Spring Break

I haven't been posting stuff over here like before for months now. Not quite shocking, I imagine.

This is the week of spring break in Los Angeles, if not Long Beach. Last weekend our tiny neighborhood was overrun with under-21 coeds fresh in from Arizona looking for a drunken good time. Timing issues...

In any case, I have been writing things for this, but upon getting three-fourths of the way through, I stop myself. I wouldn't call it a crisis of confidence, but it's in the same ballpark.

I always told myself that I like to write and post the kinds of things I would like to read, in general. So, in the middle of trying to plan how to make bad medicine tasty and desirable, I find myself fully distracted and interested in something else, and start to write a post about said topic.

But, as I sit on my couch, slumped over my computer, no longer making my medicinal powerpoints, I start to trip: Who gives a shit about the differences between gelato and ice cream? Does anyone care that "sherbert" is not a thing and the correct spelling is "sherbet", and maybe it should be pronounced like "sorbet"?

This week I planned to write a few of the longer form posts I've been tinkering with in my head until either I feel good enough about them (good luck with that) or feel like I have enough time to get them written properly. Or written at all. That's the main problem: time. I wait for a hot minute, then the post meanders in my head and becomes something else, something--to my idea's credit--that is better than the first, something more connected and cozy with the human condition. But then, while not having enough time to work on it, the post/story/piece is shattered by real events. Fun and exciting things get overshadowed by precarious reality. Se la vie.

While going through old comics to choose as prizes for kids, I learned that Valiant Comics has returned, phoenix-like to the market. This happened back in 2012, and they're part of a renaissance that may or may not be happening now in the comic industry. Valiant was one of the major non-DC/non-Marvel comic companies when I collected back before the speculative bubble burst and nearly sunk the industry. They gave up-and-comers like Joe Quesada their first taste of freedom. He now runs Marvel. Turok was a title of theirs I enjoyed, as was Ninjak and X-O Manowar.

The initial investors in Valiant Comic sold at the height of the bubble to Acclaim, the video game makers. Acclaim got in just at the worst time, watched the collapse, tried to re-configure the characters to better resemble properties they could make video games about, and eventually shuttered the publishing business.

Now Valiant is back.

That's the kind of post I would have been hatching in my head years ago. Not only hatching, but finishing with much more research.

A comic book post is something I've been working on for a while, tinkering with, but it isn't one of the posts I plan on getting done during spring break. It's even bigger and longer than that. This Valiant development could be an end-cap type of segment, and it beautifully exemplifies what I was talking about earlier: the longer I wait to get to a piece, the more it can shift and change and either cease to be or change dramatically.

I even spent some money on grocery-store-checkout-aisle Archie comics to get a sense what that shit is all about.

So...

Ice cream uses a base of cream, milk, and yolk, among the other dry ingredients (re: sugar). It gets somewhere between 15% and 85% of it's volume from air being whipped in, and can thus be served very cold. Gelato is the Italian word for ice cream, but traditionally, it uses nearly no cream and all milk, with yolks and sugar, and then has very little air whipped in. This means that at the normal temperatures that we eat ice cream, traditional gelato is too dense to eat. It needs to be served warmer, so it is a little more velvety and gooey. Because there is less fat, the flavors come through richer. You can't really eat it in a cone, though.

Sorbet is generally considered fruit, sugar, and water in some combination, while sherbet is a frozen dessert that has less dairy than ice cream but more that sorbet, which usually has none. And here I always thought that sherbet was dairy free...

The other major mid-market comic companies in the 90s were Image (Spawn!)(Still around...) and Dark Horse (Sin City! and many others; predated both Image and Valiant by many years)(Still around...)

See, even now, or maybe, especially now, I'm all over the place. Desserts and comics, and nothing too interesting.

I did reach 60k+ views on this site, which can't all really be myself and my mother and Norm, can it?

Sprink Breag!