Michael Pages In

Geek that I am, I can't believe I haven't used that entry title before.

I've been amazingly busy the last couple of weeks, most of it spent preparing for my fantasy baseball draft, which was Sunday. We gathered at Syd's house, with many people drafting via AOL Instant Messaging, and had a terrific time, as always. Syd had AirPort set up, as well as an Ethernet hub, so we could all be connected, and things pretty much went off without a hitch. The sole exception was one owner who didn't show up, so we drafted a team "by acclamation" for him. Turns out he was in the hospital, apparently not for something too serious, but serious enough that he was in the hospital. Hopefully he's okay!

I'm pretty happy with my team. Happier than I've been the past couple of years, and I think I can make a good run at finishing in the money this year. Subrata and I have already started arguing about our respective teams, which is a fun but pointless exercise, since we of course evaluate players differently and a lot of who we drafted was a matter of circumstance and opinion.

I figure I'm pretty likely to finish ahead of him, though.

I was my usual snarky self this year. My favorite line of the draft:

I seem to be getting a bunch of "Bastards" from Tim. I'm not sure I'm encouraged that I'm picking his team, but using higher picks for it. :)

Now that that's over with, I can catch up on everything I've been neglecting. Like getting enough sleep. And paying bills. And testing out the dial-up line from my new ISP, from whom I'll be getting DSL later this week, assuming the equipment arrives before the system gets turned on on Friday. It's only taken me, what, four years to finally get around to it?

I decided to go with Sonic.net at the recommendation of a friend. Of the several recommendations I got, they got a good review and also seem to offer more bang for my buck. The static IP addresses are nice, but I was particularly happy that they come with a dial-up connection as part of the package, since I really wanted that as a backup for those times when the DSL might go down for whatever reason. Emergencies, basically.

I've also been going on a little eBay spree. A little one. Mostly picking up comic books, and mostly issues of the old Epic Comics translation of Akira, at that. As some of you may know, despite being a big comic book fan I have little interest in anime or manga. Mostly, I can't stand the art style. All the faces look basically the same, they often don't even look human, and in particular the style of drawing mouths as huge as a human head drives me batty.

However, I've always heard that of all the manga out there, Akira is the one to read. Dark Horse Comics has a 7-volume version out right now, but it's in black-and-white (as it was originally published in Japan), and I was sure there was a color version. The Epic version (Marvel's old creator-owned publishing arm) has a nice complex coloring job (Epic was a pioneer in nifty coloring techniques at the time, that being the late 1980s) and it looks quite nice. Tracking down some of the issues is tricky, as later issues of the 38-issue series had very low print runs, but I'll get 'em all eventually.

I've read the first two issues. It's not bad, but it's off to a slow start. We'll see.

The art is better than I'd expected. The faces do mostly look the same, though. And, something I've always found very peculiar about manga, the characters don't look asian although the story takes place in Japan.

Anyway.