Tuesday Newsday will resume next week.

Saturday, I managed to get to more panels, but not nearly as many as I wanted. Why? That is a little complicated, but in a word : sleepiness.

I made the mistake of taking two Quetiapine when I went to bed at around 2 am, after leaving Kathleen’s excellent room party. It seemed like a smart idea at the time. I figured I would get to sleep and sleep for a long while then wake up bright eyed and bushy tailed, ready to attend a zillion panels. I would mostly be asleep during a time when there was no programming, and hence, my waking time would be synced up with the time when there was stuff to do. Perfect.

But no. I forgot that it takes between an hour and an hour and a half for the pills to kick in, and that ideally I should be active in that period for full effectiveness. Instead, I took the pills and went straight to bed without even doing any reading first, and that just does not work for me. The change is too abrupt from active to dormant, and I was in a strange bed and a strange place to boot.

The result was that it took a very long time for me to fall asleep at all, and when I did, it was not very good quality sleep. and overall, it was a pretty lousy night.

And when I finally managed to drag myself out of bed, get showered and get out to the con, I was so sleepy that I could barely remain upright, even after scoring a can of Diet Coke from a vending machine^[1].

So when at 11 am I managed to get to the So You Want To Be A Writer panel, I was a wreck. I had to rest my head against the (empty) chair in front of me just to keep from passing out. At the time I was paranoid that the panelist would think that I was being a total dick by pretending to be extremely bored, but that was just the sleepiness talking. They are experienced panelists, and have probably had some attendees in their audiences who were worse off than I was considering that I don’t even drink. They probably assumed I was hung over, if they noticed me at all. They certainly would not take it personally.

So, phew there.

It was a fun panel, or at least what little I remember of it was fun. Frankly, I was not exactly in the most retentive of frames of mind.

And so, despite my plans, I had to go back to our hotel room and get more sleep. This still pisses me off when I think about it. I will get over it eventually, I imagine. But for now, I am sort of angry at the universe for making me miss a big chunk of the day’s activities.

So I slept for two and a half hours, then went to Hospitality for more food, and then went to a hella fun panel called Justify The Science Flaw. The basic idea was that the panel brought up a lot of bad science from bad (and good) science fiction stories, and with the help of we the audience, tried to come up with some kind of way to explain them away. ^[2]

It turned out to be even more fun than that sounds, because we were all keenly aware of the absurdity of the exercise and especially of our explanations, so we were pretty much laughing the whole way through.

Sadly, I was not yet fully awake, so I do not remember most of the specifics. I remember us talking about an obscure moment from an obscure show, namely 20,00 Leagues Under The Sea : The Series.

The gist of it was that at one point, the Nautilus was under the Arctic ice when huge pieces of said ice began to fall down on it.

Um, ice floats, folks. Look in your cocktail glass. Life on Earth could not exist if solid water, namely ice, was not less dense than liquid water.

I forget our solution, but it involved a massive magnetic field magnetizing the ice, so it was not exactly plausible. Funny, though.

Then, sadly, I needed more naptime, so the next panel was at 6 pm, and it was another red hot science injection, in this case, it was The Discovery Of The Accelerating Universe.

Regular readers will know that astrophysics is one of my favorite drugs, and learning how they figured out that the expansion of the universe is accelerating involved a lot of it. So while I would rather have talked about the implications of the discovery rather than its history, it was still a crash course in astrophysics and I was once more left with a pleasantly glowing brain.

After that, a bunch of us nerds went to a sushi place called Tengeku, and I discovered that years of only eating Japanese food at all you can eat places had completely wrecked my ability to decide what I want from a standard menu.

Eventually I just got two orders of Kappa maki and a teriyaki donburi. The donburi was particularly good. A lot of places think that all you need to do to make a donburi is put the main ingredient on rice, but a proper donburi has layers of veggies and such as well. And the Tengeku people know this.

All that for around $15, too. Not bad!

After that, we went back to the hotel and went to bed.