I made the mistake of letting one of our cats out on the porch yesterday. He's the good one, the one who is quiet and never gets into any trouble. We figured that it'd be ok to let him out to lay in the sun a little, get some air, see the sky...

of course, the first thing he does is walk to the railing, look out, pop thru the rails and walk under the deck and dissapear. Gah.

We must have spent a half hour trying to coax him out. Of course, there was no way for me to get under the deck to get him, and he was having too much fun 'splorin to listen to either of us, and even an open can of food seemed to hold little interest. I was getting ready to grab the hose when suddenly he came to the edge and walked out.

Cats. I tell you.

I think it was a good week because I actually managed to finish all three comics within an hour of so of the official due date and time. yay. Ever since i got back from Anime Central I've been trying to get back on track, and its nice to feel like i'm making some progress... but the truth is, the small bit of progress is just a sharp contrast to the many, many other things that i still can't manage to get on top of. I suppose that's just normal for me, so after all these years i better get used to it. :)

Speaking of Anime Central, I wanted to say a big thank you to everyone who came by the booth, waited patiently in line for sketches, bought stuff, and suffered through my panel on saturday, etc. :) I experimented with using a decent ball point pen with good flow to do sketches this year, and i think it worked out pretty well. With mechanical pencils and Sharpies, I never really knew just how much lead or ink i tended to use at cons. With the Staedtler Liquid Point 5 pens i was using I could, because you can see the ink through the little window on the side. That said, I was quite surprised to find that by the end of saturday, i had emptied one of them. I'm not sure how much writing and drawing that is, but it's probably a fair amount.

For some unfathomable reason, people kept saying that they enjoyed the Megatokyo panel at this year's Acen. I'm glad of that, actually. I approached the panel much the same way i tend to approach comics... I had a vague idea of some things to say, but i wouldn't really know what i was going to do until i did it. I tried to approach it like it was a small group of people, keep it rather casual -- kind of hard to do with a big room filled with people, but i think it came out ok. You know that when you are really sucking people start to get up and leave. That didn't happen too much, so thank you, i appreciate your tolerance :)

To me, the best part of any con, and the part that i never get to do much of (mostly because years ago a very vocal group of artists alley people at a number of different cons went to great lengths to demand that I not be placed in the artist alleys at conventions. Don't ask me, i would have thought that bringing people to the AA (Artist's Alley) was a good thing, but what do i know?) Still, i try to gravitate to the area when i can, and i didn't have enough time to really wander through properly, but i got to see a few people.

The AA at Acen was quite good this year. It was connected to the Dealers room, and people were able to find it easily. Personally, i feel that the AA needs to become a bigger part of cons - Anime and manga goods aren't as hard to find as they used to be, and i think that its very healthy for the manga/anime community to focus on encouraging creative outlets by fans. After all, that's kind of what goes on in Japan, and what inspired me in the first place.

I managed to visit Jerry from Secret of Mana Theater and Carrie from 9th Elsewhere who we actually had a chance to hang out with a little friday night. Nothing like being at a dead stop in traffic, and being able to SEE the hotel from where you are, and knowing it will be a few hours before you get back. Gotta love Chicago traffic (don't worry guys, it wasn't your fault :P) I picked up a cute little 9E button for my bag. Goes well with my Sakaki button :P I need to make more cute buttons.

We also managed to visit Joseph and Christopher at the Alpha Shade booth. If you haven't checked out their webcomic, do so - it's good stuff. The style and setting of it is kind of unique, and comics that feature cats prominently is always a good thing in my book. Oh, and biplanes. I like biplanes. They were also nice enough to give Sarah and I a copy of their book, which came out VERY nice. Excellent job guys.

I also managed to put my "Stalking Poe for Dummies" book (given to me by some scary little redhead :) to good use and finally tracked down the bad man himself. It was good to finally meet Poe, and i was most impressed by the fact that he was managing to work on drawings even at the con. I also picked up a copy of the Exploitation Now and Errant Story books - Much like people say about MT, its easier to read it in dead tree versions. I very much enjoy Poe's style and his sense of humor. I miss Exploitation Now (ok, i miss Jordan), but i'm enjoying Errant Story just as much for different reasons, and i hope he keeps it up.

Speaking of conventions, I need to give a quick update on two conventions i will NOT be going to, and one that I am :)

First off, I was as surprised as everyone else to see that I had been announced as a guest at A-kon 2005. Ooops. There seems to have been some confusion as to if i was coming back again this year, but its all fixed now. I'd love to come, but like so many of the other conventions i would have loved to go to this year, I had to decline the invitation earlier this year because i wanted to take a break from the con circuit for 2005. I certainly appreciate that A-kon invited me to come, and i'm looking forward to coming again - just not this year :) I apologize if there was any confusion over this.

I also need to announce that unfortunately, due to some unforeseen logistical problems, we will not be able to attend San Diego Comic Con this year. I'm quite disappointed by this because SDCC is a lot of fun, and i'm going to really miss being there this year. I was looking forward to our cross country drive to get there, too. I'm not being facetious - i love to drive, and i really am looking forward to trekking cross country with the store to attend some west coast cons - i'm just sad to say it won't be till next year.

Enough of the bad news, the good news is that i do have one more large convention planned this year, and I'm focusing most of my efforts on it. We will be attending Otakon 2005, and I actually have a real, honest to goodness, decent show in the works. Well... i shouldn't really say that, because it might not be good, but we're seriously trying. I even have live music and effects lined up. and bunnies. No, no bunnies. Well, maybe. Of course, you have to keep in mind that i do comics for a living, not stage stuff, so... well, the idea is to do something as entertaining as we can manage, and make it a real honest to goodness Naze Nani Megatokyo presentation and performance and upstage everything we've done so far as much as possible.

Now that i've said that, i'm sure the show will be a complete and total disaster. But those can be sorta entertaining too (if one remembers previous Naze nani attempts)

doomed. That's i can say.

Ok, enough of that. Gotta get to work on the comic.