I've always liked horror, but I haven't had enough of it lately, I think. I pick up the Rue Morgue magazine and pour through it's contents, I buy horror-based rpg materials and read through them, I eagerly flip through webpages showing abandoned industrial and other areas returning to the wild. At worldcon I picked up two copies of Weird Tales magazine, and tried subscribing to it. I also got an interesting book on John Carpenter's films.

Reading all of this, I'm feeling a real sense of yearning. I want wierd stuff, I want horror, I want to hang around with people who are interested in watching John Carpenter and Masters of Horror and weird Korean horror films. I'd like to have some folks to go out with to a theater and see nasty horrible things happen to people. There doesn't seem to be anything like that here in Denver. Oh, I'm sure there's a vamipre LARP group in town, and there's probably goths... but searching on 'denver horror' in google returned a pile of not terribly useful answers, and a stub for a Denver Horror Meetup that doesn't exist.

What shall I do? If I were willing to put down a chunk of money, I could open up a second meetup.com account and start up that Denver Horror meetup. Or maybe someone else could start it for us? Or maybe I should try throwing around some fliers and see what happens.

I want weird and horror and things that go bump in the night.

So, it rained for over 24 hours, starting last night and continuing on into today - several inches of rain landing on us in a day or so. It's pretty amazing, and happily I'm not in a good place to get flooded out.

Unfortunately, it put a pretty big damper on the picnic I was hoping to attend today. Sigh.

On the other hand, the front yard is pretty green.

So, what did I generally think about the worldcon? I've had a few people ask me that.

( Read more... )

2009 Hugo Recommendation Panel:

This was a very tiring panel to listen to and try to record. The panel members talked very quickly, and not very clearly. This lead to my noting down things without remembering who said what.

( Read more... )

... and at this point, I'm too tired of searching for things to post them. After this they got to recommending various short stories, and I couldn't keep up. Maybe someone else recorded those?

Books

"The Anime Art of Hayao Miyazaki", Dani Cavallaro
"The Cinema of Mamoru Oshii", Dani Cavallaro
"The Films of John Carpenter", John Kenneth Muir
The previous three are published by McFarland, who had a huge booth there. Apparently they sell books on film and TV criticism to Libraries and universities - these volumes are normally $35, but he was selling at half price at the con.

"Schlock Mercenary: The Tub of Happiness", Howard Tayler
"Schlock Mercenary: The Blackness Between", Howard Tayler
"Sorcery & Cecelia, or, The Enchanted Chocolate Pot", Patricia C. Wrede & Caroline Stevermer
This I got to read with my wife, the text appearing to be the correspondence of two women, with a general Price and Prejudice sort of feel to the text.

"Pump Six and Other Stories", Paolo Bacigalupi
This is based off of a recommendation of the story "Pump Six" that I had just heard in the 2009 Hugo suggestion panel.

"Dark Mondays", Kage Baker
"Blood and Iron", Elizabeth Bear

"City of the Beast", Michael Moorcock
"The Anubis Murders", Gary Gygax
"Black God's Kiss", C. L. Moore
The previous three were all published by Paizo under their 'Planet Stories' imprint, and were given away free. Kept trying to meet up with Eric Mona at the booth, but circumstance kept preventing us from meeting, which may be why I never actually spent money there.

"Roswell, Texas", L. Neil Smith (and others)
Collection of a webcomic published by 'Big Head Press'. Printed matter is in grey tones, but color is available at http://www.bigheadpress.com/roswell.

"Aunt Dimity Goes West", Nancy Atherton
Not so much a fantasy or sf book, but actually an entry in a series of mystery cozies featuring a woman whose pink bunny toy is apparently possessed by her Aunt Dimity. I was surprised to see it there.

"Mathematicians in Love", Rudy Rucker
Bought half because of the author, and half because of the title.

"Myth-Gotten Gains", Robert Asprin and Jody Lynn Nye
I hadn't really read any of the new books since Asprin started writing again - why did he stop? - and so far, although it's nice enough, I'm not really finding it funny. I'm tempted to go find copies of the original books to see if the series changed that much, or if I did.

Magazines

"Wierd Tales", Magazine, issues 349 and 350
I also bought a subscription at a Wierd Tales party they had Friday night.

"Interzone", Magazine, issues 205, 217
"Black Static", Magazine, Issue 5
"Crimewave 8: Cold Harbours", no editor listed
These last few items were intresting - these are British magazines (and a book), and he had dropped his prices to get rich of merchandise, presumably so he didn't have to ship it home. I got the more recent issue of Interzone, which is SF, and Black Static, which is horror, and in exchange he gave me the older issue of Interzone along with the mystery collection.

Movies

"The Call of Cthulhu"
That's the black and white silent version - haven't watched it yet.

My prize on Match Game SF

"The Demon and the City", Liz Williams

I also picked up a collection of Ace/Roc sample chapters, which was amusing because apparently all of the covers but one features a sexy woman in a tank top posed almost the same way.
Additionally, they were giving out some sf covers from Japan - one of them, 'The Witches of Karres', is obviously illustrated by Miyazaki. Another one is 'The Jewel in the Skull', and finally there's another one I picked up that I have no idea what it is, but it's neat looking.

Sunday was much nicer. For one, my feet hardly bothered me after Saturday's meltdown.

We got up that morning together, and headed out for some breakfast at Sam's #3, where we ended up sitting next to another local Worldcon attendee at the counter. Astonishingly, not only did he currently live in Denver, but he came from North Carolina like my wife Tammy. For a while there I sort of leaned out of the way and let them discuss various NC-related topics.

Once breakfast was over Tammy dropped me off at the convention, although unfortunately at the wrong spot, requiring me to walk all over the place to find a door that would let me in. Sigh. Once in, I hit the Dealer's room for the last time, picking up some pins from the Foglios, some Interzone magazines from that publisher (who was running a last day of con special, probably because of the trouble of shipping all of the issues home), and picked up a Heroes tshirt and a slogan tshirt, as well as a gift for Tammy's upcoming birthday.

That done, I looked around and realized I was done with the Dealer's room. There really wasn't anything left over I wanted to get that I couldn't get in Denver the rest of the year, so I quit it and went off to a panel.

The first panel had to do with Heinlein at the Worldcons, a few people up front giving us some very interesting stories about Heinlein before the big event - a recording of his Guest of Honor speech at the 1976 worldcon, which was fascinating to watch. I never got to meet him, and so I was riveted during the entire speech.

That done with, I went on to a panel on remembering Robert Asprin, who recently passed away. Phil Foglio and two other folks were on the panel, discussing Asprin's work and life and his desire to perform all the time - I thought it was really interesting, and there's another person I wish I'd gotten to meet.

Finally, Closing Ceremonies. Everyone got into a room and - well, it's necessary, I suppose, but basically we watched a succession of people thank the convention runners and the guests. Lois McMaster Bujold, the GoH, got a mostly standing ovation for her heartfelt thanks even though she'd lost her voice.

Emboldened by all the praise given to the volunteers, and the requests for more help, I went by the Treasury office after the closing ceremonies, where I was happily given work until I finally stumbled out again at 6:30, calling my wife for a ride home, where I mostly just vegged on the couch tiredly until we gave up and went to bed early at 9pm.

Well, I need to get to work - I suppose I'll write up a general wrapup and a list of the neat stuff I got later.

Day four of worldcon, Saturday, dawned bright and sunnily. My wife, Tammy, had to head off to work for a few hours, so I stayed around the house, relaxing and writing my previous two posts.

That was all fine and dandy, Tammy got home after a few hours, so we packed up and headed into town, parking at the convention center. We hit the Dealer's Room/Art Room floor at about 1, which is when we heard that the art show was closing down at 2pm, which was a bit of a shock. I hadn't actually entered the Art show yet, as I'd been waiting to do it with Tammy, so we immediately went in and started soaking in the arty goodness. Tammy had seen the arts how already, not knowing then that I was hoping to see it with her, so she was able to point out some highlights. It was a good show, but it's a measure of how nice Mile Hi Con's art show is that I wasn't feeling it was all that nicer than MHC's. That said, we found a nice print and a unicorn calendar in the print shop that Tammy wanted.

That done, at 2pm, they started shoving everyone out. Since everyone in the art show had had to check their bags, that meant that there was a huge line to pick your bags up again, and Tammy let me go sit down while we waited. Bags collected, we had a quick (but not very good) soft pretzel from concessions before we started going through the Dealer's Room. This was mostly for Tammy's benefit, stopping to look over jewelry, clothes, and art-related displays more than the books. Unfortunately, my feet started to really hurt after about forty minutes of this.

Unfortunately, they *really* started to hurt. I left the Dealer's and went to sit down, and even sitting down they were killing me. We advised some other con goers about local sushi (Sonoda's, 16th & Market, quite good), and then we grabbed one of the nice couches that were sprinkled around the exhibit hall floor for Tammy to rub my feet and try and get them to relax. She rubbed for a while, then she went off to the Dealer's room some more while I continued to rest, and then she returned and rubbed. After my feet had calmed down, we decided to head off home - I didn't really feel up to doing anything much.

Home was nice. We relaxed, we ate, and then we decided to return to hit the parties at around 9ish. That was fun - there were some interesting parties where we got drinks (Reno in 2011), Ice Cream (Young Writers contest), and barbecue (NASFIC in Raleigh 2010). We also enjoyed some nice shrimp in the Con Suite. There was some discussion of the recently won Hugos, but no one seemed overly surprised or upset by much of the selections, so it didn't go far. After it hit around 11 or so, Tammy and I hit the wheels to head home and relax.

Keeping in mind how tired I was the previous day, I decided to stay home and skip the first session of programming. I lazed around the house, ate sausage onna stick, and said hi to some friends on the internet.

( John goes to Worldcon )

That finished, it was time for my Anime Meetup! It's always the second Friday of the month, but I wasn't sure if I'd attend due to worldcon. However, there wasn't that much I was thinking of attending then, so instead I hopped back onto the train, stopped at my car to drop off books, and then continued along to the Colorado station, which is across the street from the Perkins we meet at. The meeting was lively, lots of folks showing up and chatting, and we got to watch through the windows as a torrential downpour hit Denver. After a lovely salad and conversation with my wife, we hopped into the car and she drove me downtown, avoiding traffic to drop me at the hotel.

( Read more... )

Woo! Thursday wasn't so great, but I had a good time Friday!

Day Two

At the start of the second day of the convention, I wised up and went to Walgreens, buying a pair of shoe inserts which give me padding under the heels and arch. This proved to be a fantastic move, as although I had problems with footaches all throughout the first day, on the second day they eased off, and on the third they were gone.

Tammy, my wife, took me downtown for some early breakfast at Sam's #3, but after we were finished at 8am, I then wandered on my own to the convention center. There wasn't any programming until 10, and the Dealer/Art hall wasn't open until about then, so I ducked into the treasury room and helped out for a bit.

When 10am rolled around, I went into a panel called 'Why didn't SF predict the Internet?'. The interesting result was that SF did predict the internet, although often not using the same terms, and not as often as it predicted spaceships and the like. There was a 1946 story, called 'A Logic Named Joe'* which pretty much had an internet as the basic plot. It even predicted the ability to publish your own information onto it.

After that I felt a little claustrophobic, so I went off to delve into the Dealer's room, searching this way and that for interesting things. I didn't really feel like any more panels, so I started heading out of the convention center for lunch, when I ran into Matthew and Ritchie. They were heading over to the Sheraton (the big convention hotel, where I hadn't been yet), so I started following them, although my method of following involved hopping onto the light rail for two blocks to 16th and taking the free shuttle down to the Sheraton. I got to talk to an interesting woman with feathers in her hair along the trip, and arrived not too much later than M&R, who had apparently found Rose. I followed them around for a bit - willing to be helpful, but apparently nothing I could help with - and after they tried to deliver some things we all went to the food court across the street for lunch. That was nice and relaxing, and I followed it up by exploring the con spaces - amusingly enough the con suite is two floors underground in the Sheraton, and is huge!

I got tired after lugging around a pile of things, and started seriously thinking about returning home, which I ended up doing. I took the bus home, played around on the computer, and then had a nap. After that, my wife came home, feeling a little ill. I let her nap for a while, and then we tumbled into a car and went downtown, finding a close by street parking space - we put $2 into it to reserve it to 9:30, when we intended to come out and put in more quarters... but we ended up forgetting. Tammy's stomach was still a little green, so while she settled down to play British Rails, I went out in search of Ginger ale...

And kept searching...

Eventulally I located a can in the other side of the hotel's bar, and brought it back to her. Success! I skittered off to the livejournal get together, in time for the very end - a few people talked about unique interests they had, and then everyone introduced themselves a final time before breakdown. With that done, I decided to hit the con suite, where I ran into iamcompubear, who I hadn't seen in a long time, and certainly not since her husband tragically died. We talked a little about how horrid it all was, and her financial problems. She got a call and had to go, so I went up to check out the parties, enjoying the DASFA party the most, I think, although it was interesting seeing the rooms of fans crammed together like sheep. God forbid a fire should break out!

About tennish I got a call from my wife, who was done with her game and wanted to go. I headed down, met up with her, and we returned to the car, which was happily enough unticketed. That done, we headed home.

Unfortunately, my wife's not very impressed with the worldcon.

*Correct title provided by mandlebear! Thanks!

So, got up an hour later in the morning and headed out to breakfast with Tammy. Yum. Sam's #3, which everyone is apparently going to for breakfast.

That done, she dropped me off at home, where I did a little fiddling on the internet and then grabbed a shower before hitting the bus back downtown. On the bus I started chatting with some Worldcon folks, one of whom is in charge of the Treasury office. He tried to give me the whole 'Cons run on Volunteers' thing, but I explained how I sort of help run a few other conventions here in Denver and understood that. He invited me to drop by the treasury and help out.

Registration was... pretty awful. Arriving, I was stuck in a line for an hour. An hour! They only have 3-4K people attending, IIRC. NDK handles that many people without a problem every year, for crissakes. Ugh.

Happily, I got out of the line in time to do a little exploring, hunt down the treasury office, and then hit the dealer's room a little. I was happily surprised to find a table for Schlock Mercenary! I quickly snapped up two more volumes of that and a cute mouse pad. Further exploration found Paizo Publishing, which gave me free pulp novels, and the Speculative Literature Foundation. It wasn't until later that I could actually talk to them, but they won't have the Field Guide to Surreal Botany for sale until tomorrow... which isn't bad given how heavy my bag was.

Then I hit some programming - Schmoozing 101, partially to check out John Scalzi and partially got get some tips... and then slipped upstairs for the John Scalzi signing, where I got my 'Rough Guide to the Universe' signed and said hello to John Barnes - I didn't have anything for him to sign, but I think he's a righteous frood. Fun thing - John Scalzi had everyone who showed up for his signing sign this silly Children's book about Hamsters! Once that was done I zoned out on some Con food and sitting on the comfy couches they had out for people to enjoy.

Tammy then showed up - we hit the Dealer's room again, this time with an emphasis on the many TShirt vendors, and then I went to work in the Treasury, helping to count piles of money that come in from areas of the con that had closed for the night.

So, now I"m back home early. My feet hurt a lot, and I'm tired, but so far I'm digging the Worldcon. Tammy's not entranced yet - she expected it would be larger.

My computer's hard drive has been getting full lately, so I started making noises about wanting to buy a new drive for my computer. My wife, sensibly, pointed out that I had a perfectly good external hard drive that I hadn't been using for a while, and so I pulled it out of storage, set it up, and found it was, indeed perfectly working. So, I copied a bunch of media files over - Videos, some pictures, some ebooks...

And then my external drive stopped working. Grumble. Happily, it was a quiet sort of not working - data wasn't coming out (and it wasn't showing up as a drive), but it wasn't making angry noises, at least. Trying to fix it over usb wasn't working, so I cracked the case and pulled it out and hooked it up to my computer, along with a new SATA hard drive I did buy this weekend. Annoyingly, my case didn't have any free ATA connectors, so I had to go with disconnecting the DVD-Rom drive so I could attach the hard drive, which was balanced on the end of a kleenex box.

After this and that and poking, the solution turned out to boot into ubuntu, install testdisk, and run it there - where testdisk on Windows XP didn't work, the linux version was able to find and restore the partition table, and soon I was quickly copying all my files onto the new drive. The drive's probably still good, after all that - I think a partition table problem is more of a software/os glitch than anything else - but for now I'm probably going to be too busy to get it back into it's case. It was nice to get it working - and it was nice not to lose that stuff. (The important parts were backed up, but it's nice to get things working.)

So, I've never read any of the Dresden Files books. The TV show was on a year or so ago, but I'm not really a TV watcher, so I let it slip by. However, the author, Jim Butcher, is going to be one of the Guests of Honor at this year's Mile Hi Con, and so I figured I really should give it a try, as several people I like seem to think it's pretty good.

But what's the deal? I'm reading this first novel, and not to give away any spoilers, but everything that happens to poor Harry is the equivalent of him walking up to a someone, saying hello, and getting kneed in the balls in return. Goes to one job? Something bad happens. Goes to another job? Something bad happens. The only time anything good of any measure happens to this guy is when he manages to just barely stop someone from actually killing him. And then something *else* bad happens to make up for it.

I can't read this thing anymore. He's just rushed to the side of someone to save them from a supposed threat - which is real and greater than expected - and in return this person does something *else* bad to him while he's in the midst of saving them. If I hadn't been riding on the bus, I would have tossed it across the room. If the bus had been emptier, I might have still considered it.

Is it worth continuing? I mean, I guess he's not going to end up dead, as there's a pile of sequels to this book. But I kind of would like the guy to die so he doesn't have to put up with all this crap anymore. It'd be one thing, I guess, if the events were presented as being funny, if I felt that the guy maybe deserved some of the shit that's flying his way - but he doesn't. Not that he's got much more character than a doormat so far, but would it have killed Butcher to allow something nice to happen for a change? Just one?

So, instead, I'm reading Dirk Gently.

Well, the 2008 Worldcon is coming up, and Denvention has released the Pocket Program, something that's really got me excited. SF Origami, John Scalzi, Paizo Publishing, Studio Foglio, a workshop where you make your own book... I'm starting to get seriously excited here.

Any out-of-town friends who are coming to Worldcon?

It was a lot of fun going to the DrupalCamp all weekend, and giving two presentations during it was neat.

But I find myself worshipping the coffee maker this morning. Ugh.

I slept much better last night than I did Monday night - Monday night was tossing and turning and muscle aches and Robot Chicken, which lead to yesterday being a little bleary at times. Happily, last night I slept like a log, and so I'm feeling much better.

My commute continues to be one of the unfortunate things about working in Boulder and living in Denver. Happily I don't have to drive said commute - my wife drives me downtown and I hop on an express bus to head towards work. Along the way I've been reading - magazines are my friend - and watching videos and listening to podcasts on my Nokia N800, which is this cool mini touchscreen computer that I got for Christmas. I recently got around to updating to the latest operating system, and it's a nice upgrade - newer icons, some flashier functionality, and I can more easily convert video (to mpeg format) and play it than on the OS2007, which had a tendancy to suddenly freeze on a particular frame. I still occasionally get that with the new OS, but it's less often. Much fun with 'This Week in Tech', 'Doctor Who', and just today, 'Techzilla'.

Science fiction is heavy on my mind recently, as the WorldCon - World Science Fiction Convention - is coming to Denver in merely three weeks. I'm really excited at being able to attend one at such a low cost, and I look forward to see what makes a Worldcon better than the stellar local conventions we have in Denver each year. As either a side-effect, or just the result of running it for so long, my Science Fiction Meetup has suddenly exploded into activity, with six or more people attending my last few meetings. I got a similar burst of activity from my Boardgames Meetup a year or so ago, when a meetup that had had one or two other members showing up for the first year suddenly rocketed into a really healthy group. It's really nice to see this sort of a change.

And I think that's enough for now - work to do.

My email inbox has gotten so logged up with various mailing lists and detrius that I had to do something - I kept missing incoming emails that were actually important.

So - I've declared an amnesty on my email. All existing email in my inbox got shoved into a box, to look at later (maybe), and all the stuff that comes in from now on is going to be handled properly as it comes in. So, if you have emailed me something recently and haven't heard back yet, please try sending again - this time I should be able to see your message and reply promptly.

Thanks!

So, my D&D group got together last night, and as we tend to do these days, we kibbitzed about 4th edition, which lead to an amusing exchange:

Him: It was a total party kill. In the first round, my wizard was hit by a fire beetle - it breathed for 18 points of damage.
Me: How many hit points did you have? (as that's not enough to kill a 1st level character in 4th by default)
Him: 13
Me: How much Con do you... no, you add your Constitution SCORE. Not the bonus, the Score.

It turns out he had a Wizard with a 16 Con, and instead of going 10 + 16 = 26 hit points, he (and the entire table) had given themselves 10 + 3 = 13 hit points.

4th edition D&D is very different, and it really helps to try and leave your assumptions at the door.

$60! Sixty bucks to fill my tank.

Ugh.

So, I've enjoyed World of Warcraft for a long time, and I still like it... but the more I play City of Heroes (and now City of Villians), the more sheer fun I find in it.

There's the fun of playing with other folks without having to worry about disparate levels. There's the fun of playing with folks period, as instanced missions vary their difficulty on how powerful your group is.

There's the fun of making new characters. Coming up with possible names (Unfortunately, a lot of obvious names are taken. Just *try* to name an ice-based hero!), coming up with possible looks, body shape, costumes. The sheer number of hats!

And then there's exploring... I created a new villianess this weekend to play with a friend of mine, and found that the City of Villians start zone is a lot of fun - destroyed buildings, snake-people trying to take over, crooked cops... It's a bit more fun than starting a new hero, I think.

I'm going to keep my WoW account for a while, I'm sure, and still play it from time to time. But City of X is really proving itself to have some serious legs.

So, last Monday Peggy Taylor, one of my Mother's best friends and the mother of two of my childhood friends, died from brain cancer that she'd been suffering from for a few years. So, in a rush, my wife and I gathered up a bunch of our nice clothes in a hurry and flew out to Maryland for the service on Thursday. There wasn't a body or a casket, as she had donated her body for research, but she was very much there nonetheless.

Something like this makes you really appreciate your own parents, and happily enough this is a perfect time to do that, as my Mom's birthday is in a few days and all of her sons are here to celebrate it with her for once.

I've also had the chance to meet up with a couple of old friends from high school that I hadn't met in a long time, Dave Burnham and Rob Stevens - it was really great to catch up with the both of them and to share some of what had happened to us. Dave's got two boys, and Rob has a girl, which put me in the rear with none. But it was really cute - it was a birthday party for Dave's youngest kid, and it was a lot of fun watching them run around and have fun.

Tonight we celebrate my mother's birthday, and tomorrow we celebrate my cousin's... so it's a lot of birthdays to balance out the loss, I suppose.