Still not getting much done

The house cleaning and the sorting has declined somewhat. I had given up on trying to tackle anything big, cause that was taking too long and I just end up getting depressed and giving up. I then decided that the best thing was to do something small everyday and also to break up the day with other things like reading a chapter in a book or watching some old TV show that I haven't seen in twenty years.

Anyway, I thought that I was making some progress, and that was making me feel better. But yesterday I was looking for something, and I couldn't find it. This is not that unusual for me, except that the particular thing was among some stuff that I sorted through two or three weeks ago, so I should know right where it is. I don't. And I guess that I've even accumulated some new stuff since then and that didn't help the process. But I didn't get that much stuff, and most of it was stuff that had a place and a purpose, so it shouldn't have been a problem. But I suppose for me that all stuff is eventually a problem.

The sorted through things that are going to go are mostly out in the hallway. I guess that it will help to actually go ahead and send it wherever it is going to go instead of leaving it in the hallway. That probably isn't going to happen today. My husband announced last night that he hoped I did not have any major plans for the day, since he had to go to work an hour early and that wouldn't leave us much time to go where he wanted for lunch etc.... So that was odd. He doesn't usually announce where we're going to lunch the night before. Maybe he's got the days confused. The place he wants to go has a sale on Wednesdays. Anyway, it seemed a little weird.

Also weird is this problem I'm having with my skin. No, not the usual problems I have with my skin, but this is sort of an itch. No, not like that either. But it just feels like there is sand everywhere. There can't be sand everywhere. Look, no sand, or at least not enough that it should bother anyone. Still, I keep imagining that there's sand everywhere, getting in inconvenient places.

Okay, so I've decided that as long as I'm dealing with this imaginary sand that I might as well start making some mud. I should have started a long time ago. The summer is half over, and I'm just now getting started. I bought the over-priced screen like six months ago, and I've hardly used it at all. Anyway, I had thought that I would work with a little bit of it everyday over the summer, and then by the fall I would have a lot ready to make clay with, and I just didn't do it. It's July now. I should have started this in May.

So now I'm working on it, and I've traded the imaginary sand for real sand. Sometimes it's a matter of picking out a little bit of sand from the clay. This time around it feels more like washing the clay off of the sand. Well, it's not really that bad, and maybe I'm having a false memory of it being especially easy before. And the sand will just go into the garden, so it's not like it's a bad thing.

Okay, today I'm going to get lots of work done. Not really, but I am going to run a few errands and sift through some of this mud. And apparently I'm going to have a nice lunch.

BBC says no more knitting

Looks like I missed a bit of excitement about two months ago, both in the world of fandom and the world of craft-related websites.

For a while now, my husband has been saying that I need to start a new blog, one that is entirely about knitting. I haven't done it yet, for several reasons. One, the husband has a bunch of blogs that he tries to make money from, and he thinks that I should do the same, while I think the idea of making money from blogs is mostly a boat that has already sailed and don't really want to bother with it. Two, there are already a lot of other knitting blogs out there written by people who are really good at it. Three, if I did ever do such a thing, I would want to do a good job of it, and that would take a lot of time and maybe a lot of work, and I hate to put that much work into something on the remote chance that I might make a few bucks. If it was something that I enjoyed doing and could create something that I was proud of, and then it happened to make some money, that would be different.

Anyway, I got to thinking that I could set up another blog and start writing stuff on it, but for now just not publish any posts. So I've done that. I created a new blog that doesn't have any published posts. I started writing a few things, but they are only drafts at the moment and only I can read them.

So I haven't embarrassed myself yet, see?

Okay, so while I was working on the thing I thought that I might as well have some links, and that I would want to link to doctorwhoscarf.com, just as I have a link to the site on this blog. And I haven't visited the site in several months. Probably I haven't looked at it since before Christmas. But yesterday I went there, just cause I was about to add this link to the new blog. And there was this message from about six weeks ago saying that the guy was afraid that the BBC was going to order him to shut the site down, and that we should all make copies of any patterns we wanted, just in case.

The reason he was afraid of being shut down was this story. Apparently the BBC saw that someone was making these little knitted things that looked like aliens from Dr. Who and then selling them on eBay. So eBay pulled the listings for the items. The BBC then went to the website where a fan had posted the knitting patterns for the alien things and told her to stop. She wasn't selling the patterns, she had created the patterns herself and was giving them away for free to anyone who wanted to try to make them. Someone else was trying to sell stuff on eBay. Not quite sure if they just politely asked her to stop, or if the BBC did some legal thing, but either way the woman pulled the patterns off of her website.

Anyway, fans have been making their own Dr. Who scarves for about thirty years now. There was an "official" scarf many years ago, but they only made it that once and they didn't make enough to match the demand. So if you know how to knit or you are friends with someone who knits, you make your own or you have someone else make one for you. Sometimes someone makes a lot of them and sells them on eBay or even on their own websites.

Which is not saying that the people making these scarves are getting rich. I've seen the scarves sell for about a hundred dollars. Even if you have a machine to do a lot of the work, for the most part a knitting machine isn't something that you push a few buttons and then go to lunch and come back to find a completed scarf. So even if you have a machine you still spend a lot of time on it. And of course yarn isn't free either. If I wanted to sell a scarf, and I wanted to make a reasonable ten dollars an hour for my time, I would need to sell the scarves for at least $175. (That's for season 12. Other seasons are longer or more complicated and would cost more.) So I figure that the people who sell the scarves on eBay are a bit better at this than I am, but they are still working for about five dollars an hour.

Anyway, while there are copyright laws and all of that, and the BBC probably has the legal right to make someone stop selling things that came from the show, and they might even have the right to ask someone to stop telling people how to make their own toys and/or costumes, for the most part you're supposed to know not to enforce this particular right on fans who are not getting rich from knitting and who are not in direct competition with anything they are selling. Fan made stuff is free advertising, so the fans are usually left alone.

All of this was almost two months ago, and the Doctor Who Scarf website is still there, so I'm guessing that they are not going to do anything about it.

So why all the drama over some knitted toys now, while we've been knitting scarves for decades without anyone bothering anybody about it? My husband thinks that it's because the alien knitting patterns were designed on something from the new show, and the people in charge are more serious about such things now than decades ago when the old show was on. My theory is that the recent toys are the image of characters, while the scarves are just scarves. We try to copy the pattern of the scarves, but there's not anything like a Dr. Who logo on them and the don't say Dr. Who on them or anything like that.

Anyway, I had a look yesterday, and Dr. Who type scarves are still available on eBay. So I guess for now only the toys are forbidden, and maybe that will be the end of it.

Not much of a bang

The 4th of July weekend started for us on Thursday and will probably go on til Tuesday. Not that we planned it that way. Not that we were going to do anything interesting. And not that we ended up doing anything interesting after we remembered that we'd have all this time off. Having all this time off also means having a lot less money, so there's no point in planning a trip or anything. We've spent too much money just hanging around the house doing the regular stuff.

My husband just had off an extra three days, because they couldn't schedule any work this weekend. People just have better things to do than get their pictures taken. So on his first day off we went to see Hancock. It was okay. I didn't see that coming. Somehow not what I expected.

Speaking of not seeing that coming, we just caught up with the Dr. Who spinoff, The Sarah Jane Adventures. That was great. But I won't spoil it for those who haven't seen it.

Anyway, we were at the movie theater watching the previews before Hancock. I hate spoilers. Once I've seen or heard enough to know that I'm going to watch a certain movie, I don't want to see or hear anymore about it. So I'd already seen a preview for the movie Blindness, which looks to be like The Day of the Triffids, only without the Triffids. So I'd already decided to see it, and I don't want to hear or see anymore about it, but there was another preview of the movie Thursday, so now I know more about the plot than I wanted to know ahead of time. Oh well.

Then there was a preview for The Day the Earth Stood Still. Now, when I first heard about this I didn't think that particular movie needed a remake, though I'm probably one of the few people who really enjoys remakes. The second version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is really good, and it might even be my favorite movie. The Fly and The Fly II are both good. Miracle on 34th Street gets remade every twenty years or so, and I think all versions turn out pretty good. Lost in Space would have been excellent if they'd written a script that didn't switch to a different time theory in the middle of the film. So I really don't have anything against remakes if they are done well. But I don't think that I would have picked this movie for a remake. It was made within ten years of developing the atomic bomb and within five years of first seeing flying saucers, and it just really needed to be made right at that time. --Why don't you quit trying to blow up each other and learn to cure cancer or something? Grow up or else.-- Other films with a similar theme were made at about the same time. My dad really liked this low budget thing called The 27th Day, but I doubt that anyone else has ever heard of it.

Anyway, it was a message sort of movie, not an amazing special effects movie, and I wasn't sure that we needed another version of the film fifty-seven years later. But what the hell, it's fifty-seven years later, so let's go ahead and do it. Especially if we can get cool special effects and Keanu Reeves in it. At the beginning of the preview, they almost make you think that it has something to do with The Matrix. The preview looks very impressive. If it goes well, maybe they can remake The 27th Day, only add enough techno-babble so that the ending will make sense.

There was a preview for a third Starship Troopers. This one is direct to video. I'm not sure if that's from lack of plot, or just because the bad CGI won't hold up on the big screen. I suspect it is both. But unlike the second film, it has the characters from the first story, so I will probably watch it anyway.

This weekend I also sort of accidentally went ahead and watched Stargate: Continuum. I won't get into it much, cause I hate spoilers. But I think that I won't be giving much away by saying that it is a time-travel plot, and I liked this movie better than the last one, maybe because I like time-travel stories. SG-1 has traveled in time before, and those were good storylines too.

Other than that, Friday we didn't do anything. And I don't mean that we didn't do anything special for the 4th, I mean that we really didn't do anything. I got up and blogged a bit, went back to bed and read a little bit. Then we watched the Stargate thing. At some point he ate a hog dog and I ate leftover pizza for breakfast. I read some more while he was on the computer. Then I was thinking that I should eat lunch, but I really didn't feel like it and ate a bunch of cookies instead. Then my husband wanted to go eat, but I wasn't hungry because of the cookies. So he read for a bit and I used the computer, and after a while we went to Panchos. I'm not sure when that was, except that it was after two but before four, so I'm not sure if that counts as late lunch or early dinner. We came home and I remembered that I hadn't watered the plants yet, so I did that, and then I was thinking how I hadn't done any work. We were going to go for a walk, but very soon into it we decided to turn back. It was hot, but mainly I was just too tired. Too tired from what? We didn't do anything except go to Panchos. We didn't do even just normal stuff like wash dishes. I didn't do any laundry or any sorting or anything. Except for watering the plants late, I didn't do anything in the garden. We didn't even have sex. Why the hell was I so tired? Later, we did manage to take that walk, and I tried to figure out a bit of knitting from this video I rented, but I didn't try for very long. So that was it. We didn't go anywhere to watch fireworks. In fact, we didn't even bother to go outside and try to watch any just from the house. I was just too tired. But what the hell was I tired from?

Anyway, like I was saying, no big excitement on the 4th of July. Other than watching the Stargate thing the most excitement we had that day was at Panchos when I tried to eat a roasted jalapeno. I know better than to eat those, really I do. But I got one anyway and sliced it. And the tip of a pepper usually isn't as hot as the rest of the pepper, and the hottest part is nearer the stem where there are more seeds. So the first bite was good, and the second part was good. And then I kind of forget what I was doing and stopped being careful. About the fourth bite or so was a mistake.

Taz hate pain! TAZ HATE PAIN!

Okay, that's enough excitement for one day.

Someone started their holiday weekend off early by stealing my brother's grill earlier in the week. But I guess the smoker was too heavy for them and they left it. So we still went to my brother's place on Saturday and had brisket for lunch, but it wasn't as big a deal as it was about a month ago. No grill, so no hotdogs, no corn, no stuffed peppers, etc.... And there were only four of us, while last time there were six of us.

So that was pretty much it for our holiday weekend. I spent most of it reading the Tripods trilogy. I should have tried to get some work done yesterday, but, no. I spent one more day being totally lazy. Anyway, it turns out that I read the schedule wrong and my husband has to work today, and he even has to leave early, so that's soon enough to think about work.

The Star Trek Experience in Vegas is closing

If you haven't been there yet, you have a month or two, and then they plan to close. I have been there, though only once, and not at a great time. But I have been there. One thing crossed off my list.

I've only been on the one ride, which was probably the first one, at the end of which I was sworn to secrecy. I think that they have added two more since then. I would have liked to have seen them too.

Other rides like that from Vegas have gone on the road, and I ended up seeing them while visiting Moody Gardens in Galveston. So I'm hoping that the same might happen with this. And I've read on another website that the ride is actually owned by the company that owns Cedar Point and several other amusement parks, so maybe in time it will move to Ohio and my friend from the great white north will get to visit it. They also own a park in Kansas, so that would be good too.

General Hammond of Texas is dead

Or at least, actor Don S. Davis is dead. I'm just now hearing this, but it happened Friday. Also Friday was the release of the DVD Stargate: Continuum, which I didn't know about either.

Don S. Davis was at the last convention I volunteered at three or four years ago. He was a very nice guy, and he signed autographs, and he read us a poem about smoking with Willie. Most of my regular readers won't probably won't understand, but that's Willie Nelson. A general hanging out with Willie is an interesting image.

Anyway, in my little group we are glad that we got to meet him and we're sorry that he's gone.

Missing Tomatoes and Ugly Chickens

About fifteen years ago I read something very funny about tomatoes. I've tried for years to remember the name of it. I couldn't remember who wrote it either. I was thinking that it was something like The Great Tomato Epidemic of 1978.

That wasn't it. Anyway, it was a very short funny thing, really short, and I couldn't find it. I had read it in a library book, a collection of short stories, and I wasn't really even sure of the name of that book. I remember that it was one of those "best of" books, and that it was in the same volume with a story called "The Ugly Chickens." (The Ugly Chickens is also a very funny story, though not nearly as short as the one about tomatoes.) Since I did not want to go back to that library and try to find a collection of short stories containing the story "The Ugly Chickens" in order to find another story about tomatoes, I have many times tried to find the tomato story on the Internet.

Sometimes Google just doesn't seem very helpful. You would think that science fiction stories about tomatoes would be a rare thing and what I was looking for would pop right up. But most searches either lead to Killer Tomatoes or Rotten Tomatoes, so I was having no luck with it. Sometimes, just no amount of typing or banging one's head against the wall produces what one is looking for.

Anyway, this morning I found this. I'd remembered the name entirely wrong. In fact, it turned out to be The Dread Tomato Addiction, so the only word I'd gotten right was tomato. And it's a lot shorter than I remembered, only one page. Still, it is funny.

Around here, I am starting to miss tomatoes. I'd heard on the news that there was a problem with salmonella poisoning and tomatoes, but I hadn't really paid much attention to it. I didn't pay attention to the previous problem with spinach either. I just thought that if I got any from the store that I would wash them, and if I got any at a restaurant someone else would wash them, and that would be that. Apparently, it isn't that simple, and you can't just wash the stuff off of the tomatoes. But, still, I wasn't really paying attention.

Then a week or two ago we went to Taco Cabana and had tacos. But there was no tomatoes on the tacos, and there was no pico de gallo on the salsa bar either. I can't think of anything that I eat there that I don't want pico de gallo, so I guess I won't be going there til it is all sorted out. The next day we went to Whataburger, and again there was the sign on the door saying that they wouldn't be serving tomatoes for a while. I prefer tomatoes on my hamburger, so I ordered a fish sandwich instead, so that I did not notice the absence of tomatoes as much.

A few days after that, I forgot about the whole tomato thing, and we went to Chipotle's. But they still had pico de gallo, so my burrito was not ruined.

My plants are not producing at the moment, which I had assumed was due to the heat. Tomatoes don't produce fruit above a certain temperature, and being in Texas we spend a lot of time with the temperature being above whatever it is that makes the tomato plants happy. So I had not thought much of it, just that it must have gotten hotter sooner this year than last time I had tomato plants. Only my neighbors with tomato plants are still getting a fair amount of tomatoes, and at least one guy is having a bumper crop. So I must have done something wrong, and I will have to read up on it later.

Sometimes I just want to scream, What the f*** is wrong with you?

I've had a fight with someone today. I tried to avoid the fight. I felt a fight coming and asked that person to just go away for a while and leave me alone. That would have to happen sooner or later anyway, we both have things to do and cannot just spend the whole day doing basically nothing. So when I don't feel well and feel like if I have to stay around this person much longer we'll end up fighting, why can't the other person just go away and give me an hour or so to myself?

I think that some people just know when that sort of thing is coming and just get a feeling that they should leave. Not that they're always right, not that maybe you shouldn't say something like would it be better if I gave you some space, etc.... Other people just don't seem to sense that sort of thing at all and have to be told, leave me alone for now, go away before I say something that I'll regret, etc....

But this person doesn't get it even after I've said, you were planning to leave in about an hour anyway, and I don't feel well, and if you would just go go ahead and leave now it would probably be best.

Why?

Because I don't want to fight, and I don't feel well now, and I felt bad yesterday, so if you'd just go ahead and leave now before we get into anything maybe we won't end up having a fight.

Why did you feel bad yesterday? When did you feel bad yesterday?

You really don't know, do you? You really don't have a clue, do you? Please, I don't want to get into it now, so could you just go ahead and go?

The person doesn't leave and again asks what happened yesterday, after I've already said I don't want to talk about it. And again I say something like don't you already know? That's a simple enough question requiring a yes or no answer, or maybe admitting I don't know, or maybe guessing what it might be. And that's if the person is even going to answer the question instead of just leaving when asked to do so. But no appropriate answer was given, and instead it was followed by five minutes or so of nonsense trying to mask the fact that the person doesn't have a clue. Just say, I'm sorry, I don't know what's bothering you, and be done with it.

So the person didn't leave, and said a bunch more things to upset me. Not that the things said were that bad, just that this person knows me well enough to know that is the wrong thing to say to me when I am upset. And, as if the person didn't already know not to say that, I said don't say that, you know how it upsets me. The same thing was said again less than a minute later, and two or three more times before the person decided to leave.

While I was wanting the person to leave before I got really upset, before we were fighting, now that I'm already upset there is no point in leaving. Leaving in the middle of a fight just upsets me more, which the person knows very well, and even if the person didn't know any better I said that it was too late and leaving now would just make things worse. I said that like four times, and the person was still leaving. And it wasn't that the person didn't understand or didn't hear me. The person finally lied to me and said something like okay, I'm not really going, I just have to do something and I'll be right back.

And for several minutes I actually sat there and waited. Maybe something was needed from the car, or maybe something was taken to the car, or maybe a phone call was being made, etc.... So I actually sat there, and then I got curious and got up and walked around a bit, and then I saw that the car was gone. And even then it took me about half an hour to figure out that the person hadn't just gone up the road to drop of a package or check the mail or a number of other things mentioned before the fight, the person wasn't coming back, that we were not going to shake hands and agree to disagree or agree to discuss things at a better time or any of that. The person just left in the middle of a fight, nothing resolved, knowing how much it would hurt me.

So after having this thing going around in my head all day yesterday, now I will have this other thing going around in my head all day today. And the person I had the fight with knew that. And the person wouldn't leave when asked to leave, and wouldn't stay when asked to stay, and has told me yet one more lie and has broken yet one more agreement. So this must have been done deliberately to hurt me, because I cannot believe that anyone could be so stupid.

This is one of the reasons I never seem to get anything done. It just seems to me that whenever I have plans to do something, even some small thing like sorting through books, something like that happens to throw me off schedule. And then I'm just depressed for a while after that, and then I don't do much of anything for a while (or worse, I do something very unproductive like go shopping and eat a lot of cookies), and it seems to take me a week or so to get back to where I was to start with.

On top of all that, someone tried to cheer me up by say something like, thank God it's Friday. Only it isn't Friday, it's only Thursday. So that just depressed the both of us more.

Some things never change, or do they?

The following things are constant--daily there will be a sunrise and a sunset (except in the polar regions), decent people will always have to deal with a**holes, certain people will always have a lot of books, holiday dinner bought at a restaurant is never as good as mom's cooking (or grandma's cooking or whatever), certain men with a fear of commitment will never get married, if you have a dumba** boss he will never get any smarter, no matter how many times I go to the store I will always forget something, death and taxes, etc....

I have heard a rumor that a certain Mr. Friendly is getting married. The person who told me this did not have much in the way of details, like is he getting married to anyone I know? But supposedly he is getting married in a few months, after decades of everyone assuming he's a confirmed bachelor.

I wasn't assuming he was confirmed bachelor. He actually told me that he would never get married, that there was no point in getting married except to raise children, and he didn't want any children. And he dated someone I went to school with, and there's only so long that a girl can date someone who won't make that commitment, so she moved on. That was a long time ago, but I know that two years ago that was still his opinion. And now he's getting married?

I suppose that I should be happy for Mr. Friendly, but that isn't what I'm thinking. I'm thinking that isn't fair, that I did all the stuff that a person is supposed to do only to end up like this, and now people who've spent their whole lives doing something completely different have changed their minds and are now getting married. People my age and older who've spent decades in casual relationships don't deserve to get married. They should just wake up one day old and alone and figure out that they made a mistake.

Maybe that's what happened. Maybe he woke up alone one day and decided there was still time, and he got engaged to the next lady who smiled at him. So why couldn't he have done that when he was with my buddy from school?

For all I know, he got back together with my buddy from school. She got divorced like three years ago. I'd be very happy for her, except that I'd worry that he'd end up hurting her again.

The rest of the universal constants are still constant.

This weekend I was supposed to buy something. Really, I thought about buying something last weekend, but I forgot about it then, and I forgot about it all week, and I forgot about it again this weekend. So we should have bought something while we were out yesterday, and we still forgot. Yesterday we went to a grocery store, a dollar store, Home Depot, and another dollar store, and we forgot and didn't buy the thing. And that's not to mention that yesterday and earlier this weekend we were out at other stores that would not have had what we forgot to buy, but while we were out we could have gone somewhere else. How could we both be so forgetful?

Dumb bosses are still dumb. At my husband's company, in his area, they have now have now made everyone go to three meetings in the last six months. Nothing is really getting done at these meetings, and still no one is going to get any extra money for gas or anything else that would be of help to the employees, but the company has had a bunch of meetings to say dumb stuff like business is bad. And while they make dumb statements like how the company can't afford to pay extra for gas, even though gas is a travel expense and the company is supposed to pay for travel expenses, the company does somehow have plenty of money to send the managers around to different parts of the company to tell the employees that business is bad.

And my little place in the universe is still a place with too many books. I have always had a lot of books, but this is getting way out of hand. My eyesight just gets worse and worse, and I don't really enjoy reading as much as I used to, and I don't seem to have time for it like I used to. But I still seem to acquire more books and more books, even though I don't read as many as I used to. And I don't really like getting rid of the books I've already read. And except for maybe knitting books, there's really no excuse for buying more books. The knitting is still relatively new, so I haven't had time to get too many of those, but the rest of it doesn't need to be added to.

I'm trying to sort through these books and maybe box some of them up, and maybe even part with some of them. But mostly when I pick up a book I think, there it is, I've been wondering what happened to that book. Rarely do I think, I wonder what made me buy this? So the sorting is a slow process.

I have found that I have two copies of a certain Texas gardening book, two copies of a certain old book on home decoration, and three copies of the same book on soap making. I have endless books on practically the same subject, but there's no way that I need duplicates of the same exact book. And I'm sure that I'll find more duplicates when I start going through the novels. Anyway, I think that I can safely get rid of one Texas gardening book, one home decorating book, and two soap making books, but decided on the rest of them is a bit more difficult.

This week's schedule has been unusual, in that my husband had to work on Sunday but has today off. So Sunday I tried to make some serious progress on the books, knowing that I would probably not get back to it until maybe Wednesday. I had all these books stacked up on the bed and such.

I tripped over something and nearly fell. This in itself is annoying enough. I am now at the point where I fear that the next time I fall it will result in a serious injury, so whenever I think that I am about to fall I tense up so bad that it hurts just from that even if I don't actually fall. So I didn't actually fall that time, but I felt bad for a while afterwards, and I had to sit down for a minute. I noticed some of the books that I had stacked start to slide over.

I am in serious danger of being buried under a massive pile of books and being alone for hours before someone would find me.

Right. Back to work.

Thanks for reading

It has been an interesting week here on the blog, if not so much in real life. People from all over the world came here to read about a certain convention getting canceled. And more people than that read my words on other sites where parts of my posts were copied. So people who didn't come here knew what I had to say because they were reading something on the sci fi channel site.

That always makes me feel a little warm and fuzzy when someone I don't even know decides to copy my one of my posts and put it on another website so that more people can read it. Maybe someday someone will do that and it won't be cool, but these last two times have been especially nice. I didn't even try to write anything particularly brilliant on those days, but someone out there still thought I'd said something that was worth repeating. I guess that I just happened to write the right thing at the right time.

The interesting thing about the popularity of the convention cancellation post is that my post was so popular for the very reason that I didn't actually go to the convention. I was just writing my normal diary type thing, and while I was sitting here writing, the convention was canceled, and I got some emails about it. So I was one of the first people to post about that. The people who were actually at the convention didn't do that right away, either because they were at a convention and didn't have their computers with them, or maybe some of them did have their computers but it took a while for them to calm down enough to write anything.

It wasn't quite like having my fifteen minutes of fame. But maybe it was like the blog had fifteen seconds of fame. And while that was going on, real life here was just an average week, mostly spent sorting through the junk and watching end of the world movies on YouTube.

I don't think that I'm going to get any additional regular readers from all this attention, or at least if I have they haven't left me any comments yet. But while this was going on I felt a bit of pressure to not write the usual diary stuff and either post important stuff like about memory problems, or if not important stuff at least stuff that the new people would find interesting like movie reviews. I was going to post about memory problems and a review of the new Hulk movie anyway, so that worked out, but I'm wondering if next week I'll just go back to the usual stuff or if I'll feel weird about posting about problems with mice.

Okay. Back to sorting junk and watching end of the world movies.

The Incredible Hulk

Okay, I promised a review of this movie, and a friend is waiting on it, so I guess I'd better get on with it.

I am not a big fan of comic books, or at least, I don't read them much. I read Elfquest a bit way back when, but I haven't even kept up with that one. Other than that, I just don't read them.

Which isn't to say that they don't often have good stories that make excellent movies or TV shows. When I was a kid I watched Shazam and Isis, which I think were first comic books. Later came Spiderman and Wonder Woman. I watched the short-lived series The Flash. Now I watch Smallville, and before that I watched three other shows based on Superman. And of course I watch all the big movies that are based on comic books--Superman, Batman, The X-Men, Spiderman, etc.... I think Hellboy was a comic book first. And Ironman was excellent. If you haven't seen it yet, go watch Ironman.

When I was about eleven there was a show on called The Incredible Hulk. And at first either I didn't know about the comic book or it didn't look much like the comic book and someone had to tell me that's were they got the idea from. This was a science fiction show about a scientist who had made a terrible mistake experimenting on himself. And while he did end up rescuing a lot of people from this and that, he wasn't like other comic book heroes who deliberately went around looking for people to save, and he didn't run around in a spandex costume beating up bad guys. This guy was spent most of his time trying to find a cure for his odd condition, just as before this happened he was trying to find something that would make people stronger, and before that he was trying to cure cancer or something.

I joke about wanting to marry Mr. Spock. But I think even when I was eleven I loved David Banner. And as an adult, I still think he's pretty special. This is the guy I want. I want someone who would look at me like that. And if he happens to look like Bill Bixby, so much the better.

While I love David Banner from the TV show, I hardly know anything about Bruce Banner from the comic books. Actual comic books are not really my thing. Not that there's anything wrong with them, but I just never really got into them.

So a few years ago someone made this movie called The Hulk, and I went to see it. And it wasn't about David Banner from the TV show, and I don't know if the fans of the comic book liked it or not. To be honest, I didn't care for it, and the main thing that I remember about the plot was that his problems had as much to do with his father's research as it did his own. And I didn't like the CGI big as a building Hulk. Lou Ferringo did such a great job on the TV show, and this movie replaced him with a cartoon.

Anyway, that movie had nothing to do with the TV show.

So then I heard that there was another movie, and again there's another big as a building CGI Hulk. Okay, maybe not quite as big as a building, maybe he's more RV sized. Anyway, no Lou Ferrigno, so I was thinking maybe it was just a sequel to this movie I didn't like. Except that Ed Norton was now playing Dr. Banner. Would Ed Norton be in a sequel to this movie that I didn't like? Not sure.

So I go see the movie, just in case. This movie is a whole lot more like the TV show. The opening is even a lot like the TV show, except that the scientist who is dumb enough to experiment on himself at least isn't dumb enough to do it after hours in a room by himself. So when the Hulk makes his first appearance, the resulting damage puts Banner's girlfriend in the hospital. And then he goes on the run, not from a reporter, but from the whole US military. So Bruce Banner is in hiding, in a country where he doesn't quite speak the language, and everyone who knows him thinks that he's just a little bit nuts. Or maybe a lot nuts.

Ed Norton's Bruce Banner is a lot like Bill Bixby's David Banner. Not quite, but give him a few years and he'll probably get there. Except right at the end of the movie, maybe they're going to go a different direction with this.

And still there is the giant CGI Hulk. No Lou Ferrigno. Now, I know that they couldn't have really hired Lou Ferrigno, that even though Lou still very much keeps in shape, they would want to hire somebody younger. But they didn't. This cartoon is better than the other movie's cartoon, but it will never be Lou. Surely there is someone out there like Lou who could do the part better than a cartoon. Surely there are a few body builders out there who don't kill themselves with steroids and can act.

I don't know why they did this again. Other movies, even movies based on comic books, don't do that. I know that they use a lot of CGI, but for most shots, I think the orange guy in The Fantastic Four is a guy in a suit. And for the most part, Hellboy is Ron Perlman in a ton of makeup. So why can't the Hulk be an actor in the movies?

What else can I say about the movie without plot spoilers? I hate spoilers. I just need to see an interesting preview and hear that someone liked the movie so I'll want to go see it. I don't like to hear anything else about the movie. So if my opinion counts to anyone, there it is. Go see the movie.

There's a lot of cameos and familiar names in this movie. Lou has a cameo. Stan has a cameo, he always does. Even Bill has a cameo at the beginning of the movie, but don't blink or you'll miss it. And there's nothing to be gained by sitting through all the credits. There's this little scene with a cameo from another movie, but they show that right before the credits. All that stuff was fun.

Okay, that's about it. If you were a fan of the TV show I think that you'll like this movie. And if you're not a fan of the show but are a fan of the comic book, I don't know if you'll like it or not. It is significantly better than the previous movie. Ed Norris is in it, Liv Tyler is in it, William Hurt is in it, and they blow up a lot of stuff. Hulk smash! So go see the movie, and if you haven't already done so, go see Ironman too.

Memory Problems

One of my fellow bloggers is having memory problems. She went into the hospital for a procedure, and while I guess no one really looks forward to going to the hospital, this was not something that her doctors and family talked her into. She knew that she wasn't going to get any better doing nothing, researched her options, and decided that there was no point in putting off the treatment. She was not well, and she was at least looking forward to getting the hospital thing over with and getting better.

She knew that she'd have some problems. She knew that she shouldn't drive for a while and would have to take a cab home, etc.... But she expected to go home and get some rest and feel better afterwards.

Only now she can't remember stuff. She can't remember a lot of stuff from the past year or so. And now she's having trouble making new memories, and she can't remember stuff that she did like an hour ago.

This might be temporary. She's read about stuff like this happening to other people, and then they get better after a few weeks. On the other hand, no one knows for sure, and she's worried that she might spend the rest of her life being like that guy in the movie Memento.

There are other similar memory problems. One is described in the movie Fifty First Dates. When I first heard about this movie, I thought something like that's too bad, cause there are real people out there with this problem, and someone should make a good movie about it instead of this Adam Sandler crap. Only, after about twenty minutes of Adam Sandler crap, this actually turned out to be a good movie. It's mostly funny, but then you do start to see what it might be like for the family of someone who wakes up everyday thinking that it's a certain date on the calendar, only that date has long past for everyone else. She wakes up everyday thinking that it's her dad's birthday, and since they don't know what else to do, her family and friends all go to great lengths trying to pretend that everyday is her dad's birthday. And we see what it might be like for a person with this problem, if things don't go as planned and she has "a bad day." Then she meets Sandler, who isn't in on this, and her family wants him to go away because he's going to mess up their routine and cause problems. But then they realize that she likes him, and on his day off they still pretend that it's dad's birthday, only maybe she should have lunch or something with this nice guy she just met. After a while, Sandler suggests that they tell her the truth. They make video tapes and she writes notes to herself, and every morning she spends about an hour watching the tapes and reading the notes and being a bit upset, but then she realizes it is the truth and everyone tries to get on with the day. And it doesn't always go as one would hope, but things don't always go as one would hope anyway, even if you don't have this odd memory problem.

So if you can get through the first twenty minutes or so of Adam Sandler crap, watch Fifty First Dates, cause it is a good movie. And while Click isn't really supposed to be about a guy with memory problems, he does seem to have a lot of problems in that area. So that's a good movie to watch too, and it has a lot less crap.

I have seen a real-life guy with this memory problem do the talk show circuit. One day he had an accident or something, and he remembers everything up to that point just fine. But since then he can make new memories for one day, and then he goes to sleep and forgets everything again. Everyday he wakes up thinking that it is that day before the accident happened. That day was like twenty years ago. He's aged, his wife has aged, and his little kids have grown up and moved away. He doesn't know what day it is, he doesn't know who is president, he doesn't know about 9/11, etc.... He writes himself a note that he has to read every morning. This guy is somewhat lucky to be a math teacher, and with some help he can still do his job. Math twenty years later is still math. If he had another job, even say a similar job of being a history teacher, he probably couldn't do it. He could be lecture about something that happened many years ago, and that would probably go okay, but then if a student asked him to compare something in the lecture with Iraq, he wouldn't even understand the question.

While we were having this discussion with the fellow blogger about how she must feel, someone brought up the idea being able to selectively remove memories, like in the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. In the movie, it didn't quite work. Although the main character thought that he wanted to forget things, his mind rebelled against the procedure and tried all kinds of things to save some of the memories. Still, he signed up for erased memories, and that's what he ended up with. But only his memories were erased, not everyone else's, and while people were warned that he had part of his memory erased, people would occasionally mention something that they weren't supposed to, or someone would say something that just didn't make sense, or he would meet someone who didn't get the memo and talk about the very thing that he didn't want to remember. And after a while, wouldn't that all be very annoying, and wouldn't you get curious and go looking for the very thing that you thought you'd be better off not remembering?

I think that it would be very difficult to pick specific things to forget, but I think in the future that it might be possible to forget specific blocks of time. I think that you would have to make the horrible choice of forgetting everything within a certain amount of time and lose the good with the bad. And to really make it work, you might have to go back to a time before the bad thing happened and forget everything that happened since then. If the bad thing happened yesterday, maybe that would work. But if the bad thing happened a month ago, a year ago, or five years ago, that's a problem.

I have actually given this matter some thought.

About two years ago, some really bad stuff happened to me, and I knew that I'd never get over it. I've tried, but some things just can't be fixed, and some of the things that can be made better I can't do by myself and other people involved refuse to help. So I'm stuck. I can't go back and undo what was done. So I said, from this point on, it would be best if...but that didn't happen either. And a bit after that, I made some decisions and tried to get on with things, but someone interfered with those plans. Later, I made other decisions and made more plans, but again there was interference. So just nothing seems to work out that would allow me to get on with my life, and even on my best day I still have this bad stuff hanging over my head.

About a month before the really bad stuff happened, there was another bad thing that happened. And I had a rough couple of weeks, had some physical problems after that, and just about the time that I started to feel like things were getting better, more bad stuff happened. I've had some health problems since then, and while most of it isn't as bad as it was, it is just always lurking in the background on top of the other bad stuff that I can't seem to get over. The really odd thing is that the week before this was a pretty good week, and while it wasn't my favorite week of all time, it was one of those times when I seriously got to thinking about my life, how it wasn't really what I had wanted it to be, but it wasn't that bad either. And that Saturday was a day that I was thinking how I had a good life, but I was wasting it waiting for things to get better, things that I couldn't fix by myself, so maybe while I was waiting for a time when those things might be better I should concentrate on just things that I enjoyed that I could do without anyone else's help.

And then Sunday there was a really bad flood, and more bad stuff happened later. Wouldn't it be nice if I could just go back to that Saturday. Physically, I can't do that. But if I was given a choice to mentally go back to that Saturday and forget everything that happened after that, would that be a good idea? I don't have a career, or even a job right now, so that's not a problem. I don't have children or even pets right now, so that's not a problem. I'd forget more than two years of my life, the good and the bad, but they were the worst two years of my life. On the best day when I'm on a trip and having a good time, I'm never really at peace like I was before, and I probably never will be again.

If the memories of the last two years were gone, and I felt better and had a good life again, what would I lose? Two Halloween parties and two Christmas seasons would be gone. I have taken four college classes of ceramics and sculpture, and three of those were in the last two years. I was just starting to knit, and I'd have to learn some of that over again. I'd forget two years worth of books and movies. I'd forget about trips that I've taken and people I'd met. I'd forget that my friend J died a few months ago. I'd forget my friend from the great white north.

If that were all, then it would probably be okay. Christmas was good, and I especially thought so of Halloween, but they would be better in the future if I were my old self. I like ceramics, but I liked learning them the first time around and I'd probably like to learn it again, and relearning the knitting wouldn't be as much fun, but I might still do it anyway. Getting to see the good movies of the last two years for the first time again would be a good thing, as would reading the books, though that would take time. I liked the trips, but they are places that I could go again, and be in a better mood and maybe enjoy them more. My friend J would still be dead regardless of my memory, and I'd known for a long time that he could just die at any time.

I had met my friend from the great white north before the bad stuff happened, but we didn't really get to be friends for a while. I think that if I did forget the past two years, he wouldn't, and we would both still like the same things and would end up being friends again. So that wouldn't be so bad. But even if it really meant a choice between having my friend and being a whole person again, I think that I'd have to choose being a whole person again. If it could really work that way, I think it's just too important to get the rest of my life back even if I had to give up parts of life that I like now.

But I don't think that I'd ever get a choice like that. Even if there was a way to safely remove that part of my memory, I don't think that I could do it. I think that without the memories of the last two years, I think that I might do something stupid and maybe end up having things just as bad or maybe worse than they are now.

For one thing, since that Sunday I have had health problems. A lot of little things, but added together they tend to upset things a great deal. I don't want to get into anything too personal, and I don't want to get into the unpleasantness of UTIs and yeast infections and such. So probably the best example I could talk about would be the high blood pressure. That, and a bunch of my little health problems are probably stress related. Like most people, when I started to get older, I started to hear about watching my weight and cholesterol and stuff like that, and I was a bit concerned about becoming a diabetic if I didn't cut back on the junk food, but I was not ever in any danger of anything blood pressure related. I'd always been told how good it was. And then suddenly it was up twenty points, and maybe sometimes it was up thirty points. My own personal theory was that my blood pressure was up temporarily because I was upset about the other problems, and the high blood pressure problem would go away if I could just deal with the other stuff. My doctor at the time did not agree and gave me some meds. She did little to help me with the stuff I was actually worried about. She would upset me by trying to talk me out of tests that I wanted, by asking over and over again why I thought something was a problem and why I needed the tests. The questions were embarrassing enough the first time, and it really upset me to keep having to tell her over and over again. In the end I did not get all of the tests I asked for, I had to go somewhere else and pay extra for some of the tests, and I really didn't feel like I was going to get better under her care. So what happened with the blood pressure is that when I would test it myself at a drugstore or something it wasn't as good as it had been before, but it wasn't really bad either, but it went up when it was taken at a clinic or something, and then it really went up a lot whenever I had to deal with this particular doctor.

I thought that pretty much confirmed my suspicions that it was temporary, that my blood pressure was going up because I was worrying about other health problems, and this doctor was just making my pressure go up even more because she wasn't listening to me. The medicine she gave me for the high blood pressure didn't seem to be doing anything, and I quit taking it. A year later, I still have some health problems, but not as much as I did, and when I had my last checkup my blood pressure was back to the healthy level it was before all this happened.

But I still have to check it once in a while, just to be sure. So what if I forgot the last two years? While a lot of my health problems seem to be stress-related, and those would probably get better, what if some of them didn't get better or got worse cause I didn't know to check something? What if the high blood pressure comes back because of something else and I don't remember that I have to check it and I have a stroke or something?

What if something bad happened to a person and after that the person was paranoid or couldn't do his job or couldn't go on a date or was terrified of going out after dark or couldn't even leave the house. If you could remove the memory of that week or so when the bad thing happened, would the person get better? If something happened to make a person paranoid or terrified of the dark or whatever, and the memory of the thing itself is removed, but they still remember that something happened to make them paranoid or terrified of the dark, do they recover or does it still worry them that something did happen to them even if they don't really remember the thing itself?

We've all had things happen that we wish hadn't happened. And we think that if we had been armed with the right information at the right time, we could have prevented it or at least limited whatever trouble might come after. If you remove your memories of a certain block of time so that you forget something bad, would you just end up getting into that same mess again? And in a way, all knowledge is power, so if you remove your memories of a certain time, might you deprive yourself of something else that you might need in the future? If you are in a terrible car wreck, and you had a painful recovery, maybe you could just forget the time you were in the wreck and the hospital stay and such that followed, and not remember anything until you are well again. What if while you were recovering you watched the news and heard about some scam and saw a drawing of a suspected serial killer, and you forget that period of time, and after you are well you fall for some scam that everyone else knew about, or you went on a date with someone who's picture you should have recognized?

So, for the most part I don't think it is going to work out even after we have the technology to do this. And we have already seen how unsafe some of our current medical treatments are, so we can only imagine that future ones will not always work properly either.

Still, one can't help wishing it could somehow work.

And now back to our regularly scheduled program

Well, I know that it must seem like I've spent the last four days doing nothing but blogging and listening to people vent about a certain convention being canceled, but that really isn't the case. All things considered, I guess that I've had a pretty good weekend. Nothing really special, but I did enjoy most of it.

We watched Fringe. Bad Robot. Good show. Enough said.

Okay, so I'll probably come back later and write another post about Fringe, but for now I'll just say that I think I'm going to like the show. We also managed to go and see both The Incredible Hulk on Friday and The Happening on Sunday. I should post about both movies, but it will have to be later.

And we watched the usual stuff like Doctor Who and of course the new Battlestar Galactica. It seems strange now that we had time to do all that in addition to going out a few times and actually doing just a little bit of shopping. And that's just the stuff that we did together. While he was out I watched most of the last half of The Tripods (though episodes 10 and 25 seem to be missing), and the first half of Chocky. And I read Heroes: Saving Charlie. I used to read all of the time, but now it seems to be a rare thing. I don't have the patience for it, or I can't concentrate, and most annoying is the situation with my eyesight. I have to remove my glasses and read with the book just so, right in front of my face. Not that I didn't often read with the book pretty close to my face anyway, but now I have no choice in the matter, and if I move the book more than an inch or move my head to get into a more comfortable position, I can't see well enough to read.

So with all that I didn't manage to do anything useful like cleaning or sorting. Actually, I did, just not that much. Getting this mess under control rather seems like trying to move a mountain with a teaspoon. But I've decided to go ahead and move the mountain a teaspoon at a time, but mainly just during commercial breaks. I only get a little bit done, but I was only ever just getting a little bit done anyway, and this way I do something everyday and don't just get frustrated with the whole thing and give up. So when I remember the events of the day I don't have a mental picture of trying to do the impossible and doing a lot of work and getting no results from it, I remember watching The Tripods or some movie I haven't seen since I was a kid or reading something, and doing a bit of work between watching TV or reading chapters. And then at the end of the week I can actually see where I've gotten something done. It's not much, but it's something. Better than me sitting around all day complaining that it's too hot to do anything.

I've gotten another bag of clothes ready to send to Goodwill. I've boxed up about two-thirds of my video tapes. And I have finally figured out how to properly store a certain odd shaped costume. I'm not sure how old this costume is, but I only wore it the one time, and I think it is pre-9/11. Still, I worked hard on it, and I can't stand the thought of tossing it out. But part of it is an odd shape, and part of it is too big to fit into the 18 gallon storage boxes that most of the other stuff is in. Most of the time it has been in my closet, hanging at an odd angle, and taking up a lot of space. But I couldn't figure out how else to store it. There are different plastic storage containers that it might fit in, but they are so much more expensive than the 18 gallon totes, and of course if I bought one of those it wouldn't stack properly with the 18 gallon totes. And as many times as the place has flooded, I couldn't just put it in a cardboard box. After Christmas I got the idea that maybe the main part of it that didn't fit into the 18 gallon totes would fit in one of those plastic round boxes made for storing wreaths, but that didn't quite work out either. So the costume has been sitting in my closet, at an odd angle, taking up space.

After the incident of seeing the mouse in the closet, I decided to move the costume. And I finally decided that maybe the best thing was to just put it in a long cardboard box and be done with it. I think that I have finally fixed the flooding problem, so it should be okay stored in cardboard, but if not, I'll probably never wear it again anyway and if it is flood damaged I will then at least be able to make myself get rid of it.

So off I went to buy one of those over-sized long cardboard storage boxes, but I couldn't find any. They didn't have any at Target, and they didn't have any at Garden Ridge. And I guess it's been years since I've bought such a thing, so maybe just no one wants them anymore. I wasn't going to waste the day going to different stores looking for boxes. It's waited this long, so it can wait a bit more til I just happen to be in the right store for some other reason.

And then Sunday while we were out, I found a really big cardboard box. It was way too big for my purpose, and it was really too big to do much of anything else with either. But I thought that I'd take it home and cut up the cardboard to use later. And then I thought as long as I was now okay with putting the costume in cardboard, how about trying to make something out of this cardboard. So that's what I did, and it now fits in the closet and hardly takes up any space at all.

Okay, that's not much, but that's something that I've been trying to figure out for like five years and I finally got it done yesterday. I think the plan is going to work.

And a few more thoughts on Fedconusa

One of the vendors who went to Fedconusa has decided to sell Dedcon T-shirts. I'm not going to copy the entire thing, but I will at least copy the contact info at the end of my post, and the included list of other area conventions. I like the idea of this person making money from selling these T-shirts because a.) after the what happened this weekend it would be nice of one of the good guys did make some money, and b.) this is probably someone who used to work at GalaxyFair.

After I wrote my first post about Fedconusa (which I really did not expect to be read by many people other than my regular readers), I was left a comment from a certain Michael Nelson, who is one of the people in charge of our local fan run convention Fencon. He was concerned that people would get Fencon confused with this Fedconusa, since most of us were just saying Fedcon instead of Fedconusa, and Fedcon and Fencon sound a lot alike. So he left me and some other people this comment, and I didn't think that many people would see it on my blog, so I copied it to someplace where I thought that it might do more good.

And I was very surprised at the negative responses. Okay, I don't know those people on those other forums who were accusing Michael of pretending to have a problem so that he could get attention and sell a few more tickets to his convention, so I don't know if that's just the type of behavior that one should expect. But I was really surprised to get negative responses from people that I know. I know people who go to this convention, and come to think of it, I even know a few people who work at Fencon, and I really expected the comment to get more positive responses. But there was actually someone making fun of Michael, saying that the mighty Fedcon has been around for sixteen years and that no one is really going to get Fedconusa confused with his little fan run convention.

Well, I for one had heard of Fencon before, but had never heard of Fedcon. Fedcon is in Europe. I don't know about what goes on in Europe. I know so little about what goes on across the ocean that last week I was pleasantly surprised to find out that twenty years ago a TV show was made based on the novel Chocky by my favorite author John Wyndham. So I'd never heard of Fedcon, and I don't think that it's unreasonable to think that other fans here had never heard of Fedcon, and that we might have heard of our local Fencon, and some people might be confused.

And the other point of ridicule seemed to be that no one could get Fencon confused with Fedconusa. They don't sound anything alike, and Fedconusa has three extra letters. Except that most people weren't saying or writing out the whole Fedconusa. I never heard anyone call it that. For the most part people had shortened it to Fedcon, thinking that they were actually going to a Fedcon run convention, and no was saying Fedconusa until this weekend when the real Fedcon wanted distance from Fedconusa. So Fencon and Fedcon do look alike and sound alike and I have no doubt that people were getting confused and contacting Fencon by mistake. The names are similar, and they are both in the Dallas area, so people get confused. There was no reason to make fun of the people who were confused, and there was no reason to make fun of Michael by saying he was pretending that people were confused to get attention for Fencon.

But while we are on that subject, how about a little attention for fan run cons. They need all that they can get. They usually don't make that much money, and if they do make any money they often take that money and try to have another convention the next year. Fan run conventions are possible because a lot of people volunteer time and effort, sometimes donate artwork and materials for stuff like fliers and websites, etc.... And a few of those people put up a lot of their own money to get the thing started. So if the convention doesn't make enough money, they just don't get that money back. They could be out thousands of dollars. Then what? They put off going to the dentist that year, they cancel their vacation, they don't get to fix the roof that starts to leak, they get behind on their credit card bills, etc.... And they don't have a lot of money to start with, so most of their advertising is usually ads put up at the comic book store and fliers handed out and clubs and other conventions.

It's almost all word of mouth for them, so maybe while we're talking about this stuff, we should talk about fan run conventions for a bit. We used to have something called GalaxyFair, and it was great, but it's gone now. And we used to have something called StellarOccasions, and I loved it, but it's not around anymore either. And there's something called All-Con, which is still around, but a few years ago it took a hit when there was a flood and the hotel roof leaked. So let's hear it for the fan run conventions, and let's hope that we don't lose anymore of them.






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Because I can do it (and partially to mitigate my losses for the weekend) we will be producing a limited edition commemorative t-shirt that says “I got FRAKKED at F(crossed out)DedCon USA! anyone interested in obtaining one of these needs to contact me by Thur 6/19/08 as I’ll be printing and mailing them next weekend. My email is pegasushelp@gmail.com.

The direct link to order our "Commemorative" shirt is http://www.pegasuspublishing.com/I-Got-FRA...rt-p-29357.html

100% Cotton Red Shirt with Black Print.
We came..., the fans came... The hotel threw us out.
Limited Edition T-Shirt. Commemorating the 2008 FEDCON USA debacle wherein an inexperienced under capitalized promoter tried to put on a large scale media convention that was abruptly cut short.

Design ©Pegasus Publishing. All Rights Reserved."

There are a lot of good SF/Fantasy/Anime conventions around the country and particularly in Texas. I would like to hope that the first time attendees who were burned by this unscrupulous promoter to please please give conventions another try. They really are a lot of fun. Here is a small list of DFW area shows. DallasComicCon/SciFiExpo (www.scifiexpo.com); FenCon (www.fencon.org); ConDFW (www.condfw.org); All-Con (www.all-con.org); Project A-Kon (www.a-kon.com); Texas Frightmare Weekend (www.texasfrightmareweekend.com); AnimeFest (www.animefest.org); Portus (www.hp2008.org); Texas FearFest (www.txfearfest.com). And for those of you who travelled up from South Texas I recommend Apollo-Con Jun 27-29 (www.apollocon.org) in Houston.

Scott Merritt
www.PegasusPublishing.com

Since my last post is getting so much attention...

I have a few more words to say about Fedconusa.

I have already mentioned how Aaron Douglas tried to warn fans that he might not actually be at the convention, since he was still waiting on plane tickets and such. The fans who actually got word of this appreciate his efforts, but unfortunately most people showed up at the convention without having any clue that anything was wrong.

The organizers of our local Fencon are really hoping that people do not get them confused with Fedconusa, since when most of us were talking about Fedconusa we shortened it to Fedcon. These are all separate groups. Fedconusa was a one time thing, Fedcon is a respected group in Germany that has been in business for sixteen years, and Fencon is our local Dallas group that has put on an annual convention for about five years. If I remember correctly, past guests of Fencon include David Gerrold, Larry Niven, and S.M.Stirling.

So far, my friends do not have refunds, and are not holding their breaths.

When the stars arrived at the convention and found out that they weren't going to get paid, they stayed anyway.

Anne Lockhart (Sheba from the original Battlestar Galactica) saw the Fedconusa website and saw that she was scheduled to appear. Not having heard how Aaron Douglas and other actors had not been paid or sent plane tickets, etc...she made her own travel plans, thinking that there had been an error and all would be straightened out once she got here. That's right. She paid for her own plane tickets and hotel rooms. Once she got here she found out that she wasn't getting paid and she wasn't getting reimbursed for her travel expenses, but she stayed and signed autographs and such.

A dealer I know didn't arrive at the convention until Saturday morning. About ten minutes after he finished setting up his table, he's told that the convention is canceled and he has to take it all down and leave.

While someone in the main room made the announcement that the convention was being canceled, some of the volunteers hadn't been told, and they were still selling tickets to the convention.

The hotel allowed one convention room to stay in use on Saturday, and most of the stars went there to sign autographs. John Billingsley even continued to honor the Gold Pass and did not charge those people any additional money for autographs, though some of the fans went ahead and paid him anyway. Actors JG Hertzler and Robert O'Reiley found out that the convention was canceled while they were halfway through having their Klingon makeup put on. They finished having the makeup put on and went on with the autograph and photo session. Garrett Wang (Ensign Kim) "stole" a photo, and the Klingons chased him around the room.

Anyway, the actors tried to save the show and see that the fans had a bit of fun. Still, the people who were there are calling it Frak-con or Dead-con.

The Felgercarb has hit the fan

Seems like about a year and a half ago that one of my friends mentioned something called Fedcon. They had heard that Fedcon put on some really nice sci-fi conventions in Europe, and that they were planning something in the Dallas area. Great. But it looked a little expensive for my tastes, and I'm not as into conventions as I once was, but we'll see.

So Fedconusa was having their convention at one of the hotels at DFW airport this weekend. My friends have all been looking forward to this for most of the year. But when I saw it was at the airport I pretty much lost interest. I hate driving in Dallas, and I feel the same about the airport (toll booths and parking fees and I don't know where I'm going and I'll get run over by someone else who drives there on a regular basis.) And I didn't want to spent the money. $45 just for Saturday, $99 for the whole weekend, and of course a couple of my friends wanted the $269 Gold Pass and bought extra tickets for the dinners and such with the stars. I didn't want to part with my $45, and that other stuff was way out of my price-rage. I all but put it out of my mind.

It's been so long since I was really into conventions that I totally forgot to look into the option of volunteering. And I also forgot that we now have a train that goes to the airport. I maybe could have done that if I had thought of it in time. I usually get picked if I volunteer because right now I don't have a job and can work on Friday. Problem is, if you are working the four hours that you want to be doing something at the convention, is it worth the effort for the free ticket that you don't enjoy that much? Sometimes, there is something else in it for the volunteers, like a special arrangement for autographs, so it's usually okay. Sometimes my friends buy the expensive tickets AND volunteer.

This week while I was reading all the emails from my excited friends, I was starting to regret my decision to stay home. But, I figured that a week before the convention was too late to ask about volunteering. I have been out of the loop, somewhat deliberately on my part, and this is what happens sometimes. Don't cry about it, just go on with the original plans of watching movies and cleaning and such for the weekend.

On Thursday, a friend made one last attempt to get me to go to this thing if I wanted to buy a ticket for Saturday. He offered to drive me and everything, if I was up for the party scheduled til 2am. And he doesn't live anywhere near me, so that's a bit of a drive, especially to take me home at 2am. But, no, thanks anyway.

Yesterday I went to see The Incredible Hulk and did some cleaning and some sorting and then watched several episodes of The Tripods. And then I was checking my email, and there's strange things going on at the airport.

People went to buy their Saturday only tickets and were charged $57. The website says $45. There are often different prices for advance tickets and at the door tickets, but if the website says $45 after the convention starts, you'd think that the prices on the website would be the at the door price.

Some of the guests that were scheduled to be there weren't there. Other guests weren't paid. Some guests didn't get their plane tickets. Guests were scheduled, then dropped because of scheduling problems, then put back on the schedule after the time conflicts were resolved, but now they aren't at the convention. The guy in charge of the event is having back problems and is going to the hospital instead of the convention.

A lot of people were going to this convention specifically to see Aaron Douglas, who plays Chief Tyrol on the new Battlestar Galactica. He was one of the guests who was on the schedule and then off and then back on. He was dropped this week, apparently knew nothing about it, and was waiting for plane tickets which never arrived. Here's a quote from Mr. Douglas--

"This is the most unprofessional, egregious behaviour that I have ever seen
displayed. FedconUSA you make Creation look like Shoreleave or Dragoncon,
two of the finest run conventions a fan will ever attend."

Most of my regular readers won't understand, but this is quite a serious insult. I read it and thought that's really bad, but apparently if you've heard Mr. Douglas talk about Creation the insult is meant to be even worse than it first seemed to me. He had more to say, but I won't quote the rest of it. I think that some people will soon be trying to take advantage of Mr. Douglas after something else that he said, and I'm not going to add to the problem by telling anybody else who doesn't already know what he said. Not his fault, and everyone should leave him alone. Besides, he's a guy who likes fans, likes going to conventions, and I think that most everyone who wants to see him or get his autograph or whatever will have many other opportunities to do so.

What else? Yesterday was Friday the 13th, and everyone now says that they should have known better. And it turns out that Fedconusa is not run by the same people as Fedcon in Germany. People were trying to warn the fans since August, but most of them did not get the message. People with dealer tables are losing money, even though I heard that they didn't actually pay to rent the tables. It is still a weekend that they wasted being at a con now filled with unhappy people. Unhappy people do not buy stuff.

Besides the up to $269 that some people paid for Gold Passes, and extra money that they might have spent on dinners with the stars and such, many people have paid for hotel rooms and airplane tickets or spent lots of time and gas driving from other parts of Texas or maybe Oklahoma. If they paid for the actual convention stuff with a credit card, they should eventually get that money back, but the money spent on gas and hotels and such is probably just gone.

So I'm reading the emails of how bad it was yesterday and how volunteers today should be prepared to deal with lots of angry fans and how the convention isn't going well so if you haven't already paid for tickets you should probably just forget it and stay home. And while I'm sitting here reading the emails a few more pop up. The convention has been cancelled.

The convention has been canceled? But it already started.

Then there's a message from the guy in the hospital who is supposed to be in charge of the thing saying that everyone who bought a ticket today is getting their money back, and that it will take some time but the advance tickets will be refunded as well.

That does nothing for the people who spent time and gas, rented hotel rooms, or bought plane tickets.

I'm glad that I ended up staying home. Except for not being able to find the last episode of The Tripods, I think I'm having a pretty good weekend.