Torture states love

Torture states love spying on everyone, including you.

Torture states love religious columnists writing for torture. (At least he actually uses the word.)

Christian torture states love braying that Jesus loves torture.

Torture states love torture-extracted horror stories, true - or not.

Torture states know that power always trumps principle. Always.

Oh, and since I don't have anywhere else to put it, really, 'cause I don't feel like making an economics post today and it's significantly poltical as well - remember that credit-card-company hand-job with the Orwellian title of "The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005"? It made it much more difficult to walk away from credit card debt in bankruptcy for about half of Americans. As a result, guess what? Americans have responded by walking away from the mortgage instead. An overwhelming majority of mortgage defaulters are current on their credit cards - 70% - and it's hurting the same group of banks, only even harder that it would've if they hadn't gotten greedy because the losses are much larger, and the economy is worse overall for it. So: well done all around, scumbags. Enjoy it!

more sticker and stamp book foo

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6 of 52

The "wedding party" was actually a wedding! Not the original ceremony, tho'; the couple involved had been married for some time. But they did a short traditional ceremony at the convention. And then there was sake and lots of it. The Space Force party - source of four stickers - was nine if not more kinds of awesome, particularly has there were Crazy Scandinavians, of whom I have pictures! If you are ever at a worldcon and there are crazy Scandinavians, FOLLOW THEM TO THEIR PARTIES they will be filled with awesome. And booze.

Down towards the bottom of this page you can start to see the full-body cosplay outfits showing up in stickers; a bunch of non-Japanese fen didn't show up with trading stickers! But fortunately this was anticipated and a club had set up a sticker-making outfit - bring your own image or they could shoot a picture for you! We got more stickers for spazzkat (from his original graphics, I'd brought them along on a USB key) from them.

And the red stamp in the lower right hand corner is the Australia 2010 bid for Worldcon.


7 of 52

The large image is part of a flyer in the art show for yet another artist whose work I liked. I can't read very much of this but it's for something called Angel Mythos (TAKADA Akemi) and there are a couple of web pages, including this manga one and this second one which is the gallery site. I'm pretty sure people on my friendslist can tell me more about this than I know.

I'm also inordinately pleased to have a Mixi sticker, particularly having made jokes in a TechNet article in reference to MixiWars. ^_^ That was in the internet lounge area. And, of course, the sticker for the Hugo awards ceremony, with George Takei and Ultraman as MCs. That was, of course, AWESOME.

BTW, are people interested in this or is this like the worst kind of vacation slideshow evar? Eventually we will get past convention stickers and into more general stamps.