Dragon*Con 2005 report, pt. 1
Thursday, 9/1
I couldn’t sleep Wednesday night – a combination of a wired state and generally poor sleep lately anyway. I had to get up quite early to get cleaned up, tuck last-minute stuff in the suitcase, and make a trip to the bank. I finally got to meet thatwhichisgene – a very intelligent, charming fellow, even if we don’t agree on Shadowrun and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Gene made good time driving down, and we arrived less than 9 hours out from Norfolk – without speeding! Gas was as high as $7.00 a gallon in Atlanta, so after determining that the rented station wagon’s tank was good for about 400 miles, we made sure to gas up about 150 miles out where the prices were more reasonable.
On Thursday evening, the Dragon*Con registration lines are non-existent – I strongly recommend getting one’s badge this early. Hall costuming was already starting, though the Con was not to begin until 9:00 the next day. I found David Allen (once of Starfleet, now of Plan Nine Publishing) outside the registration hotel, and chatted for a few minutes before returning to the hotel where I was staying.
Dragon*Con 2005 consisted of three hotels – the Hyatt, home of filking, gaming and half the panels; the Marriott, home of two dealers rooms, the art show, an artists’ walk, and more panels; and registration, buried in the Atlanta Hilton. I stayed in the Hyatt. It wasn’t as crowded as the horror stories would have had me fear, but the five elevators where always unusably queued. Luckily, our fifth-floor room was easy to walk up and down to and from. (Room 523 – a nice Discordian number.) During the con weekend itself, every room in the Hyatt was occupied by con-goers: one wasn’t allowed in the hotel without a Con badge. The street between the Hyatt and the Marriott was blocked off for Con traffic. I began to get the idea that this was a big con.
It was late. I was pooped. I went to bed.
Deep breath before jumping in the deep end
Grumpy me pokes his head out of his LJ cave and says, “write some stuff, it’ll help you get over yourself”.
I have a job interview tomorrow, and tonight I work a trial shift at a typesetting job. If either one of these jobs works out to a steady paycheck, I can stop sweating and resume planning for the future. I’ve been filing unemployment claims with the state for a month now, and haven’t seen check one, so things are pretty tight.
I’ve missed every summer con I wanted to go to this year because of money issues. Bleh. This is, of course, part of the general fan experience – not news to almost anyone reading this journal – but it’s still disappointing. I keep reading about cartoonists and gaming people who will be at DragonCon and grumping.
Moving my Doctor Who episodes over to DVD so I don’t have to drag around the laptop for showings; it’s a lengthy process, involving converting the episodes to DV streams, and then letting iDVD convert them back down to MPEG-2 files. Unfortunately I don’t have software that will skip the middle step. I hope the quality stays okay, there’s clear artifacting in the AVI files already. A friend pointed out that the first season never managed to get to an alien planet – only England, Utah, and a couple Earth-orbit space stations. I hope the second season’s more ambitious.
We watched Constantine a couple nights ago. It’s an okay flick if you don’t think too hard about the religious aspects involved… which, for obvious reasons, is next to impossible to manage. It’s not even that I disliked the movie, it’s just that I kept thinking, “But, but, but…” afterwards. It was also a shame that the movie was unable to rise above killing off the three obvious redshirts.
One thing is now clear to me in WoW; soloing sucks, partying generally rocks. This has of course been obvious to most of the players of the game for ages, but I am sometimes slow. Clearly I must bite the bullet (WoW does have firearms) and find more folk to group with on a regular basis.
Booklist: finished Eragon (N), Wizard’s Holiday (N), Debt of Honor – Tom Clancy (R), Just a Geek – Wil Wheaton (N), Catch Me If You Can – Frank Abagnale (R), First Lensman + Gray Lensman + Second Stage Lensman – E.E. “Doc” Smith (R), A Morbid Taste For Bones + The Hermit of Eyton Forest – Ellis Peters (R). I wish I could find my copy of Doc’s Galactic Patrol – methinks that I’ll need to start haunting used bookstores again, which is how I got the Lensman books in the first place. I have been putting off reading Chobits 6 because it’s been long enough that I’ll want to re-read the comic from the beginning, and I’ll probably also want to be able to afford 7 & 8 soon thereafter. BTW, I’d recommend anything on this list. Eragon especially was interesting to me by being remarkably unoriginal, yet well-written enough that I look forward to the next volume.
Oh, good lord, avoid The Reality Dysfunction. Nothing at all happens for 300 pages; dozens of characters are introduced and then left by the wayside; and then we start the lovingly, orgasmically detailed torture scenes of animals and small children. Really. I darn near threw the book across the room, and I certainly won’t be finishing it. My guess is that the author has serious issues to work out, but I don’t see any need to let him do so through me at $7 a book for a six-book series.
I’ll let everyone know how the job thing pans out!
So, my old nemesis still lives…
Sorry, not “nemesis”… what’s the word, what’s the word… starts with “F”…
Oh, yes, “friend”!
Happy birthday, rattrap!
3:00 Panel on Tail- and Ear-binding
Oh, I forgot to mention today’s Narbonic webcomic, in which Arnie the superintelligent gerbil has been accidentally locked in a human form, at least for now. Apparently, some of his other hyperintelligent lab animal friends on the Internet don’t believe him, and are accusing him of being a “thumbie”. No doubt there are thumbie-themed cons, animals who construct bareskinsuits, and thumbie porn 🙂
I think “Kevin and Kell” did that joke once too. Still funny, though.
Harry Potter and the World of Dysfunctional Cylons
From the wonderful mollyringwraith, who brought us the condensed versions of the Lord of the Rings movies, comes Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (condensed) Parts One and Two. If you are a Potter fan, read these. You may even wish to if you aren’t a fan 🙂
This weekend while playing WoW, I got into my first 4-person party, and I admit that this was probably the most fun I’ve yet had with the game. But the Schwartz has an up side and a down side.
Like, WoW. This is a bit of a pain…
As I mention many posts back, I’m playing World of Warcraft with some of my free time these days. I was thrilled with the execution of the game when I began playing it, and loved the way it sucked one in early on. The fact that it ran well on my older-but-upgraded Mac was a real plus, too.
I’m beginning to have a few problems with the game, however.
My Old Googlism Entry
I did the Google meme back in November 2002. Rather than re-post it, I’ll just drop a link; the phrases it gave me are in italics, my comments in plain text.
Sure, it would probably come out different 2.5 years later – an era in Internet terms – but I’m too tired to re-do it 🙂
Booklist Update
I’d forgotten to keep this up… let me update.
Since finishing Ringworld’s Children, I’ve read: (N = new, R = re-read)
The Hunt For Red October – Tom Clancy (R), Patriot Games – Tom Clancy (R), Bridge of Birds – Barry Hughart (R), Tales from the White Hart – Arthur C. Clarke (R), Star Trek Movie Memories – William Shatner (R), I Am Spock – Leonard Nimoy (R), Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – J.K. Rowling (N), Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams (R), The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul – Douglas Adams (R), Beyond [The Physics of] Star Trek – Lawrence M. Krauss (R), and Crashlander – Larry Niven (N).
I’m working on Eragon – Christopher Paolini (N), A Wizard’s Holiday – Diane Duane (N), and the sixth volume of Chobits – CLAMP (N).
From this list, one might deduce: 1) I’ve had lots of free time lately, 2) I haven’t lots of spare cash on me until I recently got a gift card from a relative, and 3) there’s a certain part of the bookstore I usually visit first.
