Pictured is Lovi, the newest of our cats, a stray from San Jose which Sandi started feeding, then befriended, then adopted once she'd become dependent. Everything was going fine with Lovi even after the move, until she was introduced to the other cats. Loki did a double take when he saw her, but the kittens were more freaked out, and have gradually become more and more aggressive with her. Lovi started peeing on stuff, and I eventually deduced that the kittens were likely keeping Lovi from the litterboxes.
We separated them, and everyone calmed down. Apparently this backsliding is a thing that can happen when introducing cats, and you need to be willing to do a reset. But, despite the calming down, it took a week or so for Lovi to start warming back up again. She used to hop up on Sandi's lap, but quit that when she was introduced to the kittens. She refused to do that for me, and Sandi realized that the blanket we had on the chair where I read in the bedroom likely smelled of kitten. I replaced that cover with a new blanket, and within the day Lovi had hopped up on it and started making biscuits and rubbing on my hand.
So, mission accomplished. Here's hoping it lasts!
-the Centaur
Pictured: the new cat, on the new blanket, newly making biscuits.
Some days you just don't feel right. Other days you realize, you're not actually well.
So I found out late Friday that I've actually been sick - congestion, sore throat, and headaches kicked in pretty bad, followed by some pretty serious gastrointestinal upset most of the day Saturday. And, if I'm honest with myself, I haven't felt great since Thanksgiving, when I also thought I might have been coming down with something and then decided that I had fought it off. More or less likely I have been fighting it off the whole time, and was simply not paying close enough attention to my body.
Depressingly, I'm wont to do that.
So I took it easy Saturday afternoon once I knew what was going on, cutting back on my errands and trying to give my body a chance to relax. I did the same thing the next morning (breaking the illusion of the retro blogging, I know) and slept in rather than go to church. By the midafternoon, I was feeling better.
Sometimes you need to go easy on yourself, but it also requires paying attention to what your body needs.
-the Centaur
Pictured: A pair of tomato sandwiches I made at home, which itself was taking a break from my normal Saturday hit-Panera-then-run-errands routine.
Missed a couple days blogging because of a good day writing (plus another reason which wasn't apparent at the time). But, looking retro at those past few days, one thing I do notice is that you sometimes need to change it up. At Monterrey by the Mall, my favorite dish, by far, is the fish tacos (which is generally one of my favorite meals anywhere). But, in the cold snap we've been having in Greenville this early December, it was surprisingly good to have the hot chicken soup instead, with some quesabirria as a chaser. Sometimes, if you're a person who's prone to ruts, you need to push yourself outside your comfort zone. Even if you don't find your new favorite, you may find something to keep yourself warm a cold winter night.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Chicken soup and my evening reading pile at Monterrey by the Mall's high-top tables in the bar.
So I'm actually doing well on the "drawing every day" project, but am deliberately holding off resuming those posts until I'm convinced the "blogging every day" project is running solidly again. But one interesting trick from "drawing every day" is another rule of three: the three drawing rule.
My actual rules for "drawing every day" are a topic for another day (as I'm trying to mentally categorize them myself) but the main point is, it isn't a challenge, an attempt to create an unbroken streak of days drawing; it's an exercise, an attempt to enforce a total amount of practice drawing in a year.
Since I can't always sit down for the 30 minutes to 3 hours needed to do the drawings, what I've started doing is the "three drawing rule": try to do at least three drawings in a session. If I miss a day or two, then the three drawing rule keeps me on track, so I'm still doing roughly a drawing a day.
The bonus is, if I am getting my drawing time in every day, I have bonus drawings that I can accrue to one of the other years. I already tanked all my drawings for 2025, and so now I'm drawing a head into 2026 (about 70+ drawings) and backfilling 2024 (about ~120 drawings from the end).
And, strangely enough, I am actually seeing small signs of improvement. I can still see a lot of room for improvement, of course, and I don't have the nimbleness nor facility that I want.
But things are, slowly, getting better.
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Drawing at Carmella's Cafe and Dessert Bar, a late-night coffee joint which I visited after going to Hall's Chophouse for my traditional after-Nano celebration / planning-next-steps dinner.
So, I'm a carnivore married to a vegan, but there are vegan foods that I like - my wife makes a mean stuffed squash dish, and I genuinely look forward to winter squash season where we get this parade of different squash and different stuffings with great side vegetables for several weeks. And the two-black-bean-enchilada "La Vegetarian" plate at La Parilla Mexican Restaurant, when served vegan style plus a side of mushrooms, with the mushrooms and lettuce dumped on top, is one of the best things on the menu.
But then there's vegan food that I would "non-ironically" make. Vegan food not to eat because it's vegan, but because it is genuinely delicious on its own. The canonical example, is of course, tabbouleh, which is the national salad of Lebanon; it's one of my favorite dishes, vegan or not. Vegan baklava, made with vegan butter, is another example: ever since I started making it, I have preferred it, as the vegan variant is lighter, fluffier, flakier and tastier than its traditional counterpart.
But another one, surprisingly, is vegan kibbey nayye, a raw steak tartare dish which is the national meat dish of Lebanon. I will never knock Cousin Jay's traditional kibbey nayye, which is every bit the equal of his mother Aunt Theresa's or my mother's kibbey nayye; both of them made excellent kibbey, and Jay has risen to the challenge of taking the banner in the next generation. You can see Jay's kibbey, both cooked and raw (nayye) from last Saturday's pan-family Thanksgiving dinner, below:
Now, you'd be surprised, but kibbey nayye made from Beyond Beef is every bit as good as regular kibbey - so much so that I keep a pack or two of Beyond in the freezer just so I can make vegan kibbey nayye on any occasion. The recipe is dead simple: thaw out one packet of Beyond Beef in the fridge, wash one cup of fine bulghur wheat three times, soak with a fingersbreadth of water until absorbed, and drain; grate one large white onion and drain (since the onion juice will overpower the mix), and mix the meat, onion and bulghur wheat together until very thoroughly mixed. Spice with a good bit of salt and pepper, a lesser amount of cumin and cinnamon, and a small amount of allspice (but NO NUTMEG, according to my recipe book), and adjust the mix to taste. Serve in a small mound with a cross cut in it, add a little olive oil, and eat with bread.
To the kibbey nayye connoisseur, the visible texture and the color (yes, the color, even to my partially color-blind eyes) of vegan kibbey nayye is not quite as great as the original. But the texture to the palate is good and the flavor is great. I am not trying to toot my own horn here, since vegan kibbey nayye might be an acquired taste, but this last time I made it (just yesterday) it came out as best as it ever had.
So I will keep one or two packs of Beyond Beef in the freezer (two, generally, so in case you forget to run to the store or they're out, you always have that back up copy) just waiting for me to thaw it, run to the store, grab a big white onion, and pull out the grater to have a great vegan-style Lebanese meal.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Vegan kibbey nayye, traditional cooked and raw kibbey, the traditional "plate with a cross in it" style of presentation, and then kibbey nayye with pita bread (shh, actually tortillas, but that's what I happened to have on hand that day).
So there's this rule I've developed to deal with cat food. If one cat doesn't eat some food that you just put down, that doesn't really mean anything: cats are finicky. If two cats don't eat some food that you just put down, that doesn't necessarily mean anything: it could be coincidence. But if three cats in a row don't eat some food that you just put down, it probably means the food is bad and you should toss it.
The food was bad. The replacement food was a hit.
-the Centaur
Pictured: food that three cats refused, and one of those three cats chowing down on its replacement.
Seen on bushes opposite my office, when trying to coax our at Loki to either go outside or go take a nap. I'm partially red-green color-blind, so something has to be *really* red for it to stand out to me as red. Once a psychophysicist told me that, since I had three detectors like everyone else, that my vision wasn't really deficient; my color axes were just skewed from everyone else's. But that doesn't take into account the overlap of my red-green detectors, which means there are many instances of color that I can discriminate, but don't really notice. I ... suppose that would disadvantage me if I had to forage for food in the wild rather than at Whole Foods, as I do believe the berries that I would notice would likely be toxic.
I noticed these. And - just going out on a limb here - I think these berries are, very probably, very red.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Green bushes with red winter berries, which Google Lens thinks is heavenly bamboo, a bush with berries supposedly toxic to birds which, given the somewhat consistent theme of the landscaping of the house (pretty-but-toxic-useless-or-labor-intensive), does not surprise me.
So I frequently stack too many projects on top of me to adequately attack all of them - perhaps this might be a consequence of me running upwards of two hundred projects at a time, but who can say - and the consequence of that is, some tasks that aren't so important get the short end of the stick. For example, blogging (as you may have noticed) or going through bills (which pile and pile and pile until I doze them).
But this year, my drawing every day project has NOT been getting the short end of the stick.
I want to talk about it more later, but I've kept up a great buffer, and am well ahead of the game for 2025. So far ahead that I've started doing more complex drawings, rather than just the drawing exercises. Above, I'm redrawing one of my sketches for the Instant Book "An Original Use of Magic" for Thinking Ink Press. Frankly speaking, I'm not a great artist. But I have learned a trick for producing art better than I'm normally capable of: I redraw my own artwork over and over again until I get it right. I think it is progressing quite well.
I still have a long way to go. But I can see that I'm starting to make progress.
-the Centaur
Pictured: My portable drawing setup, which I carry with me almost everywhere I go, to facilitate the "Drawing Every Day" project.
... and we had a nice afternoon visiting family and nice evening relaxing afterward. But despite the fact that it worked out well for us, it's important to take some time out to share that news with your friends and family, because political action, as important as it is, can sometimes backfire on you.
More in a bit. But everyone is safe.
-the Centaur
Pictured: A New Fashioned at the 07, a restaurant with a great vegan menu that my wife and I enjoy quite a bit - and is becoming a new favorite of her mother, who recently moved to town.
So today I'm going to a #nokings protest in downtown Greenville to stand up for our democracy in the face of the authoritarianism creeping over our whole society since the re-election of Donald Trump. I'm never going to be someone who criticizes my opponents for everything that they do, but ever since Trump chose to lie about his affinity for the ideas in Project 2025 - after praising the project at the Heritage Foundation in 2022 and before embracing it in his administration in 2025 proper - we've been sliding more and more to a "unitary executive" idea in which the President has plenary power to do whatever the hell he wants.
Not in my country!
So we're going to a #nokings protest in downtown Greenville, South Carolina. No Kings may be a movement, but it's also an idea - and an ideal. For example, the No Kings Act was designed to counter the Supreme Court's blatantly unconstitutional grant of immunity to the President - when the constitution implies exactly the opposite: "the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law."
Now, Heaven knows I'm no fan of Donald Trump's policies, but there's a difference between disagreeing with what he wants to accomplish and opposing the methods by which he's doing it. Sure, I don't like many of the things that he's doing, but that's a normal part of the political process: you don't always get what you want. But the actions of ICE, the roadmap of Project 2025, and Trump's embrace of strongmen is a direct threat to the civic foundations of American democracy, and must be stopped - for everyone's sake.
So, even if you're a conservative supporter of Donald Trump, you should join these protests. The unitary executive theory is the path to authoritarianism, and while the powers and privileges of strongmen may be appealing to Trump and some of his followers, we're driving dangerously close to the edge in this country, and if we slip down that cliff into dictatorship, it can take decades to get back. As Rush Limbaugh said, if you loan power to someone, you've got to watch them. And even if you agree with Trump, you should not give him any more power than he needs - or the next president may use that power against you.
It's going to take a long time to get our civic ship righted; it's time to get started.
Anyone who knows Greenville, South Carolina would NOT describe it as a "vegan paradise". The closest place I can think of that fits that description is Las Vegas, which explicitly features vegan and vegetarian dining thanks to Steve Wynn ( https://www.wynnlasvegas.com/dining/vegetarian-dining ). Asheville, North Carolina, Montreal in Canada, and the San Francisco Bay Area are neck-and-neck behind.
Greenville? I'd snarkily say "not so much", but actually my home town has a fair share of vegan restaurants (Sunbelly, the Naked Vegan, and the Vegan Farmercy come to mind), as well as those which have a vegan menu (Entre Nous / Maestro, the 07, the 05, and the One 5 leap to mind). But actually we live in a time where many restaurants have vegan options, including our favorite, Brixx.
Veganism is an ethical necessity for some, but a luxury for most of us: most humans have not lived in an environment in which they could choose to go vegan even if they wanted to. Fortunately, even in traditional Greenville, South Carolina, we've reached the point where many places have a vast selection of vegan food items, and me and my wife can have a meal together, entirely cruelty-free.
I think I've mentioned before that I once got into an argument with a friend over whether you should complain about something you got for free. My friend said, "If someone buys you a steak, you don't complain about how well it was done, you just say thank you." No, that's how bullies give gifts: with the expectation that they can unilaterally create a debt with an expectation of gratitude.
In real life, it is, of course, gracious to simply say thank you when you receive a gift, even it isn't something that you wanted - or, even if it is not something you approve of. For example, my wife, who is vegan, used to simply smile and say thank you if she has been given something that she would not normally eat, because she's an ethical vegan: the animal has already died, so she would rather it not go to waste.
But she's found herself doing that less and less: some non-vegan food makes her sick, some non-vegan food simply doesn't taste good anymore, and, some non-vegan people are just being dicks. Once we went to a friend's house for Thanksgiving dinner, and they assured her that there would be many vegan options; when we got there, the only thing that was vegan was salad, no dressing, and they literally told her to "suck it up."
The entitlement of the giver gets drawn into even sharper relief when it comes to food allergies. More than one friend has ended up sick because waitstaff lied about what was in their food - and I do mean lied, because in more than one case they specifically asked about it, and then when the food arrived the waitstaff said something like, "but it's chopped up finely, you'll never taste it." Taste isn't the problem, buddy.
But bad actors do not fill the whole world, and the positive side to my friend's argument is that if someone has done something nice for you, it can ruin their day to find out that their extra effort wasn't wanted. Case in point is what C. S. Lewis called "the gluttony of delicacy": where you're super particular about what you want, but don't see it as being demanding or gluttonous because you're "not asking for much."
For example, I hate for stuff to go to waste, and don't use straws, or lemons, in my iced tea, so I ask waitstaff for "unsweetened iced tea, no lemon, no straw." Now, I don't really sweet tea anymore---originally for health and now for taste reasons---so I would send the wrong drink back; but if they give me a lemon and straw, I don't say anything. Thankfully, results from NASA's space probes show the Earth rests on the back of a giant turtle, not a giant camel, so hopefully, getting one extra straw will not cause the end of the world. (1)
But not wanting things to go to waste can ... interact ... with generosity. Another case in point: hot peppers. At one restaurant I go to, you can ask for a little extra sauce, or light cheese, or whatever, and it will happen. At another local restaurant, the kitchen is a little more ... granular with their generosity. I asked for an extra hot pepper on a dish ... and the kitchen sent out an entire plate of extra peppers.
My server buddy always knows what's up and once warned me: "you know, for this kitchen ... let's not make the order too complicated." So we try to keep things simple for them. They've got our best interests at heart. And when they do send out an entire plate of hot peppers when I want just one, I smile and say thank you, and do my best to eat as many of them as I can ... before my mouth catches on fire. (2)
-the Centaur
Pictured: Bistec y camarones con pimientos adicionales.
(1) NASA results actually show that neither oversized tortoises nor dromedaries play any significant astronomical role, making the apocalyptic potential of extra drinking straws even more remote.
(2) I did not, indeed, finish the entire plate of peppers - there were like 200% more peppers than I wanted.
Cats are so colorful and varied it's easy to forget that part of the function of coloring is camouflage. I almost didn't see this little gal sitting in our front foyer! But the camera never lies:
Meet Lovi(licious(ness)), the fifth member of our increasing series of L-named cats. This little lady started coming round our house in San Jose, and after Sandi started feeding her, she soon won her over (it is not clear who won whom over). Sandi welcomed her inside, where Lovi started using the litter box like a pro. We suspect she was someone's kitten who was scared away from their home by fireworks at the Fourth of July, and after unsuccessfully attempting to find her owners, Sandi brought her back to South Carolina.
Crazy cat people here we come.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Um, I said it: our new cat, in our new foyer, trying, unsuccessfully, to hide.
No, not 1923: the numbers 19 and 23: the number of years my wife and I have been married, and together! We met on September 13, 2002 and married a smidge over four years later on September 16, 2006. I always love the fact that we got married so close to the date that we met (I argued we should hold it on the same date, but everyone told me "we're not attending a wedding in the middle of the week" so, eh, the 16th).
For our anniversary, we went to Asheville, North Carolina for the weekend, which we really enjoy due to its wide range of vegan restaurants, great bookstores, nearby hiking, and spectacularly walkable downtown. My wife and I really enjoy places where we can walk everywhere - New Orleans' French Quarter, San Diego's Gaslamp District, Montreal's Old Town, Monterey, even smaller places like Davis, and of course London.
So for the weekend, we walked, and walked, and walked, and walked. We visited all the bookstores and all the art galleries that we could, and looped around downtown maybe a dozen times. Unusually this visit, we chose to try to go hiking - we spent so much time our first five or six trips there in the downtown we rarely got out to do anything else. But we did the Blue Ridge Parkway and Catawba Falls, which has a truly epic staircase tracing its way to the top - 580 steps, which is more than enough to put a crimp in anyone's climb.
No, that's not computer generated, but it did feel like I was in some infinite stairwell in a computer game after a while - it just kept going up and up and up! There's a tall observation tower at roughly the middle, which triggered my latent fear of heights - something I haven't quite debugged; it triggered leaning out over the Hoover Dam but not standing at the Grand Canyon, and leaning over the rail of the observation tower, but not leaning over the rail of the staircase just a few feet away. I think it has something to do with my body detecting "there's a big drop and it might be behind you" - or perhaps I'm just worried I'll lose my hat.
Regardless, the food was the real standout on the weekend. At two of our favorite restaurants - Mountain Madre and Strada - we found there were way more vegan items than were listed on the menu, which enabled us to get some really great things we'd never tried before - vegan nachos at Mountain Madre and vegan bolognese at Strada, both excellent. The Smokin Onion was a great new find - we went there for breakfast before our hike, and liked it so much we went back on our way out of town. The pumpkin spice "cruffin" was superb - yes, decadently sweet, but actually also fluffy and not overpowering.
But the real anniversary dinner was at Plant, one of the best vegan restaurants we've been to - easily the equal of our favorite restaurant, Millennium in Oakland. At Millennium, we often get a high-top table near the front window, but at Plant, you can actually reserve a spot at the "mini-bar" - a two-top counter next to where the drinks are prepared, which feels really intimate even though it's right out in the middle of the restaurant. The waitress remembered us and hooked us up on our anniversary dessert!
Sometimes when I travel I include picture from my hotel room, but by chance my wife and I recognized and took a picture of our hotel room. It might not be immediately obvious to anyone else - except I'd looked out the window minutes before, we were one of the only hotel rooms with an open curtain in more or less the right place --- and, tellingly, I could see the same bags piled by the window. Even zoomed in it's pretty small, and I can't go and check right now to confirm --- my wife crashed out early while I took a West Coast church board meeting --- but as best I can reconstruct it, here's what I see in that window:
My laptop bag is what I call my "portable office" - containing the book(s) I'm reading, my writing notebook, my drawing notebook and tools and any reference materials, the top scientific folder and notebook I'm working on, and a bunch of laptop gegaws like a power supply and various USB plugs. I think this doesn't look like a laptop bag because my hiking shoes are piled atop that, but whatevz. The other half of the "portable office" is a stack of books and a clipboard with my "todo paper", a heavyweight copper parchment or blue linen paper I use to organize tasks, all shoved into a tote bag for easy transport.
Next to that are more creative piles - a tote with the portable music keyboard and some music theory books for my electronic music practice, and next to that is a larger tote with the "active pile" of the fiction, comic and technical books that are near the top of my pile. I don't always get to all those piles, but the longer I stay in any given place, the more glad I am that I've got that pile with me so I can quickly switch gears to whatever task that sparks my creativity in the moment.
All that seems a lot, but it's way downsized and organized compared to the stuff I used to carry around everywhere. Someone once said they thought I had some kind of caching system that I just can't quite turn off, and I agree - except the only way I seem to be able to do all the things that I do is to keep a big pile of stuff near me so I can turn spare minutes into accomplished tasks. I ... don't think I'm that great at it, honestly, but it does enable me to get closer to where I want to go, step by step, piece by piece.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Um, I said it already: our hotel in downtown Asheville.
Back from Dragon Con, but still scrambling from thing to thing due to our upcoming 19th anniversary. So, in lieu of a serious update, I present one of "the Originals" ... one of our three recently adopted kittens:
I understand cats are boneless, but this is a bit much! How does this not break something?
Anyway, lots of news, and hopefully getting back to it next week ...
-the Centaur
Pictured: either Lily(pad(ski)), or Luna(tic(les)). Can't quite tell from this angle, but I think Luna.
So! Worldcon 2025 is at an end! And what a wild blast it was. I enjoyed the previous Worldcon I attended in San Jose, but I wasn't really prepared to take advantage of it. This year, I couldn't swing a sonic screwdriver without bapping a friend or colleague, or without making a new business or academic contact. I credit at least some of that to the prepwork that I and the Thinking Ink Press team did, and at least some of it to having the Clockwork Alchemy / Milford Workshop table as a "home base" to go back to.
After the Hugos, the Fountain bar at the Sheraton was so packed they couldn't even take my order before close, but I wanted to get more writing done, and I was just up the street last year for CVPR 2024, so I remembered the Elephant and Castle bar, right up the street, open until 2. I got a goodly chunk of THE WATCHTOWER OF DESTINY done right here in the table in the center, until roughly 1am.
BUT! Even as a night owl, I understand the value of early to bed, early to rise, and to convince myself to do that, I try to get up for a hearty breakfast. I don't always make it, but I made it today. The TIP gang has been keeping tabs of each other on Signal, and so my colleague Liza Olmsted and I realized we were at the same restaurant, got together (as I was starting my breakfast and she was finishing hers) and during our discussions came up with the idea for a brand new anthology! Woohoo.
The simple expedient of bringing Clockwork Edgar (Sandra's messenger raven) attracted a lot of people to the Clockwork Alchemy table, and the backstory Sandra had built around Edgar's messenger bag (complete with spare gear, compass, message and a few other items) was very entertaining.
After a neurodivergence talk at noon, which was very productive for me and Liza, I returned to the show floor to close up and found that we had two more hours before close due to a typo in an email. So, I had one last chance to attend a talk by my new friend Dr. Paul Price, who lectured on "exponential plots" (think Goku getting more and more powerful in Dragon Ball Z) with a strongly evidence-based lecture built on a close read of old space opera.
Paul showed that cyclical (episodic) plots work well with no-growth (think Sherlock Holmes versus case of the week) or slow-growth plots (think a slowly learning protagonist) but can get out of hand if a ridiculous enemy attacks every week with a similarly ridiculous growth in the protagonist's power - nevertheless, if you build in humanizing elements from the start, it can still work.
The coolest thing in his lecture was his critique of gender roles in the old space operas - I don't remember the precise numbers, but the gist was, in an entire space opera series by John Campbell, there were 25 instances of the pronoun "she" - but 18 of those referred to a ship, 6 to love interests, and the remaining was a stenographer who was alien, but was nevertheless depicted in a stereotypical gender role.
After that, we did close, and even as we did so, I kept on making contacts, meeting people, and so on. Even trying to buy a last-minute gift from a friend ended up with a vendor taking my card and inquiring about my writing as they were a voracious reader and were interested in my series.
Paul and I, who just met, nevertheless found many similarities in our research styles, and got together tonight to discuss next steps on using his data in our corpus or our code to analyze his data. A laser-guided question from an audience member at my talk got me thinking about DEI issues with our corpus, and Paul's "usages of the pronoun she" analysis sounds like a perfect candidate for implementation by an LLM.
On the way back, we had an interesting conversation about religion, mortality, transhumanism, the weird giant statue we saw in front of an art museum, and the crowd of filkers still filking away in the hotel when we finally got back.
I ended up retiring to the hotel bar - which I interpreted as the right thing to do because on my way down there I ran into someone I had wanted to run into at the con but had only passed and waved. We had a great conversation, and I got a lot of work done at the hotel bar before closing it up.
On that note, that's a wrap for Worldcon 2025. I may have more to say about it ... but it's gonna have to be tomorrow.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Me at the photo booth, the courtyard of Elephant and Castle, fresh fruit for breakfast, Edgar the clockwork raven, Paul giving his talk at the academic track, packing up our booth at the con, a giant statue on the street, a giant crowd of filkers, and me and a giant tray of oysters - all rendered with my "make it look like an illustration" series of Photoshop filters.
Well, we made it through WorldCon Day 4! My talk apparently went well, as I was mobbed when it was over and a half-dozen people actually dropped by the poster session - some of them, interested in serious academic followup! And one guy said, "Your talk was the fastest thirty minutes of my life. I loved it."
Mission accomplished!
The Clockwork Alchemy contingent finally arrived in force, so we at last had a proper table setup!
So I got to head out to see the show floor, which was pretty amazing! There was a Star Trek Jack Skellington, holding what appears to be either a Babylon 5 Shadow Ship or a modified Klingon batleth sword.
There were too many cool things for this post, but, I always have time for ... robots!
Sonic screwdrivers!
Wand duels!
Our books continuing to sell! (The stack isn't shorter, but we've been replenishing it)
Later that night I attended the Hugo ceremony, which was pretty awesome, with singing by Nisi Shawl that is still echoing in my head because they did it as a "bit" between the different presentations ("Down, down, down the Hugo road ...) and a really funny video bit from the actual Hugo Best Novel winner.
Afterwards, some of the award winners came to the Fountain bar in the Sheraton for a victory lap!
I also got to see a lot of friends at the con. All in all, a pretty good day!
-the Centaur
Pictured: The fan tables, me at my poster, Sandra Forrer talking to a steampunk fan, our table, the giant Jack Skellington in a Next Generation uniform, a youth robot team, a sonic screwdriver collection, a LARP wand duel, the Neurodiversiverse at the Liminal Fiction table, the Hugos, and the hotel afterparty.
Not a lot of pictures from today proper because our Friday volunteer had an unexpectedly rough trip in, and I'm again stuck at the Clockwork Alchemy / Milford Workshop table:
But the costumes have been great! I've seen a fair bit of Oz this year ...
Some Star Trek / Steampunk riffs:
And whatever these folks sitting at the far table are:
My buddy RM Ambrose gave a good talk on framework for discussing violence and nonviolence in fiction:
I have even finished a rough cut of Saturday's presentation, and despite the fact that it is +110 plus slides, because many of my slides are sequences that add elements to existing slides, there are only like 30-40 content slides, and I was consistently able to get through it in ~20 minutes, well under time.
Don't you think he looks a little tired?
-the Centaur
Pictured: The WorldCon Bar, our table, various costumes, Ralph's talk, my slides, and the Centaur, sleepy.
SO! We're out at Worldcon. I've already run into fellow TIPster Betsy Miller, author Clara Ward, and several other folks who either knew me or I knew them.
Today and tomorrow I am volunteering at the Clockwork Alchemy / Milford Workshop joint table! Compared to the GeekGirlCon and LARP booths around us, our table display is a little underwhelming as a lot of the Milford and Clockwork contingent either couldn't make it or were delayed. So we just have the brochures and stands I could fit in my suitcase, which was a fair trick as I brought 30 books to the Book Nook!
I'll be signing there today at 3pm. Then on Saturday at 11, I'll be in Room 320 presenting on "The Cognitive Science of Scenes and Sequels," joint work with my colleague Kenneth Moorman of Transylvania University. The poster session will be from 12-1 on the fourth floor Paramount Lounge:
I hope to see you there! You'd appear somewhere in the image below ...
-the Centaur
Pictured: Some Daleks and the TARDIS, the Clockwork Alchemy / Milford shared table, my book at the Book Nook, my poster up at the Paramount Lounge, and the view behind the table.
