Hey, I'm 35 and I have a playstation 2 that gets used far too often. I also have a Fender telecaster warming a corner of my bedroom and copies of Husker Du's "new day rising" and the Pogues "if I should fall from grace with god." I never got into the role-playing games, mainly because my friends weren't into them, I guess, but I find modern comics fascinating at a distance. Perhaps I'll read the book.

"Understanding Comics" is also a must-read for Web designers and computer UI designers.

"Understanding Comics" is one of my favorites, too! One of the interesting points he makes is that, in Western culture, we tend to separate words from pictures. Literature and painting are two different things. Consequently, juxtapositions of words and pictures are relegated to "low-brow" forms of art or communication, such as advertizing, children's books, and, yes, comic books, which are thought to be exclusively about talking animals or muscular men in capes. In other cultures, such as the ancient Egyptian or the Mayan, it was not so, and hieroglyphic writing went right along with comic-strip-like representations of stories of the Gods, the afterlife, sacrifices, etc.. "Sequential art..."

Keeping up a trend, 'tis a good book.

BTW, I'll soon be 50 and my favorite hobby is RPGs

Christopher was dead. Something he tended to forget every now and then; something that was happening more and more often of late. That worried him.

That was not a put-down of comic books about muscular men in capes. I find the "Batman" comics more nuanced and deep than TV shows or most movies these days. I haven't kept up on my comics the way I used to. In Fremont, California, there was a comic store I visited every week. Since I moved up here to Bellevue, I haven't found such a place. Haven't had much time to look. Too much preoccupation with blogs these days.

Crap, Dean, I'll turn 48 this year, and I spend endless time geeking around with Linux on my IBM ThinkPad like any computer-geek 16-year-old.

Ummm, I haven't bought any new comics lately, but I've still got purner every comic book I ever bought, dating all the way back to Avengers #4 and beyond, and I still haul out Mage or Miracleman or even the good X-Men (I mean, back before the death of Phoenix) for a reread every now and then. Yes, I love cartoons— in fact, I love the Japanese anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion so much that, even though I've got the entire thing on videotape, I recently bought the entire series all over again on DVD, so I can watch it anywhere I go on (guess what) my computer.

I still have all my old stuffed animals from childhood, and they show up every now and then as actors in my children's sermons. Have you ever seen Jesus as a sock monkey? (The sock monkey's real name is Mister Dummy.)

I still love reading many of the books I loved when I was a kid. Lewis Carroll. Mark Twain. Arthur Conan Doyle. Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki.

Not to mention The Human Interest Library, published circa 1919 (vol. I, The Wonder World; vol. II, Popular Science and Industry), a bizarre farrago of Thumbelina, the wonders of the modern aeroplane, Goldilocks, the direct broadcast of electric power from a wireless station on Long Island, rebuses, fingerprints and criminology, Montessori exercises, and how to build a telephone system using bladders obtained from your local butcher. My dad fell in love with these books as a boy, and I caught the bug from him when I was still young. These books (and there are also two later volumes in the series) have always, from childhood on up, held in my mind the status of classics. Read them and you'll go a long way toward understanding how I got so weird.

Music? Ummmm, I've always been about as musical as a fencepost. And RPGs? Sorry, haven't done much with 'em in the past 15 or 20 years, though there was a time when Wulfstan Redmallet was a mean 8th level fighter.

And I'm still into shit like designing my own solar system (orbital calculations included), complete with a human-colonized planet where the incredibly intricate calendar (sorta like the Mayan calendar, only moreso) is intertwined intimately not only with local astronomical cycles, but also with the culture and psychology of the colonists.

Yeah. And I'll turn 48 this year. Whatizzit with us, Dean?! :-)

Yeah. I should read Understanding Comics.

Yeah, you should read it, it's a hell of a book.

But by the way, Paul, you forgot that you also like creating languages. Don't you? :-)

I too Dean will turn 38 this year and your list sounds familiar. I do photography and websites for bands, still enjoy role playing games and, in general, still enjoy everything I did 20 years ago...plus those new things which have appealed to me over the years. If it weren't for the employment thing and general responsibility I'd do these things more often!

I've picked up RR crayon gaming (Eurorails, Iron Dragon, etc.) in the last few years since being married to a buff of this genre.

Civilization by Sid Meier is my #1 game of all time on a PC, although by now I've played so much I'm sick of it.

RPG's, I love 'em. I'm writing a book of small settings (slightly weird superheros; steampunk Victoriana {thanks Dean for the advice about Victorian women} which has impossible technology like iron plates armoring dirigibles; American Tall Tales; an Anime, and a Mecha setting focused on the fall into feudalism), and I play an on-line game over at Gaming Outpost.

My favorite RPG's include Mage the Ascension which is compared by some to Philosophy 101. Reality is a consensus dream, but some the Awakened can manipulate reality with their own vision. Its interesting for its extraordinarily flexible magic system, and politically speaking it has a lot in common with "Ordinary people are sheep".

Champions for superheroes is often claimed to be able to make any character whatsoever. You have 250 dollars and you can spend that on whatever you want, pretty much. Its probably the ultimate point-building system for flexibility. In ways that makes it the dead opposite of the following game which I also like.

D&D is a great game. Sure some people bash it, but a lot of them are just elitists. Its a good hamburger, and it doesn't try to be a filet mignon. As a friend said, if a gamer ever gets on a stamp, it will be Gary Gygax.

And I think D&DIIIe is an improvement.

And of course, my current fave. Multiverser. Its a fairly new game. The motto is 'every story is true somewhere in the Multiverse'. I like the other game systems, but sometimes they seem to be a little genre claustrophobic. After all, do I just want to tell stories in Medieval Land, or on the Mean Streets, or soaring over Downtown Metropolis (sorta)? I also want to tell the story of Santa Claus dealing with renegade elves armed with AK-47's, and the story of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Anyhoo, there's my list of fave rpg's.

Also toss in watching Stargate and Charmed, and playing a variety of board and card games when I get the chance. And going to to SF/gaming conventions.

Tadeusz

Dean:

But by the way, Paul, you forgot that you also like creating languages. Don't you? :-)

Cio plipis atho. Omrochomnimonas, mna ghthi camvw'ist, mna Vananthath miomrnadis paniz thlicharis mna jathathot yol?

(English translate: "Yes, you're right. I didn't forget, but the problem is, if I use Hermetic, who will be able to understand what I write?")

On other ongoing linguistic fronts, I still have bits and pieces to pull together before I'll be able to fit gûdhilage and gweraz together in a full sentence with materlauze sunau hapreso. ;-)

I think Sandman is one of the great recent literary achievements. Anyone who can take a title that starts out like a typical horror comic (because that was the only available audience at the time) and make it end up a tragedy in the style of Hamlet obviously has something going for them. Not to mention incidentally creating a new line of comics and tapping a previously unsuspected market.

I didn't read comic books when I was a kid, but I never got told it was childish, either.

51.
SpongeBob SquarePants.

I'm just saying.