stray thoughts and a geeky rant

Things on my mind this weekend:

1. My Visabuxx card expired at the end of September. Where’s my new one? I have no idea. Possibly my father hasn’t looked for it in the pile of mail he’s gotten in Israel. That’s ok, I have money, but still. I’m annoyed that they refuse to send it to me directly.


2. It can’t be October already! That means Fall Break is soon, and then Halloween. I’m not ready for either of those things


3. I gotta get work done. Don’t want to, but it needs to get done. I’m almost done with my astrology paper (yea!) and just need to do a bunch of reading after that. I have to actually read the current novel for my Fiction class, because I’m going to have to write a paper on it later.


4. Weather. It’s being finicky again. It was all ready to snow on Wednesday (I think it was Wednesday, the whole week kinda blurred together) and now it’s nearly 80. Just gonna make the winter all the harsher later.


5. I’ve been reading my copy of Kraven’s Last Hunt, a Spider-Man story from the ‘80s, and the Afterword had the following quoted from Mark Gruenwald: “Marvel doesn’t need to revamp their characters. We got them right the first time.” I almost burst out laughing, then realized how it was kinda sad, actually. Yes, I’m a geek and know that, over the last decade, Marvel’s gotten into the habit of fixing character or continuity problems by rewriting origins or just doing a huge, universe-spanning, reality-warping crossover (see Age of Apocalypse, Heroes Reborn, and now House of M). They’ve sunk lower than I would like to admit. And this depresses me not only because I genuinely want to like Marvel, but because I feel like I grew up with some of these characters, and now they’re not even the same people anymore. Yes, it’s realistic that they’ve changed. But there are far more realistic ways to have them change than they’ve used (Legion kills Xavier in the past; Xavier goes insane and kills most of the “core” Marvel heroes, but wait! They’re alive in a “pocket dimension” so they can come back again!; Scarlet Witch goes crazy and screws with history so her father, Magneto is a hero and rules a good chunk of the planet, and mutants are now the majority. And then there was the Clone Saga in Spider-Man…). I mean, really. If they feel like it’s this difficult to work around existing stories and get new material, they need new talent. Go ask somebody who isn’t responsible for the writing and get an outside viewpoint. I’m pretty damn sick of this stuff. And really, just once, I’d like to see somebody actually stay dead. I know Jean Grey has been for a while now, but we all know she’ll be back eventually. She always is. Just like Magneto.