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Monthly Archives: October 2013
Saturday Linksplosion #1
I am besieged by awesome links today. Let the battle for freedom begin!
This looks like it could be amusing, if you’re not arachnophobic.
Obviously, these people are not taking themselves seriously and the whole thing fit neatly into the new and rather fun movie genre of “action comedy”.
I love the premise, I love the whiff of a promise of satire of the giant monster movie genre, and that is definitely one bigass spider.
I have always found giant movie monsters boring and cheap and predictable. They are like a merger of two genres I don’t like : disaster movies and monster movies. So I would love to watch a movie that mock the tropes of the kaiju world.
Plus, seriously, what is scarier than a giant spider? I can’t think of another creature that would be more frightening in Giant Atomic Size.
Then we have this brilliant piece of citizen activism and productive culture jamming.
Don’t get me wrong… sometimes culture jamming is artistically valid in and of itself.
But I love, love, love what these people did. Especially because they did it not just by being clever enough to wear almost-identical shirts, but because they succeeded because they were relaxed and friendly (easy when right is on your side) and the pipeline people are all tense and defensive because they know that people will be asking them questions for which they have no good answers.
That is a breathtakingly wonderful example of the battle between right and wrong being won by the people with right on their side. I think these people have the right idea. Show up wherever the megacorps are disseminating their corporate propaganda, and offer people the truth.
That… is how you do it.
Or you can attack the evils of the world via satire.
Note that I said satire, not comedy, because I didn’t find the video funny. Satire is a form of comedy but it is volatile stuff and does not quite entirely fit into the category of comedy.
Some satire is simply to make a point, and not to make people laugh.
I did love the bit about the training montage to 70’s slow jams, though. That was hilarious. But the part before that was just a tad too on the nose to be funny.
Your mileage, as always, may vary on that.
And I love the attempt to make climate change deniers look like a more readily recognizable form of asshole. This makes it easier for the average citizen, who is not all that sure whether they understand enough science to know if climate change is real, to nevertheless identify, mock, shame, and ultimately make entirely irrelevant those kinds of people.
Then we have this rather fun bit of mysterious minimalism : Another Word, Another Day.
Some dude recorded himself saying exactly one English word a day for three years. That’s all that is there. The archives of him saying exactly one word a day in a dry, low-affect voice, with no explanation, no way of identifying the speaker, nothing. Just… words.
Sometimes, it’s not even him. It’s some random British chick, or a guy with an Australian accent, or who knows who else.
I love it. I love it as art, as a beautifully elegant and effective non-statement. By being so anonymous and minimal, it just creates a space without filling it.
Cracked things it is “aggressively insane”, but I think it is magic.
OK folks… harsh tone shift. Things are about to get serious and macabre.
These are supposedly the last moments of Canadian tourist Elisa Lam.
It’s security camera footage taken from the elevator of the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles. After this, she somehow ended up in the hotel’s water tower, which is fifteen feet tall and locked all the time.
People are treating it like a big mystery, but it seems simple to me.
Seems like she had a very negative brain event. She might have had an embolism or an aneurism that lead to her bizarre behaviour because she was, to put it crudely, short-circuiting. Even ending up in the water tower makes sense… we are monkeys, after all, and born to climb. Locked doesn’t mean impossible to enter.
It is an unpleasant theory, but it fits all the facts and brings it no unverifiable variables.
They say “How did she get through two locked doors and several alarms?”
I answer “How did her murderer?” To me, it’s obviously an inside job. Perhaps an employee found her dead, panicked because they thought they were going to get blamed (or reported to the INS), and either used their own keys or ran to someone who did, and for some reason, they decided that the water tanks on the roof were the perfect place to hide a boy.
On the other hand, this could all just be someone’s idea of how to make a viral video and there is no Elisa Lam and the young lady in the video is alive and well and giggling at people somewhere.
Honestly, at this point, both theories seem equally likely to be true.
I look forward to the eventual fictionalized version of this that will end up on Law and Order, Bones, or some other crime type show.
And finally, we have my little video contribution of the day.
Completely unexpectedly, it’s… A SLIDESHOW!
I was going to do a review of Behind The Candleabra, which I watched off DVD with Joe and Julian recently, but sleep robbed me of my ambition so I had to fall back on the ol tried and true.
I don’t know why I beat myself up over resorting to slideshows and Musical Minutes. The slideshows are funny and entertaining. I watched a few from a few months back recently, and they still hold up. They even made my roomies laugh.
I was just so much more ambitious and creative when the daily video thing began! Now I feel like all I do is tread water.
There must be some new frontier out there that needs me.
Maybe audio podcasts…
Musical Minute : Box Of Funk
Let’s get FUNKY.
http://michaeljohnbertrand.com/wp-admin/post-new.php
Friday Science Genechdenezoink, October 18, 2013
Hey there folks! Got another bumper crop of science for you, so let’s dig in!
As usual, we will be talking about brains, energy, tissue engineering, and miscellaneous cool stuff.
Random Cool Stuff
First off, a story just too damned cool not to cover : using ballistic missiles to deliver aid.
Can you imagine? People are trapped in a war-torn, drought-ridden area. Their lives hang in the balance. Nobody can get aid to them without risking being killed in the crossfire.
But then, a streak on the horizon…. a flash of hope… then a mighty roar as the missile streaks to its destination, shedding parachute crates of food, water, and medical supplies as it streaks overhead too fast for the eye to follow.
That would be damn near religious, man. Like manna from heaven.
Tissue Engineering Frontiers
Some page the Tin Man, because this article tells you how to build a brand new heart .
Well, sort of. Like a lot of these frontiers of tissue engineering stories, the process they are talking about does not exactly create a new heart from raw ingredients.
You still need a heart (or spleen, or whatever) to start with. Then you wash away all the active cells, leaving just the protein scaffolding behind, which you can then populate with lab-grown cells from the potential recipient of the transplant.
Which is still awesome. You are taking a foreign donor heart, which would cause a massive rejection response, and turning into a cell-perfect host heart which will be genetically indistinguishable from the recipient’s real heart.
So I merely quibble. It’s not really making a heart in the lab if you have to start with a heart in the first place. The real magic will be when we figure out how to make that scaffolding build itself.
These people are taking a step in the right direction.
They are working on a 3D system for growing someone a new pancreas, something near and dear to my… duodenum, as I might need a replacement some day.
The 3D is the key aspect here, because one of the major things holding back tissue engineering for generations was our POV being stuck in the 2D world of our microscopes.
But cells, organs, and organisms grow in three dimensions in the real world, and the flattened 2D world of the microscope slide just does not cut it any more.
The pancreas builders are using a gel to suspend and nourish the cells, and this gives the cells a chance to grow in the three dimensional way.
Now THAT is more like it!
Alternative Energy News
The main problem with solar power is obvious : what happens when the sun goes down?
A major solar plant in Arizona has that problem at least partly solved.
This plant can continue to produce power for six hours after the sun goes down via a thermal storage technology that the article is weirdly reluctant to explain. Perhaps it’s a big time trade secret.
But six hours seems like enough. After all, a) even at the winter solstice, that’s half the night covered, and b) people tend to use a hell of a lot less electricity when they are asleep.
So assuming people are cool with using battery powered alarm clocked, this is doable. Less then ideal, especially for us night owls, but doable.
Presumably, the thermal storage can be improved upon in the near future.
Then again, maybe all this thermal storage will be unnecessary because in the future, they can store the juice directly in massive molten air batteries.
Yes. That it seriously what they are called. What the fuck, right?
But they are called that because, unlike traditional batteries, they get their oxygen from the air, not from an oxidizer built into the battery. This makes them super light, which is a very big deal when you are looking for a battery tech for electric cars, and they also have a very high energy density.
Those two factors combined might just be enough to fuel the next big leap in electric cars. Have batteries that are lighter AND store more power?
That is just what the electric car industry needs. It could be just what the doctor ordered to give electric cars more power and more range at the same time.
And now… THE BRAIN!
A new theory of one of the functions of sleep has emerged.
This one starts from the observation that during sleep, the interstitial spaces between neurons increase by as much as sixty percent and there is a large fluid exchange. Protein laden interstitial fluid out, nice clean cerebro-spinal fluid in.
The theory is that this is the body’s way of flushing the nervous system clean, and that all those complex proteins going out are various plaques and other nasty stuff that we don’t need.
It is, literally, brainwashing.
We are constantly adding to our knowledge of the functions of sleep. We used to think sleep must be for one thing and one thing only.
But that would be like thinking all the employees at your local fast food place do after closing is clean the big grill.
No, they do everything that can’t be done when there’s customers there.
Finally, the Big Story. Proof that some people are just born negative.
The brain science is complicated and a tad dry. Genetics, neurotransmitters, and so on.
But I would warn this people against leaping to the conclusion that everyone with this particular gene variant is somehow sad or even clinically depressed. Most of them will be just fine.
The world needs both positives and negatives. The most productive creative and business partnerships have been between the positive person who comes up with tons of ideas and who provides much of the driving force, and the negative one who finds the flaws in the positive one’s ideas so they can correct them together, and who also acts as the necessary voice of restraint and caution.
My guess is that the world has around the same amount of each, and that’s no accident. Having that kind of diversity makes us stronger as a species.
And with that, I am off for the night. See you tomorrow, folks!
Another barrel of links
These things just spring up like weeds!
First we have this sobering and inspiring video.
Intellectually, somewhere in my memory banks, left there from my childhood, was the knowledge that, when I was nine years old, there was this thing called ERA that had not passed in the USA.
I think I thought it was a bill at the time, even though the word “amendment” is right in the name. But the point is, I knew this had happened.
But until I watched that vid, I did not realize just how fucked up that is.
Here in Canada, our Constitution has equality written right into it. So it never occurred to me that the situation was a lot more precarious down in the USA.
I can’t imagine a movement to pass the ERA now would fail, 31 years later. When it came up in 82, people were still arguing about whether husbands should let their wives work outside of the house.
We are so much further ahead now. Sure, the Tea Party types would reflexively oppose it, but they blew all their political capital on trying to stop Obamacare anyhow.
So really, who would argue with it?
Then we have snuggles for sale.
A bunch of ladies in Madison, Wisconsin are looking to start a professional cuddling service. For $60/hour, clients can go into private rooms and get professionally cuddled.
Needless to say, local authorities think that sounds just a little too much like prostitution to them, and so the ladies are having trouble getting a business license.
But the pro snugglers insist that all the rooms have cameras and will be monitored constantly to make sure that nothing more than cuddling goes on.
That’s all well and good. But a lot of fellows are going to start to have certain feelings while enjoying a nice cuddle with a gal, and at the very least the ladies will have to be experts in pretending there isn’t an erection poking them somewhere.
The rooms all have panic buttons, though, so if the fellas get too frisky, presumably all hell breaks loose.
Then we have this marvelous piece of work from the talented people at Bad Lip Read.
Man, they are getting good at what they do. They have learned that it’s funniest when it’s not totally random. Plus wow, now they have people that can Photoshop things into the backgrounds of videos fairly convincingly.
And more than that, this time they had a whole concept behind the piece that really takes their work to the next level. I found it was a joy to watch and just enjoy their increasing mastery.
Someday, they will re-dub an entire movie. And it will be awesome.
And speaking of the awesomeness, check out this new kind of display system :
The first thing I thought of when I saw that was “Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi… you’re my only hope!”.
But seriously, how “the future is now” is that? One of the things I am most looking forward to seeing in the future is all the science fiction of my childhood coming true.
We already have a lot of things, like cybernetics, nanotech, and real-time brain scanning via fMRI. Heck the USA even has a working large scale laser weapon at, of course, RIDICULOUS cost versus its actual effectiveness.
But when you tell a bunch of generals “We can build a laser cannon”, they just can’t throw money at you fast enough, because laser cannons are cool and surely if the enemy sees our awesome new laser guns they will be like “Damn, that is so much cooler than anything we have! We totally surrender. ”
That is seriously how these people think.
Anyhow, the mid-air display technology is, like the laser cannon, cool as hell, but I am not entirely sure what functional benefits it has. And at a price tag of $20K, you better be able to make some sort of halfway decent business case for it.
Granted, that business case might well be “this will impress the hell out of visitors, including potential investors, with how awesome we are. ”
I can see a lot of middle management types wanting one of them NOW NOW NOW, before that smug asshole over in Accounting gets one.
Then we have this impressive bit of craft which depicts an entire relationship in 5 minutes.
Warning, it’s very stagey, consists of just two actors talking to the camera, and is in black and white.
Why is it in black and white? Who knows. Maybe they thought it would make the whole thing seem more stark and emotional. Or maybe they were just being pretentious.
Regardless, I greatly admire the craft that went into it. It’s all one long shot, so the actors had to be really, really on their marks with every line, and there are a LOT of lines. And the writing is quite deft in the way ot gives you clues as to the passage of time in what they say, as opposed to having to introduce some artificial and obtrusive device that would have ruined the purity of it all.
I can’t say I really enjoyed the experience a lot, but I am impressed by how well it is made.
And then we have our adorable cat animated GIF of the day.
All cats are ninjas. Some just aren’t very good ones.
I LOL’d so hard when I saw that. We cat lovers live for moments of feline comedy like that. Sure, it seems a little mean to laugh at them when they mess up like that, but most of the time they are so poised and agile and perfect that it just slays us when they do something goofy like that.
Especially when it’s one of their awe-inspiring “spring loaded cat” moments that goes awry. The speed at which we go from “coiled steel” to “where kitty go?” just makes the clip that much funnier.
Sorry, kittums. We love your little furry self so much. But sometimes, you’re hilarious.
I am sure we are pretty funny to you sometimes, too.
Finally, we have this little bit of rantiness I recorded today.
I feel good about that one because I managed to keep it under 5 minutes in length, after considerable trimming, and thus was able to keep my points fairly compact and concise. It also allowed me to concentrate more on putting in the extra stuff in order to punch it up a little.
After all, it’s a lot easier to come up with stuff for 5 minutes of video than for 15!
A fascist dream
Had a rather extraordinary dream this afternoon, the sort that tends to compel me to write about it because it is vivid, detailed, and disturbing.
So much more interesting than my usual bullshit dreams about getting lost in malls.
In this dream, I was somehow a part of a very brutal and fascist type society. It was not a nation-state, I am sure of that. It was more like a large and well-organized cult. But for whatever reason, I distinctly felt that this was not the sort of thing you could just walk away from.
And I was definitely young, around in my late teens, as were all of my peers.
As usual, the exact logical order and structure of things has faded from my mind, so I have to reconstruct just exactly what went down from the flashes I can remember.
But I remember that I was being taken by my… instructors. I suppose… to do a job I had been dreading, a job that just seemed like madness and futility to me, and I was resisting going so the instructors were keeping a very close eye on me.
Bloody fascist bastards.
To stall for time, I told them I had to go to the bathroom, and they glared at me and gave me the ol’ stinkeye, but let me go.
This is where it gets weird. And fairly sexual, be warned.
I open the door to the public bathroom, and at first it seems normal, just one of those public restrooms where there’s two doors one after another and a tiny anteroom in between. But I open the second door and go around the corner, and it opens out to this quite enormous room full of boys my age, all nude or semi-nude like this is one gigantic gym locker room.
There were boys showering in what looked like old-fashioned wooden phone booths with the door taken off, and a massive heated pool full of so many boys there’s barely any room between them. As I pass the bizarre shower stalls, I hear a voice say “Plenty of butt and balls, eh?”.
I see the boys in the heated pools and greet them with a smile and a nod, but I am looking for the part of this “bathroom” intended for use for actual urination, which in this universe turns out to be this big flat wooden counter-top with holes in it around the size of coffee cup stains, and you are supposed to just direct your stream towards a hole and the tilt of the surface plus gravity will do the rest.
There are a lot of weird bathrooms in my dreams.
So I begin urinating, and I notice that the boys in the heated pool are all watching. I find this amusing, and when I am done, I shout down at them something like “Don’t you have anything better to do than to watch me pee?”
And one of the boys in the back looks a little sheepish and says “Well… it’s England!”. (Sorry, England. )
I return to my captors and they take me to where I am supposed to sit for eighteen hours cold-calling celebrities to try to get them to sign on to be voice actors in a Korean animated feature. (Wow, brain… just… wow. )
All my captors have done it, and I, in the dream, somehow already knew about this, and I completely rebel. I tell them that this is clearly the most difficult kind of work in the world (hardly, but what the hell, I was thinking like a teenager at the time) and that I was not going to participate in their petty sadism.
I then went back to my bed in some sort of “four cots to a room” type dormitory to await my fate.
While I waited, the heady glow of self-righteousness began to fade and I started to get really worried. I knew that someone would soon be coming to punish me, and I was scared. I started thinking about other ways to get by in this society, like pretending to be exactly what they wanted me to be but secretly fucking with them any way I could. I also considered just ambushing the guy they sent to punish me and kicking his ass or even killing him.
So finally, the guy shows up, and it’s a guy in bluish-grey body armor wearing a helmet. I am lying in my bed pretending to be asleep so I can surprise the guy when he gets close, but I can, via Dream Camera, see him creeping up on me.
As he gets closer, he takes out this collapsible weapon that is like two sword blades pointing in opposite directions connected by a handle, and I am starting to panic, thinking “Holy fuck, I didn’t count on having to deal with a bladed weapon!” and hastily revising my list of potential battle tactics.
That’s where the dream ended. I woke up from that feeling quite disoriented and it took me a little while to sort of tune in to reality again, but when I did, I was sure as hell glad I was out of that fascist cult!
Perhaps that is the purpose of such a dream, to make one grateful for the life one has by giving you a taste of one that is far, far worse. If so, mission accomplished.
So that’s the dream. Here’s today’s video.
Yeah, I know… ten minutes? But what can I say, I was on a roll. I have been thinking about GMI in general for years and the Swiss initiative for weeks now, and I had a lot of thoughts to express about it.
It really is a glorious idea. It would make sure wealth kept being pumped down to the average person and free people from the tyranny of employers practically having the power of life or death over you.
And not only does it pump the wealth down, by directing it to every citizen, it insures that the wealth is spread broadly and evenly, forming a very firm and reliable base to the pyramid of capitalism.
Well, that’s all from me for now. Thanks for reading my dream. I know other people’s dreams tend to be boring to read, but I really felt like I had to put that one out there.
It was just so vividly cinematic!
Shotgun fulla links
Finished my Vcon 38 report, and man are those fun to write. Is there some way to do that kind of thing for a living? Just go to events, write down the basics of what you did there, plus whatever else pops into you head at the time, and then go home, write a report, and make moolah?
It sounds sort of like journalism, but a very soft kind of journalism. And it’s also comedy and warmth, and those are two things I do well.
I resisted doing con reports for a long long time because it seemed like it would be so much work, trying to summarize everything that is happening.
But you don’t have to do that. That’s reportage. Me, I do something else.
Anyhow, now that I am done with the con report, it’s time to clear my browser of all the links I have accumulated while doing science and con reporting.
Like this very funny list of actual tourist complaints that are completely and hilariously insane.
Here’s my three faves.
12. “It took us nine hours to fly home from Jamaica to England. It took the Americans only three hours to get home. This seems unfair.”
How thoughtless of us. Next time you fly to Jamaica, we will have invented an entirely new and revolutionary form of transportation that gets you from England to Jamaica in three hours… and we won’t like Americans use it.
14. “The brochure stated: ‘No hairdressers at the resort’. We’re trainee hairdressers and we think they knew and made us wait longer for service.”
You got us. We hate hairdressers. I’m surprised we let you leave the hotel alive, you future hairdressing monster. I’ll have the reprimand the assassins.
19. “My fiance and I requested twin-beds when we booked, but instead we were placed in a room with a king bed. We now hold you responsible and want to be re-reimbursed for the fact that I became pregnant. This would not have happened if you had put us in the room that we booked.”
Three things. One, twin beds is two words, not one. Two, you can’t be re-reimbursed. It’s logically impossible. Either you have been reimbursed, or you haven’t. It can’t happen twice. And lastly, I sincerely hope you plan to sue us about this. Whatever it ends up costing us will be worth it to hear you explain your case out loud to a judge. And judges have tough jobs. They need a good laugh now and then.
Then we have this awesome Six Flags commercial I had completely forgotten.
I mean, how can you not love seeing a clearly fake old guy dance the dance of ultimate joy? I think the real credit for the awesomeness of that ad goes to the dancer and/or the choreographer.
It’s like he’s dancing as much as is humanly possible. He’s at Maximum Dance. You can’t dance more than that.
Also, I think a free bus that cruises residential neighborhoods looking for people who want to go to your amusement part would be a brilliant marketing strategy.
It would make it all seem just a little bit magical.
Then there’s this firm and authoritative commentary on the American shutdown crisis from someone who, like Jesus, Republicans claim to admire.
Of course, like Jesus, they prefer the imaginary version in their heads who just endorses everything they do to the one that might actually tell them that they are vile evil anti-Christian scumbags.
Real Reagan would have been absolutely horrified at the way the USA has gone in the last decade or so. He was a reasonable moderate who had no idea that his statement about “government IS the problem” would unleash a wave of sheer barbarity upon the nation he loved.
Come to think of it, I’m pretty fond of it too.
Now we have the Most Awesome Escalator Ever.
Except you just know there will be a cluster of people at the bottom just reading it.
Wherever they did this, for whatever reason, you rock. It’s a simple yet brilliant idea. It could not have been easy taking the original text and chopping up into stair-sized bits, let alone getting the font right.
Because that’s the thing about doing things for nerds. We’re a very picky bunch. You have to get it right or we will turn up our fannish noses at it.
Then we have this website that wants you to pitch in and Save The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus.
The site is filled with the kind of dry humour that I love. Like this :
Like this gem :
What percentage of profit from Tree Octopus products sold on this site goes to support protecting the species?
None.
Tree Octopuses don’t need your money. They need your love and willingness to write angry letters to the editor demanding action.
I heartily recommend reading the whole site. It’s simply marvelous.
Then there’s this “prank” :
To me, that is obviously fake. Everything came off too perfectly for it to be a real interaction with some random chick. So, shenanigans on that.
Still, this will no doubt stir up a lot of lively and productive debate online.
And of course, we have my little ol video of the day.
The song is okay but no big deal, so I decided today was the day I investigate my video editing program’s ability to import animated GIFs.
And it works okay. Not great, but okay. Some animated GIFs, it imports the first frame and that’s it. Others, it imports the whole thing but the video goes way out of whack.
Like this one, which I must include here because it got gibbled when I tried to import it.
Cats. They’re wacky.
For those of you who don’t speak Cat, the other cat is not being evil. That is just a cat’s way of saying “tag! You’re it! Come play with me!”.
Ditto with people who complain about their “psycho” cat “attacking” them for “no reason”. If your cat does that, odds are that the cat is simply bored and trying to get you to play with him or her.
It’s just treating you like you were another cat.
Play with your cat more, or ideally, get it the ultimate cat toy : another cat!
Trust me, they can entertain one another all day.
V-Con 38 Con Report : Day 3
Sunday, October 6, 2013
8:03 AM : Wake up bright and early on a lovely sunny day. Decide “Meh.” and go back to sleep.
9:30 AM : I wake up again. Time to boot up my brain and try Consciousness 2.0. Luckily, this time the software is more stable and I remain awake and start preparing for the day. This time I am up early enough for the breakfast (not brunch!) buffet, but between dithering on whether or not I felt like pulling myself together enough for a meal in public and grazing on the remains of the snacks from last night, the point becomes thoroughly moot. I run out of time and I am no longer hungry anyhow. So I decide to just pack up and chillax at Chez Nous until Joe and Julian show up (they opted to sleep at home) so we can check out of our hotel room at noon.
I always find checking out to be a sad process. Perhaps I am just too sentimental. But it always seems sad to be leaving one’s little temporary home just when you were getting used to it and it was starting to feel lived-in. And after you check out, you are essentially homeless until you go home for the convention.
That doesn’t sit well with a security-craving homebody like me.
12:15 PM : Joe and Julian showed up just barely in time for us to be out of that room before noon and hence not end up being charged for another day. They had me worried there for a while. But we make it under the wire. They have no interest in going to lunch (reasonable enough, they just GOT here), so I am at loose ends for now. There are no panels I feel like attending until 2 PM, when of course there are three. How do they manage to do it? Schedule all the cool things opposite each other? It must take some kind of mad twisted genius.
1:15 PM : After a bit of aimless meandering (it’s easy when you know how), I end up drifting into Fuel, the restaurant’s insanely expensive coffee bar. I had just planned on buying an expensive fruit drink of the sort I like (a smoothie, a bubble tea, whatever) but I noticed they had a few forms of real food and my appetite suddenly woke up, and it was cranky. So I end up buying a $9 turkey club wrap, which comes with a bag of Miss Vickie;s chips, plus a Diet Pepsi and some intriguing looking little pastry squares. Sadly, the chocolate in those turned out to be dark chocolate, but after I got over the shock, they were okay.
Grand total was $13.75, which is a lot for what I got, although still less than the $20 I had budgeted for brunch anyhow. So I both spent to much and saved money.
And I have to admit, the wrap was really good. Tons of super fresh ingredients, expert construction, very tasty and very filling to boot. I am not sure it was $9 good, but it was good.
Now, to pick a panel.
2 PM : I decide to go to the one about science and religion, and how they relate to one another. I am tempted to ask the panel if any of them are Americans, because honestly, here in Canada, it is totally not an issue. We don’t have religious whackjobs trying to make us teach evolution in schools. It’s just not a thing here.
Regardless, I greatly enjoy the discussion. The subject of faith always fascinates me, being an outsider to it, and I enjoy discussing it with other intelligent folks. And science, of course, is awesome.
Sadly, I end up missing the last fifteen minutes of it because my body decides that I need to take care of an urgent bodily need right now this second. Stupid body!
3 PM : Waiting for the Turkey Readings to start and I am a-tingle with anticipation. They are, quite seriously, the most fun thing I do all year.
The basic idea is that the panelists read aloud from the worst science fiction and fantasy books they can find and the audience has the chance to contribute money to either halt the reading, or continue it.
So one person might say “A dollar to stop!”, and that person put a dollar in the kitty. If nobody wants the reading to continue, it stops and the panelist move on to the next book. But if someone wants it to continue, they have to bid higher, like “$1.25 to continue!”, and then put $1.5 in the kitty,
Usually, the reading continues, with stops and starts, until the combination of the terribleness of the fiction and the price of a bid to continue combine to make it just not worth it. All the money goes to the Canadian Unity Fan Fund, or CUFF, which is a fund used to send one lucky fan from one end of Canada to the other for a convention, thus making a connection between the two places.
While the readings are happening, volunteers from the audience act them out, and volunteer artists (this year, Felicity Walker and Joe Devoy) attempt to illustrate the action.
It is ten tons of fun.
5 PM : The Turkeys are over, and now I am waiting for La Gange to be done watching the Closing Ceremonies. I am still not a ceremonies kind of guy. But I find myself a nice comfy chair (one awesome thing about this hotel : comfy chairs everywhere) and settle in to make notes and read.
6:15 PM : Supper at Agitaro’s, a local sushi place we like. Attending are La Gange plus Amos and our good friend William Graham, alias spuug. We opt for a la carte instead of all you can eat. I solve the problem of far too much choice on an Asian menu in my usual way : I look for the combo specials and pick one that has nothing I do not like in it. Bonus : this comb comes bento style. I love bento. There is just something about having all the different foods in their own little boxes that appeals to me. It’s so pretty!
8 PM : Back at the convention and waiting for the Dead Dog Party to begin. Relax, that’s just the convention-ending party in Hospitality. I am proud of myself for not giving in to the urge to just go home that struck me when we were leaving Agitaro’s. That was my social anxiety talking, and I am glad I didn’t listen to it because if I had, I would have just been depressed at home, thinking how my friends were all having fun.
9 PM : The Dog is Dead! The doors to the party open. Time to socialize!
1:30 AM : Felicity is kind enough to drive me home, and the convention is officially over for me.
Can’t wait for next year!
Blacklisters versus Whitelisters
Sorry folks, today all you get is a fairly dry (but fascinating) talker.
Now that it is done, I sort of feel like I made too big a deal of it.
But I still feel like I am onto something with this line of thought.
V-Con 38 Con Report : Day 2
Saturday, October 5, 2013
10:30 AM : Woke up too late to make it to the breakfast buffet, which mysteriously ends at 11 am instead of the much saner hour of 1 PM like a normal place. Whatever happened to brunch? I am really more of a brunch person. We night owls love brunching. It’s everything that is good about breakfast, but later.
Guess I will be dining a la Chez Hospitality today. It’s a good thing I am the sort of person who is just as happy with sandwiches as I am with eggs and bacon.
12 PM : Brunchfast turns out to be two pre-made roast beef sandwiches snagged just before the lunch rush hits. Oh, but I am a clever one. I feed the Alien Head a few bucks, and Hospitality feeds me. Boffo. Feeling almost human now.
I peruse the mendacious program book and discover there is nothing I really care to attend until 3 PM, when there is, of course, three different things. Isn’t that always the way? Either nothing, or too much.
Beret of purpose, I decide to return to home base and go back up to Chez Nous with no particular agenda. When in doubt, return to home base, I guess.
1 PM : I return to our room to find Joe is there, freshly awoken. After a few minutes chat, I get a great idea, and ask Joe if I can borrow his laptop so I can write a blog entry for the day. This turns out to be a more complicated procedure than I had anticipated, as it requires Joe to make an account for me on his computer, and so I feel a little guilty for putting him through all that trouble.
Still, mission accomplished. I log into my website and tappity type away my one thousand words for the day. I had expected to be unable to blog during the festivities, so this is a pleasant bonus. I have blogged at least a thousand words a day for years now, so it is far more than a habit and something a lot more like a need.
1:30 PM : Having done my writing for the day, I catch a little extra sleep. Conventions are like being in the Army. You learn to take sleep whenever you can.
3 PM : After much agonizing, I decide to go to the Justify The Science Flaw panel, mainly because I went to it last year and it was a hoot. The basic idea is that Karl Johnson brings a list of example of blatantly wrong science in popular media, and he, the panel, and the rest of us nerds in the audience try to come up with explanations of why that isn’t really a flaw.
It echoes the Marvel No-Prize, which Marvel used to award (or non-award?) to fans who came up with justifications for seeming errors in continuity, science, or whatnot in Marvel comics.
The real fun comes in the ridiculousness (not to mention flimsiness) of the justifications required to cover up some of the most egregious flaws.
And, despite back pain problems (damn this getting old thing), I have just as much fun this year.
4 PM : Ah, the Elrons, the always hilarious “awards” bestowed by the inimitable (but very imitworthy) R. Graeme Cameron every year to targets which richly deserve it, one way or another. They are a highlight of the convention every year, and extremely popular, a fact which seems to have escaped the convention planners because the room booked for it is tiny and cramped and many people, including my dear friend Felicity Walker, simply cannot get in to see them. This was a crushing blow to those who did not make it in, and I am very upset at this oversight. I really hope it never happens again.
Seriously, with his dry wit and stentorian voice, R. Graeme is like a rock star to us local fans!
5 PM : Regroup at our room, AKA Chez Nous, for the usual confab about dinner plans. Felicity has discovered that the TV in our room no longer gets Channel 30, her favorite. It got it just fine the previous evening, but now we get nothing but static. She calls down to the front desk to tell them about it, and they deny ever having had a Channel 30, or indeed to know what this “tell ee vish un” we speak of might be. Felicity manages to convince them of the existence of both, so they send up a tech, or at least, a worried looking Asian dude in a white dress shirt. He tries the denial trick too, but we see through it. He eventually leaves while mumbling something about checking “the box” somewhere. Well, we did what we could.
5:30 PM : Dinner at ABC Country Kitchen restaurant, another of our favorite local haunts. That’s what is great about a convention that is practically in your own back yard. You already know all the good place to eat.
7:15 PM : I catch 3/4 of the Video Game History panel. Learned tons of cool video game history trivia from the man, Ryan Cousineau, who curated the video game history exhibit for the VAG. He really knows his stuff!
8 PM : A panel intriguingly titled Are We Your Bitches? It is based on a comment Neil Gaiman made to a bunch of unruly fans that George R. R. Martin is “not their bitch”, and it was about the eternal question “What, exactly, does an author owe their fans?”. Very interesting to me as both an enthusiastic fan and an aspiring writer.
I figure all authors owe their fans is quality product and politeness in interaction. The rest is negotiable.
10:30 PM : Felicity and I head out into the night for a supply run. We return with some McD’s, a lot of food from 7-12 that I should NOT be eating, various beauty supplies (not that she needs them), and a gassed up car.
12 AM : Felicity and I settle back and get comfy Chex Nous, and unwind from the day’s activities with our old friends, television and junk food. Hope I sleep better tonight.