Shakespeare & Webcómics & Caterpillars

Have you checked out the 2009 Season Brochure from Georgia Shakes? You should. It’s big silly fun.
http://r.b5z.net/i/u/10018103/i/2009%20Season%20Brochure.pdf

You should also buy tickets to their shows (and the other theaters around town, while you’re at it), but that goes without saying.

In the continuing effort to acquire fluency in Spanish, I’ve been searching for good spanish language webcomics as documented in my other LiveJournal, coheteelectrico.

SENI (or Sergio En Internet) has much the same feel as Questionable Content. Twenty-something angst and pop culture references in reasonably-decently drawn cartoon form.

El Maizo is a fairly young fantasy-style strip, which makes it a bit more complicated to read in a foreign language. I can spend 15 minutes trying to find what a word means, later realizing that it’s probably a made-up word specific to the universe of the comic. Like trying to find a definition of Ewok. I like the art of the strip and so I’ll keep reading.

My favorite thus far is El Bulbo, the adventures of a superhero lightbulb. His true calling is to fight monstruos gigantes, but he is often called upon to fight bad-guys who aren’t so bad, such as the Middle-Class Avenger (Clasemediero Vengador), who breaks into banks and forces the tellers at gunpoint to give good customer service.

As a result of attempting to read a superhero comic in Spanish, I’ve had to pick up a lot of action-hero related words:

dejar – to leave, as in ¡déjamelo a mí! or Leave it to me!
explotar – to explode
tirar – to throw, kick, knock over
vencer – to defeat, overcome, beat
soltar – to let go of, release
golpe – blow, kick, bump/collision
mentir – to lie
cumplir – to carry out, perform
sacar – to take out
enejo – anger
bala – bullet
bronca – trouble

That last one I tried to use in class, and my teacher admonished me not to use it. She couldn’t give me the specific connotations of what it means, but just that it was sort of like gang trouble, or a gang fight, or something like that.

I still haven’t found the Spanish equivalent of Scary Go Round or Girl Genius, arguably the best webcomics out there. I guess that’s asking too much.

When my son calls me up all excited that he has caught another caterpillar AND he got to pet a duck today, I remember that’s why I’m in this cube 8 hours a day and not bumming around living in a yurt on a beach somewhere, and all is right with the world.

Decline of websites

In this post, I tallied some website popularity, according to Alexa.

SITE 9/16/06 RANK 03/21/07 RANK
LiveJournal 68 68
The Motley Fool 974 1,508
Cisco 1,140 1,157
Keith and the Girl 38,526 6,512
Creative Loafing 42,880 55,307
Scientific Atlanta 76,996 93,267
Georgia Shakespeare 746,484 7,414,733
Atlanta Coalition of Performing Arts 971,451 882,452
Dad’s Garage Theater 1,065,810 1,069,744
Alliance Theater 1,189,508 1,056,610
TheaterReview 1,221,688 2,413,153
Shakespeare Tavern 3,130,112 3,075,352
eLucas.net No Data No Data

It’s interesting that gashakespeare.org dropped quite a bit, but I remember there were some issues with the Alexa link… the link for gashakespeare.org actually went somewhere else. That seems to be fixed, and the current low ranking prevails. Possibly as a result of being out of season.

TheaterReview.com dropped a big chunk. I attribute it to the fact that I’ve started censoring flame wars, and thus interest has waned.