Transmetropolitan: Back on the Street Review

Transmetropolitan: Back on the Street by Warren Ellis collects the first three issues of the DC Vertigo title.
Transmetropolitan is the story of journalist Spider Jerusalem in the near-future of "The City," a pseudo NYC/London/other large cities. As a journalist Spider is called back into the city to complete previously promised work. He comes down out of the mountain and causes large amounts of violence and takes a lot of drugs and becomes the voice of the marginalized and downtrodden. He also gets beat up a lot. And takes a lot of drugs.
Spider Jerusalem is Warren Ellis' sci-fi version of Hunter S. Thompson, and the later volumes and issues even follow a presidential campaign, similar to Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.

Transmetropolitan is my favorite comic series. All issues are collected in graphic novel form. If you like science fiction, journalism, Hunter S. Thompson, drugs, violence, drugs and two-headed cats, then this comic is for you.

Facebook and Google+

The two social networks that I use the most are Facebook and Google+. I think that they both offer a similar way to post information, although I think that Facebook is the easier application to use. Google+ has some interesting differences in that you can create and join circles. This makes for smaller and smaller social networks inside the larger framework. I find myself using Facebook as a resource to keep up to date with family and friends, as well as getting a feel for how people respond to popular media. I use Google+ more to follow favorite artists, bloggers, writers and creatives. I also like the way that Groups works, it is easy to follow specific ideas and/or groups than Facebook. Library and information professionals can use both social networks in the way that I have. Facebook would allow for more outreach and connection with the community. With Google+ a library could connect with others in their region as a "circle" or create groups, similarly to Facebook. One post from the IUPUI (SOIC) FB page highlighting veteran service speaks to the concerns of the greater community and allows the school to sympathize, support and encourage these ideals:

Thank you to the men and women who have served and sacrificed for our country.

Posted by IU School of Informatics & Computing at IUPUI on Wednesday, November 11, 2015

MUVE and me

Most of my experience using MUVEs are gaming based. I have played a number of MMORPGs (WoW, Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: TOR) and enjoy the level of detail and immense size of the games. However, multiplayer gaming with strangers has never held much interest for me. I do enjoy playing MMOs with people I know, but then scheduling has to be perfect, which is difficult. I think that MUVEs will be used extensively in the future in a variety of fields. For libraries, I see the physical space of a library being effectively modeled in virtual space. I think with adaptive technologies and advancements in VR that the virtual space will become more and more real and accessible for people. As the library is a community hub of information resources in the real-world, it will continue to be so in the digital world.

My social media history

My first introduction to social media was through various website forums. I thought message boards were a neat idea and I still engage with them today. The first time I remember hearing about the terms "social networking" on the internet was MySpace. I never created a page, but I was happy to find some from old friends. Although Facebook became far easier to use and more popular. I also love to use YouTube, Redditt and browse other peoples images at Flickr. The least experience I have is with social bookmarking sites. Although, I think that using Pinterest is in my near future.

Introduction to the blog