The Evil Eyebrow

Month: September 2006

Too Much Dragon*Con!

I’ve been blogging incessantly about Dragon*Con and all things con-ish. I just can’t take it anymore (even though I have at least 2 more posts coming, including the one featuring Hot Babes!)

On to more important things:

Skepticality is a great podcast. Go! Listen!

The Prez (“Tacos Rule!”) flew into Dobbins Air Reserve Base in Marietta, Georgia today, which so happens to be right across the street from my office. I was intending to run out and get a picture of Air Force One, but alas, no luck. It seems (in my very uneducated opinion) that AF1 is vewwy vewwy quiet. I neither heard it land, nor take off, which is unusual, because I’ve heard some really small planes take off from that runway. Maybe next time.

Need a Random Number? Click this link…

An acquaintance of ours costumed himself as Gungrave for Dragon*Con (I can’t escape!), but more on that later.

I’m the number one hit for ruhsam on google, today.

I’m almost done with this glass of Bushmill’s whiskey I’m drinking, which might be contributing to the randomness.

I think I should start a clearinghouse for all things Ruhsam! I’m totally dissociated from the majority of my relatives. This is on account that I have no first cousins, and all my second cousins live way north in Wisconsin, etc. There are a few poking around in other places, but I really couldn’t tell you where.

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September 7, 2006
Dragon*Con Review: Miscellaneous

Part V of an n part series. See here, here, here, and here for others.

Lots of stuff, I’m telling you TONS of stuff, goes on at Dragon*Con. You can party almost 24 hours a day on the planned activities alone! If you happen to be bringing friends (or meet new ones) you can fill that bit of time between 6:00 AM and 10:00 AM with anything your heart desires. We danced ’til 3:30 on Saturday night, and I gamed until the same time on Sunday, after which I went down to the concerts! (Friday I collapsed early, but I needed to rest up for the remainder of the Con)

Saturday night we saw the Crüxshadows, an energetic goth/darkwave band that we like. I, personally, don’t find them to be that inspiring from a musical perspective, but their shows are great, and if they ever get a U.S. tour date around here, we’ll go. So far I’ve only seen them at Dragon*Con. Jenn is psyched because she hugged Rogue, the lead singer, a man with wayyy too much energy on stage. I don’t have to guess how he stays so thin.

Other things I did this weekend: I went to a session with John Ringo, Sci-fi Military author extraordinaire. He was a very engaging person to listen to for an hour. He was wearing a kilt, along with half of the rest of the guys at the convention.

One drawback of going to listen to authors is I always want to run out and buy their whole published works. John was no exception.

In the exhibit hall, one of the groups that showed up was the company Chessex, who sells dice, amongst other things. I should have taken a picture of their dice table, it was freaking huge! A friend bought a dIV, which if you understand dice lingo (6 sided die = d6, 8 sided die = d8) means the die has a I, II, III, and IV on it. They were also selling a d5 which had five non-equal sides (typically, you’d roll a d10 and divide by 2 to get a d5) and they swore it was accurate due to the way the corners were mitered. I’ll stick with my d10’s.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster was spotted at Dragon*Con this year! I was touched by her noodly appendage.

Hotel elevators are evil creations of a sadistic being. During the con, elevators were generally hard to come by, and if you tried to get up or down during the periods between sessions, good luck. All this pales compared to trying to check out of the Hilton on Monday with six people’s bags, from the 18th floor. It was so bad that people I was on the elevator with had gotten on going up at the 8th floor, traveled all the way to the top, and were on their way back down.

We made two trips down the stairs before I decided this was useless and went looking for the service elevators. Next year, it’s service elevators all the way, baby!

I did not understand the people who resided on floors 5 and below who would use the elevators. Just couldn’t be worth their time.

Lastly for this post, Dragon*Con TV! The programming and “commercials” and bumpers alone are worth the cost of entry to the Con. My personal favorite is the spoof, “The Simple Life: Ensigns” set on the Starship Enterprise. “I hope they teach me how to use the Force.” Hee hee.

September 7, 2006
Dragon*Con Review: Podcasting

Part IV in an n part series. See here, here, and here for others.

One of the session tracks at Dragon*Con concerned Podcasting in its various forms. I did not attend any sessions except one, which was hosted by, among others, Phil Plait a.k.a. The Bad Astronomer, who was the only reason I attended.

My original intention was to see what Phil had to say, but I became very interested in the session itself during the hour. I was made to see how easy it is to publish a podcast, assuming you have something to say that’s worth somebody’s time. It made me ask myself, “Do I have anything interesting to talk about that people would want to listen to?”

I don’t know.

I have some ideas, and it may involve some of the people I know, but the first warning I may give for a produced podcast may be on this blog when I post it!

Poking around on the internet shows that the equipment and software needed to broadcast your melodious self by MP3 is easily attainable, if you don’t have it already. One Microphone (check!), one set of speakers (check!), one nicely put-together piece of software for audio recording and editing (check! check!) and something that will export to MP3 (check!). Now I just need to put together something to say that would be worth 15 minutes of your time.

Of course, the equipment I’ve got is pretty substandard from a recording industry perspective. I’ve got the mic off my headset, and I’m sure I’ll run into feedback problems using my computer speakers for playback. But, I don’t intend to run out and spend money on headphones and low dB microphones until this thing becomes something useful and regular.

We shall see. Maybe it will be 15 minutes of me singing It’s a Small World…

The podcasting session was hosted by Phil Plait, as I mentioned, but he was present as a science expert and occasional Podcastee, rather than a Podcastor. The other three were Swoopy and Derek Colanduno from Skepticality, and Fraser Cain of Universe Today. It was a rockin’ good session.

September 7, 2006
Dragon*Con Review: Jim Butcher

I felt that having a humongous post about everything that went on at Dragon*Con would be a bit absurd. Here is installment III of the post.

Jim Butcher is the author of the Dresden Files. He attended Dragon*Con this year and was seen by me in the Gothic Shadows programming track. He was on a panel entitled Scarey Fairies and one featuring himself.

First off, let me say that Storm Front and its following books are excellently sarcastic in tone and wit. They are also well-envisioned with numerous dynamic characters. I enjoyed them all.

Second off, let me say that Jim Butcher is almost identical in manner and presence to my friend Brian, shown here. It’s uncanny how similar they are. I’m still freaked out about it. This picture is not the best for comparison purposes (book signing vs. RPI Freakout) but should give you some idea.

Thirdly, Jim is great to listen to because he loves what he is doing!. The Dresden Files will be a show on the SciFi channel starting in January and Jim was totally stoked about it. He went on and on about how awesome it was to be on set during shooting and to be involved (however little he’s involved; mainly proof-reading scripts, he’s got no artistic control over the series but does contribute comments) with the creation of this program.

It will apparently be a parallel universe to the Dresden Files books with the script writer (who’s name escapes me, he did Andromeda for a while) creates episodes based around the Harry Dresden character.

This seems like a good thing. According to Jim, they’d originally intended to do a 2-hour movie, but it turned out so well, they went ahead with the series. Cool! I’m looking forward to seeing it.

And of course, now that I’ve seen the guy in person, I’ll have to start buying his hardbacks. Time to run to the book store to get the latest Harry Dresden novel.

September 7, 2006
Dragon*Con Review: Blowing Shit UP!

I felt that having a humongous post about everything that went on at Dragon*Con would be a bit absurd. Here is installment II of the series.

Gaming has been a part of my hobby set since I was 10 or so (Jenn’s been playing since age 4!). I still remember the worried look on my mother’s face when I told her I wanted to start playing D&D. She had heard all the media-hyped stories about kids who’d committed suicide when their character died, or practiced “satanism”, or tortured the neighor’s turtle, or something. Thankfully, she got over it.

Since then, I’ve played D&D, AD&D, D&D 3.0 (not yet 3.5), Shadowrun, Call of Cthulu (Congrats, you’re insane!), GURPS, and several other role playing games. However, I’ve always liked playing board and miniature games more, especially battle simulators. Battletech is one of my favorites. Axis and Allies is good, but long, Risk, Warhammer 40K, the list goes on.

When I was in high school and college, I would attend at least 2 game conventions a year at various locations. Thusly, whenever I go to a con I always try to squeeze in some gaming and come home with something new. Dragon*Con is no exception.

This year, I’ve been introduced to Pirates which tickled my fancy. It is an age-of-sail “miniatures” war game.
The goal is to gather the booty and terrorize the neighborhood. To that end, you purchase (yes, I know, they sucked me in) booster packs which contain ships and other sundries on credit-card type platic cards. You snap the ship pieces out of the card, assemble them together and poof! you’ve got yourself a navy. Different ships can do different things, and you sail around exploring islands for treasure and trying to knock your opponents masts down. I had great fun playing it, even though I got romped by the group I was with. In my defence I hadn’t even read the rules, so I was making stupid mistakes*.

We managed to squeeze in a round of Battletech. I made the mistake of giving into an insanity and had one of my ‘mechs destroyed during a charge. Alas… The interesting thing we noted was the age of the people who would stop by and say, “Wow, Battletech! I haven’t played that for years!” Unfortunately, Btech seems to be on the wane, to my grave despair.

We played Frag, a Steve Jackson game based on computer games such as Doom and Quake. Yes, it’s a board game based off a computer game. Odd.

We also squeezed in a game of Ticket to Ride: Europe with the maximum number of players (5). I’d never played it with 5 people before. It was frustrating not being able to complete your routes because 4 other people are all trying to get though Zurich!

The gaming was all great fun. As the title mentioned, I got to blow shit up, and that’s what it’s all about.

*I was playing in a “tournament” wherein the player with the most gold got a prize, the player who sank the most ships got a prize, and the player who did the worst (lost the most ships) also got a prize. I played so badly, I didn’t even come in last. No prize for Captain William…

September 6, 2006
Dragon*Con 2006

Wahhhhhh!!!!!!

As you may notice from the categories tags, Dragon*Con was a multi-threaded, awesomely spectacular, ravingly cool, devastatingly delicious weekend. There’s so much to talk about, I’m not sure where to start. This will probably end up being a multiple posting.

I’ll start by saying, I bought a new camera the week before Dragon*Con, and I’m still working with the settings. Unfortunately, I had the white balance set on tungsten all weekend, so my pictures are a bit blue. I’ll be photoshopping them to adjust the color balance before I post anything. ‘Til then, you’ll just have to deal with my descriptions.

I think I will leave this post as is. Dragon*Con 2006 was great! I’ve already made hotel reservations for next year.

[editorital addition] It seems this post is similar to last year’s post. That’s ok! I feel that this year was even better, but that is probably because of the bevey of friends that made the trip here for the Con.

September 5, 2006