Good news and bad news, gang! And then another good news!
Good News #1
Ya boi got his dang degree earlier this year! The earliest this year one could have described it as ‘this year’, actually; my graduation date, 1.1.2022, looks fake as hell, which both tickles and enrages me to no end and in equal measure. But I did it! For real, I did! Here, have proof! I spent twelve years of my life across three schools in as many states and paid $40,000 for it!
You are correct to applaud; you are also correct to get me a cute mug that says “I’m Afreud The Day Is Too Jung For This” or “Id Rather Egoing Home” or “Peer Reviewers Do It Rigorously”.
What The Germans Call
“Le Bad News”
Yeah remember that $40k I just mentioned? Turns out they were serious about that, which was really awkward because I laughed my ass off and told them they’d really come a long way on the whole ‘having a sense of humor’ thing. And no matter how big a slice The Dude* carves off, that’s still more than I make in a year, and believe it or not I have things to pay for besides gargantuan debts I bound myself into when I was too young to drink or rent an Econoline from Hertz but apparently old enough to take out an educational mortgage. I got responsibilities, gang! I got a wife to keep in Pusheen Boxes and a cat to keep in the depraved lap of Caligula-level luxury!
Now your Ol’ Bageler isn’t going anywhere, don’t fret on that front, but as it turns out it’s no longer “financially feasible” or “strictly legal” or “something I’d want to come up in marriage counseling” to keep buying comic books at the rate I have been. I’m not going to stop buying comics–the disease, they assure me, is terminal–but I’m not going to be spending a new video game’s worth of money on them every week anymore, so my weekly New Comics Hauls will become monthly instead, because I’m also not gonna write up an entire post to say “Hey I picked up one comic and I haven’t read it yet but watch me try to say something funny about it.” Which brings me to!
*The–it–’cause he’s Biden his time, like the–you get it, youuuuuuuu get it
Revenge Of The Good News
My weekly New Comics Hauls were a great way to figure out what I like and what I’m good at in terms of Blög-As-Ongoing-Project, but they’re inherently flawed in a couple of ways; they come too quickly and voluminously to allow me to keep anything like current, they prevent me from reading much besides Thing I Need To Catch Up On Because New Volume Comes Out Next Week, and, as my wife expressed profound confusion about across the six months I’ve been doing them, it really kinda fundamentally doesn’t make sense to try to talk about books I haven’t read. Now that last bit isn’t going to stop me, but that’s just because I enjoy using them as a platform to talk about related books or topics or just make dumb jokes.
Mostly what this means is that I’m going to finally have time to do things besides those posts, which believe it or not are very, very time consuming; I’ll be able to do more topic-essay articles like the ones I started out with about the Hippos and the Cheese Caves and the Bucket Pasta (I’ve got one about how Marie Curie’s bones created artificial cats that’s gonna blow your minds), and I’ll be able to actually do comic and book reviews again (like these two) instead of just previews. I don’t know what that schedule will look like, but I’m not getting paid for this, so I’ll say “when I feel like/am inspired to do it”, which, knowing me, will probably still be pretty frequent. Oh also I’ll still do Let’s Talk Bookishes when the topic intrigues me, AND ONLY THEN.
Dazed And Conclused
I recognize that my readership is small, but you are all very kind and encouraging and I couldn’t ask for a lovelier bunch to yell to across the internet, so I hope this isn’t a bummer and that you enjoy this next leg as much as that good ol’ first one, that nasty ol’ Classic Bageleg.
Until we meet again, I remain yours in carbs,
–The Bageler