My friend Peggy Rae died.
I just got the news last night. I got home from the mountains super late, and I couldn’t really process it until today.
The first con I ever went to (Capclave) is one of the cons Peggy was always heavily involved in. Capclave set the bar high (it still does), and I have compared every con I have attended to that standard. Every con I went to that had Peggy Rae working behind the scenes met that bar, or set it higher.
Leonard Nimoy spent a good chunk of his acting career hating Spock. For an actor, I can see why being typecast as Spock would be frustrating. Why would any actor want to play a character with no emotions? From an actor’s point of view, Spock was a dry psychopath who had a few good quips. I can see how that would get boring.
Yet Spock broke boundaries. Here was this character who, despite his lack of emotional intelligence, wasn’t a mad scientist or a mass murderer or any of the other stereotypes Hollywood shoved introverts into back in the 1960s. He was a hero.
Over the past few weeks, I have been largely absent from the world because I have achieved a new level of busy. Some of it was my doing. Some of it was life pummeling me with lemons faster than I can make lemonade.
I’m not even that big of a lemonade fan.
I’m still wiped from North American Discworld Convention. Terry Pratchett fans are a special kind of crazy. All who consider attempting to keep up with their consumption of scumble better be prepared for an epic hangover. (Which I didn’t experience because I may be crazy, but I’m no Bloody Stupid Johnson.)
The one brilliant thing they did though was they brought in two awesome therapists to offer massages for $1 per minute in the dealer’s room. ALL CONS ON EARTH SHOULD STEAL THIS BRILLIANCE AND COPY IT POST HASTE. Because having someone work the knots out of my loweerback after a whole day of walking and being a programming gopher is not just wicked awesome, it is BEYOND wicked awesome.
I will likely write a more detailed review later. In the mean time, I had a post on Faora, one of the most bad-ass Superman villains ever, go live on Searching for Super Women yesterday. If you haven’t had a chance to read it, please DO go check it out.
The only other thing I have to report is that I successfully wrote every day during the con. I wound up writing at 1 AM twice whilst still recuperating from drinks at the bar, so there’s a higher than average chance I’ll be throwing a good chunk of those words out. As long as they don’t breed like fruit flies in my trash can, I’m totally fine with that.
Okay, that’s all I got. Carry on with your business folks. Carry on.
As the title of my blog implies, my life is chaos. I’m hitting the road, or gently caressing it with my car’s tires, once again to head up to a con in Baltimore. I’ll be spending the weekend within spitting distance of the Baltimore harbor at North American Discworld Convention, which revolves around Terry Pratchett’s Discworld.
The man himself is not coming anymore, but the con should still be a lot of fun. I’m volunteering, so I imagine I’ll be running around a fair bit. Don’t count on there being many updates to this blog or my Twitter feed. I may get some time to write, or I might not. My schedule is a mystery that I will soon solve.
I wrote a post earlier this week on acceptance, a virtue that I believe is a necessary facet of geekdom, the Golden Rule, the Prime Directive even. Yet I imagine there are some trolly geeks out there who are thinking that acceptance = you must listen my horrid bigotry disguised as “opinion” until I have worked up a lather and left a trail of boiling troll froth all over your blog.
Yeah, no.
Acceptance has more nuance than most people realize, and I think that it deserves further exploration if only so that I don’t have type the phrase “boiling troll froth” ever again.
After I posted about my first comic con yesterday, I tweeted a link to the post out into the Twittersphere. Not even thirty seconds later, this popped up in Tweetdeck.
RT @assortedchaos: I went to my first comic con this weekend. Won’t be my last, that’s for darn sure. ow.ly/lSsvA // Welcome!
— Tony B Kim (@Crazy4ComicCon) June 10, 2013
Picture by Pat Loika
I went to Heroes Con on Saturday, and while I have been to many literary science fiction/fantasy cons, this is the first time I ever went to a comic convention. And dang, did I ever have a culture shock.
As in I was shocked by how I never knew how wicked awesome comic con culture is. Read more
Mysticon sold out this year. But despite the cramped conditions that were undoubtedly making the local fire marshal a tad twitchy, the con was well-run and had a lot to offer geeks of all stripes.
There was gaming, there was LARPing, there were panels, there was filking. For a small con, Mysticon had a lot of different things going on, and in my opinion, they did a great job juggling it all.
I took the day off today so that I could head up to Mysticon early. I’ve never been to this con, but it looks like they have a lot to offer and I’m super-psyched about it.
At the last con I went to, I attempted to offer constant coverage, but instead of updating like I intended to, I wound up playing way too many games of Cards Against Humanity. So this time I intend to offer a preliminary exam and a postmortem rather than a play-by-play.
So, what am I excited about at Mysticon?
