One day left
So it's my last night of D*C, and I'm on LJ in the wee hours because I had my netbook out (watching the second ep of The Deep and having started the third, which I'm going to come back to another night) and decided to check in on people and maybe not have quite such a nightmarish backlog when I get back. (Course, given that I'm skipping over tl;dr stuff that I would take the time to read properly on a second pass, I'm still going to have to catch up properly. But I don't feel like I've missed anything vital while I've been keeping in contact largely via Twitter.)
Speaking of Twitter, that's the one I treat like LJ Mobile, streamlined for when the only internet access I have is via Blackberry. Many of the people I follow there are LJ (and/or DW) friends, and I don't use LoudTwitter or whatever to spam my tweets to LJ because I figure the people who give a shit already read it on Twitter, so it's annoying and redundant. I'm not going to be cross-linking my LJ posts to Twitter for the same reason -- those two accounts I consider overlapping, and I'm not worried about crossing the streams so much as about boring people with the same shit twice. Facebook OTOH I continue to have difficulty believing I actually have an account with, and I'd be stressing more over the prospect of cross-contamination if A) I didn't keep everything on my FB account locked down to friends-only, B) I had more than a handful of friends on FB who aren't also LJ/DW friends, and C) I had any FB friends I was unwilling to show my LJ to. I am a very atypical FB user, and I completely understand why linking LJ content to FB in particular is going to upset many users, quite aside from matters like crossposting flocked content, or users who also don't consider their Twitter networks to be largely interchangeable with their LJ/DW networks the way I do. (For example, those who may be using it professionally, or viewing it as a streamlined FB rather than as an LJ adjunct.)
So, given the mass outcry seen on my friends list regarding the new LJ crossposting options, although the prospect doesn't upset me (given my particular givens), I'll be refraining from risking upset by crossposting my comments to others' entries. (Regarding my own entries, I mostly won't be bothering for reasons of overlap, though I suspect I'll make an exception when I have my Dragon*Con pics uploaded so I can point a couple of costuming FB-only friends to the gallery.)
That's not the comment I set out to make, though. Got distracted by being reminded of the ongoing fuss on LJ, when in fact I was about to ignore my own rule of thumb regarding not spamming my tweets to LJ, since this is the only D*C picture I currently have uploaded in any fashion: Appa, Aang and Momo from this morning's parade. I feel like I've been a dreadful slacker on the photo front this year, though on checking my camera just now I had 71 pics -- and that's having been deleting the blurred shots and the someone-just-walked-across-my-shot-as-the-flash-went pictures as I went along, so 71 photos worth sharing. What I really haven't been doing was taking Blackberry photos for insta-sharing. (Costume photos are not like landscapes -- people have places to go, and it feels like enough of an imposition to get them to stand still for one camera, without then pulling out another one. And if I only have time for one photo, I want it on the better camera.)
I feel like I should say something about the con thus far. Um. Last entry I mentioned buying my ticket at the door at a shockingly high speed Thursday evening. Friday I took my sweet time about going to the con since I ran just a bit too late in the morning to make any of the 10am panels I'd been considering attending -- just got an early lunch so I wouldn't have to deal with it later and headed into town in the early afternoon. Let's see, checking my calendar I wound up drifting in for the latter half of a panel on the Sylvester McCoy years of Doctor Who, then I think I found the dealer's halls (and bought absolutely nothing for myself, being broke and having a couple of purchases I was budgeting for), got Mom her requested T-shirt, missed out on the next panel I was planning to go to, drifted into something else to hang out for a while, caught the first part of the Tennant vs. Smith Doctor Who panel, and headed out when the audience participation started and the very first person at the microphone discussed how much he'd disliked Amy Pond more and more with every episode (and admitted that Rose had been his favorite).
Headed back to my motel for dinner and a bit of light reading (a much easier task since I got smart Thursday night and used Mapquest to pull up a route from the Sheraton back to my motel that steered me to the right one-way street to find the correct on ramp), and wasted way too much time on finishing my book and on trying to find out where the Who costume group would be meeting up before the parade (location for the post-parade photo shoot was mentioned in multiple places, but not the pre-parade gathering) and, failing that, on making sure I could find my way to the parade starting location by myself. Which I wound up having to do, since I arrived later this morning than I'd been planning.
This by the way was the only morning I really wanted an earlyish start -- parade starting at 10am and me trying to arrive by 9am to meet up with the Who group (as in the last few years I've attended). So of course I couldn't get to sleep -- or rather, woke after three or four hours and couldn't get back to sleep. Started drifting off again just as the alarm I'd set went off. Just made it to the park and found the Who group on time, but missed out on the pre-departure milling around that's given me so many great costume pictures in past years. (All those spectacular outfits, crammed into one smallish park, and grouped by fandom.) Had fun in the parade, though. Very giggly. Didn't get to see much but our own group.
Afterwards I fought my way through the crowds back to the parking garage to ditch my Donna gear and grab my bag. (Had a hard time finding my car -- lot of walking around trying to find the right level and the right side of the garage.) Headed back to the con proper because the one autograph I wanted to get was from Michael Shanks, and I lucked out and got there before he was due to start a session, early enough to be very close to the head of the line when they finally let us in. A very nice photo, and I managed to keep it protected the rest of the day (aside from a minor accident when I snagged my bag on a railing back in the parking garage when I was leaving for the day). Got some lunch and then made it to three panels in a row (on upcoming books from Baen, revisionist history and "Evil Geniuses for a Better Tomorrow"), by which point it was 7pm and a long day and I headed back to the motel. And collapsed onto the bed, so I definitely need sleep.
Tomorrow there are two panels I really want to attend that are in the middle of the afternoon, and a few more I'd like to check out that start from late morning -- basically enough to keep me busy for the middle of the day if I see fit (with time for a lunch break), but nothing early I'd hate missing if I sleep late, which I could stand to do. More to the point, when I get up I'm not just dressing for the day and gathering up my con stuff but also packing all my gear, hauling it out to the car, and checking out of the motel -- when I'm all conned out for the day, I get in the car and start driving west until it seems about time to pick a likely looking motel and crash for the night.
I'm pretty satisfied with how my con experience has gone thus far. I actually made it to a fair proportion of panels I wanted to attend (rather than getting lost on the way or seeing the long line and deciding not to bother or just losing track of time), I've managed a decent balance between costuming and comfort, haven't spent beyond my budget but got something I wanted, and have just had kind of a mellow experience. Last year I didn't reach any real satisfaction till my last day, when I got my one autograph and made myself get into the around-the-building line for a big star panel I wanted to see (which I did from very close up indeed) and then finished up by watching John Ringo interview Lois McMaster Bujold at another panel. It's a pity I haven't gotten to run into any friends this year (amezri is here but I haven't seen her yet), and I haven't been as energetic about grabbing pics of some of the really eye-catching costumes as I wish I'd been, but it's gone well enough.
And I need to finish reading the entries I have up in other tabs and head to bed.
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