Ramblings and webcomics from LeEMS
A Charlie Brown Christmas is being issued as a First-Class Mail® Forever® booklet. These Forever stamps will always be equal in value to the current First-Class Mail one-ounce price. This booklet of 20 stamps features 10 still frames from A Charlie Brown Christmas (two of each design).
The Postal Store.
Source: A Charlie Brown Christmas
Yay! The only better stamp news would be if they were also issuing a set of Rankin Bass stamps.
I could not keep my composure while reading The Teen Years: 9 Cringe-Inducing Realizations | Wait But Why, because it is so spot on and hilarious. And because I am human and all humans like to think they are different, and perhaps not as ridiculous as everyone else is even though they are, I dug through my stack of old journals for your enjoyment…
I also found LeEtta circa 1997 while I was looking. I include this ’cause I actually like it and it seems much more than two years different, to me at least.
Nostalgia has a strange way of making everything look prettier. For instance the music played on the UK 1940s Radio Station music and vintage radio shows from the 1920s 1930s 1940s seems to me to be more good than bad. However, the music played on current pop rock stations seems to me to be more bad than good. I wonder if, 50 years and four generations from now, the music of today will also have the same type of soothing, safe, perfect in the background appeal to future listeners.
I have the Atari system I fondly remember set up in the kitchen of my Dad’s house. It is all packed up in a box in my closet. I have not yet found the adapter that will make it work with my new flat-screen TV.
Why was it in the kitchen that seemed barley 8′ by 8′ from wall to wall? Why was the TV it was connected to on top of the fridge? Us kids would stand in the middle of the room with the controllers (the few moments a day when it wasn’t being used for food preparation) looking up at the screen. The ridiculousness of this set up makes me question my memory, but there you have it.
I do remember that I, being very young and destined to take very little interest in video games at all, had games that were mine and mine alone. My favorite was Strawberry Shortcake. It was reminiscent of those fashion plates where you changed the head, torso, and legs of a character to make something new. I don’t think there was much else to the game. Should I figure out how to play it again, I don’t have to wait to get my Atari hooked up again. I can play on any computer nearby, because the The Console Living Room at the Internet Archive has made streaming versions of all those old Atari games (and more).
Ok, so long ago and far away I took a trip to Emerald City Comics. I was just getting into comics and I found the listing in the yellow pages while I was on my Summer vacation. What I found there was a slightly fear inducing, utterly magical world of tables and boxes filled with stories and pictures. This is where I found ‘Hero Sandwich.’ It was a collection of about six issues that comprised one story line. I fell in love.
I can’t say if this was really in a time before the internet or if it was just a time before I was aware of it. Basically, I had little access to finding more except for that same shop, Emerald City Comics, or the ad for a publishers catalog in the back of ‘Hero Sandwich.’ The ad was already old and I wondered, as I filled out and sealed up the request, whether or not I would hear anything of it. A month or so later, I had mail from Slave Labor Graphics.
I gathered up my meager allowance savings and placed my order for a few titles including Milk and cheese, Library Bonnet, and Pirate Patrol. My comic book collecting was slow in those days and everything got put on hold during the school year. By the time I made my second order, I had found SLG’s online site and discovered Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, Rare Creature, and Lenore. Eventually SLG publications started showing up in honest to goodness bookstores, and then in used bookstores. This is how I found Rex Libris. That bowling ball monolith logo was all I needed to see to know I wanted the comic it lived on.
Somewhere in the middle of this I got the idea in my head that I might create a comic myself. I’m not even sure where this initial attempt ended up. I think I can remember it being pretty bad, you know typical Mary Sue turned mutated super hero. It was the idea of SLG’s open submission policy that made me even want to attempt comicking. I was misguided, I know. I have much better reasons for drawing comics now.