Normally I am fairly immune to con crud ... but in this case I don't seem to have been so lucky.  After the con, there was a flu bug going around.  By Saturday night last week, I began to notice that I was feeling unusually tired, like "ready to go to bed at 9:00pm" tired.  This could mean that I incubating something ... and as it turned out, ( Read more... )

Last weekend, I was partying with friends from all around the world at a hotel in downtown San Jose, California.  We had gathered for the opportunity to join with like minds and share our mutual love for all things furry, from the art to the costumes to the OMG-I-drank-how-much.  Even with the online world always readily available, the convention ( Read more... )

( A short story in which I make a stupid mistake and then discover that my friends rock )

Whenever I go to a convention now, and people ask me, "How many conventions have you been to?", the answer should be something along the lines of, "Enough so that the combined mass of all my souvenir con books is sufficient to sink the North American continent."  As such, writing a con report seems almost superfluous.  But what the heck ... I'm ( Read more... )

If you're like me, occasionally you enjoy a drink of something alcoholic.  If you're doing this the ideal way, this hopefully involves doing it somewhere in the company of your friends, rather than hiding in your basement and pretending you don't have a drinking problem.  And unless you live in a city with outstanding public transportation, at ( Read more... )

Happy National Cappuccino Day!

What, you didn't know?  OK, I'll admit, neither did I until I got an E-mail at work that contained a poll asking us our opinions about cappuccino.  Why someone did this I have no idea, unless it is a bizarre form of corporate warfare intended to hurt our bottom line by distracting everyone in the company for a minute ( Read more... )

E-L-E-C-T-I-O-N.

Election Day, specifically!  You know, it's funny ... I used to be a political junkie.  Crossfire?  I was watching it.  Talking politics with my college friends every single day?  I was there.  I used to watch the stock market every day, too, and try to figure out the source of today's half-percent drop.

Then I realised, at some ( Read more... )

October in California is the start of two seasons: the rainy season and the proposition season.  The first is a result of Mother Nature.  The second is a result of our penchant to want to vote on everything.  I happen to think both are pretty much all wet, but that's another story.

At the top of the ballot this year will be Proposition 19, which ( Read more... )

If you use the Internet (and if you're reading this some other way, please let me know how), you know that all that free content comes with a curse: animated adverts.  Granted, your favourite websites have to pay the bills somehow, and a certain big company in Mountain View figured out a great way to do this fairly unobtrusively ... but other ( Read more... )

"They're fake", one of them assured me as they both giggled.  The human "they" in that sentence was a pair of girls on bicycles to whom I caught up today while I was out for a walk, as we all waited for a traffic signal to change.  They were maybe 12 or 13 years old.

The inanimate "they" to which they were referring were two lit cigarettes.  Each ( Read more... )