(no subject)

1. It is SNOWING outside and it has been SNOWING for at least the past four hours and a while before that since there were several inches of SNOW on the roof when we woke up this morning and it is OCTOBER and not even late October but it should be FALL what the FUCK Minnesota.

2. Oatmeal. Oatmeal and hot cocoa.

3. When Books Could Change Your Life: Why What We Pore Over at 12 May Be The Most Important Reading We Ever Do is a good, short essay. It's not saying anything wildly new, but I like the way it's said here. Tim Kreider is a solid, though not brilliant writer, but his political (and other) cartoons are excellent and also worth checking out.

4. Yesterday, tiamat360 and I went to Fallcon, the (very) local comics convention. It's actually located in the State Fairgrounds, which we walked to many times during the Fair itself, but since it was THIRTY FUCKING DEGREES OUT IN OCTOBER yesterday we drove instead. I ended up spending much more money than I had originally intended to -- I found the only trade paperback of Impulse which was ever published (it was a dumb, silly superhero comic, but a good dumb, silly superhero comic) for $3, and then we found the entire run of GTO, all 25 volumes, for $45. GTO has always been a series we wanted to own, but its length made collection cost-prohibitive, so we jumped on the opportunity. Now we a) own all of it, yay! and b) have had to reorganize the manga bookshelf to have some series stacked vertically, a la Congery's setup.

That would have been fine, but then I ran into several webcomic artists whose work I like, and I always feel obligated to support webcomics where I can. Thus, I ended up buying a minicomic of The Intrepid Girlbot (which is adorable and you should read), which the artist actually spent several minutes drawing a really nice sketch in the back of while we chatted about comics and David Lynch and whatnot. Then, I was more or less shamed and wheedled into buying (at a discount!) a complete set of the Templar, Arizona books, which the artist also signed and sketched for me while we chatted about random online/Something Awful-related bullshit. I'm slightly more hesitant to recommend Templar, because it's much weirder and really needs to be digested in large chunks (books, in other words), but it is very creative and well-written, to the point where the artist said that people have described the comic as "Chekhov's Arsenal."

Oh, and then afterwards we went to our regular comics shop, armed with the special discount coupon from their booth at the con, to discover not only the newest volume of Pluto but TWO new volumes of Black Jack, which made us both very happy. I also bought the first issue of The Unwritten, the new Vertigo series by Mike Carey and Peter Gross (the writer and primary artist of Lucifer). It seems pretty good so far, but it's all about the Power of Narrative to Shape Reality, which has the danger of setting off basically every alarm in my old and disused Folk & Myth brain.

5. We went to see the new Coen Brothers movie, A Serious Man, last night with tiamat360's parents. It was just about the best possible encapsulation of the particularly Jewish/Yiddish/Russian philosophy of life I could have imagined, and I just can't find any other words to describe it appropriately. It is not for everyone, but if you understand the meaning/proper usage of the word "nu?" then you absolutely must see it. If you don't, you would probably still find its individual scenes really funny, but I suspect the movie as a whole would be either disturbing or just confusing. Very well made!

6. Now I have to write an essay about My Philosophy of Teaching, in which however I suspect it would be inappropriate to quote Foucault. I will, somehow, make do.

7. WHAT THE FUCK SNOW IN OCTOBER. Also I have finished my oatmeal.