Avram's journal

The funniest thing about this afternoon’s Mooninite-induced panic is that the billboards don’t actually look like bombs. Real bombs are hidden away inside innocuous-looking containers. The blinky lights and LEDs counting down to zero are artifacts of Hollywood dramas, a modern-day symbol of “bomb”, the cinematic equivalent of the shiny black sphere with a fuse sticking out that you see in cartoons.

The city of Boston was shut down today not because of devices that looked like bombs, but because of devices that looked like Hollywood fake representations of bombs.

I took off Friday and Monday from work to go up for cthulhia’s Snakes on a Plane party.

Actually, Friday was for laundry and sleeping late and making an iron-on t-shirt of my “Badger and Mushroom on a Plane” design. The party was Saturday night. I took Amtrak up, hoping for maybe a rhyming herpetological incident, but no, just 45 minutes worth of normal mysterious service delays. The party was lots of fun, especially with this special guest:

That’s a nine-foot albino Burmese python. And yes, she was brought packed in that suitcase. And nobody managed to mix a binary explosive out of beverages. That I know of.

Then I spent Sunday and Monday up there, and I didn’t realize till I’d got home that I’d totally forgotten to even mention either of the two Boston places I’d been meaning to check out on my next trip up. So I’ll have to make a list for next time.

So how was Arisia?

Well, just OK. A let down from last year’s, which was fantastic. Though the travel was much better this time. I took Amtrak up, and I’d forgotten how comfortable train travel is compared to those cramped buses. A bunch of us wound up taking the train back because of the blizzard. So between travel and taking a day off work, this was more than I’ve spent on a non-Worldcon convention in a while, since I stopped buying lots of dealer’s stuff.

Part of that was the guest. Last year we had Tim Powers, an author whose work I’ve been following for years, and who is interesting and entertaining and hangs out at parties and chats with the fans. This year, Barbara Hambly, one of whose series I read a long time ago and I haven’t bothered with anything of hers since, and I hear she didn’t hang out so much.

Another was the con itself. Seemed like lots of the usual people didn’t show. I’ve heard that most of the NYC crowd skipped it this year. There were a total of three parties listed for Friday night, and I think they all closed down early. More parties Saturday, but still seemed like not as many as usual. Not many interesting panels, or maybe I’m just getting tired of all the usual panel topics.

Hey, here’s a convention panel idea: What typical advice given at convention panels is bullshit? For example, what advice given about writing is actually some editor telling you her preferences, and doesn’t have anything to do with what actually sells once published?

And did the hotel’s key-maker malfunction, generating room keys which expired within a few hours, causing inconvenience for many people?

Why, yes, how ever did you guess?

OK, but did you at least see some episodes of a kick-ass anime series that you’d never heard of before?

Funny you should ask. I saw the first four episodes of Samurai Champloo, the latest work by Shinichiro Watanabe, director of Cowboy Bebop. Bebop was SF with a jazz score, Chaploo is Meiji-era samurai action with a hiphop sensibility. And I don’t just mean the music — one of the main characters has a wild fighting style that incorporates breakdance moves. Despite the first episode’s warning of historical inaccuracy, I found myself wondering: Breakdancing is descended from capoeira, a martial art developed by African slaves in Brazil in the 16th century; Brazil was a colony of Portugal; there was contact between Portugal and Japan in the 16th century....

Anyway, the fights scenes are amazing. The characters are mostly ciphers in these first four episodes. Mugen is the wild breakdancing vagrant who lives to fight. Jin is the calm, quiet ronin with formally perfect style. Each is the best fighter the other has ever met, and for Mugen, that’s reason enough to challenge Jin to a fight to the death. Their fight is interrupted when a burning building collapses on them, they’re arrested for having killed the local governor’s thugs, and Fuu, who at first seems a generic cute girl from anime central casting (complete with pet flying squirrel), shows up to break them loose if they’ll agree to help her hunt down a samurai who smells of sunflowers. We don’t find out anything about these character’s pasts in the first four episodes, but we probably will.

I see that Samurai Champloo will turn up on the Cartoon network’s Adult Swim this summer, probably with the profanity stripped out. The DVDs should all ship this year, so I’ll probably just wait for those.

How about insane crack anime? Any of that?

Oh yeah! We saw the end of Dead Leaves, a bit of bizarre hyper-violence with a Peter Max color scheme, and two episodes of Time Boken, which starts out with groups of villains from other anime competing to be the villains for this one, and moves on to an invasion of a land populated by heroes from another anime company. With a special guest appearance by the Gatchaman characters ordering noodles!

Did anybody remark upon your t-shirts?

Why, yes, they did! I got the usual grins, thumbs-ups, and other signs of approval for my “We’re not all jerks” shirt on Friday, but all Saturday I had people asking me what the idea was behind my “Consumable” shirt. Which I guess shows that SF fans just think too hard about some things. Eventually I took to telling people it was apple juice gone bad.

Do you have a favorite line from a Socratic dialog?

“That is what is wanted, Gorgias; exhibit the shorter method now, and the longer one at some other time.”

OK, convention, yeah. That was more fun than I’d ever had at a Worldcon, and less time spent in the filk room than ever at (maybe) any con. There’s probably a causal relationship there — the filk room has become the place I go when I’m bored.

Spent my evenings party-hopping, and managed to get into many more interesting conversations than I usually do, including some with people I hadn’t previously known. It’s almost like I’m developing social skills.

A lesson I ought’ve learned long ago: When picking which panels to attend, ignore the topics and pay attention to the panelists. Any panel with Patrick and/or Teresa Nielsen Hayden on it will probably be fun. Same goes for Cory Doctorow, Neil Gaiman, Gavin Grant, and others I should have made note of.

I checked out the art show, something I often forget to do. I went around with Teresa and Ctein’s guided tour, and that’s just about the best way to see an art show I can think of. Afterwards I looked up the Frank Kelly Freas art in the Retro-Art section. There’s stuff that guy does that you’re just not supposed to be able to pull off. I picked up his book As He Sees It later in the dealer’s room.

The con had wireless Ethernet (802.11g), but for some reason it didn’t jibe with the WiFi card (802.11b) in my Clié. This isn’t the first such trouble I’ve had; the Clié seems wonky on this score. I was able to connect with the free WiFi in the Marché Mövenpick in the big Habitrail, so they wound up getting a lot of my eating business, helped along by the food being really good and varied. The free dessert they gave bugsybanana and me when we first had dinner there was also an encouragement. That first Worldcon post I made? I typed it up at the panels (with a folding keyboard) and posted it while waiting on line for some pasta. So cutting-edge you could slash your wrists!

Oh, another lesson: I should spend more time in the hotel bar. Even if I can’t always manage to do it with papersky, John M Ford, Elise Matheson, and Jordin and marykaykare.

As I think I’ve mentioned before, when I was a kid, one of the things they told us about the USSR to demonstrate what an oppressive place it was, was that Soviet citizens couldn’t travel within their own country without showing ID papers. The America of my birth is receding ever more pastward, as transit police will soon begin random ID checks on the Boston subways:

Although officials would release few details about the initiative, the identity checks will mark the first time local rail and subway passengers will be asked to produce identification and be questioned about their activities.

And it may not just be Boston:

Concerns about threats to the nation's rail system have risen since ABC News reported a pattern of suspicious activities along the rail corridor between Washington, D.C., and New York. The report said New Jersey's attorney general is investigating at least seven instances in the last week of suspected surveillance along the New Jersey Transit commuter lines leading into Philadelphia, Trenton, and New York.

Not that we’ll get to hear about all the details:

"About a year ago they admitted they were using training based on an Israeli security model of behavioral profiling or selection which they declined to either explain or to otherwise amplify what it means," said John Reinstein, legal director for the ACLU of Massachusetts. "We asked for the records and they said that's no longer a public record because anything that has to do with security is no longer a public record."

Y’know, you hear all the time about inchoate longing but nobody ever talks about the choate kind. Probably because not many people yearn to defeat Tammany Hall nowadays. Me, I’d be happy just to see Bat Boy there again.

The relationship of any of the above to my just having returned from Boston is left as an exercise for the reader, ’cause the lot of you are getting kinda flabby. Me, I think I’m gonna see if I can start dragging my lazy ass out of bed an hour earlier and rejoin the gym. But not tomorrow. (I seem to always come home from Boston with renewed enthusiasm for fitness. Must be the beans.)

Stayed at lyonesse’s, met ceo and coraline and, um, other people whose LJ names I can’t recall, dammit. Spent less time than I ought with cthulhia, ’cause I’m a doofus. Spent less time than I’d have liked with mamishka, but that’s always so. Found a couple of Jim’s Big Ego CDs at Harvard Square; failed to find the fourth Kane TPB in four different comics shops. (I’m running out of places to look. What’d be an appropriate sacrifice to the god of comics?)

I must remember to look up the Chinatown bus schedules before blithely assuming that they run hourly at night. I got to Fung Wah at 9 PM, and discovered that the next bus after 8 was at 11:30.

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!

Damnit, I’m going to Arisia. Hell with the expense. (Actually, it won’t cost all that much.) So no GC-in-E for me this Friday.

Could anyone in the Somerville, MA area put me up for Friday night? Preferably someone who lives close to cthulhia? It would simplify my Saturday tremendously.

Update: Never mind, it's taken care of.