What I'm doing for my Winter Break:

A Collection of Random Ramblings

I hadn't been reading blogs for most of last quarter, but now that winter break has set in, I've become completely nocturnal and have been catching up on the wit and wisdom out there in the blogoshpere. I'll share some of my favorites among the things I have learned:

A lovely new find is Beth Spotswood, who amused me with her review of the Brokeback Mountain viewing experience, and delighted me by saying 'hi' in the comments to my post. When I subscribed to her feed, my newsreader for some unknown reason downloaded the last MILLION posts, and I actually read them all. The process was suprisingly fun, and I highly recommend her.

Violet Blue recently posted her list of The Top 10 Sexiest Geeks of 2005. The whole thing is lovely, and I do indeed love sexy geeks, but my favorite discovery was Annalee Newitz. Not only is this a totally cute picture, but I had no idea she was anything other than a standard aspiring academic. How cool is it that one of the people whose book I read for class last year actually understands and writes about technology. Based on her response to King Kong, I'm totally excited to read her forthcoming book, Pretend We're Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture. I love it when academics become cool writers.

The Hammer museum here in LA, which is currently displaying the first half of the Masters of American Comics exhibit (MOCA is doing the later half), will be putting on a puppet rock opera in February. Awesome.

What's even cooler than a puppet rock opera? Zombie super hero comics! Marvel asks one of the great questions of our age, positing: "an alien virus has mutated all of the world’s greatest super heroes into flesh-eating monsters! It took them only hours to destroy life as we know it—but what happens when they run out of humans to eat?!?" We'll see if they manage to develop a story that goes beyond a cool premise, but I'm curious.