Bag of Holding

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I in no way need another bag. I have multiple backpacks provided by employers on top of the various ones purchased myself. In addition I have multiple bags that come from conferences. I have so many that I have taken to setting different ones up for different contexts. I have the backpack I take for work and work travel; I have the backpack for personal travel; I have the backpack for taking the child out to events; I have the messenger bag I like to take when I am riding my bike.

That said, despite my complete lack of need for such a thing, I find this Think Geek bag purpose built for taking to SF and comic conventions to be crazy sweet. The whole reason why I mix and match my bags is that none of them are perfect. Some have the water bottle mesh side pockets, some have the laptop compartments and the inner pocket with lots of pen and pencil slots. I love the idea of taking the needs of a specific event and crafting a bag to address it. I have probably taken all of my backpacks to some convention or another and none are perfect. And it is only $30 so not even expensive.

But I don’t need it. Really I don’t. Really. I don’t. Need it.

Around the Podosphere

Here’s a few things that have struck me as interesting from my recent listening.

I’m a fan of Harry Shearer’s Le Show and the July 20th episode featured a lot of talk with John M. Barry, a writer and expert on New Orleanian issues. I liked how Mr. Barry debunked the whole ridiculous “why rebuild a city under sea level?” meme quite well. If you are at all interested in New Orleans, the failure of the federal levees and related topics, I recommend this for a listen.

I continue to be interested in minicomics. I’ll be honest, most of my inspiration and excitement that I get from DIY media lately has come from the minicomics community. I really want to find a place where I can send them some dough and they’ll send me a grab bag of mixed stuff. I’m interested in the medium but the search costs are high. I do love when I can get a nice compact burst of information on the topic, which I did get from this Dollar Bin recording of the minicomics panel from HeroesCon. This panel had a lot of Alec Longstreth in it. This does make me realize that I need to go to Lulu.com and buy the collection of his minicomics.

I like listening to SModcast and I don’t begrudge the boys making some money, particularly when they are paying a dude to edit and lay in their music bed. Considering the music bed is really the third guy on the show, it’s a significant part of the program. However, their Think Geek sponsorship on the show I listened to today was painful. It was goofy and all and in the kind of style I like to do mine, but damn it felt like it went on forever. I checked the MP3 player and it was a little under 3 minutes but it felt like 10. I’d suggest after about a minute, y’all stop. Past that, you subtract value and make me pissed off at Think Geek. I’m just saying.