An actual entry about Greg's life.

Otakon was last weekend. I had a good amount of fun, caught more Read or Die TV, and had a lot of fun wandering around and doing stuff with Kate. Just caught one panel, but it was a good one: Fairy Tales in Miyazaki's work. The panel was fairly insightful and a good reminder of series that I still need to catch. I've come to a decision about what I think makes a good panel: informed panelist, a clip real, and audience feedback but not really audience discussion. The average con panel audience really isn't interesting enough to sustain a panel in my view, this isn't to say it can't provide good questions or insights, but that the panel leader(s) are going to have to do the vast majority of the heavy lifting.

I did not end up seeing the L'Arc De Ciel concert as the line seemed a bit longer than we really wanted to deal with. The pre-reg long was also pretty long, but seemed well organized and pretty efficient as a whole. They actually lost Kate's reg info, but we dealt with that pretty quickly and without much trouble. On the whole things seemed well run from my end, particularly the new art auction system (barcodes!) which I'm told saved a lot of time. I picked up an artist card or two and wrote down the name of a few favorites artists in the auction. I haven't yet, but I intend to make the rounds in the internet to see if they take commissions or have other stuff I want to buy. Also bought a cute Starfire/Raven Teen Titans (CN version) print. I didn't buy much of anything else.

Did see Krissy and caught dinner with Omar, Liz, Danny, and Eric from Eastern Standard Time. I think I may see sometime if I can write an article for them, although it'll probably have to wait until after next issue, which is ninja focused. And I actually don't have anything insightful to say about ninjas. I love Eastern Standard Time because their articles actually rise to being insightful analysis/criticism. I rather enjoy that sort of thing, although I actually haven't found many good sources for it, perhaps only due to lack of effort on my part.

Otherwise saw a winning Os game with Kate, they actually won in good part thanks to Julio successfully closing the game. That was fairly surprising to say the least. They were playing the Seattle Mariners and I did get to see Ichiro, which was neat. Kate and I also shared a thing of space dots, the ice-cream of the future, that will never likely become the ice-cream of the present. Tasted about the same as normal ice-cream but had a slightly different texture, which was neat but nothing amazing. I'd repeated a discussion I'd had with Moti about Os pitching, namely that the way to tell a pitchers gone bad is that he can't throw strikes anymore. This in contrast to the other side getting some hits off of him, some hits are difficult to field but while Os fielding seems mediocre of late it's still much better than their pitching. On the upside I think I actually do have a feel now for when a pitcher should be taken out of a game. :P

In other news, house sitting is going well although it has played some havoc with my online stuff and I've been more unproductive than usual. Still pondering whether to take the computer over. Been reading more of the Black Company series by Glen Cook, which I think I can recommend all the way to the end (although I'm still on the last book). Been doing a little campaign planning for my next game, just minor world building stuff. Also working on wrapping up SAB and hoping I can give something vaguely resembling a distant ending, but I'll be content with just an ending if need be. :P