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Archive for July 2004 Con pics are here! I met and hung out with a lot of people at the con, including a number of people I figure I really didn't have any right to hang out with. Having been able to be in the position to grant people An Autograph or Picture of Myself, I probably have a truer, clearer vision of what makes Chex -- and anyone, really -- so goddamn bitter. But far, far more important than any meager sense of celebrity I experienced was being surrounded by people who knew exactly what I was talking about. I can't even begin to tell you how satisfying it is to hear the word "Serializer" and watch untold numbers of eyes roll. Kurtz told me a story of a fellow at con he knew of, who was offering a product few were interested in, and the depths of his sadness. It said to me that writing and drawing things, and the ensuing attempt to make a living from them, is different from making a living from say, fixing telephones or, I don't know, fencing. The things these people create are little pieces of themselves. And it hurts when the public takes a cruel swipe at your pieces. I learned a lot, but most of it isn't as pithy. Most of it involves fatigue. Oh, and the panel Sunday -- more fun than not, more informative than fun, and more confusing than informative. I was hanging in there for the first twenty minutes, but as soon as they trotted out the newspaper distribution laws and creator/syndicate contract ethical bandpass normalization, I tagged out. (I swiped Jantze's napkin-scrawled calculations, so watch eBay.) I got the impression R. Stevens was in a similar boat as me, but Gabe and Tycho professed the same failure to understand their presence on the panel. I was proud to be its silent, lost center. All right, I'm leaving tonight for San Diego; I won't be able to make the special preview night, but that's okay. I thought I was going to wind up getting sick for it, but if I watch myself, I'll be fine in a day or so. I'm hoping very much, anyway. I'm very excited to be going back to the Con as a "professional," which seems to be sort of a specious title. Here "professional" more seems to mean "person who applied for a different color badge than yours" than, you know, an actual professional. But if I get to pretend for the better part of a week, that's fine. I get very anxious when I have to talk, or meet people, so this convention should be a fiesta for the fear centers of my brain. One of my and my brother's favorite pastimes is thinking of the worst thing to say in a given situation, and my head is full of them. (Chex is written about 70% from this, I think.) Anyway, I'll post here if I can. P.S. I don't think I'll wear the costume. Maybe I'll take it for others to wear. Although I'm not fond of Schwarzenegger as a governor, I have to say that the democrats look kind of stupid taking great offensive at Arnold's use of the term "girly-men" to describe politicians in special interests' pocket. The term was called hateful to gays. So gays are girly-men? That's a little like me calling my opponent a "thief," and he responds with "I take offense, I am not black!" Sunday, the last day of Comic-Con: 3:00-4:00 Is Newspaper Syndication Dead? The Future of the American Comic Strip - Scott Kurtz (PVP), Mike Krahulik, and Jerry Holkins (Penny-Arcade) have turned their comic strip creations into legitimate success stories without the help of the newspaper syndicates. Does the future of the American comic strip lie with print or on the web? Join Scott, Mike, and Jerry along with syndicated cartoonist Michael Jantze (The Norm), Kristopher Straub (Checkerboard Nightmare), and other web cartoonists as they debate the possibilities. Room 2 The letter-word "H" has no trace of the actual sound an H makes, unless you count the consonant pair "ch" in which H is involved, but doesn't exactly play a key role. The "ch" sound could have easily been denoted by "cg" or "cj." Or better yet, "tj." Other iffy letter-words: F - "Eff?" That starts with a short E sound. "F" should be pronounced "fee." L - Ditto. "Lee." M - "Mee." N - "Nee" -- and now we start to encounter a problem. All these "ee" sounds start to run together. Maybe another arbitrary long vowel sound would work for some of these. "Noo" or "na." R - Instead of "arr" I suggest the transposition "ra." S - We can't use "see" because that's "C" already. But what makes "ess" so functional is you're left with the actual word sound, "sss" at the end. So I recommend "sis." W - "Wee." X - There is no solution. Y - "Yoo?" "Why" ends up with a W sound in there. So Homeland Security is proposing a plan for postponing the election in November, hmm? That's the wrong thing, I think. What's to prevent an attack from being postponed? Are we going to keep the real date a secret? Anyway, here's an interesting thought someone brought up. It's election day, and there wind up being some averted attacks, and it frightens some voters. What if they occurred in liberal districts, and because the turnout is lower, Bush wins? Or vice versa? Could those scenarios be considered fair elections? I don't think so. Maybe there should be voting from home, via website (as unsafe as that would be; imagine the site getting DoSed on election night). Okay -- our Internet is for ads and blogs and dumb things. Internet2 is for schools and research. And Internet3 can be for voting. I won't link directly to the 3.7 MB video file, but this guy is researching fluid dynamics, and if you ever played with cornstarch and water, you should see the video (and read his paper on the subject). He sends Faraday waves across the cornstarch in a dish, presumably to solidify it a little, and then he sets the cornstarch off. It looks like it's CGI from The Abyss, I wish the image wasn't black and white. (Oh well, I'm sure the solution was white anyway.) http://slate.msn.com/id/2103152/ MSN's Slate is recommending Firefox over IE. I switched to it about a week ago. You can import all your IE goods over. Some wags have said that, well, IE is the one with all the visible security flaws because it's the most used, so of course it's going to be the one being attacked most. And maybe that's part of it, but also I think it's because hackers hate Microsoft. But even that's not the real problem. The real problem is, I don't need a browser that can create an object through which a web page can open my CD tray, thus: <script language="VBScript"> <!-- set oWMP = CreateObject("WMPlayer.OCX.7" ) set colCDROMs = oWMP.cdromCollection if colCDROMs.Count >= 1 then for i = 0 to colCDROMs.Count - 1 colCDROMs.Item(i).Eject next end if --> </script> Why is that even possible? Why would Microsoft want to allow that? Anyway, I haven't been disappointed with Firefox yet. I just... needed to have a pretty candy shell on Mozilla before I started using it. |
