Mini-Slog and Miscellany

I’m sitting outside in a lovely breeze, reminded of how wildly the weather
fluctuates this time of year — and how nice it is to sit outside in a lovely breeze.

The laptop says it’s 86° at nearly 6:30 p.m., which the stifling heat up in my bedroom reflects, but I only just realized that the storm windows probably aren’t coming down again. Hefting the air conditioner into place seems premature, though.

I’ve had a little more trouble restoring the blog after the other day’s sabotage than anticipated. Of course, I should’ve anticipated it — Blogger often doesn’t work as planned. The ability to export the entire code of your blog to your hard drive, however, makes for a decent bulwark against hackers and the service’s own glitches. Not long ago, I realized that I should be doing so regularly in addition to saving the HTML of individual posts. When my blog was vandalized Apr. 1st, the entire thing was deleted, but fortunately I’d saved the code to my laptop the night before. All the posts and even the comments were preserved; while the sidebar widgets unfortunately were not, they’re easy enough to set up. My biggest complaint by far is whatever bugs in Google
or Blogger security allowed this hackery to begin with — quite a concern since my password was total nonsense and changed frequently.

Let me wrap up this mini-slog — “slog” being, as faithful readers know, my
contracted coinage for a “state of the blog” report — with one more reassurance that this thing isn’t going anywhere except maybe, eventually, to another service either in addition to or instead of its presence here on Blogger. I’m now leaning more towards TypePad than WordPress, although a mirror on the latter (not yet public) already exists, but if you have amicus briefs to file on behalf of either I remain interested. The only difference you should notice once all my old posts are republished is that I’ve left out the Cover Album and First Friday posts again; I’m keeping the rest of the Empaneled posts reminiscing about my life in comics. I really need to better prioritize my energies, and holding that other material back for a blog based on my professional writing on the subject feels like the right move. Some posts that were down more often than they were up may also be republished with the current date instead of in their old slots or have material incorporated into new posts instead; the post from Mar. 31st, for example, apparently never even stayed up long enough for it to get sent out in the RSS feed, so parts of it appear below.

I’ve noticed a couple of issues with comments on republished posts. One is that icons don’t appear next to folks’ screen names. (Click on handles and you still get taken to their relevant profiles or websites.) Another is that the comment count in some post footers is double or more the actual number of comments; perhaps older comments have gone up in value after what they’ve been through.

You might’ve heard about yet another copy of Action Comics #1 setting a record for the sale price of a comic book. My first post last month was prompted by a copy selling for $1 million, after which a copy of Detective Comics #27 sold for just north of that figure. The Action #1 that changed hands last week went for $1.5 million. I’ve done the math and it would take 1.5 million $1 bills to equal $1.5 million.

While catching up on Mark Evanier’s fine blog, News from ME, I learned that Mike Valerio passed away in March. Although I never met Mike and certainly never knew him the way Mark did, we spent time together in CAPA-Alpha, comics fandom’s first and greatest amateur press association. Mike could be caustic, and I recall us having some differences of opinion, but we also collaborated on a favorite piece of my work from that era. Like everyone else in K-a then, Mike was older than I, although younger at the time than I am now; like almost everyone else, he was encouraging of the ambitious, excitable young turk that was me, and I thank him for it. My thoughts are with those who knew him and lost him too young at age 51.

I’m sure you’ve seen the latest insane video from the band OK Go by now, but I
wanted to end on an up note. Sharing it and their behind-the-scenes content also gives me an excuse to remind folks that what’s known as a Rube Goldberg device is named for an actual person, Rube Goldberg, the author, engineer, and inventor who at one time was possibly the best-known cartoonist in America.


Related: 3 for 3/3 • Case Closed • Boing! • Twitter-Pated • Grimm Tidings