It's been too long, again.

Almost three months since my last post. You might have just been thinking I'd dropped off the map if you haven't been following any of my other feeds. (Which is unlikely, as the homepage of this blog has a window of shared items from my reading.)

A little update on my status for those who only have contact with me via this blog. Yeah, that's all of Zero people out there, but this is for the sake of continuity and my own sick amusement.

In the last three months: I've received the best grade I've gotten at the end of a semester since they started dividing my school years into semesters, had an eye exam (first one since 2005 I think) and subsequently started wearing contacts (pictures will go up on my Picasa as I get them), searched for, found, and quit a job, spent a month slacking off and trying to minimize my financial output, finally saw the Avatar finale, grown ever more obsessed with RSS in all it's succulent goodness, found not one but three writers to obsess over, got my finger jabbed and a magnet installed (My first functional body mod, good stuff. I'll write more about it later), re-read Transmetropolitan twice and become the fan of no less than three separate mad scientists. More on those after some more background.

At the moment, I'm sitting in a rather comfortable, if frustratingly non-massaging, recliner at my Mom's house. My Mother, as well as all the other family members that inhabit/regularly visit the 80 acre midland Texas compound that is the Cox family land, is off on vacation in California. As happened last year, I have been tasked with house-sitting, plant-watering, and dog-taking-care-of. This is all well and good, except for a few limitations that the property has. One; it's about as far as you can go from civilization without leaving the continental USA. Two; the nearest city, Buffalo, is roughly equidistant from both Dallas and Houston. Meaning I am quite litterally in the middle of nowhere. Three; The internet connection here is a marvel of the modern age. Satellite internet. I have no open incoming ports, a bandwidth that fluctuates between a quarter of a DSL link and a 4400 baud modem, and annoyingly frequent service outages due to passing clouds. And Four; I have five animals and about two solid acres of plants to tend to.

So internet video is mostly out, torrents don't run at all unless I shut down my IM client to free up a few decabits of bandwidth, and most of my time is spent making sure nothing around me dies. Needless to say, I've had a lot of time to think and a poor internet connection keeping me from keeping up with my feeds. Instead, I've wandered through some old backlogs, some low-bandwidth browsing of websites and forums, and I've started to make some connections re: mad scientists.

They're back in vogue, for some reason. Ever since these three doctors made their way into my awareness, my perception of things has taken a half-twist, looping back around on itself like some auto-cannibalistic möbius strip.

I discovered Doctor Horrible and his Sing-Along blog via my feeds a few weeks ago; the latest brainchild of scifi film master, Joss Whedon. Starring Niel Patrick Harris, this low-budget online-only musical superhero comedy was found to be a quite amusing, if traditional, boy-meets-girl story. Unfortunately, due to the poor internet connection here, I was not able to see the third section before it vanished into torrentable memory (I'll go back and see it when I get home). I've also recently discovered Twitscoop, a tag cloud automatically generated from the latest twitter posts. While following the cloud erupting from Dr. Horrible's premier, I noticed another doctor.

Dr. Steel, by contrast, is a doctor on a mission. No three-episode internet miniseries here, this doctor is an insane post-steampunk musician bent on ruling the world with an army of toy soldiers. When I saw what he intends to do with the world once he rules it, I immediately enlisted in his army and torrented his discography to start absorbing his message. A track on his 2002 album, People of Earth, caught my eye. "The Singularity". My favorite subject. I started digging around through his forums, chatting with other toy soldiers for a while, and discovered yet a third doctor.

Doktor Sleepless, it turns out, was created by "Transmetropolitan" writer Warren Ellis. It took a full day, but I managed to torrent a few issues of the comic to absorb them. Warren's writing has only improved since that other comic I'm familiar with, the storyline is both ongoing and excellent, leading me to wonder if the local comic book shop has some sort of subscription service I can use to reserve subsequent issues.

Anyways, at the end of each Doktor Sleepless comic there's a bit of text from the author. Warren's been busy lately, it seems. There's a wiki for the comic, a webcomic he's writing for and it's associated forum, and so on. But something caught my eye. The body mod community in the Doktor Sleepless universe, "Grinders", are represented in the fictional blogosphere by a groupblog at grinding.be... but grinding.be also exists in the real world as a groupblog for transhumanist subjects. I've been following this blog for months... Weird how I'm just now discovering it's origins.

And even weirder, it seems Warren has somehow woven his way closer to me. While writing a weekly column for SuicideGirls, Warren worked alongside and mentioned Zoetica Ebb; who's blog I follow and is also a contributing writer to Coilhouse, an art blog I also follow. Also, that webcomic he writes for, FreakAngels, is also another one I follow...

It's strange how people gravitate towards those of like mind, even without noticing it.