First of all, I absolutely love the site! The gigantic amount of wiki pages, the helpful community and its forum and the always entertaining news makes me return almost daily to the site. I adore it, I wish I had found it sooner. Maybe, just maybe, if I had joined sooner, I would have had as many wiki point as Pikahyper has now. Nah...

I hope that the things that make me smile, make you smile too. And please, please take the things that make me frown as positive criticism. These are my frowns, but you don't have to agree with it. Maybe my frowns are your smiles, who knowns? Either way, don't take it personally.

Finding ones niche on CV is difficult. It took me several months to discover what sort of things I wanted to do on Comicvine. Coming from Europe, I grew up with comics from the Big Two and the European comics, but I quickly learned to love indy comics. I order comics from Archonia, a Belgian (online) comic store, which luckily has tons of indy stuff. I admit, it often is a race to be the first to add new information on CV. It's an advantage to live in Europe, because of the time difference with America. I mean, by the time I come home from work, the people in the good, ol' US of A are just halfway through their working day. So while they do their dayjob, I can already do my work on CV. Maybe it's not fair (I'm sorry!), but I can't help it that the Earth rotates on its axis. And hey, it was the American president Chester A. Arthur that held a conference in 1884 in Washington, D.C., that placed the prime meridian (the zero hour) in England.If the prime meridian had been placed in New York, the Americans would have the advantage.

Alright, enough rambling, let's go to the list of things. In no particular order:

• What makes me smile: it's international! As I said, I'm from Europe. So this gives me the change to add comics from my own country, the comics I grew up with. In a sense, I'm reliving my childhood! And just at the right time, cause people at my age start to have their so-called 'second youth'. Either they start dying their hair (I'm short-haired, almost bald), get a motorcycle (not interested), take a much younger girlfriend (wife won't let me), or do other things that remind them of their youth. Oh, who am I kidding: I never left my childhood... Anyway, CV's international character lets me explore local comics from other countries, like Saltire (from the UK), Besoboy (from Russia) and Superlopez (from Spain).

  

• What makes me frown: it's international! Yes, the thing that I like, also annoys me. Let me give you an example: X-Men. Only the first series shown on that page is from Marvel, the rest is 'foreign'. Foreign for Americans, that is. Now I know that Gli Incredibili X-Men is not originally from Marvel, but the rest looks legit. What annoys me is the fact that I think I'm looking at the original (American) comics, but then I discover, after waisted minutes, that I'm not. And the X-Men are not the only ones. Some time ago, I read a suggestion from someone in the forum: a flag from the country next to the title of the series. Until someone gets a better idea, I support that suggestion.

• Another frown: I like to be thorough in what I add to the wiki. That includes adding a picture to the new pages, whether it is a character or a team or a location, etc. Now I get it that not everyone has a scanner to scan their own pictures, or know how to Google preview pages of the comics, but please try to add a picture to your newly created page. It's so much beter than the standard picture, don't you think? Just take a few minutes to add a picture, with the knowledge that you not only made a page that will live on forever on CV, but also gave the page it's 'face', so others know what he/she/it looks like. I learned how to use Photoshop from my wife (thanks, dear!), which makes for even better pictures without the empty word balloons.

• Now the next thing is another frown, that will always be a frown, I fear. Because it will always be there, and sometimes I do it too: create silly pages. What are silly pages? Things like Thor's beard and Tony Chu's ear. They have interesting stories, but c'mon... they're bodyparts! What's next: Superman's spit curl? Tony Stark's stubble from his alcoholic period? Captain America's chafed thighs?

• On to better things: what I like are the animated gifs on the user pages (like the user MadeinBangladesh has). It gives the user more character and uniqueness. I don't have it on my user page, but when I come across a suitable one on the Internet, I won't hesitate to put that on my page.

• Another thing that makes me smile: meeting like-minded people. Most of my forum posts are requests to one of the mods, but I really like the inner thoughts of others (like Mat Elfring's self-doubt). And I never ever thought that I would receive a PM from a real publisher and creator of The Wraith: Frank Dirscherl, asking me to correct something on The Wraith's page. I even met someone in real life whom I first met on CV (shoutout to @youmika). I hope you guys and gals have similiar experiences with other members of CV.

Again, I love CV. I can't stress that enough. I've been a comics fan for about 30 years now, and will continue to be that. And what better place to express one's fan-ness than on CV?

So here I am, sitting behind my desk with a sore throat, a headache and a stuffed nose, at 6 o'clock in the morning, thinking about a Youtube clip I saw yesterday. The clip is simply about how long a piece of string is. It could be 32 cm long, or 12 inches, or 18 fingers, or a million atoms... or infinite, depending on how you measure it. British actor and comic Alan Davies discovers on his journey that everything is put in perspective. If you have a spare hour, it is worth watching.

So that got me thinking, just how sick am I right now? Do I have a mild virus of a terminal disease? The fact that I'm up in the middle of the night, is that because I'm a bit restless or do I suffer from chronic insomnia? Am I a realist of a hypochrondriac? I guess I'll never know. Unless I'm dead in two weeks, then I can rule out the mild virus...

Moving on to comics. Do I own several thousands of them or just one, with an infinite amount of pages, considering it is one big story in a giant multiverse and everything is connected? Thinking back to the origin of comics when they were comic strips in newspapers, I could also argue that I have hundreds of thousands of comic strips. Or breaking them down to their components, do I own a small forest worth of paper? Millions of octopuses (sic) worth of ink? Several tons of pigments for the color? Think about the thousands of pencils and erasers that were used to create the images. Tons of steel for the staples. But most of all I own enough electricity from years of brain and muscle activity from the writers, artists and other creative people to power a small island nation for several months... Consider that next time you look at your comic collection!

The fact that I'm feverish could contribute to my ramblings... yeah, definitely... or indefinitely, depending how you look at it... Whatever, I'm going back to sleep.