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.
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.
Things I have done since my last post on September 19, 2013 (NOTE: if you read through the entire list, the best cat picture is at the very end.):
While I was at Contemporal, I went to the Baen Traveling Road Show. For folks who are familiar with it, one of the editors of Baen Books generally gives a Powerpoint presentation about their upcoming releases. And folks who ask questions during the presentation get a free book.
Knowing this, I ask the first question so that I could get my hands on the Advanced Reader Copy (ARC) of Larry Correia’s new book, Warbound. ARCs are printed so that they can be sent to reviewers as well as other folks in the business who might be interested in purchasing the book. So ARCs typically have a summary of the promotion plan for the book either printed on one of the covers or on a piece of paper slipped inside the book. It looks like this:
As I was reading the blurbs, I thought that the third one looked quite familiar.
Then I realized I wrote it. Baen quoted MY review of Hard Magic from SFRevu.com.
My disgruntled cats can testify that I did a jig on my bed. I know marketing folks will use any favorable quotes they can find to sell books, but it’s still flattering to have a publisher choose your words to promote a series you enjoy.
Plus, Baen didn’t skew my intent at all. I If you aren’t reading Larry Correia, you’re missing out on some of the smartest, most entertaining urban fantasy on the market.
You can see the full quote here:
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’ve never been much of a Superman fan. I’ve always preferred superheroes with more, erm, humanity, which is probably why I largely gravitate toward the Bat family and the X-men. Despite their superhero powers, they have Earthly origins that I can relate too.
This film did a better job of making Henry Cavill’s Superman more relatable than any of the previous attempts. This journey to find truth made him more human-like than any of Superman’s previous film incarnations. Cavill’s performance was also anything but stiff, which is always a danger when playing an embodied American ideal in tights.
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
There was an interview with Brian K. Vaughan yesterday for a SuperMOOC course on gender in comics that I’ve been keeping tabs on. For those of you who aren’t aware, BKV is the author of Saga, which is a comic gushing with so much awesome I’m surprised it hasn’t flooded comic shops nationwide. My respect for BKV knows no bounds.
I tossed a question in via Twitter, not expecting a reply at all because there were so many thoughtful questions being asked. I put my headphones on and started tackling some boring re-formatting tasks, thus justifying why I allowed myself to tune into this interview at work.
