Me: Eleven degrees!
Chris: No shit, really?
Me: (checks WeatherDock more closely) Twenty-three; feels like eleven.
Chris: When I was twenty-three, I felt like eleven.

Our apartment building has a recurrent problem with leaks. As one of my neighbors joked, leaks are how we meet each other.

Tonight we discovered a leak in our bedroom, and I went upstairs to tell the guy above us about it. Turned out his bedroom ceiling was leaking, too, so we both went up another level to some neighbor I hadn’t met before. I knocked on the door, and then again, louder. Between the knocks I could hear someone talking from inside: “If you roll a seven, you get to decide who the robber attacks.” So when the door opened I introduced myself with “Sorry to interrupt your Settlers of Catan game, but…”.

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.

First foreshadowing: Yesterday, on the way to a NYRSF meeting, discovering that I neglected to put my current book (A Betrayal in Winter by Daniel Abraham) in my shoulder bag. I make do on the subway trip with a copy of The Onion from a sidewalk stand.

Second foreshadowing: Just a few minutes ago, realizing that actually A Betrayal in Winter has been sitting in the pocket of my cargo shorts, where a sketchbook usually rides, since Tuesday night.

I have successfully raised my computer from the dead.

Seems it was just the hard drive. I swapped out the old, dead 100 GB drive for the 320 GB drive I had sitting around. There were a lot of screws involved, and I had to zip out to the hardware store at one point to get a better #00 Phillips-head screwdriver than the one I was using, but aside from that things went pretty well. Oh, and Migration Assistant bogged down while porting my Applications folder across, so I had to finish that up by hand.

So I’m back, with 200+ GB of free hard drive space that I don’t know what to do with.

MoCCA Art Fest was this weekend, NYC’s top event for indie comics. I’ve been going every year since the first one, but I totally forgot to do a list like this last year.

Books

• Octopus Pie volumes 2 and 3, by Meredith Gran.
• Templar, Arizona volumes 2 and 3, by Charlie “Spike” Trotman.
• Piracy is Liberation book 001: Information Wants to be Free by Mattias Elftorp.
• Never Learn Anything From History, a collection by Kate Beaton.
• The Mourning Star vol 2, by Kazimir Strzepek.
• Pretty Little Book by Lucy Knisley.

Floppies

• Inbound issues #1 and 2, a Boston-based anthology magazine by the Boston Comics Roundtable.
• 252-Z: Law of Monsters by Carter Allen.
• The Spring 2009 issue of InkStains, the anthology magazine published by the School of Visual Arts comics department.
• Las Aventuras de ¡Quixote!, by Pat Woodruff. This was also on the SVA table.
• Papercutter issues #1 and 2, a comics anthology from Tugboat Press of Portland, Oregon.
• Yeah, It Is by Leslie Anne MacKenzie Stein. I’m actually not sure whether to categorize this as a floppy or a book, since it’s got an ISBN. I think my dividing line is the binding — this is saddle-stiched, so it’s a floppy.
• Pixu #2, an anthology comic by Becky Cloonan, Fábio Moon, Gabriel Bá, and Vasilis Lolos.

Minis

• Comic-Strip Movies #4: Bury Me Not, by Luisa Felix, who has a pretty good hard-sell technique. Good thing the comic was only 50¢.
• Jobnik Manifesto, a little freebie from Miriam Libicki.
• Harvest is When I Need You Most, Only What You Take With You, and And Don’t Forget the Droids, a trio of adorable Star Wars-related anthology minis edited and designed by Shelli Paroline.
• Sordid City Softcore, by Charles Schneeflock Snow.
• Geraniums and Bacon #5, by Cathy Leamy, who was next to Charles Snow, and laughed at my jokes.

This year was the first in the new venue, the 69th Regiment Armory on 26th and Lex, which has one big internal space, much more convenient than the three smaller spaces at the Puck Building (no link because their website has annoying automatic sound). A bit warm, though. Ran into, jeez, practically everybody, which highlights the superiority of one big space for socializing and networking.

Two or three different people asked me if I had done any comics lately, which has me pissed off at myself for having done practically no comics at all in like twenty years. I clearly in some way emit the aura of someone who ought to be making comics.

Was just seized by a sudden urge to do some weight-lifting. So, a workout writeup:

Ordered a bunch of stuff from Amazon early last week, to take advantage of their Black Friday-through-Tuesday sale. Got a few DVDs I’d been wanting at five or six bucks a pop, a couple books I’d been faunching over, and a Hanukah present for my nephew. As they usually do, Amazon broke the shipment up into four boxes.

Yesterday, the postman rings a few times, and I buzz him in and get a package. bugsybanana and I wind up spending the whole day indoors, so we don’t check the mail till Sunday, when she finds one of those we-tried-to-deliver-a-package-but-you-were-out slips. There’s no mail delivery on Sunday, and only one delivery other days, so the postman must have dragged the two packages out here, handed me one (the heavier one, as it turns out, though neither was particular large or heavy), and then dragged the other back to the depot.

Today I wait around till 3 PM, just in case yet another box turns up. Spend an hour walking to the post office, getting my package, walking back.

There’s a UPS slip waiting for me.

I’ve been hankering for more gaming in my life, so when I heard that NerdNYC was having a gaming get-together within walking distance of my home, I couldn’t miss out. (Though I didn’t actually walk, since it was raining.)

I played one game of Jungle Speed, a tense twitch game that relies on fast pattern-recognition skills. I’ve played it before at GC. I came maddeningly close to winning at one point, then fell way behind.

Then I got into a couple of games of Incan Gold, a quick, simple game with a treasure-hunter theme (and step-pyramid art, though I don’t think the Incans were pyramid builders). Players explore a tunnels as a group, with each player having the opportunity, at the end of each turn, to either press on or return to camp. Returning secures your existing treasure, and might let you scoop up more on the way out, but bars you from further gains in that tunnel. Pressing on gives you the opportunity for further treasure, but risks losing it to a random hazard card. There’s a strong chicken aspect to the game. It supports up to eight players, and I think it’s better with larger groups.

For role-playing, I signed up for what is probably cadhla’s ideal dream game: The PCs were all Disney characters, living in Kingdom Hearts-style linked worlds, when the zombie apocalypse hit. (bugsybanana says that for it to be truly Cadhla’s perfect game, it would have to smell of pumpkin spice.) We started out holed up in Scrooge McDuck’s money pit, and wound up heading to the setting of Aladdin to get the genie’s lamp and end the plague. I played Huey Duck; the other PCs were Scar from The Lion King, Mulan and Mushu, Sally from The nightmare before Christmas, Clayton from Tarzan, and Gonzo from The Muppet Show.

The really odd thing about this game was the resolution mechanic, which involved pulling a piece from a Jenga tower to do anything dangerous or interesting. If the tower collapsed, your character died. This only happened once, near the end of the session, but for a good half the game the tower was really intimidatingly skeletal, and we all eyed it warily as we weighed our options.

It also occurred to me that you could use this mechanic for a really tasteless game in which the PCs are firemen trying to evacuate the WTC on 9/11.

Had fun. Met people. Am tired. Pants bankrupt.

More tomorrow.

I had a rockin’ time seeing the season opener of Battlestar Galactica at trinityvixen’s and feiran’s place Friday night. (I’ve got neither TiVO nor a VCR, so BSG is likely to interfere with my Games Club attendance for a bit.) Pizza and margaritas enhanced the experience.

It wasn’t till the next day that I noticed the episode’s title: “He That Believeth In Me”

For some reason, I really want the next ep to be titled “I Knoweth Not Just What He Seeseth In Me”. (No, not seeeth.)