Well, I've been here for a while now, but I've never had anything up here on the old home node apart from one of those nodegel visualiser things, usually several months out of date. Time for all that to change...
Why "Snailgus"?
Snailgus is my user name for just about every single account I have on the internet that requires one. Gus is what my frinds call me in real life, but that's a name that gets snapped up pretty quickly, so I was forced to come up with something a little more unique. There's a character in Mr Squiggle (an old Australian kids show) called Gus the Snail, a snail that had a tv instead of a shell, and "snail" actually suits me pretty well. In primary school my nickname was "Speed", a name that used the traditional Australian nickname logic that gives red-headed people "Bluey". I've always been pretty sedate, so Snailgus it is.
More about myself, and stuff I've written about
The most important aspect of my life right now is my family. I met my wife at a party way back in 1997, we got married in September 2000 (September 11, to be exact, which has put a bit of a dampner of our anniversery the last couple of years) and we had a little baby boy in March last year. He's lots of fun, and if anyone is considering going into the family business I can heartily recommend it, as long as you're prepared to forget about having any spare time or money.
Speaking of not having any spare time, a couple of years ago I decided it would be a good idea to go back to university part time while working full time, and I'm now halfway through a law degree. My work started paying for this, which was good, but halfway through they decided they couldn't pay for it anymore, the bastards.
All of the above will explain, if anyone is ever wondering, why I don't node stuff at an incredible rate. Time is precious commodity, and I can't always spare it for writing about the things that interest me. When I get a chance, I write about some of the things listed below.
Doctor Who is my all-time favourite tv show, and after my family and friends probably one of my favourite things in life. Sure I like other normal things like books, movies, going out, etc, but I'll always come back to Doctor Who. It probably comes down to the Doctor being a hero who outthinks his enemies rather than just beating them up that has always appealed to me, plus that fact that the format of the show is so adaptable, accomodating science fiction and history and just about anything in between. If all it ever was was a tv show I would probably have grown out of it, but in some ways the show has also grown out of itself, and the novels relaesed first by Virgin and now by the BBC are so much more sophisticated than the original show. Apparently there are now, including the original show, the books, the comics and the audio productions, over 400 Doctor Who stories. I've been a fan for over twenty years and I've probably only experienced about 3/4 of the total.
It's now a better than ever time to be a Doctor Who fan. I was overjoyed when the ABC announced they were going to be show every complete Doctor Who story, from An Unearthly Child through to Survival on Monday to Thursday at 6:00 pm. It's been almost ten years since Doctor Who was on free-to-air television in Australia, and now it's back and a new generation can get hooked. So that news was good, but then it gets even better - the BBC is going to be making a new series. Woo-hoo!
I've done writeups on:
- Doctor Who, of course;
- Some of the Doctor Who novels, listed in my Doctor Who node;
- a short one on Ace, one of the Doctor's companions, which really needs expanding.
To do list for Doctor Who:
- Keep going on the books.
- Add more detail to the Doctor Who node, possibly stuff about the characters of each of the Doctors.
Comics
I've read comics intermittently for a long time. I remember staying over at my Gran's house sometimes, and in the morning we'd go to the newagents and I'd spend my pocket money on the black and white digests of DC comics we used to get here in Australia. It was weird, because they didn't really seem to care what comics they put together in the digest. There'd be a Superman or Justice League story, and then there'd also be some horror story (like one where a henpecked husband whose wife isn't satisfied with how close his shave was, and kept sending him back - eventually he came out with the flesh of his face all shaved off, asking "Are you happy now?"). I'd also get out whatever Tintin and Asterix books they had at any libraries I was a member of over and over again.
I lost track of comics for a while once I got a bit older, but in my later years of high school a friend of mine was buying a lot of comics, and I started to get a little interested again. This was the mid to late eighties, and my friend was into the stuff that was popular at the time - Wolverine, Lobo, Batman and endless amounts of X-Men. I'd go with him into the city sometimes, and have a look around the comic shops, but the stuff he was buying didn't really do it for me. I still had a thing for the old DC characters, but the DC comics I glanced at didn't excite me either (I looked at a Flash comic once and was disappointed to discover that the Flash was no longer Barry Allen). Later, Superman died and my friend bought a few issues of Superman #75 in that black plastic bag, but didn't want to open any of them. This seemed stange to me. Then one day I wandered into the comic shop and discovered there were now four supermen, and I was a little curious. I started reading the Reign of the Supermen story, and discovered I liked it. That was a damn good story. I read the issue with the Cyborg Superman destroying Coast City and decided I was missing a whole world by not reading comics. I also saw an ad for Flash comics at the same time, and saw that Barry Allen had returned, so I had to buy that as well. I remember buying the double-sized Flash #79 and, not being able to wait till I got home, sat in the car and read it in a state of breathless excitement.
If I'd just stuck with the DC superhero comics I probably would have got bored of them before too long, as they got a bit complacent with the success of the "event driven" stories, and soon just about all they were publishing, it seemed, were regular DC Universe-wide crossovers like Zero Hour. Luckily, wandering into the comic shop one day I ran into an old friend from high school who I hadn't seen for a couple of years (I was a few years into university now) who has also started reading comics. She, however, wasn't reading the superhero stuff, and recommended Sandman. I bought Sandman #55 (the one with Prez Rickard) and again had my mind blown by the possibilities of comics. Now, I read a healthy mix of Vertigo-style and superhero comics, and spend more than I can really afford to on them, what with our family now having one more member and one-half less paycheques.
The comics I'm reading now are:
- Powers
- Bone
- Astro City
- Fables
- Promethea
- Flash
- Legion
- Y: The Last Man