Arisia

We just got back from Arisia a little bit ago. I had the two worst Chinatown bus trips ever. On the way up, I just missed the 3 PM bus (the guy in front of me got the last ticket), so wound up on the 3:30 overflow bus, which was a short bus, with seats for 25 people. I‘d gone off to buy food for the trip, and wound up the 25th person on line, stuck in the back with four other guys in that supposedly-five-person-wide-but-actually-more-like-four-and-a-half seat in the back. And no reading lights, so I couldn’t read once it got dark. And then on the way back we also got a short bus (7 PM), and this one actually had a broken seat and a cracked windshield.

The con itself was wonderful. Tim Powers gave a very entertaining GoH speech, and I got to chat with him a bit later in the day, but I forgot to ask him what he’s working on now. I got some gaming in (The Great Brain Robbery, Agora, and giant Ice Towers), and the party-hopping was some of the most fun I’d had at a con in years. I wound up inadvertently crashing not one, but two parties I oughtn’t have been at, and I got to hang out in the Park Plaza’s presidential suite. I asked Eric Raymond if he knew of any open-source handgun designs, which has to be the ultimate Eric Raymond question. (He didn’t.)

(Oh, in the photo of people playing Ice Towers with the giant cardboard pieces, taken at Worldcon in 2001, I’m the guy at the far left in the shorts, and mnemex is the one at the far right in the white t-shirt.)

There was a whole lot of cleavage on display at this con. Serious amounts of major industrial cantilevered cleavage, cleavage you could serve snacks on, sometimes with inclusions. I don’t mind at all, I’m just sayin’.

And a thousand thanks to drcpunk and mnemex for putting me up!

The word of the day: Panda

The word panda has come up on the journals of three different people on my Friends page — none of whom are on each others’ Friends lists — in three totally unrelated contexts. Paging mamishka, redbird, scottbateman, please pick up the black-and-white synchronicity phone.

Ungroovy

Six pages into the new sketchbook and I’ve done nothing I feel like scanning and posting. Not the sketchbook’s fault; the Strathmore paper is giving me the excellent performance I expect from Strathmore. (Consider this a recommendation.)

I spent the day at Ground, mostly reading Exodus from the Long Sun, occasionally sketching, but not really getting into the groove. I need a cheap source of Art Nouveau inspirational reference material; Google image search isn’t quite doing it for me. (Hm, this page of doors would be pretty good if the images were larger.)

It’s odd; I came back from Arisia all revved for doing some art, and now I just can’t seem to get into that head-space.

I was thinking about terms for the undead, and considering the D&D monster, the wight. It hadn’t occurred to me before, but whoever named this creature (probably Gygax, his linguistic reach has always exceeded his grasp) should have done a little research. Wight is a Middle English word meaning person, or possibly creature. The undead creature that Tom Bombadil saves the hobbits from he calls “barrow wights”, which simply means grave men. Gygax (or whoever) clearly seized upon the unfamiliar word wight as a term for an undead creature, and assumed that barrow was just a way of saying what kind of wight it was, like there are hill giants and storm giants. It’s as if you wrote a story about some zombies haunting a tomb, and called them “tomb folk”, and someone unfamiliar with the word folk decided it meant zombie.