Monday: I don't have a coherent theme for today, so this is the title.

Part 1:  A bird.

I caught it in mid-hop.

Part 2: A gratuitous Dutch angle shot of my lunch.

This wasn't a fully intentional artistic choice, I just wanted a good shot of my delicious strawberry soda and was too lazy to reorganize things, mostly because I was really hungry for that sandwich.

Part 3:  My never-ending battle to find a decent patty melt.

This is a long-running issue.  My best success has been to make them myself, but that's a lot of effort.  There's this place that made a proper one three and a half years ago, and a check of their menu indicates they still sell them (so, maybe I'm going to Aiea this weekend).

Tonight, just before heading home, I checked Dumbing of Age, which now updates at "before leaving work" instead of "after getting home" due to the time change.  Since I know that he bases lots of things on real life, so I googled the restaurant they're at.  After a bunch of menu pages of "that looks good, probably a lot because I'm hungry," I became very unhappy that they have a patty melt.  It doesn't use Swiss cheese, but it's still very close.  Plus, you get fries, and soup.  Sure, a lot of kinds of soup aren't that great, but still.  It comes with soup!

Part 3a:  A quick discussion of web comics.

It is too difficult to keep track of web comics any more.  Most of them publish something on the order of 4 panels a day, which means that the story is decompressed about a factor of 1.5 compared to a regular comic book (taking 22 pages at ~8 panels a page, published monthly).  This makes the story somewhat slower, but since it's broken up into tiny chunks, keeping a full story line organized is even harder.  This explains why it's possible for me to realize today that one comic I've been reading since college has been published for eighteen and a half years.  What's happened in that comic?  No clue.  I remember bits of stories, but even though it's in my RSS feeds, I don't really read it.

One issue is that many web comics add characters, and then add more characters, and repeat until the cast becomes so large that it's no longer feasible to keep everyone straight.  I think this is one reason why Alice Grove is one of my current favorites.  The cast is basically three people, with a new person just recently added.  It's manageable.  Another good example is Scary Go Round, as that has a cast of Shelly Winters (who died once.  Maybe twice.  It's been a long time.), her sister Erin (now Mordawwa, Queen of Hell), and Lottie Grote (the best character in webcomics, ever).  Sure, there are other people, but I don't even bother trying to keep them straight.

"Was there a point to this?"  No, not really.

Part 4: WTF was with today's episode of Supergirl?

"Are you really going from web comics to actual comics, which have an even worse problem with way too many characters that are impossible to keep straight?"  Yes.  Duh.  The main difference is that in web comics, everything is done via one perspective.  In actual comics, you can decide to stop following the story of Superman and Batman, because that's just a pile of shit now, and instead follow the story through Supergirl, who is apparently being written by insane people now.

"So it's bad?"  There isn't a way to explain this without clearly stating the following facts:

1. They wanted to get Flash from the CW Flash show onto Supergirl to do a cross promotional thing.
2. So they looked it up in the comics, and saw that Flash has a Cosmic Treadmill that he can use to travel through time and between dimensions.
3. They then said, "Yeah, ok.  But we'll probably have to explain the concept of the multiverse."
4. So they did that.  As part of the episode.  On national television.  With all the characters just being, "Sure.  Makes sense to me!"
5. But they had to cover the fact that this was clearly cross promotion, so had a character point out that they look like "the multicultural gang from some CW television show."
6. And, despite it being a gimmick, used the episode to also tie up like four or five hanging plot threads from the rest of the season.

I simply don't understand how they could possibly have gotten the approval to cram all of this into one hour long television show.  I saw a review last week that I think best articulated my though from here:  this show simply wouldn't work without Melissa Benoist making Supergirl so wonderful.  The fact that they're fine letting people cram all the crazy shit in makes it even better.

"This doesn't make any sense."  No, this doesn't make any sense.  Mary Marvel gets her strength through the wizard Shazam invoking the power of Hippolyta as the "H"?  Hippolyta as in Wonder Woman's mother?  That just blows my mind.  That has to have come up at some point, right?  Unfortunately, because people are awful, I can't find anything about it, because all "Mary Marvel Wonder Woman" searches have to deal with the stupid shit that happened more recently, which to steal from that link "I dunno, it gets very dark and overwrought and honestly I have not kept up with DC Comics very much in recent years."

Part 5: All the remaining links.

• Bunnies aren't supposed to get wet, so I'm using this link to point out that bunnies aren't supposed to get wet.
• Dogs.
• Cat.
• Mark Hamill.
• Words.
• Estimates of the elasticity of employment with respect to the minimum wage.
• This is kind of depressing, and kind of interesting at the same time.
• This is just an interesting history thing.