Maybe it's the sense of fun you bring to any situation but I miss you already

I take back what I said earlier - you COULD be a bigger pussy

One time I took some acid and when the trip was over I could play the bagpipes and drive stick

I will admit that sometimes you can forget that the bigger picture is that we're actually getting better as a species.  The vegans and the vegetarians have the right idea, of course, we just don't want to admit as much right now because that would be to announce our moral inferiority and culpability in something appalling, so we respond to their perfectly sensible dietary choice with open hostility, denial, ridicule, and even outright lies, and this notion returned to me as I was watching The Dallas Buyers Club, finding it weird - suddenly - to see people walking down dowdy hospital corridors talking about the "business" of tending the terminally ill, seeing money symbols instead of human beings and deciding on the life and death of people based on where a decimal point goes.  This is what the millionaire boys' club of the Condems want for the NHS, so the film is a horror story as much for us as it is for the US audience, possibly more so because we at least have to go through the anticipation of waiting for the full scope of the atrocity to make itself known over the coming years, while the yanks have been brainwashed already into thinking private healthcare is normal rather than yet another example of their money being spirited away into the coffers of the rich, the public debate on Obamacare successfully hijacked - with the gleeful aid of the media - by the tea party donkey show of America's crypto-fascist upper-middle classes infuriated yet again at the idea of altruism, because while bombing anonymous brown children is all well and good, giving them a band-aid afterwards is going too far.
Dallas Buyers Club uses the banality and uniform acceptance of this everyday evil to give its story an antagonist in the form of corporate America and the complicity of uncaring and small-minded government bureaucracy, so it's an easy watch in that regard for a big softy like me who likes things to throw back to the telemovie-of-the-week trappings of the mid-80 as the film does quite often.  It also has a protagonist who's essentially a paradigm for the modern politically-incorrect misogynistic racist dickhead central to much of modern entertainment, only here his failings aren't held up as indicative of a rebel spirit who blazes their own trail, these things are held up as failings to be surmounted so that the character can be less of an asshole, which again is quite welcome.

I seem to have waffled uncontrollably again when I could have just said "good film, I liked it."

I'm starting to think this is not therapy - I think we're making you sangria

Posting early today, so I haven't even seen how badly the budget has fucked me over this year while handing money to rich people.  I'm guessing there, of course - I'm sure I can always edit this post in the future if it turns out around one o'clock that the Condems have been just lovely to all us poor folk.

I drank three beers and I got like all giggley and tired and I didn't want a fourth

While it still looks lovely, I don't recall Grant Morrison's and Rian Hughes' Dare being quite as adolescent as it seems to be to these jaded old-man eyes, but in my defence, when I got around to reading it I was 13 and its primary audience.
Nestling in the pages of the Rian Hughes-centric Yesterday's Tomorrows collection of the artist's comics and design work - a beautiful-looking object and no mistake - I recall reading somewhere that it was Morrison's rebuttal to the idea of a gentleman upper-middle-class type adventurer as beloved of a certain generation of schoolboys, but that rings hollow for two reasons:
1 - Morrison didn't have any problems at all with the upper classes adventuring and oppressing the weak when he wrote superhero comics for DC for 30 years in adventures aimed at a specific tier of white, male, middle-class North Americans, and
2 - Dare eschews the class system in favor of the more pantomime-y good/evil dynamic, its nods to the class system being little more than parading out some cartoonishly noble Northerners struggling against The Man.
As well as Dare's 4th form political posturing, there's also Really and Truly, a Morrison joint from the pages of 2000ad that I am going to go ahead and assume got commissioned because of the art.  Hughes really didn't get a good script from Morrison during their 2000ad tenure and I wonder why he didn't plump for the more energetic and fun Robo Hunter outings as a showcase - Morrison's name being worth more in terms of attracting the casual comics reader happening upon the book, I imagine.

drinking, violence, destruction of property - are these the things we think of when we think of the Irish?

Subtle exposition is subtle.

St Patrick's Day here in Ireland, and I didn't notice if the local Baptists showed up to picket the annual parade as usual, as there was a bit of a crowd at it.  I can only presume the Baptists object to the exclusion of gays from the larger parades in New York and Boston and that's why they usually protest a cultural festival in the middle of a mostly-Catholic town attended by thousands of children, so more power to them - we must teach tolerance for difference at a young age.
Been watching the Veronica Mars film, a Kickstarter-ed project based on a television show about a teenage detective, so it's kind of like when Firefly fans got that Serenity film, only this wasn't for massive fucking nerds who need to accept that their shitty space cowboy show wasn't that good.
Set ten years after the end of the teen detective series, it hits its first hurdle in being a movie based on a teen detective show that doesn't actually star a teen detective, so if you're a fan of the genre the movie is not for you before it even starts, though if you're a fan of the original series and only want an epitaph for it, it's likely for you, as there is a pretty narrow focus to proceedings that excludes newcomers despite some concessions to the idea that there might be people other than viewers of the television show watching, so it's hard to say - as a viewer of the original show - if it's any more than the decent movie-of-the-week drama with some mystery elements that it appears to be.  I enjoyed seeing the returning cast, including cameos from successful-ish small screen actors like Schmitt from New Girl and Sue Heck from The Middle as well as blink-and-you'll-miss-it shots of Jamie Lee Curtis and James Franco.  It's an okay sign-off for the series, but I suspect it's nothing special in isolation.

Why is everyone hitting me in the face today?

I ought to move to some place where there's no art like Iran or Utah

I did it first and that's why you're doing it now

Although I've finished with the pages I sent off as samples, I continue posting regardless and today begins another J6 strip.  This one's an "arena" type story where characters get dumped in a place to fight other characters for "all the marbles" on some flimsy pretext, and it was inspired by Marvel's Avengers Arena comic book, which sounded okay at the time but in practice spent its first issue apologizing to the readers for its own premise, which it then didn't follow through on.
Although it cannily cultivated fan outrage at the premise while it was ongoing, it wasn't actually a particularly odd duck of a comic, being no different from other mini/maxi-series published by the Big Two, as DC did a more or less identical miniseries called Salvation Run a few years earlier, and Ultimate Spider-Man had a near-identical story arc in the mid-2000s, but I did like AA for being so openly a product of editorial mandate rather than creative teams making a pitch, and even if this did kind of betray very early on that we wouldn't be seeing the deaths of any characters beloved of editorial (like X23 or Runaways), it does at least help underline that when you're making comics on Marvel's level - especially something under the Avengers brand - it's a product first and foremost.
Martin Gray has some good reviews of the series over on Too Dangerous For a Girl, should you be curious to know more about it.

And so we arrive at the end of another week!  I shall continue to post daily strips over the weekend - hopefully you'll all have a good one.