Extremely early thoughts on the T-Con beta schedule
Technicon starts a week from tomorrow, and they’ve posted an early version of the schedule. I do realize that con schedules are subject to complete revision until late Sunday afternoon, but I couldn’t help noticing a few things.
The first thing is that my sweetie and I are involved in one of the Live-Action Role Playing games, and that at least one (possibly both) of the games starts Friday night at 8:00. So we may miss meiran‘s Women in SF panel 🙁 I’ve enjoyed representing the Liberated Male there in the past, and I’d be sorry to miss this one.
Another scheduled LARP event (if it’s for the one I’m in) may cause me to miss the first half of the Amateur Film panel, which would be a shame. We don’t have a submission this year like we were going to, but it’s fun to see what others bring and comment on it.
(2 years ago: “Are you sure you want me as a panelist? I haven’t actually been involved in anything since Space Rogues – all I can talk about is the several projects I hope to start work on sometime soon.”
“Amateur shmamateur, that makes you a Hollywood professional!”)
The person I will be playing in the LARP is a major Russian political figure, I haven’t decided whether my accent should be “Boris Badenov” or Connery’s “Alexsandr Ramius” (i.e. Moscow by way of Scotland).
This year’s midnight discussions include the SW Virginia Spiritual Alliance (a pagan group), Polyamory 101, and a BDSM demonstration / panel. Who says science fiction fans never do anything but watch their Trek videos?
Internet Movie Madness
For those who wanted to know, the online version of the first episode of Space Rogues can be found on my Movies page.
It’s in two parts which add up to 90 megs of Quicktime, so don’t try this on your 28.8 modem.
Which Space Rogues Character Are You?
Geek Moment!
So, I’m playing the 3D cyberpunk video game “Deus Ex” yesterday… I find a note that an engineer has left for his superior, alerting him that the new root password for the local computer system is “reindeerflotilla.”
I sit there and think, “That sounds so familiar… why is that familiar to me?”
Turns out it’s the internal level 6 password to the Emcon mainframe that Jeff Bridges uses in the movie “Tron.”
Why does my brain only store this stuff? Why can’t I remember anything useful?
Wow, the Internet really is vast and complex!
My Internet access is working again.
Yesterday: “It’s your Ethernet card.” “I have four machines here with cards from three different manufacturers. None of them are working. I don’t think it’s the card.” “Uh, okay, you don’t have your Windows Network control panel properly configured for TCP/IP.” “This is a local intranet consisting of two Windows machines, one Mac, and a BSD Unix box. What do you think I’m configured for, carrier pigeon?” “Uh, okay, your modem’s bad. We’ll send a guy over with a new one tomorrow.” “Fine.”
Today: “Hello, we aren’t going to send you a modem yet, the tech support person you talked to has been screwing up a lot lately. What’s the hardware address on your modem?” “Blah-blah-blah-blah-4C.” “Okay, that the problem, we have it here as blah-blah-blah-blah-4L.” “What? How can you have an L in a hexadecimal number?” “… Just reboot the modem and try again.”
So I’ve got access… and about 300 unread messages. 🙂
A quick comment on meiran‘s cosplay postings: I am still trying to find the picture I had from an old VTSFFC Halloween. It’s myself as Tuxedo Mask surrounded by the Katsucon 1 Sailor Senshi from Blacksburg. The anime freak where I work doesn’t believe me when I tell him I did that, though it’s funny watching him trying to decide whether I’m 1) lame for being in a Sailor Moon costume group, or 2) way cool for being in the company of five women in skirts that short.Interestingly, when you search the web for Sailor Moon cosplayers, you find a lot of men playing the senshi. A quote from one male Sailor Moon: “I get a lot of female attention. Apparently chicks dig the bows.”
Topical humor
This page at this web link claims to have acquired a recording of the new voice mail announcment for Enron. Judge for yourself, if you feel like it.
When sampled songs attack
“Legend of a Cowgirl” is a much cooler song than “Sunshine Superman”, which I can’t stand.
However, “You’re so Vain” was fine the way it was and didn’t need sampling, thank you.
Pre-lunchtime thoughts
The Macintosh SE gathering dust in my office is currently worth about $15 bucks on the open market. It was a $3700 system when it came out (thank Ghu I didn’t pay that.)
To prove my geek credentials, I got the Tron 20th Anniversary DVD a couple weeks ago. If that movie had nothing else (and many would say that it did have nothing else), it had great visuals that drew you in when the ‘story’ and ‘acting’ couldn’t. The art director for the film makes an interesting comment on the DVD, claiming “If we’d had the technology then to produce the realistic effects we can now, I’m not sure that the visual style would have been as memorable.”
Sometimes artistic beauty springs from limitations.
I’m also amused that the Light Cycle contest, a sequence took weeks of pre-rendering at the time, can now be rendered on the fly as a playable game by any competent desktop computer.
Ahhh… the technology curve.
So, I sent wave after wave of my own men at the killbots…
According to GotFuturama.com, Futurama has been put on production hiatus next season. Apparently, the show’s been pre-empted so much by sporting events, that they have a season’s worth of unseen episodes to air. The problem is, this amounts to cancelling the show next year, as the cast and production crew will all need to find other work next season to pay the bills, and probably won’t be available when Fox gets around to ordering new episodes.
There’s an online petition with about 35,000 signatures pleading with Fox to rethink their decision. I guess we’ll wait and see…
The Vulcan databases have no such record…
Woohoo! I’m in the top 15 members of the SETI @ VTSFFC project!
If I’m the first to find E.T., I’ll introduce him to all of you. 🙂
