be successful. By which I mean that I love doing it and interacting with you guys over pirates and jungle girls.

I also finally figured out how to use Twitter and Facebook in ways that complement this blog. Not that I'm doing it perfectly (or even well, necessarily), but at least I have a basic understanding now of the strengths and weaknesses of those communities and how they're different from a blog. That was a huge light bulb moment for me this year. I can be kind of slow sometimes.

That's enough reminiscing, I think. Tomorrow I'll talk about plans and goals for 2011, but until then have a Happy (and Safe) New Year's Eve.

Blogroll Updated

After mostly neglecting them for a couple of years, I've finally updated the sidebar links. I took out any blog or site that hasn't updated in over a year and added a ton of links to favorite places that I've discovered since the last time I combed through the list. There's a lot of great stuff there, so check it out if you've got some time to kill.

New Banners: Thanks, Ian!

I got a cool, unexpected email last night from Review2AKill's Ian Explosivo. He'd noticed that I've been playing with banners and rotating through some, so he made a few himself and wanted to see if I'd like to use them.

They're WAY cooler than any I've done. I mean just look at the font and that gun for the L in the one above. The other two are awesome too, but I'm going to rotate through these a bit more slowly than I've been doing. I want to look at each of them longer.

Thanks, Ian! 

[If anyone else wants to play with an Adventureblog banner and send it in, I'll be happy to run it too. I can't pay anything, but I'll be sure to mention you when I use it. The size should be 800 x 150.]

Political ads on this blog

Following the wisdom of Linus, I work hard to keep this site free of religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin. I've noticed though that Google's chosen to rotate some political ads through (not all of which are for people who'll be getting my vote) and I've struggled with what to do about that.

Where I've come out on it is to let the ads run with the following disclaimer: I'm endorsing no political candidates on this blog. Please vote, but vote your conscience. If you live in Minnesota and need help deciding who to vote for, I highly recommend Minnesota Public Radio's Select a Candidate survey.

The One Lovely Blog Award

Kristopher and Crew's Rodents of Unusual Size blog was nice enough to honor me with the One Lovely Blog Award. Thanks, K&C!

The idea is to pick fifteen "enjoyable and deserving blogs that you've recently discovered." It's always hard to pick just a few out of the many enjoyable and deserving blogs that I read, but the "recently discovered" caveat helps me narrow the list (though "recent" is pretty subjective).

I've divided these into categories for your convenience:

Art
1. The Artfolio of Rosh
2. Kt Shy's Sketch-a-ma-blog!
3. Kyle Latino
4. Giant-Size Geek
5. George O'Connor's Online Sketchbook

Comics and Pop Culture Commentary
6. 4th Letter
7. Too Busy Thinking About My Comics
8. That F'ing Monkey
9. Flick Attack
10. Shanna the She-Devil Blogger

Actual Comics
11. Diversions of the Groovy Kind
12. Gold Key Comics!
13. Wondermark

Humor and Writing
14. Catalog Living
15. SlushPile Hell

Twitter Update

I tested out copy/pasting my Twitter feed to a weekly post, but it's not going to work very well. I'll keep looking for an automated widget that can do it effectively (recommendations are welcome!), but in the meantime, if you're interested in news about adventuresome movies, TV, and comics, here's your one-stop shop.

If you use an RSS reader, you can even subscribe that way without having to sign up for Twitter yourself. The only problem with that is that you won't be able to comment, so that's another reason for me to figure out how to integrate tweets with the blog.