Category: Conventions

This year John was one of the Clarke judges, which meant that on Wednesday we took the train down to London for the ceremony. I was curious how it would go, being more familiar with awards ceremonies that have multiple categories and fill an evening. In the end it was lovely, about an hour of socializing much as you would at a convention (minus the handy badges) interrupted by a speech by the organizers, the announcement and speech by the winner, another hour of socializing and then off to the pub! All of the authors were there, which I gather …

Had a short weekend in London, chilling on the Saturday and then spending Sunday wandering Pimlico. It’s an area I haven’t spent much time in, so it was fun to have a little explore – spent a pound to browse a massive car boot sale, didn’t buy anything but it was still worth it. Visited several charity shops I knew about and found a couple more I hadn’t, and then spent two hours at the Tate Britain. The thing about London museums is that you can visit over and over and not be sure you’ve seen everything you want to, …

After fiddling around on and off with several opaque map plugins, I’ve finally settled on a simple OSM embed and am working on making a nerdy map, mainly for my pleasure but hopefuly of some use to others, especially with the increased enshittification of search and other web tools. I’ll surely refine as I go, but have started with the more specialized retailers, plus a few fun bits and pieces, separating into layers by broad type.

It is always tricky to decide which day to arrive and how long to stay for a convention, especially when its in a place you want to explore. Aside from the obvious considerations around money and time, you have to balance the fear of missing out with the human limits if endurance. Particularly if you are friends with the harder drinking fans! ,We arrived on the Friday, by which time our social media feeds were already knee-deep in excited posts and envy inducing photos. We flew direct from Newcastle, which was nice and easy but did require getting up at …

We had the very great luck of booking at the Bullit Hotel, about and eight minute walk from the ICC and Hilton where the convention was taking place. Obviously there is always a risk of being off-site leading to missing out, or at the very least making one feel like they are missing out. But the Bullit had a bunch of other fans there, including lots of close friends. The hotel breakfast was truly excellent, but even if it had not been, the company would more than have made up for it – on various days we were able to …

in order to do justice to our wonderful time in Northern Ireland, I think it is best to split my con report into three parts covering the city, the food and drink, and the convention separately. There will be overlap, but I fear becoming a bit overwhelmed at the size of the post if I try to cram it into one chronological post. But suffice it to say that we had an absolute whale of a time, and are excited to go back at some point – either to a convention or just a visit.

O_O

I quite enjoy fiddling with Procreate and the Affinity suite, but perpeturally find myself in the position of having set them aside for long enough that I’ve forgotten a bunch of things (which to be fair does happen with some traditional mediums as well) and it takes several days of figuring out what I actually remember that is still correct, what has been upgraded and works entirely differently lo these many months later, and all that can’t even start till after several rounds of updates and installs. Which is to say, these tools are basically magic but of course that …