Two kinds of Nerdy Things.
I flew out of Australia last year to go to meet up with some friends of mine I'd known from the internet back in the day(2002 onwards), we'd agreed to meet up in Atlanta, Georgia to go to something called DragonCon, which I'd never heard of but it apparently was a big deal. I figured it would be like Supernova in Australia, a few thousand nerds, some guest speakers, a long line here and there but not that impossible. 63,000 people were crammed into three hotels convention spaces, every hotel in the central city was booked out, I was staying with some friends a little way out of town(we had to train back to our hotel every night and train back out every morning).
But before I got to Atlanta I was in LA for a day, I'd organised to go to LA and do a day there solely because I wanted to go and see the Craig Ferguson show being filmed before they finished it up and I'd never get a chance again. Sadly the week I was there was the one week the show didn't air so no episodes were being filmed.
Sunshine, happiness, sea. I hated every minute of it.
I ended up stuck in LA for a day with seriously annoying Jet Lag which I destroyed by staying awake until 9pm on the day I arrived(I got in at about 8am and hadn't slept in 20 hours at that point). I stayed awake by taking a free bus to some beach(Manhattan Beach it was called) and then walking five kilometres to the bike shop the bus driver had assured me was "just over the hill" and then cycling around for about half an hour before having to walk back 5km's to get the bus back to my hostel.
The hostel was pretty bad, I managed to tough it out because I've been in worse places, they did let me stay there despite the fact that I was above their minimum age(mostly because the girls on the front desk were having an argument with someone else about them being over-aged and didn't check my age because they were distracted). I managed to get myself a SIM card and a data-plan for the month as well as some sweet cold cash before passing out and going to bed at about 10pm.
The next day(Thursday) I got up and flew to Atlanta, home of the busiest Airport in the World for some reason, I knew that the convention needed you to register before you could do anything and I knew that as soon as I landed I would have only about ninety minutes to register from the second I got off the plane. Thankfully before I left Australia I did a smart thing and downloaded complete maps of Georgia and Oregon so I wouldn't get lost(I didn't bother with LA because the hostel I was staying in was literally on a straight road from the Airport). I got a train to some station called Peachtrees(I think) and promptly got lost trying to find the hotel where I had to register. I did find a public library, but it was closed for the night.
So many people going in and out of the train station that the guy at the bottom had to stop people every now and then so that we could actually get off at the top without being jammed in.
This homeless guy eventually showed me where to go and basically walked me to the door, which was nice of him. I found out when I got there that I had to get a badge and a lanyard and that I would need to wear that around my neck all weekend if I wanted to get into places associated with the convention, which was officially starting the next morning(there were already a few thousand people walking around in costumes at this stage).
To say it was a bit overwhelming is an understatement. With the badge and a small bag of stickers and stuff they gave everyone this little paper booklet thing which had every event, every speaker and a map for every place you could go to in it. And it was a thick little thing with a ton of things I really really wanted to see and do.
But first I had to go and find my friends because they had the keys to our room and also because I wasn't really there for the convention I was there to meet up with these people I'd known online for over a decade but hadn't actually met in person yet.
It's a weird feeling meeting people you've known for so long for the first time. First you need to get their actual real names, then you have to adjust to their actual persona and how it fits into their online persona. It's weird but it gets easier after about thirty minutes or so.
The arrangement for the weekend was, Hilary(who organised pretty much everything for the weekend) and her husband were staying at one of the actual convention hotels so they could take an elevator downstairs if they wanted to go to something. The convention was being held in three major hotels, all connected by walkways and bridges. We non-hotel people were staying at a hotel about three stations down the line from the convention. We were given a key to Hilary's room and it was going to be our base of operations for the weekend, we'd arrive, drop anything we had up there, check in with people and then go do our convention things either as a group, in pairs or by ourselves. We had one guy who was a local, Michael, he had a car which we used a hell of a lot that weekend.
At some ungodly hour we all managed to get to our hotel, crash out, I slept on the floor which was oddly comfortable considering. We all had dibs on the powerpoints in the room to charge our phones and my camera battery.
The next morning we had a free breakfast and I sat with the little book of DragonCon and worked out exactly which events I wanted to go to, I crossed out everything I didn't want to go to, did a square around the events I wanted to go to and a circle around the events I absolutely had to go to. And then, using the separate time-table page I plotted out where I had to be, what I was going to do(I had a lot of conflicting events I had to prioritise a lot of things over others). Eventually I had my entire three-day convention planned out, I had an event for every slot on the time-table. I wasn't going to go to all of them but I would never ever had a time when I wouldn't have something to do if I was looking for something to do.
Sadly that is all the time I have to write today, I need to get some sleep. I might hopefully finish this up sometime next week.
Turns out not being in cosplay makes you the weird one on weekends like these.
My Day.
Before I went to sleep but after I posted my blog entry for yesterday I finished reading my latest book Veronica Mars: Mr Kiss and Tell. It was pretty decent, only issue was something I didn't notice until I read a review of it later, the book is in third person but the show had the main character narrating a lot of the action so the book might have been more in keeping with the spirit of the show if it had been in first person. I liked it anyway.
I'm now lined up to read "The Familiar Vol.1" by Mark Z Danielewski who wrote "House of Leaves" which I once wrote a horror story about because I was desperate to get something done for my writers club that month. I haven't started it yet but it looks to be as weird as his first book(I haven't seen a copy of his second major novel "Only Revolutions" in a book store so I don't know if it's any good). After I finished up I tried to sleep and eventually succeeded.
It was another weak day, my legs are finally back on track and tomorrow I'm hoping to go cycling for the first time in about a month and a half. Really hoping my knee holds out for it.
I managed to get out of the house without too much pain after everything else and took my newly found bicycle wheels to the bike shop at Graceville to get them looked at because the spokes are a bike loose. The guys there said they were but not enough to worry about and also that trying to tighten them would likely cause more breakages and damage than just riding on them as they are now. So for now I'm going to leave them.
After that I went to feed the dogs at my dad's house because he's out of town at a mates place and I think he said they were going to go and see Mad Max or something.
I eventually had to go back to my brothers place and made Mongolian Lamb and Rice for dinner, he ate the Lamb and left literally all the vegetables, sauce and rice on the plate. A fussy eater if ever there was one is my brother.
After dinner I got his shoes on him and we went out to Mount Omaney shopping town to get some potatoes and some cream for tomorrow nights dinner and also to walk a lap of the centre as exercise because my legs hurt too much today to do the hills around his house. If you stick to the side of the wall and walk a complete circuit of the centre it's almost exactly 1km(1.03km in reality) so it's a great way to get an exact amount of exercise. We only did one lap tonight because it started getting late so I got Matt home and put him to bed before watching Good Game which was a bit weird tonight because they had this five minute long bit about the next Batman Game which felt kind of like an advertisement for the game which I didn't really appreciate, I watch Good Game solely because commercial interests don't play any part of their reviews, I understand that they were probably just trying to fill some time in the episode because nothing major came out this week and they had to do what they could to accommodate this, but still it felt kind of wrong.
I'm hoping that tomorrow I can, make some Pumpkin soup in the slow cooker for dinner in the morning, then go back to work at school for the rest of the day and follow that up with some cycling in the afternoon before cooking dinner. Also I think I'm meant to pay my car registration or something, which means a trip to the bank! I do love seeing how much money I somehow have saved up.
YouTube Clip of the day.
I don't like Eminem but I really like the beat of this song. Also I'm interested in maybe learning sign language(yes I know that Australia uses Auslan not ASL) sooner or later. It's an interesting language.
But before I got to Atlanta I was in LA for a day, I'd organised to go to LA and do a day there solely because I wanted to go and see the Craig Ferguson show being filmed before they finished it up and I'd never get a chance again. Sadly the week I was there was the one week the show didn't air so no episodes were being filmed.
Sunshine, happiness, sea. I hated every minute of it.
I ended up stuck in LA for a day with seriously annoying Jet Lag which I destroyed by staying awake until 9pm on the day I arrived(I got in at about 8am and hadn't slept in 20 hours at that point). I stayed awake by taking a free bus to some beach(Manhattan Beach it was called) and then walking five kilometres to the bike shop the bus driver had assured me was "just over the hill" and then cycling around for about half an hour before having to walk back 5km's to get the bus back to my hostel.
The hostel was pretty bad, I managed to tough it out because I've been in worse places, they did let me stay there despite the fact that I was above their minimum age(mostly because the girls on the front desk were having an argument with someone else about them being over-aged and didn't check my age because they were distracted). I managed to get myself a SIM card and a data-plan for the month as well as some sweet cold cash before passing out and going to bed at about 10pm.
The next day(Thursday) I got up and flew to Atlanta, home of the busiest Airport in the World for some reason, I knew that the convention needed you to register before you could do anything and I knew that as soon as I landed I would have only about ninety minutes to register from the second I got off the plane. Thankfully before I left Australia I did a smart thing and downloaded complete maps of Georgia and Oregon so I wouldn't get lost(I didn't bother with LA because the hostel I was staying in was literally on a straight road from the Airport). I got a train to some station called Peachtrees(I think) and promptly got lost trying to find the hotel where I had to register. I did find a public library, but it was closed for the night.
So many people going in and out of the train station that the guy at the bottom had to stop people every now and then so that we could actually get off at the top without being jammed in.
This homeless guy eventually showed me where to go and basically walked me to the door, which was nice of him. I found out when I got there that I had to get a badge and a lanyard and that I would need to wear that around my neck all weekend if I wanted to get into places associated with the convention, which was officially starting the next morning(there were already a few thousand people walking around in costumes at this stage).
To say it was a bit overwhelming is an understatement. With the badge and a small bag of stickers and stuff they gave everyone this little paper booklet thing which had every event, every speaker and a map for every place you could go to in it. And it was a thick little thing with a ton of things I really really wanted to see and do.
But first I had to go and find my friends because they had the keys to our room and also because I wasn't really there for the convention I was there to meet up with these people I'd known online for over a decade but hadn't actually met in person yet.
It's a weird feeling meeting people you've known for so long for the first time. First you need to get their actual real names, then you have to adjust to their actual persona and how it fits into their online persona. It's weird but it gets easier after about thirty minutes or so.
The arrangement for the weekend was, Hilary(who organised pretty much everything for the weekend) and her husband were staying at one of the actual convention hotels so they could take an elevator downstairs if they wanted to go to something. The convention was being held in three major hotels, all connected by walkways and bridges. We non-hotel people were staying at a hotel about three stations down the line from the convention. We were given a key to Hilary's room and it was going to be our base of operations for the weekend, we'd arrive, drop anything we had up there, check in with people and then go do our convention things either as a group, in pairs or by ourselves. We had one guy who was a local, Michael, he had a car which we used a hell of a lot that weekend.
At some ungodly hour we all managed to get to our hotel, crash out, I slept on the floor which was oddly comfortable considering. We all had dibs on the powerpoints in the room to charge our phones and my camera battery.
The next morning we had a free breakfast and I sat with the little book of DragonCon and worked out exactly which events I wanted to go to, I crossed out everything I didn't want to go to, did a square around the events I wanted to go to and a circle around the events I absolutely had to go to. And then, using the separate time-table page I plotted out where I had to be, what I was going to do(I had a lot of conflicting events I had to prioritise a lot of things over others). Eventually I had my entire three-day convention planned out, I had an event for every slot on the time-table. I wasn't going to go to all of them but I would never ever had a time when I wouldn't have something to do if I was looking for something to do.
Sadly that is all the time I have to write today, I need to get some sleep. I might hopefully finish this up sometime next week.
Turns out not being in cosplay makes you the weird one on weekends like these.
My Day.
Before I went to sleep but after I posted my blog entry for yesterday I finished reading my latest book Veronica Mars: Mr Kiss and Tell. It was pretty decent, only issue was something I didn't notice until I read a review of it later, the book is in third person but the show had the main character narrating a lot of the action so the book might have been more in keeping with the spirit of the show if it had been in first person. I liked it anyway.
I'm now lined up to read "The Familiar Vol.1" by Mark Z Danielewski who wrote "House of Leaves" which I once wrote a horror story about because I was desperate to get something done for my writers club that month. I haven't started it yet but it looks to be as weird as his first book(I haven't seen a copy of his second major novel "Only Revolutions" in a book store so I don't know if it's any good). After I finished up I tried to sleep and eventually succeeded.
It was another weak day, my legs are finally back on track and tomorrow I'm hoping to go cycling for the first time in about a month and a half. Really hoping my knee holds out for it.
I managed to get out of the house without too much pain after everything else and took my newly found bicycle wheels to the bike shop at Graceville to get them looked at because the spokes are a bike loose. The guys there said they were but not enough to worry about and also that trying to tighten them would likely cause more breakages and damage than just riding on them as they are now. So for now I'm going to leave them.
After that I went to feed the dogs at my dad's house because he's out of town at a mates place and I think he said they were going to go and see Mad Max or something.
I eventually had to go back to my brothers place and made Mongolian Lamb and Rice for dinner, he ate the Lamb and left literally all the vegetables, sauce and rice on the plate. A fussy eater if ever there was one is my brother.
After dinner I got his shoes on him and we went out to Mount Omaney shopping town to get some potatoes and some cream for tomorrow nights dinner and also to walk a lap of the centre as exercise because my legs hurt too much today to do the hills around his house. If you stick to the side of the wall and walk a complete circuit of the centre it's almost exactly 1km(1.03km in reality) so it's a great way to get an exact amount of exercise. We only did one lap tonight because it started getting late so I got Matt home and put him to bed before watching Good Game which was a bit weird tonight because they had this five minute long bit about the next Batman Game which felt kind of like an advertisement for the game which I didn't really appreciate, I watch Good Game solely because commercial interests don't play any part of their reviews, I understand that they were probably just trying to fill some time in the episode because nothing major came out this week and they had to do what they could to accommodate this, but still it felt kind of wrong.
I'm hoping that tomorrow I can, make some Pumpkin soup in the slow cooker for dinner in the morning, then go back to work at school for the rest of the day and follow that up with some cycling in the afternoon before cooking dinner. Also I think I'm meant to pay my car registration or something, which means a trip to the bank! I do love seeing how much money I somehow have saved up.
YouTube Clip of the day.
I don't like Eminem but I really like the beat of this song. Also I'm interested in maybe learning sign language(yes I know that Australia uses Auslan not ASL) sooner or later. It's an interesting language.
Click to view