12-27-07: Another Bright Red Day
Christmas has come and gone. I received a copy of the 1982 production of Sweeney Todd which is very cool. I also attended the movie opening weekend. I put up a review of it on this site. I enjoyed it overall, even though I won't be buying the soundtrack until they put in all the songs they cut out. I have also been playing around with my typewriter, since it has been snowing for the last three days. Stupid children wishing for a white christmas. I have a two hour commute each day when it is perfect weather! Snow doubles that.
Beyond the movie, I have been adding to my comic collection. My local comic book store was having a 20 percent off back issues sale, and I took the opportunity to acquire a few late 1960s issues of Batman, since they were cheap(er). These most recent purchases pushes my collection to 1,155 issues.
And I have not been neglecting Victor either. I updated his Statistics Page with X-Men #205. I did read New X-Men #45, but it is not in the statistics because Victor did not appear in that issue. Woe and misery.
12-10-07: I Want You Bleeders
I can not begin to describe just how excited I am getting for the release of Sweeney Todd this upcoming Christmas weekend. I am a big fan of the original Broadway cast, and to better prepare myself for this event, I have been listening to the original Sweeney Todd soundtrack (the 1979 recording with Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou) nonstop. Seriously. I deleted every other song from my iPod so I could devote my entire workday to the lyrical stylings of homicidal barbers.
Sweeney Todd Movie Site
Looking through the official movie website above, it looks pretty awesome. It looks like most of the songs I love have made their way into the movie, although I will still be a little leery until I see the soundtrack. I am a little ticked that all the Ballads were cut out, but hopefully they will make their way into the DVD release, which I am already planning on buying. I am sure I will post something here once I go see it.
In the meantime, I have not been neglecting my comic collection. I am running a little behind because of my new job, but I still found the time last month to hit up the comic book store and add several more issues to my collection, which now stands at 1,135 issues. My Pull List is updated accordingly. I also made a very special purchase: Devil's Advocate. This Joker story was very hard to get ahold of, and I am in the process of writing a featured article about the comic. The article is still in progress, but is readable enough for now.
And I have not been neglecting Victor either. I updated his Statistics Page with New X-Men #44, although I have not yet gotten to X-Men #205, in which I know he appears.
Christmas has come and gone. I received a copy of the 1982 production of Sweeney Todd which is very cool. I also attended the movie opening weekend. I put up a review of it on this site. I enjoyed it overall, even though I won't be buying the soundtrack until they put in all the songs they cut out. I have also been playing around with my typewriter, since it has been snowing for the last three days. Stupid children wishing for a white christmas. I have a two hour commute each day when it is perfect weather! Snow doubles that.
Beyond the movie, I have been adding to my comic collection. My local comic book store was having a 20 percent off back issues sale, and I took the opportunity to acquire a few late 1960s issues of Batman, since they were cheap(er). These most recent purchases pushes my collection to 1,155 issues.
And I have not been neglecting Victor either. I updated his Statistics Page with X-Men #205. I did read New X-Men #45, but it is not in the statistics because Victor did not appear in that issue. Woe and misery.
12-10-07: I Want You Bleeders
I can not begin to describe just how excited I am getting for the release of Sweeney Todd this upcoming Christmas weekend. I am a big fan of the original Broadway cast, and to better prepare myself for this event, I have been listening to the original Sweeney Todd soundtrack (the 1979 recording with Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou) nonstop. Seriously. I deleted every other song from my iPod so I could devote my entire workday to the lyrical stylings of homicidal barbers.
Sweeney Todd Movie Site
Looking through the official movie website above, it looks pretty awesome. It looks like most of the songs I love have made their way into the movie, although I will still be a little leery until I see the soundtrack. I am a little ticked that all the Ballads were cut out, but hopefully they will make their way into the DVD release, which I am already planning on buying. I am sure I will post something here once I go see it.
In the meantime, I have not been neglecting my comic collection. I am running a little behind because of my new job, but I still found the time last month to hit up the comic book store and add several more issues to my collection, which now stands at 1,135 issues. My Pull List is updated accordingly. I also made a very special purchase: Devil's Advocate. This Joker story was very hard to get ahold of, and I am in the process of writing a featured article about the comic. The article is still in progress, but is readable enough for now.
And I have not been neglecting Victor either. I updated his Statistics Page with New X-Men #44, although I have not yet gotten to X-Men #205, in which I know he appears.
10-13-07: The Crittenden Report
A couple months ago I was clicking around in Wikipedia, when I turned to their vast number of pages about the history of homosexuality. To my utter suprise, I discovered the existance of a document I had never heard of before, called The Crittenden Report. This report was created in 1957 for the United States Navy, and for many years afterwards was suppressed. Knowing that this would be an invaluable resource in my comic book research, I vowed to track this down.
The only problem was that this document didn't seem to exist anywhere. I obtained a copy of Conduct Unbecoming by Randy Shilts, which examines the history of homosexuality in the U.S. Military. This book did have a couple of quotes from the Crittenden Report, but nothing more than that. Failing to make any headway here, I plowed through many online databases from both my public and university libraries, trying every possible combination of keywords I could think of. Nothing worked. I even tried various government sites, including the Library of Congress.
After several days of this, I was willing to admit defeat. I then tried a general search using the keywords "Homosexuality" and "Military" at some random government site. To my complete suprise, this found something, a published compilation of government documents printed by DIANE Publishing in 1993. Included in the contents was The Crittenden Report. How this eluded all of my previous searches, I do not know. Looking through my library's Prospector Catalogue, I found this exact book, ironically located at the Auraria Campus, where I had gone to college for four years. I was a little ticked off, mainly since I had previously searched both the Prospector and the Auraria catalogues, with no success.
But at this point I was happy enough to simply find it. I ordered it from Prospector and it was delivered into my hands soon afterwards. This afternoon I have been scanning in the pages for my future reference. I may end up putting it online, to prevent occurences such as this from happening again. I will also probably end up writing an Angry Rant about the whole ordeal.
I did also update this site several weeks prior, but hadn't bothered to upload the changes until now. With the release of New X-Men #42, I updated the Victor Stats accordingly. I also updated my Comic Spreadsheet and my Pull List.
A couple months ago I was clicking around in Wikipedia, when I turned to their vast number of pages about the history of homosexuality. To my utter suprise, I discovered the existance of a document I had never heard of before, called The Crittenden Report. This report was created in 1957 for the United States Navy, and for many years afterwards was suppressed. Knowing that this would be an invaluable resource in my comic book research, I vowed to track this down.
The only problem was that this document didn't seem to exist anywhere. I obtained a copy of Conduct Unbecoming by Randy Shilts, which examines the history of homosexuality in the U.S. Military. This book did have a couple of quotes from the Crittenden Report, but nothing more than that. Failing to make any headway here, I plowed through many online databases from both my public and university libraries, trying every possible combination of keywords I could think of. Nothing worked. I even tried various government sites, including the Library of Congress.
After several days of this, I was willing to admit defeat. I then tried a general search using the keywords "Homosexuality" and "Military" at some random government site. To my complete suprise, this found something, a published compilation of government documents printed by DIANE Publishing in 1993. Included in the contents was The Crittenden Report. How this eluded all of my previous searches, I do not know. Looking through my library's Prospector Catalogue, I found this exact book, ironically located at the Auraria Campus, where I had gone to college for four years. I was a little ticked off, mainly since I had previously searched both the Prospector and the Auraria catalogues, with no success.
But at this point I was happy enough to simply find it. I ordered it from Prospector and it was delivered into my hands soon afterwards. This afternoon I have been scanning in the pages for my future reference. I may end up putting it online, to prevent occurences such as this from happening again. I will also probably end up writing an Angry Rant about the whole ordeal.
I did also update this site several weeks prior, but hadn't bothered to upload the changes until now. With the release of New X-Men #42, I updated the Victor Stats accordingly. I also updated my Comic Spreadsheet and my Pull List.
9-16-07: MyComicShop.com Reprise
About two weeks ago I placed a large order with the online comic book store MyComicShop.com, run by Lone Star Comics out of Texas. I did this mainly since they had a considerable run of Detective Comics for very cheap, as well as a ten percent off sale on those same comics. With some trepidation (since I had never used their online store before) I ordered 63 comics. They arrived last Tuesday,
5 1/2 inches of comic joy
and I have been organizing, catologuing, and reading them since. The stack of comics is over 5 inches tall.
I was specifically wondering how the comics would be packaged. Some stores like Newkadia package each comic in a sealed sleeve and backboard, while others such as Mile High Comics leave out the backboard altogether. The comics I ordered this time did not arrive in individual sleeves or backboards, which was unfortunate. However, all of the comics were in good condition, with no tears, spine rolls, or other issues that could have arisen from having been stored with no boards or sleeves. I was also impressed by the very sturdy packaging the comics arrived in. As seen in the photo to the above right, the comics were bundled in groups of about 15, placed between cardboard supports and wrapped together. None of the other stores I tried used this many supports with their comics. On the whole I will probably use them again, especially since they have some very good deals. My only qualm is that I have to order over 50 dollars of stuff to get free shipping, and that it seems to take them a day or two longer to ship than other stores.
Because of this latest purchase, I have updated my Comic Collection Spreadsheet once more. I have also consequently updated my Pull List, reflecting the 50 issues of Detective Comics I bought. This major purchase forced me to get some sleeves and boards at my local comic book store, where I also grabbed some of the new releases, including X-Men #202, which features the New X-Men cast. Victor also appears, and I updated the Victor Stats to reflect this. I noticed that he did not have his freak arm in this issue, which makes me ponder continuity issues.
9-5-07: The Angry Rant That Never Happened
By all rights I should be writing an Angry Rant right now about my latest computer experience. But it never happened. I have long known that my computer has needed a massive memory upgrade,
It worked. That's weird...
since it came with a paltry 512 megabytes that didn't do much when I had multiple programs open while editing several hundred megabyte photos in Photoshop. This upgrade from 512 Megs to 2.5 Gigabytes could have been an apocalyptic experience that would shatter my faith in humanity yet again, but that did not happen.
Nothing exploded, or was broken, or couldn't be installed in my computer. It is truely surreal. Everything worked just as it should, from purchasing the RAM sticks at CompUSA, to installing them at home. My computer is now running (slightly) faster, so I suppose I got my 150 dollars worth. I was a little scared when hearing about CompUSA's return policy on RAM, which amounts to "if it's open, too bad". But luckily I did not need to deal with that, since everything worked perfectly. I am a little freaked out about this.
To actually provide some content to this site, I have finally imported all of my Scholarly Essays from the old version of this site. These are the select few essays and research papers I wrote while in college that have some redeeming qualities about them.
9-3-07: MyComicShop.com
Multiple things have happened since I last updated. About half a month ago I purchased my latest stack of comics, and consequently have updated my Pull List. Of particular interest was New X-Men #41, and I have updated my Victor Stats accordingly. Of course, those updates were last month, and I deemed them too small to warrant a front page news entry.
I have long been thinking about how to reorganize my Comics List. To put it simply, I have not yet discovered an easy solution, but in the meantime I have decided to just put up my entire Excel Spreadsheet of my current collection. This will have to do until I get a database solution up and running.
Anyway, as the title of this post suggests, I have taken the initiative and just purchased many more comics from another online retailer. Mycomicshop.com is run by Lonestar comics out of Texas, and I have been contemplating using their online store for nearly a year now. I have been a little wary of buying from them, mainly because the Free Shipping option requires purchasing fifty dollars of stuff, which is more expensive than the shipping option for MileHighComics.com. Last week, however, I went and signed up for their e-mail "member" discounts, having been tempted by several cheap issues of Detective Comics I had been browsing through. On Saturday I received an e-mail informing me of the latest sales, which included ten percent off all DC comics from 1990 onward. This spurred me into action. The issues I had been looking at were the early nineties issues of Detective Comics, which were currently priced at around 88 cents an issue. With the discount, that fell to 79 cents an issue, which was just too good a deal to pass up. The ultimate result of all this is that I purchased 62 issues, including 53 issues of Detective Comics and several more Batman issues. If all goes well, they should arrive in a week and a half.
On a more technical note, I have been restructuring the news update portion of this site. At this point I have redesigned the main page and updates page to pull data from the same news file. Thus when posting a news update to the site, I only need to update one single file, and no longer need to cut and paste old updates from the main page over to the updates page. Readers of this site (all two of you) will not notice anything different, but this change will help me keep my sanity for several weeks more. This solution is not perfect, but I am willing to overlook the few flaws. On the plus side, this has corrected whatever Firefox bug kept screwing up the hover effects on the links in the first news update on the front page. I was never able to figure out why those were broken. But this content shift has corrected all that. Huzzah.
About two weeks ago I placed a large order with the online comic book store MyComicShop.com, run by Lone Star Comics out of Texas. I did this mainly since they had a considerable run of Detective Comics for very cheap, as well as a ten percent off sale on those same comics. With some trepidation (since I had never used their online store before) I ordered 63 comics. They arrived last Tuesday,
5 1/2 inches of comic joy
Because of this latest purchase, I have updated my Comic Collection Spreadsheet once more. I have also consequently updated my Pull List, reflecting the 50 issues of Detective Comics I bought. This major purchase forced me to get some sleeves and boards at my local comic book store, where I also grabbed some of the new releases, including X-Men #202, which features the New X-Men cast. Victor also appears, and I updated the Victor Stats to reflect this. I noticed that he did not have his freak arm in this issue, which makes me ponder continuity issues.
9-5-07: The Angry Rant That Never Happened
By all rights I should be writing an Angry Rant right now about my latest computer experience. But it never happened. I have long known that my computer has needed a massive memory upgrade,
It worked. That's weird...
To actually provide some content to this site, I have finally imported all of my Scholarly Essays from the old version of this site. These are the select few essays and research papers I wrote while in college that have some redeeming qualities about them.
9-3-07: MyComicShop.com
Multiple things have happened since I last updated. About half a month ago I purchased my latest stack of comics, and consequently have updated my Pull List. Of particular interest was New X-Men #41, and I have updated my Victor Stats accordingly. Of course, those updates were last month, and I deemed them too small to warrant a front page news entry.
I have long been thinking about how to reorganize my Comics List. To put it simply, I have not yet discovered an easy solution, but in the meantime I have decided to just put up my entire Excel Spreadsheet of my current collection. This will have to do until I get a database solution up and running.
Anyway, as the title of this post suggests, I have taken the initiative and just purchased many more comics from another online retailer. Mycomicshop.com is run by Lonestar comics out of Texas, and I have been contemplating using their online store for nearly a year now. I have been a little wary of buying from them, mainly because the Free Shipping option requires purchasing fifty dollars of stuff, which is more expensive than the shipping option for MileHighComics.com. Last week, however, I went and signed up for their e-mail "member" discounts, having been tempted by several cheap issues of Detective Comics I had been browsing through. On Saturday I received an e-mail informing me of the latest sales, which included ten percent off all DC comics from 1990 onward. This spurred me into action. The issues I had been looking at were the early nineties issues of Detective Comics, which were currently priced at around 88 cents an issue. With the discount, that fell to 79 cents an issue, which was just too good a deal to pass up. The ultimate result of all this is that I purchased 62 issues, including 53 issues of Detective Comics and several more Batman issues. If all goes well, they should arrive in a week and a half.
On a more technical note, I have been restructuring the news update portion of this site. At this point I have redesigned the main page and updates page to pull data from the same news file. Thus when posting a news update to the site, I only need to update one single file, and no longer need to cut and paste old updates from the main page over to the updates page. Readers of this site (all two of you) will not notice anything different, but this change will help me keep my sanity for several weeks more. This solution is not perfect, but I am willing to overlook the few flaws. On the plus side, this has corrected whatever Firefox bug kept screwing up the hover effects on the links in the first news update on the front page. I was never able to figure out why those were broken. But this content shift has corrected all that. Huzzah.
8-7-07:The Harry Potter Review
I actually had this review completed several days ago, but I have been too lazy to do anything with it. But now I have actually taken the initiative to post my full review of it. Oh. I should mention that review (along with all my reviews) contains massive spoilers for the book. Deal with it. In case you are too lazy to read the sizable chunk of text beyond the link, let's say I was rather unimpressed. Beyond that, I haven't actually done much with this site. I added in another older book review to my review archive, and I updated my comic book pull list to accurately display the comics I purchased last month. I still haven't figured out a database solution for my comic collection yet. It will happen eventually.
I actually had this review completed several days ago, but I have been too lazy to do anything with it. But now I have actually taken the initiative to post my full review of it. Oh. I should mention that review (along with all my reviews) contains massive spoilers for the book. Deal with it. In case you are too lazy to read the sizable chunk of text beyond the link, let's say I was rather unimpressed. Beyond that, I haven't actually done much with this site. I added in another older book review to my review archive, and I updated my comic book pull list to accurately display the comics I purchased last month. I still haven't figured out a database solution for my comic collection yet. It will happen eventually.
7-18-07: Success With MySQL!
I have finally achieved what I thought was impossible: I managed to make PHP and MySQL play nicely with each other! It took me three days of pure agony, but I finally figured out the configuration problem and and I am now able to use PHP to interact with MySQL databases on my computer. I am extremely happy that I have finally succeeded. True to form, I have already written an angry rant about the experience.
Leaving that horrific experience, you may notice there is a new subsection to this site. I have began a new Book Review section, since I am physically capable of reading books that do not have pictures in them. I have reviewed The Terror by author Dan Simmons, since I read it while on vacation last month. I also have included several older book reviews I wrote while still in high school. I will include more of these in the coming days.
On to comics. I did hit up the comic book store today, with one and only one goal in mind: New X-Men #40. I did manage to acquire it, and it was fairly awesome. I did enjoy the extended Victor scenes, and I have updated the Victor Stats accordingly. I am still unsure about his freak arm, but it came off better than I thought it might. I have also updated my pull list to reflect my new purchases, but my comic list remains unchanged. I am still trying to figure out a database solution, especially since MySQL and PHP are working. Hooray for that.
It has been a considerable amount of time since I last updated this site with anything worthwhile. Part of this has been because I only returned from a two week vacation last week, and am still in the process of getting back into the routine of work and such. Anyway, part of my delay in updating was because I was experimenting with MySQL.
Now, I converted all the XHTML pages on this site to PHP back in March, but that did not mean that I had PHP actually installed on my computer. Rather, I took the laborous process of typing the PHP code, uploading it to the server this site is hosted on, and then testing it. Luckily I did not use much PHP, and consequently had very few errors to troubleshoot. However, I am now contemplating the incorporation of a MySQL database into this website. The reason for this is simple: my comic collection.
After my purchases last week, I now have over 1,000 comic books in my collection (1,002, to be exact). If you look at my Comic Page, however, you will notice that it has not been updated for several months. This is intentional. It is simply too much work to enter all my comic book data into the Spreadsheet I use as a catalogue, and then enter the information again into my website page. Also, with 1000 issues, that list is getting too long for a single page, and trying to separate it into several pages manually would be Hell.
So I took the leap and installed the Apache HTTP server, PHP 5, and MySQL Server 5 on my computer. They all worked perfectly. By themselves. When I tried to use PHP to retrieve information from the MySQL database, however, all Hell broke loose. Apparently all the MySQL extensions were removed from PHP 5, and I now have to configure it all manually.
Victor and His Freak Arm
Like the title of this post explains, it has been two days of pure agony, and I still have not succeeded. I will probably write an angry rant about this experience in the near future.
But enough of that. Let's talk comics. New X-Men 40 arrives on Wednesday, and I will buy it on Wednesday. I have finally updated the Victor Stats for issue 39, and when I read the next issue I will update it for #40. While I am exited that Victor is getting more facetime (including two covers in a row with issues 42 and 43), I have not decided about his new arm. As you can see in the image on the right, I have already dubbed it the "Freak Arm". But who knows? Perhaps when I read issue 40, it will be extremely well done, and will make perfect sense, and everyone will love the new Freak Arm.
I hope.
Apple recently released their Safari web browser for the Windows operating system. This makes me very happy, for I now have another browser to test my websites in. I wasn't worried at all about what I would find, for I already code to web standards. Much as I predicted, all my sites worked perfectly.
I took this opportunity to play around with a couple of Cascading Style Sheet properties that are only supported by Safari. The results are cool, even if they are currently limited to one single browser. I also added in another Coding Test, this one creating simple navigation boxes for my Site Archives. The test worked out great, and I have already implemented the design on my aforementioned archives. I think it looks pretty slick, and it uses only a minimal amount of XHTML.
I have not neglected my comics, either. At the very beginning of June I purchased several more issues, pushing my collection to 966 issues. I have updated the Pull List accordingly. Supposedly New X-Men #39 comes out tomorrow. I shall attempt to purchase it so I can discover Victor's fate.
It has apparently been two months since I last updated this page. I know that I have updated my comic collection page at least once since early March, but I did not feel the need to add in a news item. Anyway, I have graduated from college with excellent grades (Summa Cum Laude with Honors), and now must discover some job that will hire a history major.
To keep my mind off of the prospect of future work, I added several dozen comic books to my collection, pushing it to nearly 950 issues. I have also updated my Comic pull list accordingly. One of the comics I purchased was New X-Men issue #38, which has some serious Victor love. I have consequently updated the Victor Statistics.
Lonely Gods, the sister site to this that I developed in conjunction with my undergraduate Honors Thesis, has also undergone several significant updates, mainly because I have completed my thesis. Both sections on Women in Batman Comics and Homosexuals in Comics are now essentially complete, with many images and over two hundred endnotes. In the coming days or weeks, I will probably post a PDF of my complete essay to the website for others to read, since some people have asked for it. It is worth a look.
I have just completed a two day long conversion of this website from XHTML to PHP. I did this specifically because my right menu was getting out of hand, and I needed something that could make managing it a bit easier. It was a bit of a pain to do, especially since I decided to tweak the positioning in all of my stylesheets and this led to me having to figure out exactly why the bottom margins wouldn't work. After about two hours of glaring at my code, I finally figured out the reason: my main content DIV had relative positioning, which threw off the height (and consequently, the bottom margin) of the containing DIV. I am glad I figured that out. Only took me two hours...
With the conversion completed, you may now notice some new sections in the right menu; specifically my new Creative Writings section. It is rather sparse right now, but in the coming weeks/months I will gradually add more cool stuff there.
But I have not been neglecting my comics, either! I hit up the local comic book store with a friend of mine, and I added twenty two issues to my collection. This pushes my collection over the 800 mark, for anyone keeping score.
There may be one or two final kinks I am still working out with the new stylesheets and PHP code, but the site should be working almost perfectly.
The Joker Must Have a Loose Tooth...
This purchase pushes my comic collection up to 781 issues. The newest issue of New X-Men features Victor!, and I have updated the Victor Statistics accordingly. But I have done more than just buy comics. I have also been playing around with some website designs, and I have produced another XHTML test, this one dealing with quick rollovers used in a menu. I actually made this one last month, but haven't gotten a chance to upload it until now.
And no, I haven't finished my article on Gay Characters in Marvel Comics yet. Deal with it.
While reading through this last batch of comics I purchased,
I noticed something that fascinated me. The scene in question, seen to the right, is exceedingly similar to something else I read a while back. I have begun an article detailing my observations. It is not yet complete, but I have made a good start.
Finally, I have also added a new section to my portfolio, detailing my accomplishments with graphic and logo design. Not much is there yet, but it will expand in the coming days and/or weeks.
Oh, and looking through the forums at ComixFan, it seems that my article on Victor has been discovered. Hmmm. Perhaps that means that I should actually finish it one of these days...
Read Older Site News
I have finally achieved what I thought was impossible: I managed to make PHP and MySQL play nicely with each other! It took me three days of pure agony, but I finally figured out the configuration problem and and I am now able to use PHP to interact with MySQL databases on my computer. I am extremely happy that I have finally succeeded. True to form, I have already written an angry rant about the experience.
Leaving that horrific experience, you may notice there is a new subsection to this site. I have began a new Book Review section, since I am physically capable of reading books that do not have pictures in them. I have reviewed The Terror by author Dan Simmons, since I read it while on vacation last month. I also have included several older book reviews I wrote while still in high school. I will include more of these in the coming days.
On to comics. I did hit up the comic book store today, with one and only one goal in mind: New X-Men #40. I did manage to acquire it, and it was fairly awesome. I did enjoy the extended Victor scenes, and I have updated the Victor Stats accordingly. I am still unsure about his freak arm, but it came off better than I thought it might. I have also updated my pull list to reflect my new purchases, but my comic list remains unchanged. I am still trying to figure out a database solution, especially since MySQL and PHP are working. Hooray for that.
7-16-07: PHP + MySQL = Hell
It has been a considerable amount of time since I last updated this site with anything worthwhile. Part of this has been because I only returned from a two week vacation last week, and am still in the process of getting back into the routine of work and such. Anyway, part of my delay in updating was because I was experimenting with MySQL.
Now, I converted all the XHTML pages on this site to PHP back in March, but that did not mean that I had PHP actually installed on my computer. Rather, I took the laborous process of typing the PHP code, uploading it to the server this site is hosted on, and then testing it. Luckily I did not use much PHP, and consequently had very few errors to troubleshoot. However, I am now contemplating the incorporation of a MySQL database into this website. The reason for this is simple: my comic collection.
After my purchases last week, I now have over 1,000 comic books in my collection (1,002, to be exact). If you look at my Comic Page, however, you will notice that it has not been updated for several months. This is intentional. It is simply too much work to enter all my comic book data into the Spreadsheet I use as a catalogue, and then enter the information again into my website page. Also, with 1000 issues, that list is getting too long for a single page, and trying to separate it into several pages manually would be Hell.
So I took the leap and installed the Apache HTTP server, PHP 5, and MySQL Server 5 on my computer. They all worked perfectly. By themselves. When I tried to use PHP to retrieve information from the MySQL database, however, all Hell broke loose. Apparently all the MySQL extensions were removed from PHP 5, and I now have to configure it all manually.
Victor and His Freak Arm
But enough of that. Let's talk comics. New X-Men 40 arrives on Wednesday, and I will buy it on Wednesday. I have finally updated the Victor Stats for issue 39, and when I read the next issue I will update it for #40. While I am exited that Victor is getting more facetime (including two covers in a row with issues 42 and 43), I have not decided about his new arm. As you can see in the image on the right, I have already dubbed it the "Freak Arm". But who knows? Perhaps when I read issue 40, it will be extremely well done, and will make perfect sense, and everyone will love the new Freak Arm.
I hope.
6-12-07: Safari Browser Testing
Apple recently released their Safari web browser for the Windows operating system. This makes me very happy, for I now have another browser to test my websites in. I wasn't worried at all about what I would find, for I already code to web standards. Much as I predicted, all my sites worked perfectly.
I took this opportunity to play around with a couple of Cascading Style Sheet properties that are only supported by Safari. The results are cool, even if they are currently limited to one single browser. I also added in another Coding Test, this one creating simple navigation boxes for my Site Archives. The test worked out great, and I have already implemented the design on my aforementioned archives. I think it looks pretty slick, and it uses only a minimal amount of XHTML.
I have not neglected my comics, either. At the very beginning of June I purchased several more issues, pushing my collection to 966 issues. I have updated the Pull List accordingly. Supposedly New X-Men #39 comes out tomorrow. I shall attempt to purchase it so I can discover Victor's fate.
5-13-07: School is out forever.
It has apparently been two months since I last updated this page. I know that I have updated my comic collection page at least once since early March, but I did not feel the need to add in a news item. Anyway, I have graduated from college with excellent grades (Summa Cum Laude with Honors), and now must discover some job that will hire a history major.
To keep my mind off of the prospect of future work, I added several dozen comic books to my collection, pushing it to nearly 950 issues. I have also updated my Comic pull list accordingly. One of the comics I purchased was New X-Men issue #38, which has some serious Victor love. I have consequently updated the Victor Statistics.
Lonely Gods, the sister site to this that I developed in conjunction with my undergraduate Honors Thesis, has also undergone several significant updates, mainly because I have completed my thesis. Both sections on Women in Batman Comics and Homosexuals in Comics are now essentially complete, with many images and over two hundred endnotes. In the coming days or weeks, I will probably post a PDF of my complete essay to the website for others to read, since some people have asked for it. It is worth a look.
3-3-07: The Conversion
I have just completed a two day long conversion of this website from XHTML to PHP. I did this specifically because my right menu was getting out of hand, and I needed something that could make managing it a bit easier. It was a bit of a pain to do, especially since I decided to tweak the positioning in all of my stylesheets and this led to me having to figure out exactly why the bottom margins wouldn't work. After about two hours of glaring at my code, I finally figured out the reason: my main content DIV had relative positioning, which threw off the height (and consequently, the bottom margin) of the containing DIV. I am glad I figured that out. Only took me two hours...
With the conversion completed, you may now notice some new sections in the right menu; specifically my new Creative Writings section. It is rather sparse right now, but in the coming weeks/months I will gradually add more cool stuff there.
But I have not been neglecting my comics, either! I hit up the local comic book store with a friend of mine, and I added twenty two issues to my collection. This pushes my collection over the 800 mark, for anyone keeping score.
There may be one or two final kinks I am still working out with the new stylesheets and PHP code, but the site should be working almost perfectly.
2-14-07: That Special Day...
I certainly hope all of you know what special day it is: Comic Book Day! Several of my favorite titles went on sale today, including New X-Men, New Excalibur, and most importantly, Batman. I was particularly anticipating this issue, for it features the apocalyptic return of The Joker! I have devoured the issue and have posted my extensive review of it on this site.The Joker Must Have a Loose Tooth...
And no, I haven't finished my article on Gay Characters in Marvel Comics yet. Deal with it.
1-14-07: Seem Familiar?
I just realized that this is the first update for the new year. I also realized that I haven't updated this site for over a month, even though I have been to the comic book store at least twice in that time period. Well, that is corrected (and I also went to the comic book store once again) and my updated Comic Collection is out, with 772 issues!While reading through this last batch of comics I purchased,
Finally, I have also added a new section to my portfolio, detailing my accomplishments with graphic and logo design. Not much is there yet, but it will expand in the coming days and/or weeks.
Oh, and looking through the forums at ComixFan, it seems that my article on Victor has been discovered. Hmmm. Perhaps that means that I should actually finish it one of these days...
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