[550] playin' in the park

console

< Piro >

"off to seattle..."

Wednesday - April 21, 2004

Well, I was gonna touch on RFID tags in this rant, but gee, shock of shocks, I'm woefully behind on... well, everything. :P So, RFID tags aside, I need to go over a few quick newsitems.

Tomorrow evening I'll be heading off to Sakuracon in Seattle, Washington for my second appearance there. I'll be there the whole weekend, most times at the Wizzywig booth to sign, draw, and other wise lower the worth of items placed before me. I am pretty sure that Wizzywig will have copies of Book 1 available as well as a nice cross section of MT stuff.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like Seraphim will be able to join me on this trip, something which I find really depressing. :( She has an exam friday night, and her final paper due Monday morning. There's just no way she's going to be able to make it. You'll just have to deal with boring old me.

Honestly, I've been looking forward to going to this convention for a number of reasons. Aside from the fact that the staff at Sakuracon are great folks, I'm particularly worked up about possibly being able to meet Yoshitoshi Abe-san (you know, that guy who did Haibane Renmei and Lain). I'm also looking forward to meeting Akitaroh Daichi-san (you know, the director who did Fruits basket), being able to see Hiroshi Nagahama-san (we met last year) again, seeing Tim, my Editor from Darkhorse (Dark Horse is located in Portland), and even seeing those two Penny Arcade guys again. That is, if I don't embarrass the hell out of myself meeting Abe-san, after which I will just fly straight home and wrap myself in a blanket, never to set foot online or in public again.

Lots of neat stuff going on at this con this year, including a concert by Hiro that I'll have to try to see (saturday at 8pm), and a few panels that I'll be doing.

The first one will be Friday at 3pm, a Webcomics Panel with me and the Penny Arcade guys, Tycho and Gabe. It was a fun panel last year, so we we get to throw things at each other one more time. This will be in the Emerald Ballroom A-F.

The next panel will be Saturday at 1:00pm, the Megatokyo panel, where I get to see just how many of these boring things I can do before people stop coming. As long as you don't ask me about one of the 30 forbidden MT questions, I'll try to make it entertaining. This will be in the Glacier/Horizon/Alpine room.

I also plan to sit in on the Dark Horse panel with Tim at 3:00pm. Tim is looking for feedback about not only MT, but other directions Dark Horse is looking to go in. I hope he brings the Kuu hat I got him. This is in the Columbia room.

All other times I should be at the Wizzywig booth (click there to see the con schedule for the year, which shows where they (and I) will be located :P). As always, stop by and say hi, I'll be happy to draw something for you. Be creative with what you'd like, but lets not get TOO creative, k? :P

I didn't mention this above, because I decided to leave my whining for the end of the rant, but I am pathetically behind on things right now. I'm supposed to have friday and monday's comics done before I leave tomorrow, right? I was super late with todays comic, so take a guess how well im doing with fridays and mondays ^^;; I'm determined to do it, its just that mondays might have to wait till late when I get home to scan and finish, depending on how things go. Good thing I'm getting used to working on planes.

I need to get back to work. More updates if I have any. :P

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< Dom >

"Aliens in my lap"

Thursday - April 22, 2004

[Dom] - 10:00:00 - [link here]

You'd think that, working at Wired Magazine, I could advise Fred on recent technology jokes, such as last month's utter failure of the much-hyped DARPA race (though DARPA says, and rightly so, that it's just the first step in a long walk toward robotics), the neo-Luddite posing as Salt Lake City's mayor, the continuously unraveling bust that is Diebold, or dozens of other topics.

That assumes that we have free time at the same time in which to talk, though. See, there's this little thing called E3 coming up, and given that I'm always be more of a game journalist than a technology journalist, taking care of that is always a priority. And on top of that, we have an issue closing this week, in which I have two bylined articles (woohoo!).

And, yes, FFXI/City of Heroes. Those don't help my free time either.

On to more substance to my rant! As I write this, I'm patching FFXI on an Alienware laptop, which makes me feel so inferior that I want to throw my monitor out the window. While I can't talk too much about it since I'm writing a review for Wired, I must say. UT2k4 looks sweet on this thing.

Let's see what else is going on. Ah, yes, anger. Well, most of my anger is abated, due to connectivity at home and... well, a continued silence from Cohn-Wolfe, actually, I should ping Ashley about that again. And I'm buying a new case soon, which should help my mood a great deal, when I can type in Japanese again.

One thing that helped my mood a great deal was the arrival of a CD entitled The Very Best of Sega from OneUp Studios, which has remixes of some of my favorite video game tracks ever, especially the ToeJam and Earl theme, Streets of Rage 2 and Eternal/Skies of Arcadia. It made me want to go out and find the actual Streets of Rage 2 soundtrack, but apparently, it was a limited release back in 2001 and is extremely difficult to find. This makes me sad.

Whoop-I have more to say, but I have to go. It's Take Your Children to Work Day, and I have to set up the robots and the EyeToy for the little rascals. See you next time!