Fear Leads To Hate, Hate Leads To Anger, Anger Leads To Windows…

We have received our tax refunds here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office – when you have the kind of comic book habits that we have and you can write off your comics as a legitimate operating expense, you tend to get a big old refund – which means that we are starting some capital and equipment upgrades here. The first being the spiffy new laptop upon which I am trying to write this.

On one hand, it’s pretty cool – the machine is an Asus, replacing the Asus Transformer tablet I’ve been using for 90 percent of my writing for the past two years, and Asus chicklet keyboards are pretty spry and responsive to type on – but on the other hand, unlike the Transformer, it is a computer rather than a tablet… and in this year of our Lord 2014, that means Windows 8. Which is a truly hateful and counterintuitive operating system for someone who’s been using Microsoft operating systems since the first Batman movie was just a beautiful dream.

I mean seriously: for the past 19 years, the Start button has opened a Start menu with a hierarchical list of available programs, and now it suddenly defaults to a page of a bunch of fucking animated tiles? This is a computer, not a Goddamned iPod! Where’s the command shell? How can I group similar programs so I can find them? Sure, this thing is optimized for a touch screen, but if I can’t find and modify the list of running services in about three minutes, it had better be ready to become a fucking kick screen.

But this is neither here nor there; it is new equipment that must be learned, with a lot of new stuff coming in the near future, and none of it is showing us dudes in spandex getting kicked in the face. That’s what comics are for, and being Wednesday, that means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

But there’s some good stuff there to distract us some of us from the fact that there is something on my start page promising me “Sensational Sandwiches” for some reason. We’ve got the first issue of the new Mark Waid and Chris Samnee’s Daredevil, the final issue of Jeff Lemire’s Animal Man, a new issue of Amanda Conner’s and Jimmy Palmiotti’s Harley Quinn, the first issue of Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 10, and a bunch of other cool stuff!

But you know how it is: before we can even think about talking about any of them, we need time to read them, and to figure out what the hell an “Asus USB Charging Service” is, and why it’s taking 25 percent of my available RAM. So until then…

…see you tomorrow, suckers!