Miko Reports From The Con

It's 4 am locally (2 am in Seattle) and I probably should be getting some sleep, but I slept for 2 hours or so much earlier. Mike and I stayed up late last night reading, and we're doing the same thing again. I'm reading Thud! (getting near the end) and since I only brought the one book and a couple of graphic novels, I don't know what I'll read on the flight back home Sunday. Mike is currently reading "New Cayote" which is a story about Cayote the Trickster, which was for sale at Kenkitt's table (not sure if I spelled her name right, she's one of the artist guests of honor). He read Good Omens last night. He tends to stay up reading until he's done with the book... which means he'll need to buy a new book tomorrow.

So, how was the con so far? Well... we ate breakfast with David Zawitaj (I'm probably mispelling his name). He's a very nice person as I already pretty much knew. He needs to meet Tom Milliorn sometime, they could talk about art and modelling and playing Warhammer 40K for hours, I suspect.

After that we set up the Tai-Pan table, aided by all of David's very neat toys and things. Table cloth, display stands, signs, two radios so we could talk to each other from different parts of the con... a little yin-yang notepad, and a collection of cheap yin-yang earrings and rings to hand out to whoever, the list goes on and on. I'm half convinced that David has more Tai-Pan stuff than Gene does. ^_^ Our table is next to the two artist GOH's, Tincrash and Kenkitt. I was going to order a badge from Kenkitt because I liked her display copies, but you know how these things work, she's a talented artist, she's a cute female, she's a Guest of Honor, so all of this means she's only at her table about half of the time, and when she is there are always one to three guys standing in front of the table talking to her.

I brought my art books to the con, and also julessong's book, which I've had for maybe a year, I'm not even sure if she remembers that I have it. I haven't drawn in it in all of that time, which is partly okay because I told her I wouldn't when she insisted I take it... but I thought, hey, I'll take it to Midwest Furfest and get people to draw in it there! This will assauge my guilt for having kept it so long and having done nothing with it in all that time! Of course, I failed to consider two things: I know very few people here, and since we're not having a Tai-Pan party, I'm not very likely to wind up at any party that people are drawing in sketchbooks at. So, plan B is to pay Tincrash to draw something in it, he seems like a very nice guy and is sitting right next to us in the dealer's room. And then, if I manage to corner David Z or someone else to draw in it, that will be an extra bonus. We'll see. David is working two cons this weekend, I doubt he'll have any time to sit down and draw for me, but you never know.

As you might expect, my entire convention experience so far has mostly consisted of sitting behind the Tai-Pan table and talking to people that wander by, or occasionally wandering the dealer's room, and at one point being on a panel. I haven't seen any other parts of the con, really. I had an interesting conversation with Steve Martin that I didn't really intend to have -- as if there are other sorts of conversations you might have with the man -- in which he said business was bad, then noticed I was a dealer, wanted to know what I sold, and asked to see a copy of our zine (he didn't seem to recognize it by name) and then when he realized it was a fanzine he appeared to lose all interest and instead tried to tell me at length how fanzines were all dying and doomed because of the net, because "fans can just log on and talk to each other, who needs a fanzine?" I tried to explain several times that what we did was something different than what you can find online -- and at some point he kind of agreed that putting out a quality product was the one way a fanzine could hope to stay in business -- but mostly he's an idiot and not a very pleasant person all around and I don't know why I was talking to him at all.

As Gene reported, the people who do the nice Norwescon shirts are here, and are the ones who made the Midwest Furfest shirts. In fact I was wandering around as they were setting up, and I had my black 2004 Conifur tee shirt on (which lead to several conversations about how wonderful the Northwest is) and over it I was wearing my most recent Norwescon blue button-down shirt, the one with the cat reading a book... and so the lady running that table saw it and immediately directed me to the blue button-down Midwest Furfest shirts they had. She said they have a different manufacturer now because the old ones kind of faded in odd spots, leaving a splotchy look, which in fact my Norwescon shirt demonstrated quite well. After the dealer's room officially opened I went over and got one of the blue button-down con shirts, and one of the black tee shirts.

My other purchases were two prints that I liked, and a keychain ornament thing with a pawprint on it. Come to think of it, I need to buy another of those and ship it off to my friend Inara in Alaska, s/he would like that very much. I also plan to locate at least one print that I'm sure pencil_rain would like and buy one for him, just because in the past I've been pretty good at buying things that he also liked.

We went to dinner, as Gene said. We were at the mall so we went to JC Penney's and Mike got a hat/scarf/gloves set to keep warm. It's amazingly cold here, although the night before was worse. I almost bought some nice isotoner gloves and a scarf, but I'd left my checkbook at the hotel, and while I could use both, I figured I'm not going to be out in the cold all THAT much, and decided to save my money. Gene joked at dinner that we had a very large refrigerator back at the hotel -- meaning the balcony, where we've taken to placing refilled pop bottles of water so that we always have cold water handy. ^_^

Well, I think I'll go back to my book now... or go to sleep, one of the two. ^_^