For the benefit of those of you who are wondering if I don’t have anything better to so than make jokes at the expense of poor Mr. Scalzi, Kevin explains why I have no brain cells right now. We’ll be hitting the road again soon, and stopping off at the Vacaville factory stores on the way home. Hopefully I will be OK by then, but if I discover that my shopping mojo has deserted me then I’ll start worrying.
Personal
Post Party Wrap
Well, that was a fun evening. As Kevin reports in comments on his post, the Consul-General has a very nice house near the Presidio just a few doors down from Diane Feinstein’s place. It was quite a small gathering, and it wasn’t full of venture capitalists as I had feared, so I actually got to talk to the Vice Chancellor a bit. I was delighted to hear that my former colleagues in the Department of Oceanography now have proper research vessels and can swan off the to Seychelles to do their research rather than have to bob around on small boats on Southampton Water like we did in my day. There are also some interesting new developments going on. All I’m saying for now is that one of the things that the VC mentioned perked my interest and the first thing I did on getting home was to email Cory.
Oh yes, and it turned out that the Consul-General is a Welsh rugby fan and as soon as I get back to the UK I am getting a copy of this.
Gone Ligging
I don’t often get involve in the university alumni game, but tonight I’m making an exception. It is, after all, rather good of my university to come to me, here on the far side of the world, rather than expect me to come to them. And besides, they’ve arranged this little do at the home of the British Consul-General. I suspect they are hoping to attract smart graduates who have made a fortune in Silicon Valley. Instead they are getting one who has won a Hugo Award. Let’s hope they are not too disappointed.
(Now if only they had asked for evening dress rather than business attire…)
An Impromptu Party
Today (it being past midnight) is Gary Wolfe’s birthday, so we’ve been having a little party. A bunch of us had dinner together in the hotel restaurant and amusing conversation flowed. Charles was curmudgeonly – something he’s very good at. Ellen Klages was hilarious – something she is very good at. Clute has become obsessed with the hotel’s habit of distorting the aspect ratio on their TVs so as to make the pictures fill up the whole wide screen surface, thereby making people look shorter and fatter than they really are. There was a running gag about the World Fantasy Award trophy as a result of which I discovered I was one of the few people at the table who did not have a big, ugly head.
The hotel kindly brought Gary a candle with his desert, and we discovered that the Big, Bad Wolfe is indeed not very good at huffing and puffing.
But Gary did come up with one of the best one-liners of the entire conference. Here it is:
“Realism is nothing but the domestication of fantasy.”
One of Those Days
I think I now have some inkling of what it must be like to have caused a traffic accident that caused serious injury to someone you are very fond of. Obviously you didn’t mean to do have a crash, and certainly you didn’t mean to injure someone, but it happened, and there’s no question that you were responsible. Now you have to live with what you have done, and there’s nothing that you can say or do that will come anywhere close to apologizing for what you have done. Fortunately in my case no physical injuries are involved, but things may be kind of quiet here for a while until such time as I trust myself to go near a keyboard again.
Dangerous Stuff, Cookery
Yes, I knew that chick peas sometimes explode in the microwave. No, it hadn’t quite occurred to me that they might continue to explode after you have taken the food out to stir it.
Good job I wear glasses.
This has been a public service announcement of the “Cheryl does something stupid so that you can learn from her mistake” variety.
Gary Gygax RIP
Talking about people dying, news is just coming in that Gary Gygax has passed away. I only met him once, and we tended to disagree a lot about what role-playing was all about, but without him there would have been no Dungeons & Dragons, and my life would have been much the poorer. (I might, for example, have never met Marc Gascoigne, Kim Newman, Neil Gaiman or Eugene Byrne; and Martin Hoare might never have thought it would be a good idea for me to meet Dave Langford).
So long, Gary. May whichever gods you end up with not be too angry about the number of hit points you allocated them.
A Toast To Life
People write about all sorts of things on their blogs: about their jobs, about their families, about their dreams and their fears, about what they are eating, and of course about their cats. And some people write about the fact that they are dying.
It must, I think, take an incredible amount of courage to go out and say to the entire world, “I have an incurable illness, I don’t know how long I have left, but I’m going to carry on having fun with you guys while I can.” I have one such brave person on my LJ friends list. And now, it appears, there is an online event.
A Toast To Life is an event at which those living with an incurable disease, their friends and family and supporters, can all raise a glass of something (“water of life” would be good, but feel free to choose your own tipple) and celebrate the fact that it is good to be alive. L’Chaim, as our Irish friends put it.
More details on the Toast to Life web site. Please spread the word.
Commercialization of Affection Day
Just for the record, I have received precisely one card, from exactly the person I wanted to receive it from. We’ll worry about presents when we are able to be together again.
Camden Fire
A quick update for anyone who has just seen the news from London.
Firstly, I am not in Camden. I’m staying with Bruce and Holly in Queens Park.
Second, the location of the fire is the market area north of the canal, not the market area across the road from the Clutes’. I’ve just tried calling them and got an engaged signal, which is unsurprising. I suspect they are besieged by calls from worried friends right now. I’ve also checked Ellen’s Livejournal and she has a report from last night so it looks like all is as well as it can be under the circumstances.
Meanwhile I am worrying about the market traders. My guess is that a lot of them will have lost all of their stock.
Sick
It appears to have been food poisoning, presumably from breakfast. That’s about 7 hours of my life vanished. Ah well, thank goodness it didn’t happen tomorrow when I’d be spending 11 hours on an aircraft.
That Time Of Year
Everyone else seems to be doing Year In Review posts, so I guess I should make like a sheep.
Continue reading
Marion van der Voort
Those of you who read Emerald City regularly may remember an article I ran back in December 2005 abut the economics of book dealers at conventions. I’m sorry to have to report that the author of that piece, Marion van der Voort, died over the holiday period. Pádraig has the full announcement. My best wishes to Richard and the rest of the family.
Santa Has Arrived
I got a call from the picture framers this morning, as a result of which our apartment is now much better decorated than it was before. Fabulous timing, I think.
And talking of my favorite artist, it would appear that John is rather inspired by Jeffrey Ford books, because this is awesome.
Anyway, it would appear that Christmas has now officially started chez moi, so I guess I’d better do some cooking. Not that I put any great effort into it with Kevin not here, but as I had to go out anyway I popped into Safeway and collected the fixings for a pork chili flavored with mole sauce and Guinness. If I set it going now, it should be nicely done sometime during tonight’s football game. And it will be even better tomorrow.
You Know You’ve Got Old When…
You wake up in the morning with a bunch of aches and pains for no apparent reason. I’m not sick; I didn’t do a lot of strenuous exercise yesterday; I haven’t even been lying in a cold draft. I just ache. Ah well, maybe a hot shower will help.
Still, in writing this post I have learned that while in British English “draft” and “draught” mean very different things, in American English the same spelling is used for both. And I can’t be that old if I can still learn things.
Branching Out
As a result of the trip to SMOFcon (not to mention SFSFC winning its bid to host World Fantasy Con in San Jose in 2009) Kevin and I have been thinking quite a bit about marketing conventions recently. As a result of this I have taken the plunge and joined Facebook. I confess to having been a little nervous about this. That’s not anything to do with concerns about identity theft or whatever. I’m pretty well out there on the Internet, and nothing I can say about myself could possibly be as damaging to my reputation or employability as what other people have already written about me very publicly. I am, however, rather concerned about Facebook pulling nasty stunts like monitoring what I buy on Amazon and then telling the world about it. Thankfully they seem to have been persuaded of the idiocy of that little trick, but as a consequence my Facebook presence is pretty minimal and in serious lockdown. It will probably loosen up once I understand how the site works a little better. But there you are, I’m out there. Those of you who are Facebook regulars are welcome to friend me. And if you have any tips about convention promotion on Facebook I’d be delighted to hear from you.
Happy Solstice
The Big Days come thick and fast around this time of year, but for many people today is it, or not as the case may be. You see, the trouble with being tied to astronomical events is that, not only do your holidays not fall on the same day each year, they don’t fall on the same day everywhere on the planet.
I’m not an expert on such things, but a brief bit of Googling turned up the information that the timing to the winter solstice is around 1:00am EST. That means that for most of the planet it will already be tomorrow when the solstice happens, but for us here it California it will still be today.
Anyway, today is more convenient, because I suspect a whole lot of you will soon be going offline for that Other Holiday, but you might actually still be following your RSS feeds today and thereby get your seasonal wishes. Please consider yourselves seasonally wished.
I haven’t sent many cards – I never do – but if I had lots of money you’d all be getting one of these. As I don’t have lots of money, it is DIY time again. You still get a card with tentacles on it, but you have to download your own from here.
And finally, for those of you who will be celebrating that Other Holiday, Nadolig Llawen.
Up for Air
Since getting back from SMOFcon I have been wrapped up in urgent project work. We had the client meeting this morning and they are very happy, so I now have a few hours to get my life back on track. First priority: do the laundry, before Kevin starts complaining that he has nothing to wear.
Screw Loose
This morning I found a nose pad from a pair of glasses on the floor. It turned out to be from mine. The shop I bought the glasses from is back in Darkest Somerset. But we headed out to the local Site for Sore Eyes and they fixed it for me for free. Nice people. This is a public thank you note.
Feast and Famine
As many of you will know, the life of self-employed people, and especially of self-employed consultants, is one of feast-or-famine. I’ve just gone from having three urgent projects on the go to having just a few back-burner things. I know this means I ought to get back to work on a bunch of SF projects that have been hanging fire since WHC, but priority one is getting my life back together after a month of way too much traveling. I’m back on the Pilates routine again, and I might even have time to make a concerted effort to reduce the belly bulge. After that I might feel like I have some energy again.
And if I owe you email but have forgotten due to being snowed under, please remind me.