| I heard about King-Con just a few days ago, through Becky Cloonan’s blog. A comics convention within walking distance of my apartment, how could I not go?
It was a small con, even smaller (I think) than the first MoCCA Art Festival, but the vendors managed to fill up the lower level of the Brooklyn Lyceum. The Act-I-Vate crew had a table, of course, since a lot of them have studio space in the area. I held back from buying a lot of stuff, since money’s tight, and I’ve still got books from MoCCA 2008 that I haven’t gotten around to reading. I limited myself to a (half-price!) copy of Joel Priddy’s new book, The Gift of the Magi.
One nice feature of the dealer space was a row of benches along one wall, which gave me a place to sit down, pull out my sketchbook, and do these:
That guy in the lower right? Neal Adams. | comments: Leave a comment   |
| 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 ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) 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. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| Woof. Great con. Tired now.
The cab ride from NYC-Chinatown to Jersey City cost more than the bus ride down from Boston.
Hey, bugsybanana, when did you cut out? | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| "I understand Mitsubishi is working on a robot truck designed to run over Asimo." -- John M Ford on the When is a Cyborg? panel
"It's like typing on a keyboard that's embedded in an aircraft carrier flight deck while facing an IMAX screen." -- Charles Stross on his 17" PowerBook
Security Tradeoffs panel:
Jim Macdonald: "If any of you were buying drugs in the 1980s -- I was the reason they were so expensive."
Four ways of breaking unbreakable codes:
Rubber hose cryptanalysis
Checkbook cryptanalysis
Dumbshit cryptanalysis
Black bag cryptanalysis
TNH: "If you're worried, be boring. The other guy is probably short on manpower too."
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| Goth panel:
TNH on HP Lovecraft: "A Yankee xenophobe with a tolerably good prose style is menaced and then overcome by seafood."
Infodump panel:
TNH on summaries: "Nouns are hard to metabolize."
Mary Sue panel:
Kim Kindya on Masterharper Robinton: "He's become the Fonzie of Pern." (She later explained that bishonen is Japanese for "Orlando Bloom".)
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| | Tags: | art, comics, conventions, day2day, links, mocca, nyc, subway, webcomics | | Current Music: | "Blueboy", John Fogerty | | Subject: | MoCCA, day 2 | | Time: | 11:25 pm | | Current Mood: | tired |
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| Day 2, the day of the much less sticky floor:
Got to chat with Jeff Smith (Bone is gonna be released as one honkin’ big paperback book, 1300 pages for a ludicrously low price, and he talked to a textbook manufacturer about the binding) and R Stevens and Batton Lash and a bunch more people. And I ran into Charles Sperling, who I hadn’t seen in years. In fact, I was unusually social and un-shy for me.
It seems like the first MoCCA was dominated by mini-comics people, and the second by people making actual indie comics. This year had a lot of web-comics people, like the Dumbrella folks, and, um, probably someone else but I’m stupid.
This year’s swag:
Books:
- Blame the Sky by John Allison, the second Scary Go Round collection
- Table for One by Bosch Fawstin (I bet he didn’t have to fight anyone over that domain)
- Jax Epoch and the Quicken Forbidden: Borrowed Magic by Dave Roman and John Green, a collection of something I’ve been seeing in pamphlet form and meaning to pick up for years
- Diesel Sweeties: Pocket Sweeties Volume One
- If New York City was the World by John Kerschbaum, whose last name is German for cherry tree, and whose publishing company has a very disturbing logo
- The Waiting Sun by Justin Madson, a stand-alone story in his Happy Town world
Floppies:
Minis (’cause it just wouldn’t be MoCCA if I didn’t come home with a bag full of minis!):
- Satisfactory Comics #4 and A Treatise Upon the Jam by Isaac Cates and Mike Wenthe
- Feel the Burn by Ron LeBrasseur
- Take-Out, #1 vol 2 by Raina Telgemeier
- Karmikaze by $teve Pri¢e
- Moxie #1 by a bunch of people
- Young Geeks in Love #1 by Robert Bienvenu
- No In-Between by Marion Vitus
- An Axe Fell by Brian Musikoff
- Planet Peezo by Suzanne Baumann
I finally left when my shoulders felt like they were gonna fall off from the weight of my bag. And then I discovered that while I was at the con, the Gay Pride Parade had severed Manhattan into two pieces, one of which contained me, and the other containing PATH stations. I worked my way towards the 9th St station, but couldn’t get there through the parade, so turned around and headed towards the Christopher St station (a walk that should have taken five minutes, but took around an hour), only to find that station closed and the cops telling us to go to 9th St! Fuck that, said I, and walked down to Ground Zero and the WTC station. Folks, don’t elect me mayor, ’cause I’d ban all parades in Manhattan. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| Last night’s Games Club ran till almost 3 AM, and I only played one game. (San Juan, and I managed to win despite thinking I was doing really badly. I made really good use of a Crane.) That’s OK, as long as I get my San Juan/Puerto Rico fix for the week, I’m really there for the socializing. We wound up watching weird animation and doing tarot readings. If I hadn’t left my deck at home, and Beth hadn’t already left taking hers, we would probably have tried using a San Juan deck to do divination.
It was nearly 4 when I got home, so I slept in late, and stopped off at Pearl and the Art Store on the way (I’m pricing the Golden Transparent Airbrush Acrylics set — $26 at both places, $23 online), and to buy a new strap for my shoulder bag (the old one broke Thursday — my third Eagle Creek strap to break. I got a different brand this time) so I didn’t get to the MoCCA festival till after 3.
The con was physically larger — taking up more floor space in the building — but it seemed less dense, so I don’t know if there were actually more exhibitors.
First purchase: A membership in the museum. I’ve been meaning to for a while.
Second purchase: Fragments, the book of sketches by Enrico Casarosa and Ronnie Del Carmen. I’ve been looking for this, and not finding it at stores (turns out it’s not shipping to stores), so I snapped it up immediately I saw it at the Monkeysuit Press table. Beeeatiful!
It was at this point I said to myself “I’ve spent $60 in my first ten minutes; time to hold back.” So I bought no more comics after that, just a few buttons. I’ll go back tomorrow and get more stuff. I miss coming home with a bag full of minis.
Best moment: Shaking Scott Morse’s hand and telling him how much I liked Ancient Joe, and seeing his face light up.
Weirdest moment: Not one moment, but all the time, my feet sticking to the floor. The wooden floor of the Puck Building was sticky in some weird way that made rubber and plastic soles bond to it tightly enough that they made an audible thwick! noise when you pulled your feet up. A funny comment about this phenomenon could be used as an icebreaker for any conversation at the con.
Second-weirdest moment: A couple saw me and thought I was someone else. “You must be thinking of some other fat, bald guy with a Van Dyke. There’re probably a dozen of us around.” We had a nice little chat anyway, and traded theories about the sticky floor.
People I ran into that I already knew: A woman from work (but I knew that, since we’d chatted about MoCCA earlier in the week when she learned I was a comics geek; her husband does a comic called Gabbagool!), an old friend from my SVA days, one of cthulhia’s friends, and the woman running the con (who I know through pnh and tnh).
People I was expecting to see but didn’t: scottbateman, sw_inku, maybe bigscary and negativeq.
Guy whose t-shirts I would have bought a bunch of if they’d had them in my size: This guy. Ah well, there’s always ordering over the web.
How much I hate myself for having not made any progress over the past year in getting a comic done: A moderate amount.
Another comic I bought that I forgot to mention above: The Gypsy Lounge, by Jasen Lex. Some seriously neat combining of drawing and photography here. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| 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! | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| | 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. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| Since my only realistic hope for being able to afford Arisia was to get hired right away, it looks like I won’t be going. No Tim Powers for me.
Last year’s Arisia was the last con I went to, so that’ll make a year without one. Arg. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
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