Well my attempt to get myself back into some sort of political writing has now started with The year past, and the year ahead and Me and Meghan. I'm not totally satisfied with how either read or sound, but they weren't getting better with revisions, so I'm placing that down to me still being rather rusty after my break.
I guess my next job is to collect my thoughts and try a review of Alien Nine. Expect that and another political article before the end of February.
Update: I got bored. The old Yuramon4 videos have died with the account, but I've still got the raws here and I saved the descriptions, so I'll re-upload them at some point. I really hated the old, clunky name though, and I wanted an account with a proper name. Incidentally, the channel name is taken from a rather awful PC-98 hentai game, the name having struck a chord with me.
The retrospective is up! Phase 2 of The Great British Newspaper Experiment is finally done! It was a disappointment in the end, but I'm glad I was finally able to bring it to a conclusion. I've also fixed up various other Phase 2 pages (it seems I left them in a very badly-coded state) and replaced the broken Sunday Times review with an abridged version of the original based on what I could remember and a quick read through the paper. It's probably never going to get better than that.
This now leaves me with the question of where to go next, and numerous options are open to me. The near-constant presence of Alien Nine on my mind has left a review of it a distinct possibility (which would likely be a test run of my reviewing skills, to see if I feel like making it a more permanent part of pointlessness). The old spectre of politics also raises its head again, elections both here and in the US making it an especially promising year for writers of opinion pieces. I think I have my first possible article forming in my mind right now, though I've not got a start on writing it yet.
This week or next should see at least one of the possibilities mentioned above.
Back to normality on pointlessness then, and I'll start with the three webcomincs I mentioned below.
All three I've read ultimately lead back to Venus Envy (specifically, this forum post), so you'd expect at least one to have plenty of transgendered activity, and you'd be right no matter which one you chose actually. I'll start with The Princess though, which was the first one I found.
The main star of The Princess is Seth/Sarah, a transgendered boy who has plenty of fun as his alterego, Princess Sarah. This is really what I'd see published in newspapers in my ideal world, as it makes up for what it lacks in plot with cuteness and simple fun. It makes a good contrast to the more serious stuff that dominates my comic list. This is also a spin-off of Eves Apple, which I haven't got around to reading yet.
Paranormal Activity is something I found while browsing DrunkDuck (coincidentally only a few weeks before it left, I'd never have found it if I'd started looking a month or more later), I'm somewhat ashamed to admit that the 'moe factor' pulled me in, but it did. There are a few too many cliches for my liking, the characters are hit and miss, and the plot stumbles a lot (in the early stages of the story especially). But it slowly got better as I read, and it's proven enough to keep my interest. So hardly a classic, but not without its charm.
Spirit X is a spin-off of Paranormal Activity that has only just got started, so it's hard to see where it's going. The start failed to impress me (being both cliched and implausible) and I think I've seen the main character design somewhere before (it's like Tidus and Vaan all over again), but I'm giving it a chance for now.
All four comics mentioned above have been added to my comics list, and I've tidied the site up a bit by finally archiving the old news posts and articles. My next task will be to do a retrospective for Phase 2 of The Great British Newspaper Experiment, finally bringing a close to that ill-fated experiment.