So here's kind of what's happening

Hopefully my return will not include revelations about a child I was unaware I'd fathered

So I get these emails from a company called "Blog2Print" that's selling me the opportunity to buy bound copies of my blog(s) as a book.  You don't run a blog for as long as I ran Vol. 1 of League of Melbotis without the same sort of ego it takes to want to spend a few clams putting those volumes on the shelf for future generations to discover and enjoy.  But I'm also cheap, so I haven't actually done much but run the process to see what getting a full run in print would cost (and, sister, it ain't cheap).

But in looking at Ye Olde Blogge, I got a little misty-eyed.  Gone were the days of reader contests, pointless pet updates, personal commentary, stories of The League's employment, and all the stuff that made League of Melbotis a fun little clubhouse tucked in the boughs of the interwebs.  We used to wrap that stuff up with waxing rhapsodic about The Man of Steel, the comic reviews, movie pondering, etc...  and I guess, more or less, that seemed to work.

But that's not what we were doing here at The Signal Watch.  Here we decided, I think, that social media and my own growing concerns regarding broadcasting my private life to the internet made what we'd been doing at League of Melbotis no longer viable, and so maybe we'd dial it back a bit and have just a media-focus to the site.  But to my mind...  things just never gelled (I blame myself.  And Randy.).

While the sort of "personality blogging" that League of Melbotis represented has become generally considered passe, if not a bad idea, in this age of kids and their Tweeter and The Face Book, oh, hell...  none of that seems to be working super well, either.  And I don't mean just for me.

What today's bloggers are supposed to do is find a niche and say "here's my focus, I'm going to cover (fill in blank)", so you wind up as a comics blog, a movie blog, a political blog, what-have-you.  This is supposed to draw attention to your blog, and I believe increasing your readership to the triple digits  and $1.50 will get you a cup of coffee. 

In its first incarnation, League of Melbotis (ie:  I)  never focused on any one thing very well (the downside of ADD), and while we're not embarrassed about what we did at The Signal Watch to date, all this fixation on keeping it semi-impersonal never really worked.

Some of you have been with us for a while, and I think I can be honest with you people:  This week I watched The Pixies play through an album I bought at age 14 and then became quite excited by the return of Elvira to the cable spectrum (she showed Night of the Living Dead last night and it was a lot of fun.  She's still got it.),  and these things got the hamster running on the old brain-wheel again.  Sometimes you can look at what used to work and you can try to do it again.  Sometimes Coke Classic is where its at.

That's not to say that this always works.  For every Star Trek: The Next Generation there's a The All-New WKRP in Cincinatti.  So, who knows?  maybe three or four weeks of this, and I'll be apologizing to everyone as I shut up shop once again.  But...

...as an experiment, we're going to try to go back to League of Melbotis-style blogging for a little while.  (Yay...?).

I know it sounds kind of wacky to not want to return to the old melbotis.com URL, but that's the way its going to be. If I'm a little weird about that, well...  sticking with The Signal Watch is my way of moving forward.

We hope you'll stick with us.  We're at a very different place today than we were at in 2003 in many, many ways, but so are all of you.

I don't plan to blog every day, by the way.  So, I suggest you prime your RSS reader or look on Facebook for links both back to this site and our official wacky links site.*

But I think I still remember how to do this, so let us give it a shot, shall we?

We've got some stuff to look forward to!

• A Green Lantern movie is set to come out
• a Flash movie is in pre-production
• there's a Jimmy Olsen feature in Action Comics (which is really good right now, by the way)
• UT football is off to an inauspicious start
• Colbert is being summoned to Capitol Hill
• Jamie is occasionally producing some videos
• Lucy has learned how to drive**
• and much, much more

I will be talking a bit about comics themselves, so... be forewarned.

Anyway, we hope you'll come by and set a spell.

*A special thanks to Randy (aka:  RHPT) for keeping the homefires burning with his always-excellent contributions to our sister site, Zee... Zee... Zee...

**this is not necessarily true.