Hey! I'm walkin' here! I'm walkin' here!

Back in January of this year, I was let go from my fintech job of 10 years.  I had planned on retiring early anyway, but would have preferred doing so on my own timeline for obvious reasons.  I did something stupid and I had let my manager know I was contemplating retirement and so my being let go was not entirely unexpected since the company always does layoffs in January.  It was easier to give me the pink slip than another co-worker who would have been blindsided.  The biggest disappointment was not getting a farewell lunch with co-workers and thanks after a software engineer career that lasted well over 30 years!  I'm in my mid 50s, so I feel fortunate that I'm still young and have my health.

I spent a few months moping around the house initially, but then I began pondering what I wanted to do with the next leg of my life!  I'm married, my wife still works, and both my kids are older and have completed 4 year degrees at college and moved out of the house.  I'm sure some of you have noticed I stopped creating content for my blog back in 2020 which coincided with work becoming extremely busy.  At the end of this summer, I started posting again and want to keep doing so for the foreseeable future.  I have the time now and I love the process of reading comics, researching interesting tidbits, and sharing the information.  I still have a ton of comics in my collection that have not been posted including a fair number of international books.

I found myself watching too many YouTube videos earlier this year when the idea hit me to spend some of my time making my own videos about this hobby I enjoy.  I released my first video last week to little fanfare!  It is rough, but taught me a bit about the process.  Earlier today, I just completed my second video which I'm a little more happy with and is emblematic of the type of videos I want to create.  This video is Star Wars Dark Empire Surprising Comic Cover Changes and, while sensationalistic in nature, I feel is full of the interesting content I love researching and writing about.  In fact, the bulk of the content in the video is taken from a posting I created back in 2016, Wizard Ace Edition #13 - Star Wars: Dark Empire #1.  The video is undoubtably rough, but every outing, I plan on improving one thing until these videos rival the best content for Star Wars comic fans.

I plan to create 4-5 blogs a week and 1 video.  I feel the videos are an extension of what I've already been doing here, but I'm hoping it can reach a larger audience.  If you happen to read this blog and enjoying the content, you would be doing me a tremendous favor if you went over to YouTube and watched the video I posted today.  If it interests to you, I would be grateful if you decided to like the video and subscribe to my channel.