I was excited to get home and unbox it and I have to see the packaging was very charming and lent itself to being opened without being destroyed. It also had a 75% charge to it when I turned it on, but I quickly plugged it in and began to tinker find the device easy to use and rather responsive. However, something was nagging me. I did not care for the Fire Launcher. Not a problem. I was able to easily install Go Launcher and basically for all intents and purposes turn the Fire into a $200 Android 2.3 tablet. I could even take it a step further and root it so I could install the Android market on it as well, but at this current time I feel no reason to do so. Best part is I can easily switch back and forth between Fire Mode or Tablet Mode as I have named them.

I was easily able to load my own applications, books, movies, and digital comics onto the device and have them all work without a hitch. Netlfix and Hulu worked like a dream and I even got a month free of Amazon Prime which allows me into there video library, but more importantly lets me borrow books! So I set to work on reading a guide to investigations. I was also able to download many classic books such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula for free.

I can say that I am very happy with it. Although there are somethings that I felt hold the Fire back just a bit and I assume that these were cut out of the product to keep its price down, but the Fire could really have benefited from an SD card slot for expandable memory, 1gb of RAM as opposed to just 512mb, and last a built in microphone. These are certainly not deal breakers, but I feel they could have really elevated the device to another level.
So if you are in the market fora tablet and just want something simple. I highly recommend giving the Kindle Fire a look. It is not without its flaws, but what it offers for the price is incredible.

Which brings me to Tim Tebow and the Denver Broncos.  I admit I enjoyed their story lines this season.  I have to admit that I admire Tim Tebow for being firm in what he believes and I think he’s caught a little to much flack for it.  My good friend and confident Adam and I had a conversation last week about the possibility if God really did help the Broncos defeat the Steelers.  He seemed to think so while I was a little more skeptical. Adam’s reasoning is that our talents are from God (I would agree on this point) so yes in some way God played a part in that football game.  To add onto to the fire the fact the Tebow threw for 316 yards of offense and John told him to pull the trigger on that last play of the game.  It was a heck of an ending to a great game of football.  I mean here we had Tim Tebow, the golden boy, going against Ben Roethlisberger, the touted bad boy.  A battle between good and evil.  Classic stuff.  The only conclusions you could surely draw at the end of the game was that clearly God is a miracle worker and good will always defeat evil.  Sure enough that is how the internet blew up the following day.  With people screaming we should “believe” and “316 surely this is a not a coincidence!”

Get.  A.  Grip.

I’m all for miracles, the unexplained, and the supernatural.   I like a good mystery, but their is no mystery here.  Anyone can be beaten on any given day.  Come on didn’t anyone see Little Giants (Rick Moranis and Ed O Neill anyone?).  I’ll go ahead and let the cat out of the bag for those of you who do not know me I’m a Christian.  I believe that Jesus was the Son of God and died for humanities sins.  Surely if I could believe this, I could make the connection to Tebow and his stats.  Yet I have to say I was disgusted by it.  I like to think that God has better things to do in the world then consider the outcome of a football game.  Does that mean  I think God wasn’t there.  No.  But if he was I would hope he had more important things to do like watch out for the safety of the players and fans.  Now am I denying that it could be within the scope of his power to have Broncos win either. No.  Simply rather I don’t think He is into that sort of thing.  I think the world has bigger issues at hand.  But in any case now what?  Many people made a big deal out of these “events” and now Tom Brady and the Patriots are up next.

My fears realized.

Denver was crushed and embarrassed.  Totally and utterly destroyed by the New England Patriots.  So what now?  Did God abandon Tim Tebow?  Perhaps we can just say God works in mysterious ways?  Does God love Tom Brady more than Tim Tebow?  Or even worse are Tom Brady and the New England Patriots more powerful than the Almighty?  I think not.  Rather this is what happens when we choose to assign such meaningless nonsense to God.  We diminish his power and his glory.   Not to mention I think we make ourselves look like fools.  I know the good people over at r/atheism are having a blast with this whole thing.  Why shouldn’t they?  I’m Christian and I find the whole thing just silly and in some ways plain insulting to the God who can raise the dead, split the sea, and visit plagues up the Egyptians, etc etc.

Where do we go from here?

We put it behind us.  Each of us will come to a different conclusion on the matter.  Yet I would say from here on out lets not be so quick to assign mediocre happenings to God All Mighty.  Maybe we wait until another plane lands in the water with zero causalities?  Something along the those lines perhaps?  Also maybe from here on out if we do ask God in on our sporting events we ask him to look after everyone, thank him for our good fortune, and ask him he might pay it forward to those less fortunate than us?

When I was young and I was reading my fathers donated collection of comic books from the 80s and early 90s I subconsciously found myself less interested in the male characters then their female counterparts. It’s hard to tell exactly why that was as I had few positive role models in general at that time in my life regardless of gender. In retrospect I partly blame the fact that the two leaders of the X men during the run of comics I had a hold of were Storm and Cyclops. Most people’s taste dictates that Storm is the superior character there and Cyclops mostly just sucked the life out of any scene he was in, so maybe that helped shape my interest a bit.

Cyclops is Vanilla. Storm is....you know what I don't have to finish that joke.

Later as I watched more TV I saw this sort of prevalence of male writer’s guilt around the time of the early 90s where it seemed like every animated children show’s token female had to be the smartest person in the room to balance out the comedic dumbness of everyone else, and also presumably because they were only going to have one so they might as well make it a good one. This didn’t always make the character more interesting but it usually made them less annoying, and considering how annoyed by stupidity I got as a child that was sometimes important.

When the show Power Rangers hit the airwaves it had a profound effect on me not because any of it’s characters were any good, but because an unintentional current of gender ambiguity ran through the series. This was partly due to the fact that the Yellow Ranger in the original Sentai of the first season was a man, and even the Pink Ranger’s stunts were done by a man. Also lets all just admit it to ourselves, brightly colored spandex catsuits are a femmy concept no matter how much you make the helmet look like a T Rex. They even had an episode where the nerdy Blue Ranger switched bodies with the airhead Pink Ranger and the super intelligent aukward version of Kimberly ended up to me at the time as a 10 times more entertaining character then either of the two ever were in the series.

This actually happened. I know body swaps are a cliche but they were just asking to confuse gender assumptions in children.

So with Superhero comics, Power Rangers, and men walking gently around the concept of writing female characters in TV the groundwork was set and only one more thing was needed to push me over the edge into understanding and accepting my priority for femininity as a concept.

That one thing was Anime.

Holy ever loving crap does Anime have the largest crop of genuinely interesting and varied female characters. Washu Hakubi, Haruhara Haruko, Motoko Kusanagi, Edward Wong Hou Pepelu Tivrusky the Fourth.

Everything needs more Ed

This was just the list of ones that changed my outlook personally. There are too many fun characters to possibly list.

So you must be thinking ‘gee that’s great and all, but what does that have to do with you not being a man’s man?’ The truth of the matter is after exploring all sides of things, once I developed as a person I began to find maleness to be a boring as hell concept. When I could track down female characters that were everything that men could be from a badass, strong, and intellectual perspective and also have a unique and attractive visual identity it just didn’t even seem like a contest for what was more interesting. This then distanced me from my identity as a male because I had very little connection to it already.

See, I am one of the unfortunate subset of men unlucky enough to be an ugly ass nerd. I have had to wear glasses since I was five, I’ve had weight problems off and on for my entire life, my facial structure is kind of goofy looking and I spent a large chunk of my formative years in braces. I, needless to say, spent the lions share of my growth as a person being judged negatively on my appearance and as a person with severe emotional issues from a childhood fraught with emotional abuse I was ill equipped to handle it.

The end result was a complete and total destruction of my self esteem which to this day makes it completely impossible for me to take my own physical appearance seriously as something worth anything but disgust. The thing that filled that gap to give me some kind of mental image of myself that wasn’t ‘horrible nerdish gremlin’ was losing any distinction between traits I found attractive and traits I personally wished I could possess. The works of fiction I talk about above provided a framework for a sense of identity for myself that didn’t involve wanting to crawl in a hole and die.

Now that I am grown I know that gender is largely irrelevant and my appearance has nothing to do with anything but the most superficial judging of me as a person. There are good men and bad men same as women. There are ugly women and good looking women same as men. Nothing about appearance and personality is really connected in any way aside from ‘work ethic at maintaining a perfect appearance’ usually being somewhat less prevalent in people who have ‘work ethic in maintaining an emotionally honest personality’

Just the same I can’t really throw out my entire life up to this point and just stop liking the female gender identity better then the male one. So I just think of it like Eddie Izzard does. I am the male equivalent of a tom boy. If I want to dress or act differently from the traditional man there is no reason not to because it hurts no one.

Eddie Izzard: Making it more fun to be different since sometime in the early 80s

This is also why I choose to use female characters as representations of myself in online games and avatars in forums and the like. I simply can not overcome my long nurtured negative reaction to my own physical appearance and want my interactions with people online to not be marred by me looking at my own face next to my posts. I want to show people what my own sense of style is like internally rather then what the limitations of birth and poverty have provided my appearance in real life.

This to me is obviously a facet of my long running trend of escapism. My life has largely been defined by contextualizing my problems and struggles as reaching for things I do not have rather then reaching to improve the things I do have. I know the rational ways of thinking but there has always been a large difference for me between knowing a problem and acting on that knowledge. For me it is more natural, and more interesting, to accept who I am and learn what I can from my differences then to try to ‘fix’ myself. Hopefully so I can teach new things to others one day.

That was cleansing. I love a good confession for feeling like all your troubles and fears have been put to temporary rest. Look for a blog in the future about how I feel that the modern media portrayals of transgendered and non traditional gendered peoples are dehumanizing and crappy. As for the comic, look for female characters to be much more prominent then previously under my pen. They will hopefully be on an even keel with the males as I don’t want to undermine any of the perfectly awesome male characters in this comic because of personal bias.

Also if I ever get another artist who I’m not currently burying with work (sorry Brian) I’m totally looking into making another webcomic with a respectable and awesome male crossdresser character. There aren’t enough of those.

Which trigger do you want your hero to pull?

All the grey areas in between (and even, sometimes, the elemental example characters themselves) inevitably get swept up in this debate by one writer or another. Some people write batman as a hard nosed but fair force for justice and others write him almost as a sociopath, for example.

If I were to put into words where I fall in this debate it would be somewhere in the middle. I, as a very flawed individual, relate more to flawed individuals. Still I want the flawed individuals I relate to to WANT to be good like I want to be a good person. The search for nobility and truth in a world that seems to have so little of it is what makes for a good heroic story to me. Facing personal demons and a harsh environment to try to do what is right.

My problem with the side that revels in violence to ‘evil’ is that I personally don’t believe in good and evil. I just believe society and people in general punish acts that are destructive and hurt other people’s lives.  The ‘bad’ guys in comic books are often times the most sympathetic characters in the story despite breaking those laws (particularly batman villains). They are often times people that society or humanity has in some way left behind, consumed by their own inability to cope with the reality of their lives.

Even the Joker has a heart breakingly human motivation to him if you believe Alan Moore....and I do.

I think that everyone feels cast aside like that at some point or another, so I really can’t get behind a guy who kills anyone who does wrong because even the worst person you can think of had an emotional arc that led to them doing what they did.  The catharsis of punishing someone who ‘deserves’ it is only there when you don’t connect it to all the times you have been unfairly punished by someone who believed you ‘deserved it’.

My problem with the side that focuses only on clean as a sheet heroics and icons of justice and decency is that it is the moralistic equivalent of a supermodel. A model is designed to be so perfect it makes you feel bad about not being perfect, thus you swear off of cake (or in this case, selfishness) entirely to try and reach a standard you can never obtain.

Often times in real life you are not given a choice. You will be put up into a situation where you have to choose between a selfish act that is right and a selfless act that is wrong, or your selfless attitude will be exploited by someone else to their benefit. Selfishness is not in itself evil. The problem is being unaware of the negative effect your actions may have on others, not in the act of caring about your own needs.

These two heroic archetypes have their place and have both produced plenty of compelling stories. There is room enough in the realm of fiction for all shapes and sizes of characters. Still I probably won’t use too much of them personally and am aware of how easily such a character can ring hollow if not done right. Even the most elemental of archetypes needs to be carefully planned to have nuance and self awareness in order to not seem like the writer has no grasp on the complexity of the human condition.

In creating characters for my own fiction I think about what makes me who I am, why I am flawed and what makes people in general flawed. Then I make characters who are flawed in ways I relate to but want to be something more then they are and struggle for that goal. Attempting to overcome your own imperfection in order to do what is right is the most heroic sentiment of all in my opinion.

This is also my first time working with characters that were created by other people. In being an on again off again comic book fan the one thing that turned me off of comics was a new writer getting a hold of established characters and screwing them up because he doesn’t understand/like them like their fans do. My number one goal (besides telling freaking awesome stories) going forward is basically to avoid that. I do not want any character or fan to suffer under my reign of terror at the writing desk.

I want to help End of The World step up into real relevance but the last thing I want is to abandon what made it have fans in the first place. So I want to make no character irrelevant or unrewarding to have interest in and make the story have focus and a rich storyline while still having it’s off beat sense of humor and it’s uniquely scattershot continuity. There is pretty much no way I can please everyone in this but I will do my best and so far working within this universe has been a blast.
In the interest of understanding what the audience wants as much as possible in order for our fan base to thrive and grow I encourage everyone to follow me on twitter at @Meyeselph ,comment on my blogs to your hearts content, and drop me an email on KnowMeyeselph@gmail.com if you have any opinions or concerns about the direction of the comic. For my first time working for a fan base I would very much like to get to know and understand the fans to do that job better.

I’m not a perfect guy, I’m not a perfect writer, and I’m lucky I got this opportunity. Still I am taking it seriously and looking forward to the time I spend on it as much as anything I have ever done. I have some big ideas coming down the pipe and hope you enjoy them.

Look forward to getting to know you all.