I’m ready to sell my comic-book collection. Anyone who’s interested, I have a list of titles, issues, some comments on condition, etc. Except where otherwise noted, all are in very-fine to near-mint condition.

With some exceptions, most of my stuff doesn’t seem to be very marketable (judging by ebay). In some ways, this surprises me–a lot of my stuff is from smaller publishers, and is better quality than a lot of the mainstream stuff. Then again, mainstream stuff gets made into movies, which no doubt feeds demand. It was also interesting just looking over some of the issues in my collection for the first time in quite a few years, and being surprised at what passes for “good” in comic books. I suspect that the original artboards for a lot of these really are good, but between the shitty paper and awful print quality, only a faint echo of that comes through.

Finally posted some pictures I shot on the trip Gwen and I took to Enchanted Rock on Sunday (login “adamguest”, password “adamguest”).

As a rule, I don’t do SXSW. In fact, the last SXSW event I attended was a Kim Wilson show at Antone’s back when it was on Guadalupe–probably in ’93 or ’94. It was a great show, but it was more crowded than the Marunouchi line at rush-hour. I decided it wasn’t worth it and that was the end of that.

This year, I broke that rule, sort of. There’s a free way to get into the trade show. So I took it. Several friends I know through Austin Bloggers were staffing a EFF-Austin booth at the SXSW-interactive tradeshow. And I had recently corresponded with Rebecca Blood about weblog ethics. She asked if I’d be at SXSW–I said I generally leave SXSW to the out-of-towners, but I’d stick my head in at the trade show, and if I saw her there, I’d say Hi.

So yesterday, Gwen and I rode down. Gwen, who had worked the trade show in years past, observed that it was much smaller, and that there wasn’t much of an Austin focus. I had a chance to pester my friends at the EFF-Austin table, did indeed meet Rebecca Blood, avoided picking up any swag whatsoever, and much to my delight and surprise, bumped into long-lost friends Greta and Chester. I ran across a neighbor, Susan, and we commiserated over this country’s current regime administration.

Jon Lebkowsky, local blog dude, has written an article for the Chronicle that quotes me. He’s going to post the unedited text (about 2x the length) on his site at some point.

How do you like the new look? Thanks to the wonders of CSS, most of the work was in making the oval graphics, and that didn’t take long. That and tweaking a few CSS settings, but I was pretty much able to do this in my spare time over one late morning.

I’m guilty of one act of backsliding: the title logo is now text-as-graphic. Getting the effect I wanted using text-as-text would be terribly painstaking (it still isn’t exactly right), and would probably break in a bunch of browsers I don’t have access to. When CSS3 support is available, I’ll revert to text-as-text, promise.

Due to a configuration problem, any mail sent to me between roughly noon Sunday (Jan 26) and 9:00 AM Monday (Jan 27) would have bounced. It should be working now.

For whatever reason, people eat a lot of soup when sick. Especially the canned stuff, since the invalid is feeling too lethargic to put together real soup. Having just gotten over the flu, and with Gwen ping-ponging back and forth, there’s been a fair amount of soup consumption in our lives lately. A lot of canned soup.

But here’s the thing: it’s a terrible over-extension of the word “soup” to use it to describe both the stuff that comes in a can or styrofoam container, and the stuff you actually make yourself. The two things really have very little in common, I’ve decided.

As of last night, Gwen was still sick, and when she asked what I could bring over food-wise, she suggested we could have soup. I’m not much of a cook, but I’d be damned if I had another can of Progresso or whatever. Bleah. Off to Central Market, where I assembled ingredients for something vaguely Thai-like. Okay it had lemongrass and ginger and cilantro and shrimp, and some other stuff. That’s about as Thai as my unculinary Jewish ass can get. It wound up being pretty good. A damn sight better than anything coming out of a package.