Do I Look 40?

Eventful day today!

Went out canvassing at a local park with some TRUCT pals. People seemed very receptive, turns out people like free things and improved public services, who knew? Hot as hell though. I wish I could have been running around in the water area like the kids there were.

When talking to one guy I mentioned my age (part of a usual spiel about how as a college kid I would like more access to public transit) and the dude said, "21? I thought you were 40!" He clarified he was joking but damn lmao, first time I've ever gotten that.

For the record I think I look like an average 21 year old. Maybe a slightly worse hairline than the mean.

I'm going back to canvassing on Thursday, and we're building our first bench Saturday. It's stuff like this that really makes me happy. I adore my city and helping actually make things better here (instead of just sitting there angry doing nothing) is good. Hope I can continue helping TRUCT out.

After getting home, I played some Ace Attorney 4 with some friends. Very fun game. We used to voice act when we first played (which was like a year ago at this point) and I didn't realize how much I missed doing shitty voice acting with friends. It really is fun as hell.

Been getting back into the Beach Boys. Or rather, Brian Wilson. Not as much the others. Just adore his voice. I need to continue my SMILE research. Thank you to Morgan for putting me onto this and pushing me to watch Brian Wilson Presents Smile. Needed that kick in the pants :)

Song of the Day: Brian Wilson - Heroes and Villains

Oops.

Oh yeah, I had a blog, didn't I?

Oops.

I realize I kinda abandoned this quickly. My fault. I think I just overthought what I was writing. When every blog post has to be some big deal it's easy to just not write. I forgot that that's not what most blogs back in the day, my inspiration for this blog in the first place, were about. They were dumb, they were daily or weekly or whatever updates on the authors life. Not every post had to be a essay on the complexities of existence.

So I intend to get back to this, and to do that I'm going to be transforming this into that sort of daily (Or almost daily, à la Itoi) blog. Sometimes it might be essays on the complexities of life but far more often it'll just be updates on what the hell I'm up to. 

Things have changed a lot since I last posted. For the worst. Very much for the worst. I hope that trend will reverse as I keep writing. At the very least this may be an interesting time capsule of a horrible time to whatever poor nerdy kid finds this 27 years from now.

For those wondering about what I've done today? Nothing. Just lazed around. But that at least gave me time to do this, so worth it I suppose. 

I promise future updates will be more interesting, lol. Everything's gotta start somewhere.

Song of the Day: The Inbreds - Any Sense of Time

Webcomics

 This blog post is dedicated to the brave Mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan

      One of the weird things about being on the internet for a bit is seeing entire mediums essentially die out. And for me, one of the saddest deaths is the death of webcomics! I don't intend to write this as some sort of in-depth look into how they died - I think I can make an educated guess and say it was probably just the rise of social media and the lack of interest of consumers to support webcomic merch as they did in the past. I more so just want to talk a bit about them in general. Late night webcomic thoughts™.

    My all time favorite webcomic is still to this day Brawl in the Family (which has a kickstarter currently active!) This was a webcomic themed around Smash Brothers Brawl, active from 2008-2014 (Realizing the death of BitF was over a decade ago now is something else!!!) I have no clue how I originally found it, probably the Super Mario Wiki forums? I was an active lurker of those as a young kid. Once I did find it, however, I became an obsessive reader. I have vivid memories of reading all the comics, watching all the videos, listening to the songs on repeat, etc. Some kids had Charles Schulz, I had Matthew Taranto. 

    I thought it was super funny, and honestly looking back? It was! I still think it was incredible, especially as most video game humor (and video game webcomics especially) was so hacky. It's easy to fall into stupid "lol this isn't realistic" or "lol what if Mario had a gun???" Dorkly-type humor (and I say this as a kid who watched more Dorkly than I should have). Brawl in the Family was no Calvin and Hobbes, but there was a layer of professionalism there. It was clever! There's a reason my Dededoll, which I begged my parents to buy, still sits across from me as I write this.

     I also spent way more time than I should have on the BitF forums. Also just on forums in general. I was too young to contribute so I just read lines and lines of what random adults were talking about. It's a weird feeling knowing that unlike most forums I read as a kid, such as the Mario Wiki forums or Zelda Dungeon, the BitF forums are just completely gone. Sad stuff. I tried looking for it just now to check, and any guest just sees a "you are banned" message from vBulletin. Image verification doesn't work so you can't register a new account either, I tried :(

 

    Of course Brawl in the Family wasn't the only gaming webcomic I read, just the only one I gave that much of a shit about. I read my Awkward Zombies, my VG Cats, my Brentalfloss comic (please tell me someone else remembers that????) I read a lot of them more so on other sites. I was a big Dorkly kid, as mentioned before, so I read a lot of the comics posted on the Dorkly website. (Side note: I wish more people had nostalgia for the website because honestly I spent more time there than the channel, need to talk to someone else about PWN Up!!)

     There's something so poignant about webcomics to me. There was no Comics Code for the internet, so you could make a comic about or containing practically anything. And people did! The internet was like the world's best and worst indie comic shop. In the 2000s and early 2010s there were so many different people making webcomics, from kids making sprite comics about Mario and Sonic to professional stuff like the Perry Bible Fellowship. You could make a comic centered around some serious story, gag-a-day strips with random humor, political satire, parodies, porn, and so much more. I think it says something that XKCD, arguably the biggest webcomic surviving, is mostly about science and math. You could really do anything. And there was no need for publishers!! (Unless you wanted to make a book out of your strips)

    And each of these comics had bona fide communities. Not just fandoms, communities. The intimacy of the 2000s internet combined with the popularity of message boards for basically anything meant nearly every comic had a fanbase constantly in communication with each other and the author(s). I saw this first hand with BitF. Most of those forum posts weren't about the comic, they were just about random shit. You couldn't do that with physical media, and you can't really do it now.

    It's a shame. Webcomics meant so much to me as a kid. I used to spend hours daydreaming about writing my own (Smash-centric, of course). I couldn't draw then, but I assumed I would be able to in the future. I still can't draw but even if I could it'd be pretty difficult to build the webcomic empire younger me dreamed of. The medium that gave me hours of fun, the medium that helped me go through my days as a lonely nerdy kid, the medium that made me feel like there were people like me out there, the medium that introduced me to so many different artistic ideas, is mostly dead. That makes me sad.

    Then again, blogs are dead too and yet here I am writing one. Maybe the idea of a Liam webcomic isn't too out of reach after all.

Song of the Day: The Squish - You Once Said

Hello World

10 days ago I officially turned twenty-one years old. I figured for this milestone I would finally do something I've wanted to do for years, the proper rite of passage all people go through - I would start a 2000s style blog.

Unfortunately, LiveJournal is long dead (unless I intend to learn Russian, anyway), so Blogger will have to do.

So why do I want to do this? Three reasons.

    1. This can essentially be a diary. I think preserving my day-to-day thoughts and experiences will be useful to me in the future. My memory isn't the greatest and I don't expect it to suddenly improve, something like this can be immensely helpful in that regard.

    2. I need to write more anyway, why not use a medium I have always wanted to use in order to do so?

    3. I like talking :)

I have no idea how often I'll return to this, or what the subject of most of my posts will be. I want to let that all happen naturally. Writing is best if left to occur on its own, I think. But I'm sure you can expect copious amounts of talk about 90s and 2000s power pop, vintage internet, and esoteric politics. Those do seem to be things that follow me no matter where I go.

Finally, before I close things off, thanks to my buddy Deckra for letting me steal his blog skin. True friends encourage creative theft. He runs a killer blog looking into very obscure bands which I heavily encourage folks to check out. Also just a killer person.

Song of the Day: Chemical Bomb - The Aquabats