autographedcat

Whew.  It’s been a long time since I was at a gencon, but I’ve been having a great time at this one.

After getting up and getting a shower, we wandered over to the nearby mall for a late breakfast/early lunch.  We ended up getting reasonably tasty teriyaki chicken from the food court, and had a great time watching the skaters on the ice rink in the middle of the mall while we ate.

Between panels I was on and things I wanted to attend, I had a pretty full day.  First up was “Can Movies Capture The Joy of Comics”, which was a lively panel.  We talked about the many various successful and unsuccessful attempts to adapt comics to the screen, and got a lot of input from the audience.

Immediately following was a panel called “Books to Movies to Comics to Movies to Books”, which was all about adaptation.  While some of it focused on similar topics to the first panel, we were a bit broader in the discussion, and got in several examples of cross-medium adaptation, including movie novelisations, TV series continuing as comics, and even the recent trend of taking a bunch of disparate iconic concepts and blending them into a new series, such as “Once Upon A Time” and “Grimm” have been doing.¹

We had a brief break before a 6pm panel on “Developing Convention Policies”, which was attended by my wife and the husband of one of my co-panelists.² After 10 minutes of no one being there, the panel and audience decided that we ought to continue our conversation on convention policy over dinner, and adjourned as a group to the restaurant.

After dinner, we got to the filk room in time to hear most of Frank Hayes’s concert.  I had arranged with the filk track to present Frank with his Pegasus Award for Best Alien Song,³ and as luck would have it, he played it in his set.  We interrupted the concert in order to present the award, which was great fun, since he hadn’t been warned this was going to happen.

Next up was the Filk Guest of Honour concert performance from Debs and Errol.  I was already quite familiar with their work via recording, but it was great to finally see them perform live.⁴ I hope to spend more time with them as the weekend progresses, but after the concert they had the usual press of folks wanting to meet them, so I briefly introduced myself and figured I’d see them again as the weekend progressed.  Tremendous fun duo.  Do *not* miss them if you get the chance.

As I’m writing this, I have one more duty, which is to be part of the Polyamory panel at 11pm.  After which I think I will sleep soundly.  Tomorrow has another full day in store!

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1. I mentioned and was surprised no one in the audience had heard of “Welcome to Night Vale“. ↩

2. My opening remark:  ”We outnumber them.  I think that means we win!” ↩

3. Which was awarded two weeks ago at OVFF ↩

4. During the concert, I tweeted “I really want to fold up @debsanderrol and put them in my luggage. ↩

Mirrored from Home of the Autographed Cat.

I was already a fan of Questionable Content (possibly my favourite webcomic ever), Girls with Slingshots, and Girl Genius, and I've seen random good bits from Hyperbole and a Half. I'll have to check the fifth one out.

GirlyNerds… » Blog Archive » Top 5 Girliest-Nerdiest Webcomics

Move over Superman! There’s a new force on the comic scene, winning the hearts of GirlyNerds even without all that form-fitting spandex. *swoon*

Webcomics have taken cyberspace by storm, with an estimated 38,000 nerdy narratives currently in publication. Some are good, many are bad, and an alarming number are downright indecipherable. With all that internet ink to choose from, a girl can waste precious hours sifting the trash from the treasures.

Thankfully, GirlyNerds is here to point you in the right direction! Below you’ll find a comprehensive guide to the girliest, nerdiest comics that webdom has to offer.

Beware- Not all of these comics are safe for work, not that you’d EVER try to kill a few on-the-clock hours browsing through the extensive archives.

It's been many years since i read the comic strip Broom Hilda, though I remember having a couple of paperback collections of it when I was a kid. I honestly forget that it's still around.

Someone on rec.arts.comics.strips linked to this one, though, and I just had to share it.



"Broom Hilda" by Russell Myers


"Sometimes the burdens that we carry
Are the blessings we forgot
And I've learned a lot about the difference in the two
It's in the point of view
That you've got"

--Ben Wakeman

I read a lot of online comics. Some I read because they're impossibly funny, and some I read out of cultural inertia.

One that falls into the latter category is "The Wizard of Id". Today however, I got a good laugh out of it, not because the core joke was that funny, but because I couldn't help reading it in a poly context:



The Wizard of Id by Johnny Hart and Brant Parker


Polyamory puts a whole new spin on this one, doesn't it? :)

Joe, I think I found some evidence of one of your past lives. :)



Dave Blazek's Loose Parts

If you grew up on silver and bronze age comics as I did, you probably fondly remember the various Hostess snacks advertisements featuring various Marvel and DC Comics heroes. These all were one page, usually 6-8 panel, stories, all of which centred around the featured hero bagging the bad guys with the clever distracting use of a tasty Hostess brand snack.

Well, thanks to xiphias, I've now seen the ultimate rendition of the form:

Rorschach vs. The Retard Raider

I'm in awe.

One of the Usenet newsgroups I still bother to keep up with is rec.arts.comics.strips. Today, one of the regulars posted a message about a comic he was working on. It's still a work in progress, but he wanted people who appeciated the form to take a look and give him feedback, good or bad.

So I went to take a look.

Mom's Cancer will not amuse you. It may not even entertain you. But it will affect you. The author, who is preferring to stay semi-anonymous for obvious reasons, has crafted an intimate, frank, and touching portrayal of what he and his family have gone through during the course of his mother's treatment for incurable lung cancer.

It is a work-in-progress. It doesn't yet have an ending. But in the space of time it took me to read the installments to date, I have come to know these people, to care for them, to worry about their outcome. I want to know what happens next. I need to know how the story continues.

This is undistilled Good Stuff. Read it. It's worth the trip.

This is especially for all the poly folks on my friends list:



Dave Coverly's Speed Bump

First of all, this meme has been amusing me, but for somewhat personal reasons. Long long ago, we had officially sanctioned clans on JediMUD. At the time they were implemented, I was still a low-ranking member of the administration, and i warned them all it would end in tears. I was sadly proven correct, and one of the first acts I undertook when I became a member of the administration team a few months later was to have them all desanctioned. Jedi's official position became "You can create whatever affiliates you want between yourself and other players, but the administration will not recognize any of those affiliates as official nor extend any special treatment towards them." I still think this is a reasonable policy.

Anyway, flash-forward a few years, when Dina and I were hanging out mortside and complaining that no one ever did anything for the sheer fun of it. So we founded Clan Quixotic. The only requirement to join was the willingness to, at the drop of a hat, band together to, say, go kill every dragon in the game, just for the heck of it. After Dina finished the papers she had to write for her Masters degree, we celebrated by making a list of the ten hardest mobs to kill in the game at that time, and setting out to kill them all in ascending order of difficulty. We were that kind of group.

Ah the good old days. I think it's about time to wipe the dust of my mort's armor and clock back to Minus Time for some hack and slash.

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A lot of people have been writing a lot of good stuff about electronic voting machines and their disturbing lack of audit trails. This week, PBS's Robert Cringley weighs in with a thoughtful analysis. Go read it, it's good stuff.

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One of my favourite comic strips right now is Jef Mallett's Frazz. Today's strip is a good example why: