Good news! I finally finished the resizing of all the strips to a much more legible size. I think it’s making the page look better already and makes the comedy of errors putting them together worth it.
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Well I’m psyched. I just made my reservations for my trip back east for the twelve days of Christmas. I’d been putting it off for a while my excuse being I wanted to confirm a few last minute things before I decided exactly when I would leave. Of course that was mostly an excuse behind my usual foot dragging and so once I found out what I needed to know I was all out of excuses.
I’ve finally gotten the hang of using Expedia, or more accurately I’d gotten over my fear of it. A lot of these online stores, especially the ones involving large purchases make me nervous. It’s too easy to make a mistake. I still prefer using a travel agent for the simple reason of having some one to blame if anything went wrong. But as I said, I’d put it off too long and had to take the plunge.
Fortunately It all went off without a hitch, and my departure on December 20th is all set. The only thing resembling a mistake was my mother misreading the return time and thinking that I would be there until the 11th which would conflict with them going on their own trip on the 7th. After a brief panic, where I worried that I’d put down the wrong date. I realized the way Expedia printed the itinaray made January 6th 2011 look like January 11th at a very brief glance. Still I knew about the trip so I should have asked before I’d made the reservation thus avoiding a very close call.
But I digress
I always enjoy getting back east for the holidays. Christmas has a lot of emotional baggage for me. Perhaps it’s because the holiday is so culturally charged that it’s when I get an overwhelming sense of homesickness on top of that as one of the many “Seattle orphans” I find myself stuck in Seattle when everyone else has gone to their families. The fact that one is constantly reminded of this by the commercial overkill does not help either.
Because of all of these factors for my first couple of years living out west, Christmas was the season of getting slammed by depression. Over the years I’d found some ways to deal with it. Throwing a potluck for my friends who were also stranded (unfortunately poorly received or worse but that’s another story.) or finding “substitute rituals” the most successful being my annual Christmas specials on the strip. But ultimately the most successful way to get it all out of my system is to just go back home.
Christmas in New England is nice. I won’t say it’s Norman Rockwell nice but still it’s very nice. It’s the family network, the feeling of history, the REAL winter. It’s some thing I find very therapeutic and while I don’t have to do it every year, every once in a while helps a lot.
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So after many weeks of my friends in the know recommending it and even more weeks of being wowed by images of collapsing cities in the previews, I finally saw inception, and to put it completely bluntly… WOW.
To be honest I hadn’t the slightest idea what to expect. Sure I had heard said friends talk about it, while trying to avoid the spoilers, and because of this I knew it was about people going into a dream. But then so are several other movies I like such as Paprika and Dreamscape. So anyway I went with an open mind expecting something good and complex. It did not disappoint.
This has been a good year for Science Fiction. Whatever else we may think of Avatar, it reminded us that the genre can follow the level of complexity that we expect in the book, and it doesn’t have to be dumbed down for the masses. By this standard Inception followed up in spades.
Without blowing anything, and this film has plenty that I could blow, this was a movie that demands multiple viewings and I will have to get the DVD for so I can get all of the nuances eventually. It’s very refreshing to watch a film that challenges us, and does not hold our hand. A film that makes us wonder if anything is real and, if so, will we embrace the fantasy.
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Well everybody, the cast page is now up for everybody to see! Pretty much covers everybody with the exception of people who were merely unnamed cameos.
For the sake of clarity the definition of “main character” is anyone who has had more than fifty appearances in the strip.
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Well everybody welcome to the new improved Rhapsodies page. For the longest time the strip had been on a Joomla format which was not designed for graphics and so was not good for linking individual strips and didn’t play very well with search engines. Now that Rhapsodies is on a Comicpress format it will be easier to find the strip, make comments as well as subscribe on RSS.
So come on in and hope you all enjoy the ride.
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Well since it was such a nice summer day today I decided to stop vegetating at my usual haunts and go to the Seattle Arboretum with intent to do some watercolors. Unfortunately in my rush to get out of the house I forgot my water bottle so the initial plan was scrapped. I did get some nice photos and a sketch of some really cool broadleaf maples though.
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