agenda: comics - ice cream - doom3 - el boom

i've been an avid comic book reader since 1992 (the first issue i ever bought was a doozy: uncanny x-men #294 - part 1 of the x-cutioner's song. this introduced me to cable, stryfe, apocalypse, the importance of jean grey and scott summers, time travel, cloning, etc.). i was hooked from then till high school...around 1996 when i was busy with theatre and video games. once my freshman year in college came around, i had regained interest and increased my collection from two boxes to 10 or 11 boxes. i also expanded my reading from exclusively x-related titles to everything: dc, vertigo, image, wildstorm, top cow, oni, marvel. comics became an addiction, pretty much. i started buying again in 1999 and stopped right around my graduation from college in may 2003. the reason i call it an addiction is that i was going to the comic shop once a week and spending somewhere between $50-100. a. week. so yeah, i'd call that an addiction. i would stock up on bags and boards, get the weekly stack on my friday drive home, and use my usually free friday nights to read all the comics i bought and then bag, board, and organize them in the boxes.

as you may have guessed from my previous post, i'm back on the wagon (or is it off the wagon?). i've caught up with everything that's been going on in the world of the x-men and i've been reading others that i'd heard about, but never got around to reading. mainly vertigo books, but there are some indies here and there. books like 100 bullets, y - the last man, lucifer, hellblazer, anything by grant morrison, garth ennis, or warren ellis...the latter especially. i recently finished a series of his called transmetropolitan. if you like comics or scifi or both, you should read it...it's one of the best comics i've read in a while. he has enough techno-jargon to interest the scifi junkie and the actual story is interesting and well done, so you want to find out what the main character, a "guerilla" journalist named spider jerusalem, will do next in his search for the truth. the artwork is highly detailed and funny, fitting right in with the scripting of the story. i'm serious, you should check it out. i don't think you'd be disappointed by it.

around my sophomore year in college (2000), it was determined that i had developed lactose intolerance. up to this point, i was a dairy fiend: milk, cheese, yogurt, ice cream...the works. i consumed it multiple times a day. ice cream is my weakness, though. in the 5 years of being lactose intolerant, the only thing i missed was ice cream. i could handle eating cheese (with pills that let me digest it) or drinking lactose-free milk (milk, not soy milk...that stuff tastes nasty), but there was nothing i could do about ice cream. until now, that is. a week or two ago, jessica and i were over at brad and shanna's (friends of ours) and shanna had made homemade ice cream sandwiches using lactose ice cream that she found. it turns out that it's real ice cream made by breyers, the best ice cream brand in my opinion. they add the enzyme that breaks down lactose into the ice cream and it's delicious. i can eat ice cream again and that makes me happy.

well, i don't think i mentioned that i finally got my machine up and running. it's brand new and running lean. now, i've had doom 3 for quite a while, but hadn't gotten a chance to play it...hardware lacking and all that. i fired it up the day after i set my computer back up and started playing. it's a nice game - great graphics, nothing special in gameplay/story. it's also intense and scary. this is a horror fps all the way. i'm wanting to finish it so i can start on half life 2. that's the game i'm really looking forward to.

news: i've designed a new wallpaper for my computer at home and you can check it out here (1600x1200). we have a new addition to the nodal-point blogs - el boom, a page for robby to post his adventures in houston. it's your standard plain design right now, but i have some design ideas in the works that should be applied soon. go read his site.