It will probably surprise no one to hear that I’ve been simultaneously anticipating and dreading this book for months. On the one hand, a new Batgirl series is an opportunity for some of my favorite fictional characters to come out of the storytelling limbo that they’d been left in. On the other hand, it was also an opportunity for my favorite fictional characters to potentially be written wrong, to once again have their characterization derailed by hack writers too lazy to do even basic research on their subjects or be abused by the short-sighted editorial mandates of a misogynistic editorial staff, or to be thrust into incoherent stories with nonsensical plotlines.

So it was with a great deal of caution and some faint optimism that I started reading the first issue. As it turns out, both emotions were appropriate. This issue is not as terrible as we might have feared, but it does suffer from deep flaws.

I was informed bynevermore999  that there's a five page preview of Batgirl #1 online, if anyone's interested.

The narration sounds like it's probably Steph. I'd be cool with that, since I like Steph, especially if Cass was still around training her and backing her up. The theory that there might actually be a whole team of Batgirls has been proposed, but I'm filing that one under "too good to be true" for the moment.

The Narrator’s-Living-Room Inn was doing a brisk business this weekend. First some old friends let me know at the last minute that they’d be visiting Seattle and crashed on my floor from Friday night through Monday morning. Then my friend who comes down from Bellingham for the weekly gaming decided to crash on my couch rather than try to go back on Monday night.

The old friends slept at night while I was working, went out and did the tourist thing in the mornings when I was sleeping, and then we hung out in the evenings. On Sunday, with my work week done, I decided to only catch a half-night's sleep to spend more of the day with them. As always when they come up, we had a few tasty beers at the Elysian Brewery. They insisted on going to the top of the Space Needle, though, and dragging me along Let me tell you a little something about Seattlites: we don’t go up the Space Needle. There’s a reason for that. It’s just not that interesting. You can look out over the whole city, yeah, but we already know what the city looks like. They were inexplicably fascinated by it, however, and stayed until it closed. It was after dark, and Seattle Center and Downtown are not great neighborhoods... I found myself longing for my body armor.

Monday night my friend from Bellingham and I stayed up until dawn (which is turning in early for a night-shift type like me) first watching The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya for about nine episodes and then stopping and working on game-related stuff for a while, because there’s only so much Haruhi one can stand in a single sitting. Not the show, which is funny and smart, but Haruhi herself. She’s such a horrible fricking person! Like, a borderline-sociopathic sexual predator. It’s not as funny as the writers seem to think it is. They really need to tone it down. (They need to tone down the fan service, too, but I know that’s a vain hope.) Even with a little rum (previously established to help with the viewing of the first few episodes), we hit the limit of our tolerances after a while. One of the reasons the first episode of the second season that aired last week was so good was that there was so little Haruhi in it.

 
Got up early (for me) and then he and I went out into the U-District for a bit. It was fun. We checked out the comic and gaming store to see if they had some RPG stuff he was looking for. They didn't, but on the shelf I spotted Farscape comics! New Farscape comics! Why didn't anybody tell me they were doing more? I grabbed the two issues there and told the guy who runs the place to put the rest on my subscription list. I'm always interested in more Farscape.

Even better, my replacement Noir boxed set arrived. Discs themselves are exactly the same as the previous set, so I have all the extras, and I like the box art even more than the other one. Black suits this series, for obvious reasons, and the whole thing is more badass.
 

Anyway, the net result is that I didn’t really get a proper night’s day’s sleep all weekend. Decided to sleep late today yesterday rather than get up early enough to get my comics before the store closed. Will have to get them tomorrow today.

Also, it seems Television Without Pity has finally decided to close the TSCC forums. They shall be missed. Goodbye, Meet Market thread! You were the source of much fun and wasted free time over the last two years! (Did we ever decide on a fallback point, or are we just going to do our nerding on LJ full-time now?)

A couple of rays of hope for a fairly craptacular day, one relating to real life and one relating to nerd stuff.

The real life one first:

Over the last two days, I've gotten a grand total of no more than four hours of sleep, max. I'm pretty much only still going right now because of the coffee and omlette I had delivered at work for lunch and the additional coffee that the swing shift officer brought me when she came in to relieve me, kind-hearted soul that she is. I wish I could say that was an unusual state of affairs, but that's pretty much been the case every weekend for more than a month now. The schedule they've stuck me with is absurd: it's stressful enough to be working day, swing and graveyard shift, but they've spaced them out poorly, too. Work graveyard Thursday night, go to sleep Friday morning and wake up Friday afternoon... and then because I've only been up a few hours I can't get to sleep Friday night until it's almost time to wake up to work Saturday morning. It's impossible to get any decent amount of sleep. This weekend I even made a point to turn in early Friday and Saturday nights, cutting short evenings out with old friends I hadn't seen in years, to try and get some half-decent sleep only to wind up lying awake for hours. It's pretty much running me into the ground. I can't keep doing it. The small amount of extra pay they offered for putting up with it isn't going to cover what it's costing me in caffeine, much less the poor health. I was planning to give my boss an ultimatum tomorrow: either my schedule changes or I become the fourth guard in two months to resign from working it.

So I was very glad when the swing shift officer offered to trade me shifts on Thursdays, and work that one grave while I pick up a third swing. Working two different shifts is doable. Working three isn't. I owe her big for this one. Bless her anime-watching heart. (Nerds take care of their own.) I'll even offer to let her have my "putting up with a crappy schedule" bonus. When I talk to my boss, it'll help to be able to say that I already have a solution that the other person has agreed to.



And in nerd news:

There's a rumor that Dan Didio may soon be fired. For those who don't follow the comic industry, he's the Editor in Chief of DC Comics. He's a terrible editor in chief, and from his behavior in interviews and at conventions, quite probably a terrible person as well. I've already sworn that if it turns out that he really is fired, I will quite literally dance a jig right then and there. Dead serious. I did it a few months ago when I watched Boiling Rock, and I'd do it again if Didio got the boot. And I refuse to feel bad about wanting someone to lose their job when it's this guy. Especially since his severance package for a job that he sucked at will probably be more than I've made in the last five years.