So I'm just waiting for my Digital Coloring For Comics online class to start, and I've exhausted the online comics and blogs and game sites and other things I usually look at, so...here I am. What could I talk about that one of you may find interesting?

Oh, probably nothing. Hm. Still, it's nice to be in the habit of posting somewhat regularly.

I could tell you TV Stories, I guess. Marilyn and I finally receieved all of the DVD sets of "Angel" from Amazon, and we've been making our way through Season Two. The story arc / metaplot of the series is really starting to have a presence now, which makes things more interesting. We're done with the introduction of the main characters phase of the series - we have a pretty good idea of what to expect from the protagonists, and some of them have been experiencing personality shifts, progression along their individual story arcs, etc. It's a great show and I enjoy it quite a bit.

We watched a couple of movies recently: "The Producers" and "Beowulf and Grendel." "The Producers" was pretty funny, though it's Mel Brooks's broad, obvious, vaudevillian humor, so it takes a little adjustment. By the second half I was laughing quite a bit. I think it's worth the movie just to see the opening number of "Springtime For Hitler" and the ending credits, during which Will Ferrell sings a soulful R&B rendition of his song, "Guten Tag Hop-Clap."

"Beowulf and Grendel" was a bit of a warning to me. It could have been really good - they had the cast, the costumes, the buildings and the locations to pull off a really good retelling of Beowulf. Unfortunately, what began as a "Let's Give Grendel A Motivation For Killing Danes" morphed into a politically-correct tale of cultural guilt and mutual understanding, complete with a self-righteous Pre-Neo-Pagan Wiccan delivering the movie's message with a wagging finger. As much as I want to say things with the stories that I write and draw, I need to remember that it can be a fine line between a meaningful story and heavy-handed propaganda.

I'm also disappointed that my favorite character, the crazy epileptic Christian missionary, ultimately served little purpose to the plot, except to illustrate that the Danes were genuinely scared of Grendel and the curse he represented. Oh, well.

The pleasant surprise - well, sort of a surprise, as Michael Slusser pointed me toward this - was our free game rental, which this time was "Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy." For something that I saw on demo at Best Buy and thought incomprehensibly goofy ("Why in the world would you...Huh?"), it was really, really fun. We had it for a week and had only finished half of what the game had to offer. Every day when Marilyn and I were at home together, one of us would say, "So...wanna break Legos?" Great game, with a lot of replay value. The little cutscenes between the game parts are also totally worth it, retelling Episodes IV, V, and VI with, um, creative additions and interpretations.

Okay, my class is going to start in a few minutes. Gotta go!