(no subject)

Hm.... Woke up this morning with a mild headache, scratchy eyes, and a disinclination to get out of bed.

Pretty similar to the way I feel a lot of mornings.

If that's a hangover, it's a damned mild one. But somehow I sincerely doubt this constitutes a true hangover, with the splitting head, profound nausea, and wish to kill whoever invented that damned thing called daylight. ^_^ I'm feeling pretty darned good right now.


Going to go clean my room in a bit and read that Turtledove novel Tom-chan lent me. Ranting about the dreadful review Duane Dudek gave X2 will follow in a day or so.

(no subject)

What is it with webcomics?

So few of them seem to last any length of time.

So many start out with a bang, making you think you just might have stumbled across the next Sluggy Freelance, or next Megatokyo. Then they get bogged down in the abyss of lack of time on the creators' parts, like Diana of the Hunt. I'm going to miss Cute Fuzzy Thing and Diana, damn it. I have a feeling they're never going to see print again. Or the pitfall of really bad pacing, wherein it takes a dozen comics to finish the scene which would take all of five seconds in an anime. ::looks meaningfully at recent No Need For Bushido updates::

So very very many seem to end abruptly, leaving fans feeling oddly bereft, because the artists are having severe life difficulties. Not the run of the mill "I have a ton of classes these days, so I've decided the comic has to go to keep up" or "My kids are getting more active, so I need to chase them around more than I need to update a comic that makes no money for me". Nope, it seems like it's always because the artist is succumbing to the need to seek treatment for clinical depression, or is suddenly and excruciatingly jobless, or really angsty things like that.

::sigh::

I don't mean to suggest these people should continue to make comics when their lives are so stressed. Far from it. It just strikes me as wierd that so _many_ of the reasons for ending them are so tragic.

Writer's Block, a perfectly good, if really silly, comic, is now officially dead. It started out as a nice lil anime fan-comic, with a decent plot device and funny stuff. Then it got altered into something a bit strange, but still good. Now, it's dead. ::sigh::

Bitch-Slapped, which has a frigging COOL premise, to my mind, had several really promising opening comics. Now, unfortunately, it seems to be languishing in the Land of Intermittent Updates. I have a bad feeling it'll go the way of WB, since it's done by the former original artist of WB.

Amuse Me, a comic I found through the Links page of Bitch-Slapped, has died on account of the heavily angsty reasons listed above. ::sigh:: I wasn't heavily addicted to it, but it was cute and funny, and I liked strolling by there every so often. I feel bad for the artist, who's clearly going through a rough time.

Amethyst Angel's entire web archive, which is quite understandably not getting much done to it these days because the poor woman lost her job with very little notice, and is now scrambling to find something else, _any_thing else. I think it's a frigging miracle she didn't simply decide to archive it all into CDs and then yank her web presence to save money.

I just wish there was something I could do about all of it.

Creative people, who bring joy and humor to the world, are something to be encouraged and nurtured. There are FAR too many of the sort who kill people's minds and souls and senses of humor. I hate knowing that so many of the people who have the talents to counter-act all that are suffering, and are having difficulties doing what they love best.

:;sigh::

I'm still semi-bouncy, but not quite as sparkly as I was before.