more cascadian fun

BTW, if anyone is interested, the PDFs of this year's daily 'zine STOMP (as well as year's posters) are now all uploaded here. I've also got the previous two years up: Run, Runner!, RUN!!, and the NASFiC daily FaxCascadia. My intent is to get all the back issues of the dailies I've done online, which means going all the way back to The Claw!. So if you want any of that, now you know where to find it.

Also, I'm going to make a CafePress shop for the Cascadian Mecha Militia coat of arms, which is originally in colour, like this, only without the CLASSIFIED text. I'll do versions with the arrow graphics and without, and will post here when it's up. I mostly want a mug, so I'll be doing that. But if you want any of their other formats let me know, I can make that work.

jwz found this

This tiny robot is awesome. (jwz found it first, posting about it here.)

In other news, I am sick with the Martian death flu. Blah.

my summary of norwescon 31

Okay, so. Got to the Norwescon hotel Wednesday night, got unloaded, set up the Norwescon Cart O' Publishing and got out issue zero in PDF form to the printer for overnight printing. Good things about electronic submissions: 1) Less work for office; no need to carry a master over anywhere. 2) Better results: all "copies" are first-generation digital prints, rather than photocopies thereof, meaning if we keep doing this, I get greytones. I did a little experimenting with this (a very little) this year, hoping to get away with one real one, and as it turned out, I could probably effectively use five levels (counting black and white as one each). 3) I could put the 'zines online as soon as I sent them to the printers, so overnighters hitting my webpage could get them before they actually appeared. Muah ha ha ha! Bad things: Really, none appeared this year. So that was a pleasant surprise.

Then Thursday I started feeling tired and achy and by the end of the day was completely trashed with YAY annathepiper's COLD. DAMMIT! I was winding down already by the time I'd finished Thursday-during-the-day 'zine work, so spent a little chunk of the afternoon in my room, trying to sleep some of it off, but that evening worktime was miserable. Then Friday wasn't as bad, and I walked around some with Splinter (and handed out an assortment of cards to people interested in my flutemaking) but I still spent a lot of the day in bed again - at least, until Alec's concert, which I made - and when not, I was mostly sitting quietly in the volunteer's lounge quietly playing the mandolin. I perked up a lot for Match Game SF, and managed to rally to be a reasonably entertaining contestant - one of my answers in particular nearly killed one of the panelists, which was lulzworthy - even if I lost with zero (0) matches. But then that night was brutal, and I got very little sleep.

Saturday in the AM was pretty bad, and after my morning rounds and a stop at the Girl Genius Radio Hour (v. funny, as always), I went back to bed and slept the entire afternoon, and finally managed to get 20 minutes of massage, which helped a lot, so Saturday evening wasn't too bad at all, and I got a couple of more card-handout opportunities, and played a lot waiting for the Masqurade. I even got done with the 'zine early enough that I could think about going to the filk room - I'd brought a lot of instruments and was by the gods gonna play with somebody - and it was closed. So I went downstairs and heard someone playing the hotel piano - another tradition - sat beside the guy, pulled out the bodhran, and started playing. We ended up playing together for at least half an hour before I'd had it and headed back to my room.

Sunday morning was all tiredness and packing until I got signed out (from both hotel and convention), and then Anna and I found places to sit and play. And we had a couple of other people come over, and then some join in, which was fun, and I ended up giving out a couple of cards.

So despite the hideous Martian death flu attacking my brain, I actually had a pretty decent time. I gave out a decent number of cards - most for my flutemaking, but a couple on the basis of my music, which felt awesome - and on Sunday, when I was returning the Norwescon Cart O' Publishing to Grand 3 for loadout, had a woman from the dealer's room stop me and tell me how beautiful she thought my playing had been a couple of days before. (I'd been playing a shortened version of "Leaffall" as a demonstration piece for Splinter, and she'd been one booth over.) I hope I responded well, I was pretty much in a cold-and-flu daze at that point and honestly don't remember. ^_^

So, there was good fun in between the head and muscle aches and the continual exhaustion and no-sleep-for-the-wrong-reasons. I think the 'zine went over pretty well - I was getting positive comments pretty regularly, which surprised me - tho' it'd have done better if I'd remembered to make submissions forms. Contribution levels drop off a cliff if you don't have the pre-made forms out, and I remembered I'd failed to do it on Friday, but was too exhausted to do it then, and by Saturday, well, kinda late, so I didn't. And also if I'd been, you know, more coherent, even if tired-to-the-point-of-punchdrunk-and-beyond got Anna giggling uncontrollably when I gave her a title in the colophon.

I've got some photos, I'll pull them off the camera soon, I've just been busy being sick. And doing a couple of job interviews, despite sick. Yay.