Three graphic novels read last weekend.



Invincible is a relatively new comic book series written by Robert Kirkman and illustrated by Cory Walker and Ryan Ottley. I read the first 13 issues collected in graphics novel format as Invincible: The Ultimate Collection (Volume 1). Invincible is about what it would be like to grow up as Superman's son. Essentially a well-written combination of science-fiction and the O.C.

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Then I read three volumes of The Walking Dead also written by Kirkman (Illustrated in horrific pen and ink by Charlie Adlard.) This is a zombie book, which opens suspiciously like 28 Days Later. Pretty quick however we see that this book is about a lot more than just zombies. It's one of the most plausible portrayals about how people would actually act during a world-wide catastrophe. This book has bigotry, sexual politics, mania, and everything else that makes us human.

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And finally, I read a book which quickly finds itself in the list of the greatest graphic novels ever written, right up there with Persepolis and The Watchmen. The Tale of One Bad Rat, written and illustrated by Bryan Talbot. The story of a young girl with a pet rat, on the run, that will break your heart and give you hope. The art, lush and beautiful, illustrates Mr. Talbot's mastery of all the literary devices of modern graphic novel, quite a few of which he invented himself, in his earlier work The Adventures of Luther Arkwright. (Hat tip to Warren Ellis for introducing me to Bryan Talbot.)

A mid-afternoon post is a rare thing. But seeing as how I haven't really been posting otherwise this will have to do.

We've had some unseasonally warm weather for the last couple of weeks. No complaints.

I should probably cook more than I do. Still, I seem to be cooking more than in my old apartment, so I guess I shouldn't complain.

I should spend less time in front of a computer. Eyes hurty.

Nothing good on TV but Steve Carell won a Golden Globe last night for The Office which was a good thing. He beat Zach Braff in Scrubs though, which goes to show how good the NBC comedy line-up is. (There's should be a new episode of Scrubs on today, yay!)

Tetris is addictive

I downloaded a free version called Yet Another Tetris for my mobile phone, and haven't been able to stop playing. I play a couple of hours everyday. I should stop as I see blocks falling when I close my eyes.

Now that we finished trying out Performancing, let's try Deepest Sender. It's actually been designed for Livejournal exclusively but the latest version supports posting to Blogger. The first thing I notice is that I cannot pull up an older post. I guess this is something which will change in the future. Other wise the interface is pretty much the same. Update: Well, I reviewed this just a few days too soon! The latest version (0.7.3) does support editing posts which is great. Code generation also works better than Performancing.

Most of my complaints with Performancing seem to hold true for this extension too. No fixed width font in the source tab, no easy way to use a <code> tag etc. Also, the default text editor font is too small.

So this is a test post using the Performancing Firefox extension. It's a blog managing mini-application that runs inside Firefox. You can add, edit and delete posts. I guess it would be especially helpful if you have multiple blogs with multiple blogging services.

Looks like I already found a few bugs! If you select a post to edit from your existing posts, it seems to wrap paragraphs in a <div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> and add additional line breaks.

Also, the html editor is not syntax highlighted, and doesn't use a fixed width font. No easy way to wrap chunks of code in <code> or <pre> tags. More importantly no spell checker. I'm probably going to stick to using the rich text editor built into blogger.com until they fix all this stuff.

More bugs! If the connection to blogger.com fails when you are editing a post, the post as edit button disappears. I have to restart performancing to get back normal behavior.