What with timezones, and having posted in my afternoon yesteday, the timeline gets fuzzy. That said, yesterday’s total ended up being two panels and the bid session. The first reading didn’t happen – I think it there was a panelist issue rather than technical, but I wandered off to find food and couldn’t be bothered with trying for the one immediately following. Which means my first panel was Cartography in SFF with Jared Pechacêk, Michael Noone, and Natania Barron. It was quite fun and had some interesting map nerderdy… it did trend a little towards “advice for writers”, but not …
Day One Virtual Worldcon
The good news is that although the parcel with my art arrived late, Spike and Tom arranged to have Ian Stockdale collect it and bring it down to Seattle! Having generous and resourceful friends is the best part of fandom, truly. So I have six fans hanging in the art show and handful of prints in the print shop, not my best showing every but it is nice to have a presence. And I did get a photo of the Rotsel display, which now includes my panel, so there’s that too! Meanwhile in virtual… I went through the guide book …
Conventions, convention prep, and lack thereof.
Worldcon is next week, I wont be there in person but have a virtual membership and have been enjoying the Discord in the lead up. While it is giving me massive fomo already, it is also lovely to see all the excited chatter – especially the introduction posts from first-time members. Although I wont be there in person, some of my art might be… maaaybe. I left it a bit late and after UPS UK failed utterly to provide even the most basic service (the website didn’t produce a label, the payment system tried to charge me three times, each …
Zombies and Demons and Witches, oh my!
October may be a few months away yet, but my media consumption has been a bit horror-centric the last couple of weeks. First of all, catching up on Agatha All Along, which so far is a hoot. A great cast clearly having a very good time, feels like a logical continuation of WandaVision but still very much its own thing. The short form dramatic presentation category is good this year, and I’m glad it helped us move this up the viewing list. Then there’s K-Pop Demon Hunters, which may very well end up on my long form nominations for next …
Walking the Wall
John and I have been talking about walking the the Hadrian’s Wall path for a while now. It’s a big part of the local history, a UNESCO World Heritage site, and just kind of a neat thing to do. Plus they’ve managed to gamify it by having the museums on the route sell little ‘passports’ which you can get stamped along the way! Its a popular, relatively easy hike, but not short – 135km from Wallsend to Bowness-on-Solway, so we are doing it in sections. We started in Wallsend, which has the advantage of being accessible by Metro. We got …
The Clarke Awards
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 …
Pimlico
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, …
A Map
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.
Vienna
We barely had time to unpack from Belfast when we had to leave for Vienna. Poor us! John had a work conference to attend, so for him it was not pure leisure, but I was just along for the ride and took full advantage. After several years of him sending me lovely photos of the city in between EGU sessions, we decided to extend his stay and have a little vacation to celebrate our ten-year anniversary. Our hotel was in Leopoldstadt, right over the canal from the city center, very convenient to several metro stations and a nice walk from …
Belfast: The Sights
When Belfast was announced as the Eastercon 2025 location, we were excited about getting to explore the city and maybe do some more general touristing. I had never been to Northern Ireland at all, and of course the Giants Causeway is a UNESCO World Heritage site so I knew we definitely wanted to see that. During the convention I had a chance to pootle around town, walk along the river getting to and from the hotel, explore St. George’s market, see some murals, and generally get a feel for the centre of town, which is lively and full of interesting …