14A2: The sequel to 14A

This isn't the post I promised you, where I talk about a couple comic trips that came close to ending my hunt.  You'll have to wait patiently for that one.  It'll be called post #15 and it will mark the return of editor Scott Allison.  I promise to try my hardest to make it interesting but I can only say it might be interesting if you've found any of my previous posts interesting.  It's okay if you don't, because I know you're all reading.  I've passed 1000 views, so that's tantamount to about 56 per post and that's good enough for me.  You should be proud to be riding first class on what's been referred to as "an internet phenomenon" (by me).

First thing I wanta discuss is what I should have mentioned in my last post.  I claimed that I was filling you in on what was going on in my real life, and while I did give some info, I left out a lot.  I sometimes forget that I'm living a very irregular life right now and some people might find this interesting.  I'm gonna put little labels to make it easier for you to skim through my life to the things you like to read about.

Read about my family gathering on Easter and my awesome aunts, uncles, and cousins!

First off, what do they call the relation between myself and the child of one of my cousins?  Is there a word?  Someone said second couin, but that doesn't make sense to me.  What about that cousin's husband, or the husband's kids from a previous mother?  What do I call them?  Does that have a title?!  But enough of that and onto my Easter Sunday.  I went to a family gathering.  I haven't been to a family gathering in years because there are so many small children, and unfortunately I'm loaded with immunosuppressants(to prevent my body from rejecting the stem cells).  This year I was no less immunosuppressed, but I've been living this way for too long.  I wanted to see my family before they forgot who I was.  I didn't ask my doctor for permission to go.  I just took extra precautions(gloves, mask, constant purelling, no xoxo, and no holding babies.  It was worth it.  The bet thing that happened is my Aunt let me in on a secret that basically changed my life.  When wearing oxygen tubes, the backs of your ears, where they hang from, get a lot of friction and the skin gets raw, swollen, and painful.  She noticed my red ears and told me about some little gr  y foam things that the oxygen company can send for free if you ask them.  Yes, you have to ask for these things.  You wouldn't know, because no one tells you, but luckily I have my Aunt Susan.  Everything else went well too.  I didn't get sick(er), I saw the young cousins who I've been sending comic books to and I got to see their reactions to getting a new stack of comics.  From that I got exactly what I had hoped for.  It's so cool to see these books that cost me almost nothing brighten up their day so much.  I hope they don't grow out of it any time soon, but if my friends and I are any indication, it comes back when you're about 27.

Left: Legend of the Spider-Clan..this series is really popular with the little dude.  What kid doesn't love Spider-Man?  I had ordered it just to check out the Skottie Young art, I had no idea I'd be giving it away, but I really expected this one just to be a filler.  Now he's got me hunting for the missing issues of the series.

Right: Perhapanauts: My cousin is a really unique little girl, and so far, she seems to love the Perhapanauts the most.  She also told me she really likes Takio, which makes me feel really bad because I got her the book and the first three issues and I'm starting to wonder if Brian Michael Bendis has abandoned it.  At least they're still making Perhapanauts.

Read about the new addition to my family, coming soon!  But if they do grow out of it, I'll be fine because I'm gonna be an Uncle soon.  My brother Tom and his Wife Lindsay are having a baby and I've already started blowing money on him.  

Of course when the plushes came in the mail, I found a tag that said ages 5+.  It's disappointing, but I guess it's because of the plastic eyes.  The baby should be able to play with them if he stays supervised.

 I wish they would be living a little closer so I could easily see Tom the 6th(or is it 7th?  I should know that) grow up,  But maybe I'll end up moving to Philly.  It all depends on when I can get out of this hole I'm stuck in.  

Read about my lung problems!
Here's the news on that.  I just finished the first part of a drug trial with a drug that has helped others' lung problems that resulted from graft vs. host disease.  The problem is we know I have GVHD, we know I have lung problems, but we don't know if the lung problems are related to the GVHD.  I do know that my lungs have gotten slightly better, so hopefully that will continue, and if this temporary break from the drug hurts my breathing, I'll know that it was probably the drug that helped me.  If this trial fails, they have another drug planned, and if that doesn't work there's a last resort: lung transplant.  The lung transplant scares the hell out of me, but I've been told it will completely fix the issue, so at least I know there is a light at the end of the tunnel.  For now, my therapist has advised me to start figuring out how I'm gonna get this last class out of the way so I finally get my bachelor's degree.

Read about my Academic Future!

I've been unable to take the class for the same reasons I can't go to work.. my immune systems crap, I an't drive because of the pain meds, and Rhode Island College is amazingly disorganized.  Furthermore, I'm having trouble with the type of course this is.  It's an internship.  I can't really do an internship unless I find one that I can do at home.. so it looks like I'm going to talk to someone important at RIC and keep going up the totem pole until I find a solution.  My therapist and I discussed my plans to finish school and then go back for a masters, and my plans to get myself on some kind of ADHD drug.  But when my therapist and I aren't talking about school and getting ahold of drugs, we talk about our common interest, comic books.  Strangely enough, I told him about my new Lego hobby today, and he had plenty to say about Lego collecting.

Read about my therapist and I talking comic books and Legos

Today, impressively, when I brought up comic books, the good doctor produced from his desk a card that listed the dates of upcoming small-time comic cons.  These comic cons are different than the big ones full of celebrities, costplayers, high profile creators, and sich.  These are the legendary ones that comic collectors drool over because of the apparent improved odds of finding treasures in the boxes.  Searcing comic bins at big name cons or comic book stores will generally bring you s few good books, but these are just big white boxes filled with random old comics.  I've been dying to go to one ever since I saw them described on "comic book men".  Okay so like I said, I also recently got into(or back into, every kid loved these things) Legos.  I saw a couple Marvel super hero minifigures.  I knew Lego made quite a few things from different fictional worlds I loved.. Marvel, DC, Star Wars, and I had recently been impressed by smart business they had done by creating their own TV series, Lego Ninjago, and then merchandising from that.  When I was a kid, Lego was already the best thing when it came to versatility.  It promotes creativity.  The more sets and new minifigures they produce, the more tools a kid can have to mess around with and create what's in his head.  I took a trip to the Lego store, with my Dad, of course, and I discovered the blind lego minifig bag.  I'm no stranger to blind boxes from different designer toy companies I've collected in the past, so I was really appy to find out Lego was doing this with their lines of minifigures, which are Lego men and women that represent tons of different people from history, pop culture, industry, public service, outer space, etc.  I'm in love with these things, and right now I'm working on finding more efficient ways of getting my hands on them.  The gentlemen at the lego store was very helpful.. he had developed the ability to feel the bag and identify what figure was inide in about 3 seconds.  He accurately found the man in a chicken suit that I was asking for.  Here's a few of my favorite guys:

So at this point I've managed to get off to a nice start.  I bought a few minifigs to start.. the first one being "Iron Fist".  Then when I visited the Lego store I couldn't help but try one of the new "architecture" sets.  I started building this thing, and it all came back to me.  The sound of the pieces as you rustle through them, the satisfying snaps, the glorious moment when two seperately built massive parts need to be put together.  It's awesome, but I quickly realized that the set I had chosen was not enough.  It only took a night to finish.  I wanted more.  This time I decided to take the opportunity of having both my brothers and several friends coming over during the course of the next week while my parents are on a cruise, and I ordered a ridiculously large architecture set.  It's the Tower Bridge which crosses the River Thames in London.  I wish I could have been patriotic and bought the white house, but it's a shamefully small set, by comparison at least.  The White House has 561 Lego pieces.  The Imperial Hotel has 1,188 pieces.  The Robie House has 2,276.  But this week, starting on Friday, I'll be working with 4,295 pieces.  Here's what it looks like so far:

Comic Books

If you're a weekly comic book reader, you're already doing everything right.  Every wednesday you get to go down to the shop and pick up your pull list.  If you aren't reading comics, you gotta ask yourself why not.  Feel free to ask me for some recommendations.  If you like art, some of the greatest modern artists are in the comic industry.  If you like great literature, it's there.  Yeah, there are plently of nonsense comics that live up to every bit of the negative stereotyping.. and I love that stuff too, but it's not for everybody.  What I want to get across here is that there is in fact at least one comic for everybody.  I've seen a few people convert because of "Saga", so that might be worth checking out., otherwise, keep looking.  There's great stuff out there.

Today a lot of great stuff came out but the big book on my list was "Li'l Gotham".  It was originally digital only, but now it's coming out in comic form, which I'm really happy about because I have no iea how permanent the ownership rights to a digital comic.  I want every issue of this series because the art is so cool.  I'm glad that DC puts so much into their all ages comics, but art like this belongs in one of their big selling titles  Here's a sample:

And let me finish by posting this awesome ad I found for a product I will most definitely be buying.
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14A: My life outside of comic books

To be honest, I enjoy comics so much, I could easily allow myself to do nothing buy buy, sell, and read comics all day long and I woud still be a very happy guy, but I wouldn't be very social and I'd probably grow old alone, gradually losing all of my friends except for Jeff at the Time Capsule. This week, however, I didn't really see anyone. I staed in touch with a few people by texting.. or with Scott, by facetiming. It's because of facetime, along with the new watch I got, that I'm realizing I've suddenly taken two giant steps toward the future I've been waiting for since I was a llittle kid. I figured I'd share it because I'm sure a lot of other people looked forward to this too.

Now obiously we were all told there would be flying cars. It didn't occur to us back then that the fling cars would be ridiculously dangerous, impractical because they would chug fuel like a frat boy doing Jager Bombs. The other dream did nothing but become more and more likely every day until now where we stand right on the brink of having our own personal wrist communicators that show an image and pla the voice of the person we're talking about, while giving us a location if they should allow it. This watch would also prvide all kinds of other ridiculous services like unlocking doors to scret hideouts, starting your car, paying for things via a credit card scanner, providing identification to police, heart rate monitoring, lie detecting, projecting movies or holograms, and maybe even date and time.
Most of those features are already available either on watches or martphones, and if there isn't an app for most of them, there will be soon. I'm simply looking forward to the day that the one device I need on my person is my wrist watch. Here's what makes me say we're almost there. At the beginning of the summer, I bought a new gadget from Nike called the Nike+ fuelband.

It improved my recovery process exponentially b giving me motivation by showing me concrete evidence and records of how hard I had worked. Here's my review of it that 534 of 559 people found helpful!

http://www.amazon.com/review/R2I5RGMPW72JV/ref=cm_cr_dp_cmt?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B007FSEMPY&nodeID=3375251&store=sporting-goods#wasThisHelpful

I really do wish I could give one of these to anyone in recovery. If you're thinking of buying someone a gift who needs to recover from something terrible, get it.

Okay, so there's that, and then there's this. I'm now wearing the “Pebble”. It's a watch that connects to my phone via bluetooth.

This thing has already made my life better, but because of it's developer friendly design, it's just gonna keep getting better. For now, it displays my text messages, so I don't need to take my phone out unless it's a message I feel like answering. It tells me where and incoming call is coming from, so again, I don't have to take out my phone, I can ignore it with a button on my watch, and silence the ring. This eliminates those awkward times in a quiet waiting room when your phone goes off and you're struggling to dig it out so you can silence it. I can control my music you have stored on your phone. This is cool if you're out biking with headphones on or in any situation where it's inconvenient to take out your phone rather than just skip with your watch. All notifications on the watch itself are vibration only.. so if you silence your phone, you'll still be alerted by your vibrating watch. The bluetooth range works at least from one end of my upstairs to the other end of my downstairs, so I'm really looking forward to using this when I go back to work. Phones aren't allowed at my watch, but if a friend texted me about an emergency, I'd know what's going on and I could judge whether I should run out to the car or not to call back. And finally, don't forget about the many different cool watch faces. It's just a cosmetic thing, but it's really cool. The display takes very little battery to keep running, because it's E-Paper like Amazon Kindle, and it's just kinda cool to look at your watch and see “quarter past four”.

I'm not trying to sell the product here. They're not even for sale. I got mine early because I donated to the project on kickstarter.com almost a year ago. What I'm pointing out is that we're only years away from having the awesome wrist communicators that must have been used on Ninja Turtles or G.I. Joes. I don't know where I saw it, but I wanted one, and now I'm pretty sure I will, because the way things are going, it seems like gadget makers had the same chilldhood dream.

I went to three comic stores since my last post, and I got a lot. I'll post about them in my next entry. but for now you can check out the new and improved checklist which shows the final 8 comics I need. This is where I need people to start keeping their eyes peeled. If you see any of those  8 missing issues, I'll pay you for them. $11 for #2,5, or 6,.. $5 for, 22, 33,, 127, 130, or 131.Thanks for reading!