Category: x-personal

Random and intermittent postings about life, the universe, etc..

Delicious Links for 2014-05-28

BayCon

I spent all day Friday at BayCon, the Bay Area’s largest sci-fi & fantasy convention. It’s been about fifteen years since my last con (and the last one was a small college-sized affair) so this was all pretty new to me. I mostly went so that I could meet the artist Guest of Honor Ursula Vernon and her husband Kevin Sonney ( & respectively). Kevin & Ursula are the pair behind the excellent podcasts Kevin and Ursula Eat Cheap and The Hidden Almanac. Ursula is also the artist/author of the Hugo award-winning comic Digger, a fantastic artist, and extremely funny to boot.

It was a lot of fun. I drove, parked, wandered the wrong way around the parking structure/hotel/convention center, registered, and ended up in the throngs of people. I checked out the dealer’s room (where I picked up an anthology of sci-fi mysteries (a hard genre to pull off), and a couple of mid-sixties Peanuts and Charles Addams collections) and the art show (excellent leather masks by this one lady whose card I lost and some impressive work from the Bay Area Lego Club.) I attended a few panels throughout the day (one on costuming, one on how Doctor Who has endured all these years, and one about clockpunk, steampunk, & cyberpunk. I also poked my head around the entire con to see what else was going on. I found a nice Indian place a couple blocks away from the hotel for dinner and I got back in time to watch the presentation of the Guests of Honor. The author GOH, David Weber, is a great storyteller. After that I stuck around for charaoke (charity karaoke), but I was feeling some heartburn from the biryani for dinner so I never did turn in my slip to perform “Mahna Mahna.”

The big highlight of the day was meeting Kevin & Ursula at their table in the dealer’s room. As their unofficial segueographer I felt it my duty to bring them a nice snack so I brought some honey sticks from Buzzbee’s Honey, and I apologized for the box of food that I sent a couple months back. I browsed through Ursula’s selection of prints and chatted with her and Kevin while I picked out a few.

And the best part? I got a wombat sketch in my new notebook!

Other memorable moments:
* David Weber’s amalgamation of the worst con he’d ever been to – no schedule, no con staff, had to pay own expenses, con committee ended up in jail on fraud charges.
* “Sherp is a verb, isn’t it? It should be.”
* “Lots of planets have a Vancouver.”
* “Located next to the memorial Gorn.”

I spent most of yesterday napping off an on. I’m kind of glad I went on Friday when it was a little more sedate.

Current Mood: 🙂happy

Delicious Links for 2014-05-22

Joy, Inc.

So last night’s excursion was actually pretty fun. It turned out that we were going to see Rich Sheridan ([twitter.com profile] menloprez), president of Menlo Innovations. He was talking about his book (Joy, Inc.) and how to build a culture of joy in the workplace. Not, as Gill was hoping, creating a culture. When you build a culture, you get to start from scratch, but often when you’re creating a culture you have to fight against the old culture.

So the presentation was at the Adobe building in SF but was actually presented by the Bay Area Agile Leadership Network. I think it was Gill’s first time at one of their meetups but she did recognize a few people from other meetups in the area. I got to introduce myself as her “plus one” and I finally came up with a good way to describe my work: 60% sitting around researching & planning and 60% climbing ladders & cutting lumber & painting. I don’t know where they got the pizzas that they provided, but I had a slice of a fig and bacon pizza, with balsamic vinaigrette and goat cheese that was just heavenly.

So the crux of Rich’s philosophy was that by creating an atmosphere of joy, where employees and customers came together to actually enjoy the work they were doing, that they could create better work. I was particularly impressed by his description of the technology anthropologists that his teams employ to study how the users work in the real world. And any culture that allows and encourages parents to bring in newborn children must be doing something right. I’m doing a bad job explaining it, but I was far more interested in what he had to say than I thought I would be when I got there. The entire presentation was recorded for later broadcast, but for now Rich put together a little page with some brief introductory materials.

DC, number four publisher?

I stopped by my new local comic store on Saturday and was browsing while the owner talked with another customer (I ended up getting the Thrilling Adventure Hour graphic novel). Anyways, it turns out at that at this shop, DC is the number four selling publisher. Marvel’s on top, mostly on Spider-Man and X-Men titles, Image comes in second, and IDW is third with a strong showing from the Transformers and My Little Pony lines.

So how does this compare to what other folks are seeing in their local shops?

Trial separation

I am so done with Tumblr right now. This post from Humans of New York has inspired a mild backlash and argument about cultural appropriation (nice discussion of the concept there). Within the first few hundred comments we got to watch somebody call this under-ten kid a racist bitch and call to have her address leaked on the internet. And I particularly loved the people who were calling it cultural appropriation, getting corrected by people of Japanese descent, and then doubling down and saying that everyone who disagreed with them was probably actually white and just pretending to be Japanese.

I’ve got to take a break from that place. There’s a lot to see and discover there but there’s also far too many people just looking to pick a fight. So I’m out for a while. I’ve queued up a whole month’s worth of posts for Home Inspection Nightmares, I’ll go back in June.

Current Mood: 😡irate