No new code developments this week
I spent hours on trying to get AWS Lambda to work for me and all I got was this endless anger. This week, I'm going to talk a little about IRCB and a few comic books.
I’ll be quite honest with you all. Things have slowed down significantly over here at Mike HQ1. The holidays are to blame... mostly.
But also: According to the internet at large and the AWS documentation, AWS Lambdas quite easy but not if you’re doing things my way, it seems.
No. Not really.
I actually think I’m close to getting the hours of hammering my head at a keyboard working, but I do have to do some restructuring of my already existing runner code to get the Lambdas I want in place to work (and probably find a way to export some of my DB schema work to a consumable library--aka “Layers” for Lambdas).
So I’ve been fighting with that business for the last week or two when I’ve been sitting down at my computer to code in my after-work hours. The progress so far isn’t great, which means I should probably put it down completely and dive into one of the many other things on my list of things to do:
Searchers for a few more services
Indexing a few more publishers and sites
Cleaner page loading screens
Creating some sort of Logo / Branding
Creating a release notes page with Gatsby
Cleaning up the front end package builder
Fixing a few already known and partially annoying bugs
The more I ruminate on these things, the more I think, despite the last post, I may want to figure out non-admin user authentication sooner rather than later just because... it may actually be something doable (that isn’t Lambdas lol).
We shall see.
You ever meet your heroes?
I sort of don’t believe in the whole heroes thing, but let me have a cool heading, okay?
We had Ed Brubaker on I Read Comic Books this past week to talk about comics and THEN we talked for an additional hour(?!) about Ed’s new comic, Where The Body Was.
I’m extremely proud of this episode. Paul was a champ in this episode, Kait and Danny sat in the production booth and kept things running smooth, and our editor, Zander, nailed the end product. We’ve done some great episodes in the past, but this one is honestly the best yet.
My buddy Nick N., who start DestroyTheCyb.org!2 with me back in the day, said something along the lines of, “When we were sitting at our desks writing reviews, something like this episode was the fucking dream.” And I was really taken aback by that. I don’t think 19-year-old Mike3 ever envisioned talking to one of the names on the comics I was reading every month. Having Ed on the show was such a cool and wild experience if only because I’ve been reading the guy’s comics almost as long as I’ve been reading comics. An old college pal, Jeff, put me on to Brubaker’s Daredevil run back in the day and I was hooked.
At this point, making a comic podcast for so long and being a comic-convention regular4, I’ve spoken with and met plenty of comic creators whose work I’ve read and fawned over, both on IRCB and in person at conventions5, but this one is clicking a bit different for me. It’s one thing to have a quick chat with someone you admire, but this episode felt like a personal achievement. Someone out in the ether passed our show’s name through the grapevine (or it was simply found by happenstance) and then this episode happened.
That feels really incredible.
And when I say we that’s not some royal ‘we’ business. IRCB is made by a group of people every single week. Most weeks, it’s me and two of our twelve rotating panelists plus a live producer (from that group of twelve). Then the man with the power of a thousand suns, Zander, puts it together for our (exceptionally good-looking) audience. It’s so far from a single person’s project and we keep kicking ass every single week.
IRCB6 is coming up on 400 episodes7, which is an impressive thing in itself. Like. It’s been over eight years of my (and Zander’s) life putting this thing together week after week--and I think we’ve only ever missed one or two weeks in that time. And we’re still going. I mean, I’ve got friggin’ episodes planned through 2025 at this point.
But enough about that. When we hit that episode 400, I’m certain I’ll have something pretty fun to say about it all.
It’s been an really solid week.
Now a few comics for ya
Because I gotta and because I really liked both of these books.
Please Don't Step On My JNCO Jeans
Noah Van Sciver came on to my radar on a whim when he released his book Fante Bukowski, back in 2015. I saw this book on the old comiXology site and then later in an indie comic shop while on a jaunt with my pal Paul while he was in NYC for a visit and decided: I think I need to own this. Van Sciver’s work is likely not everyone’s cup of tea as each of his books tend to swirl around extremely dry sarcasm and irony, or, in the case of this collection, anxious and matter of fact slice of life stories that feel, sometimes, too on the nose.
This collection covers a mix of one(ish) page comics originally published in newspapers or alt-magazines from 2017-2019, most of which I Personally, found to be really relatable and endearing. I think if you vibe with the quick ponderings, musings, and anxieties of a well-read 30-something guy in Ohio, you might like this.
Petrol Head #2
I’ve talked a bit about this on the show, but this book continues to be one of the best looking action sci-fi comics on the market for my money. Nick, of the IRCB crew, recommended this and I was floored by the art of issue #1, drawn by Pye Parr. It doesn’t hurt that Rob Williams writes a compelling story about a robot race car driver living in a bleak future as a second class citizen to humans, suddenly thrust into having to choose to save a man and his daughter with the robo-police on their way.
The first issue does a great job of hooking you, and issue two? Well, it has maybe one of the funniest gimmicks I could only expect from a seasoned 2000AD creative team.
Next Time
I know we’re early into things, but I may cut the next post short here in order to make a little room for the holidays and for some dedicated code time.
We’ll see just how busy things get.
Until then, I’d be curious to know what you folks want to hear about next, or if you have any comics you’re reading to round out the year.
I don’t know why I wrote that but it’s staying there
A humble beginning that launched with handfuls of comic reviews hastily thrown together to GET. CONTENT. OUT.
Eventually, this site blossomed into 30(ish) people writing and editing reviews and essays before things fell apart and IRCB became my main side-hustle.
19-year-old Mike...
At least, pre-pandemic…
One time, over tacos at a bar attached to C2E2 — that’s a whole other story
Which I constantly, always just call “the show” and assume everyone knows what I’m talking about as if saying. I was going to write “the show” here but refrained.
Not including 64 minisodes and another 50+ other bonus episodes and miniseries we’ve dropped in our podcast feed