I should write one of these things, since that itself may constitute a Sign of Ragnarok, or something.

So. The date being 20060606, even in most of the US now, we're within a matter of hours of 7th June 2006, at which point we'll have more eschatological fucktards to laugh at.

For those not keeping up: various LARPers like to predict the end of the world on certain unimportant dates. Like anytime in the year AD666, at the end of the year 999, at the beginning of the eleventh century on 1st January 1001, and so on, eventually being wrong on 1st January 2000, 1st January 2001, and--in a matter of hours--6th June 2006. Because, see, notwithstanding countless fuckups over the last couple thousand years actually making today something more like October 2011, worldending bullshit always perfers to occur on convenient Julian dates.

The simpler version is that people are still morons.

In any case, the next mainstream failed prophesy can be laughed at after 21st December 2012, beyond which the Mayans didn't bother plotting out their DayRunner. We've got some time.

Anyway: what else is new....

I went out and saw XMen tonight. Granting that the last issue I bought was #213, you can guess that I don't care all that much. Though I do find it amusing to note that, now, as of the third film, they've finally got the entire original team together. More or less. Even if half of them died in the film. Or at least poofed. Yes: there's an epilogue after the credits.

Now I just wonder, since X3 was essentially Dark Phoenix, whether X4 is likely to be Age of Apocalypse or Days of Future Past. Or neither. If there's an X4 at all. Probably, there will be.

On a largely unrelated note, I found a decent actionfigure of Carnage at a comicstore here in town. Then I bought it. Because: duh. Except that led directly to having to explain what Carnage was to Hunter. And secondarily why Marvel suck by federal law.

In the end, I figured it was simpler to hit eBay.com and buy up SpiderMan 361-363 and the entire Maximum Carnage crossover mess. I already had Secret Wars, since those came out before XMen 213, when I pretty well abandoned comics until hitting eBay.com for Carnage stuff.

For those of you more like Hunter, who have no idea what's going on here, but might find it interesting to know that Marvel once created an actual badguy before figuring that out and declawing the bastard before he could remain cool: the story is fairly simple. Twenty years ago or so, someone at Marvel thought it would sell comics if they took every character in the marvelverse and sent them off to Battleworld to amuse the Beyonder. The Beyonder itself was this spoiled brat of a moron--essentially Q, from Star Trek, without a lot of universal knowledge and cunning. If that's not redundant.

On Battleworld, the marvelverse split into three factions: the good, the bad, and the mutants. Mostly. And they spent the next year trying to kill each other, because...it's Marvel.

In the eighth issue, Spidey, having got beat up and shredded, needed to replace what remained of his costume. One of the other guys had already done the same thing, and mentioned that this neat alien vending machine could produce something for him. Spidey went off and got a new unitard.

Stuff ensued, and everyone got back to Earth. There was also Secret Wars II, but we won't discuss that travesty here.

Over time, it developed that Spidey's suit wasn't technically a suit at all, but a symbiotic lifeform, which eventually snuck off and became Venom. And that brings us into more mainstream events.

Venom was the hybrid of the alien and Brock, who hated Spidey, but, being in the marvelverse, couldn't do much about that.

Later still, Venom encountered Kasady: a serial killer. In the marvelverse. Because someone forgot to bounce it off Stan Lee, who tends not to let anyone actually die in the marvelverse [in point of fact, the marvelverse even contains Death, which is an anthropomorphic entity in a hoodie].

The alien spawned a second alien, which merged with Kasady at the genetic level. The result was Carnage. And the result of Carnage was that the thing dismantled everyone in the building within a few pages.

So. Carnage was cool. At least until it got declawed. And, having last seen that back in 1992 in Corey's basement, I've now got the comics to prove it. So that's good.

And, speaking of onestop shopping....

So, I like toys. Not just actionfigures, though those count more as toys than anything else I like. Also, I like shiny electronic stuff. In most cases.

And, in most cases, I go buy new shiny electronic stuff before anyone else hears about it. Usually.

So, in 1998, I bought a shiny electronic MiniDisc Recorder. Which is cool. And which, eight years later, still works pretty well for an $800 walkman from 1998. Even if it is a bit scratched up now.

The problem is that the newer MDRs suck. Which is fine, since mine doesn't. What's not fine is that the newer ones don't suck entirely. Hunter got one which, though it mostly sucks, has got this more modern ability to compress the hell out of anything you'd record to it, and also to send the compressed stuff through a USB cable; mine, on the other hand, records for seventy-four minutes through a headphonejack. Which is okay, but slightly annoying.

So, I went shopping.

As of now, I've reportedly got both an iPod and a Sony PSP en route from California, somewhere in the nation. Presumably west of here. To be honest, all I really know about these things is that they're shiny and they're electronic. I do know that I got the 4gig iPod Nano, since I saw no logical reason to get a 60gig iPod Video when I'm also getting a PSP. If only because some twit thought it'd be funny to build this dangerously advanced sixty-gigabyte semicomputer, which plays music and films in the general mass of a Zippo, with a 4:3 screen. The PSP is 16:9, like my television, my computer monitor, and my field of vision. So that's a match.

Sadly, there's not much else to mention about those yet, since they're still in transit. I should have them by Thursday, if the world doesn't end.

I'll have them by Thursday.

Oh yeah. Another couple bits of news. Though a couple are a bit old by now.

First, I broke down and got a shiny electronic MySpace.com account. It's at http://MySpace.com/wastedinc I think. I'm not entirely certain why I got a MySpace.com account; but, evidently, I did.

Second, as mentioned on MySpace.com, I read through Damnitology for the first time in six years, and noticed that it was probably a good thing that I've never released it. Not that it's exactly bad; it's just not what it actually should have been. So, I scrapped it. And, now, I'm in the process of rewriting it so it can be what it should be after all. There's no ETA on that yet, except before the end of the world.

Third, and half the reason Damnitology won't be ready instantly, I got tired of trying to think around FinalDraft and backed away, instead writing out Subheroes as a novel. Because that's what I do. I should have done this in the first place [in a way, I did; but I'll get to that in a minute] since everyone currently involved in Subheroes is just as capable of working from a novel as they'd be working from filmscripts. Not that I couldn't write it all out, and then port it over to filmscripts too. We'll see if that's actually necessary once I'm done getting the basic story written out.

About the original version...that's not easy to track down anymore. Because, technically, this is the original version, from 1995, before it was really called Subheroes. I guess that's its own backstory.

1995. Swyndle has this idea for a cartoon. Which was actually the idea for a comicbook. What counts is that he's got this great idea for The Unexplainables, but, apart from coming up with decent characters and situations, can't really write things. Enter me, wot can write things. And we end up with enough written stuff to carry the show/comic for its first couple years.

One episode happened to involve the subheroes. Which were basically the Slackerhood of Mutants. A satire of the marvelverse, really. So: great. That was an episode, and we moved on to the next.

Except that, to date, The Unexplainables have never really happened.

1998. Partly because The Unexplainables have never really happened, I come up with Subheroes.

In 1998, the idea was to have a couple of guys lurking in this interstellar truckstop countless parsecs from Earth. Now it's more of a satire of anyone lurking in any restaurant in the middle of the night.

While that had potential, it never really went that far.

2001. New plan. Subheroes could be set on Earth, in a world infested by zombies. Because it's me. And because it's zombies.

2002. Subheroes evolves into Deadache, which has its own reasons for remaining in preproduction as of 2006.

2006. I remember the subheroic episode of The Unexplainables I'd written, factor in the interstellar truckstop, push the zombies into a corner somewhere, and realise that I'd had the basic story all along: a couple guys against the backdrop of this diner, in a galaxy of slackerhoodlums. And that, oddly enough, makes everything easy again.

Except for fucking around with the formatting in FinalDraft, returning me instead to Microsuck Word where I can just type out page after page of normal storyline.

So, I'm working on that these days. And on Damnitology. And, of course, on Deophagy, to some degree. And that's why I get about two actual things finished per decade anymore.

I'm sure all that'll change once I'm able to play GrandTheftAuto on a PSP anywhere in the world, though. How could that be a distraction, after all.

More later....

Forgot to add tags for this stupid entry.