Given how much I've been tweeting about Zero Patience, my brain clearly thinks I should blog about it; and my brain has thought for some time that I should blog about The Mad Man. (Maybe Oglaf, too?)

I'm nervous, though. Partly because of the content of The Mad Man: I've already squicked out one friend with a brief discussion of some of the practices featured in the book. Admittedly, with that particular friend, a bit more reluctance to raise certain topics is not a bad idea; and it's led to quite interesting conversations with another friend. Still: a minefield.

And partly because it hits at one of my insecurities. I'm used to blogging about video games, and I have some idea how to think about them in ways that lead to interesting posts. I have much less experience doing that with books and movies, however, and those are both areas where the state of the art in criticism is a lot more advanced than the state of the art for video games, so the bar is higher. And I don't like feeling banal.

Still, my brain seems fairly clear on the matter. And at least I can be fairly confident that people aren't likely to read about those two particular works elsewhere...