gwalla

I need to be better about updating with stuff I've done reasonably close to when I do it. It's been a week since WonderCon!

I went all three days, but only have pics from Saturday and Sunday. Oh, I brought my camera on Friday...it just refused to turn on! Batteries were fresh too. I was a little put out, since I'd lugged the damned thing to work with me (I work just a few blocks from Moscone Center), and I'd just had it fixed (I just hadn't bothered to try it out since I got it back from the shop, and it'd been too long since then to just bring it back and get it fixed again for free). I borrowed my folks' digital camera for the rest of the weekend

( Dr. Who, Cobra, and Girl Genius )

( Art Adams, Silent Hill, and Cartoon Network graffiti )

( By the gleamin' gates of funky Asgard! )

( lol wut )

( Street Fighter, Star Wars, Mike Mignola, Johnny Depp, and Batty bad girls )

( The Dark Horse panel, plus criticism )

( Violet Incredible, Dan Brereton, Halo, and MST3K )

( Above ground: R2D2, Link, Cassandra Cain, and a monster )

( Boba Fett, Green Hornet, the Clone Wars, Mike Royer, and ROB! VAN! DAM! )

( Boba and Boushh, Gandalf, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon )

( Kurt Busiek, manga maestro Jason Thompson CHARGIN EYE LAZOR, Sergio Aragones and Steve Leialoha )

I also attended the latter half of the DC panel, saw some Bleach, and saw a couple of movies. One was the 3DCG anime Appleseed: Ex Machina. The semi-cell-shaded look took some getting used to, but it was pretty fun. Although it's kind of hard to believe that Deunan is an "unmodified human" when she's pulling off crazy Matrix gun-fu acrobatics. And it's produced by John Woo, so naturally there are flocks of doves everywhere (later it's revealed that the doves are actually robots broadcasting a mind-controlling signal. At this revelation, the entire theater broke out laughing). The other was the animated Justice League: New Frontier, based on Darwyn Cooke's revisionist (but not "superhero deconstructionist") take on the Silver Age DCU. I missed most of the first half, but what I saw was pretty good (I don't think there was any need for Hal Jordan to be abducted by a UFO to find Abin Sur rather than just being led to him by the ring, because blowing up the room he was in makes his secret identity a little harder to justify, but then by the end it seems like a lot of folks, including Rick Flagg of all people, know his ID, so it hardly matters). Both are worth checking out, JL:NF more than Appleseed (unless you're up for some fairly mindless explodification).

And to sum up, here's all the stuff I got:

( Con haul )

But it was long and probably not that interesting to anybody who wasn't already into it. So, in a nutshell: it was awesome, I had a great time, caught up with people I hadn't seen for a while and made some new friends, got my ass kicked by a man in his 60s, learned a lot, and was really tired by the end.

Now with that out of the way, an awesome video by The Avalanches (no, it's not Frontier Psychiatrist):

Early tomorrow morning I will be off to Ohio to be thrown about like a rag doll by men in pyjamas. Since I'm not going to risk having my laptop mistaken for a bomb, I will be sans intarwebs until I get back Sunday evening.

So, in the meantime, I leave you with an image to ponder in my absence:

Seen at the giants game last Friday:

Dear Jenny
Will you
marry me?

Not too bad. Then the second screen:

By the way:
NO
is not an option
- Jose

Ohh...kayyy...

I wonder if she knows him?

Tonight I managed to slap myself in the eye with a pho noodle covered in spicy broth.

In related news, a bean sprout up the nose is a potent reminder of the importance of stereoscopic vision.

Starting to put together my new PC, I found that a bunch of the wires to the front panel are wound around a circular magnet. Anybody know what that's about? Just for storage? I'm a bit leery of having a magnet hanging near my hard drives...

Sometimes I feel like people take everything too seriously. Then I see somebody drive by in a car covered in Legos, and I'm reminded of why I like this place.

Today sucked mightily. I'm in book print this week, which normally I don't mind, but the books I'm getting seem to be a bad batch and keep getting mangled in the printers. The men's room is closed due to it catching on fire over the weekend. Also, a fire alarm got pulled today and we had to evacuate for a bit. No fun.

I think it's to make up for the rather awesome weekend I just had. On Friday night I went to the San Francisco Symphony to hear Michael Tilson Thomas conduct a few Stravinsky pieces and one Takemitsu piece. MTT has a reputation as a great interpreter of Stravinsky, and he's one of my favorite composers, so it was a nearly ideal opportunity to finally check out Davies Hall and the SF Symphony. I caught the pre-concert talk, which didn't really help me understand what was going on later, but was still enjoyable. Someone apparently had a heart attack or something like it right after the talk, and someone actually shouted out "Is there a doctor in the house?" I never thought I'd hear that said seriously. Given the absence of EMTs in the lobby, I think it turned out okay.

The performance did not disappoint. The first half was two Stravinsky pieces: the Symphonies for Winds and the short ballet Apollo (not staged). Both were great, but Apollo really stood out. After the intermission was Fantasma/Cantos by Takemitsu and Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms. The piece by Takemitsu is for clarinet solist and orchestra, and the soloist was Richard Stoltzman, for whom it was written. The piece really didn't do much for me—it relies on big washes of sound, while I tend to prefer pieces where it feels like every note counts—but I did like Stoltzman's clarinet tone, which almost felt jazzy in places (I was not terribly surprised to read in his bio on the program that he had done some work with jazz artists). The Symphony of Psalms involved the SF Symphony Chorus as well as the orchestra, and was dazzling. The second movement is a double fugue between chorus and orchestra!

Then on Sunday I took my dad to see Dave Brubeck playing at the Masonic Auditorium as part of the SFJazz series. Dave is looking a little shaky these days (he's 86!) and his voice is cracking, but he can still play piano like anything. He played two sets: one with his current quartet, and one with a big band. His quartet is very cool: his saxophonist doubled on flute for one piece, his drummer can pound out some great rhythms, and his bassist played with a bow for one piece. The big band included his quartet as well as additional saxes, brass, and a percussionist (marimba, glockenspiel, and miscellaneous untuned percussion, I think). I didn't catch the titles for the quartet set. The big band played, among other things, his Theme to Mr. Broadway (for a TV show that had the misfortune to go up against The Man From U.N.C.L.E. in its heyday) and expanded arrangements of Take Five and Blue Rondo a la Turk. They also played a fairly recent piece titled Elementals. It's based on a simple heartbeat rhythm and the melodic motif A B C, and from there branches out into a Gregorian "chant" (instrumental), a Bach-style chorale, polyrhythm, polytonality, and swing, and finally ends up in a Schoenbergian twelve-tone form. Fantastic stuff. They ended with a version of Take the "A" Train.

After that we went to Absinthe for cocktails and chatted about current events, philosophy, education, etc. over our drinks and desserts of fruit and cheese.

WonderCon started on Friday, but I didn't go, since work and gym conflicted. I came kind of late on Saturday, but I don't feel like I missed anything—none of the early panels really grabbed me. I didn't go to any panels, actually, and just hung out in the dealer room spending money and getting sketches.

The dealers room was very good to me. Just about the first thing I found was a booth selling old comics, where they had a table of random issues they were selling for $5 each (not bad at all for vintage stuff in still-readable condition). We're not talking Action Comics #1 here, but there was some stuff that at the very least would be fun to post on scans_daily. I picked up a Silver Age issue of Action Comics in which Superman goes up against a criminal made of kryptonite, an issue of Blackhawk in which the Blackhawks (a WW2 flying team) fight a magician who shoots himself into the water with a cannon, an issue of Giant Size Man-Thing (hee hee!), an issue of Dial H For Hero where Robby Reed turns into three bizarre creatures, and an issue of Where Monsters Dwell featuring Kirby art. At another booth I got some old weird DC stuff: Anthro #2 (a caveman hero), Star Hunters, and DC Super Stars of Space (a collection of reprinted adventures of Adam Strange, Captain Comet, Tommy Tomorrow, and SPACE CABBY!).

Then I found what I was looking for: most of the DC Challenge maxi-series. It's missing a couple of issues from the middle, and the last two, but I'd never been able to find any issues before (and I looked at the last Comic-Con!). I'm looking forward to reading this silliness. The samples on scans_daily are just too awesome.

Got a sketch of Nocturne by Michael Ryan. It's beautiful.

After some ships-passing-in-the-night hijinx, I caught up with Shaenon Garrity and bought signed copies of Narbonic volumes 2 and 3, and chatted for a while. She agrees that Fin Fang 4 should be an ongoing, and told me that the original pitch was for a miniseries which at one point was to involve a Stan Lee clone with hypnotic powers. God I wish they'd gone through with that. I got vol. 3 signed by Phil Foglio, too, who did the bonus story. From Phil I got a few cloisonne pins (why does nobody else sell these? I love 'em), volume 1 of Girl Genius, and a copy of Dealer's Choice: The Complete Guide to Saturday Night Poker (which he illustrated). Both books were signed, and I got a sketch of Agatha. Also, since he collects poker variants, I told him about Crosstown Traffic.

Caught up with Chuck Whelon and bought a book from him. I left my sketchbook with him while I wandered around Artists Alley, and when I came back he'd filled the page with a huge and very detailed cartoon dragon! Chuck is awesome. Read his comic.

Bought the new K Chronicles collection and the new Marginal Prophets album from Keith Knight. Got a sketchfrom him, too...of his K Chonicles alter ego riding a milk bottle (captioned "don't ask").

At the Oni Press booth I got a sketch of Pandora from Death Jr. by Ted Naifeh, and bought his comics Polly and the Pirates and Courtney Crumrin and the Night Things. Good stuff.

And one booth I got DVDs of Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death (the Rowan Atkinson parody), Wild Wild Planet (partly just to impress my dad, who still repeats his favorite line from it, "look out for those gadgets on their chests!" said regarding a bunch of buxom space amazons), and Light Years (a French animated sci-fi film directed by the guy who did Fantastic Planet, with an English script by Isaac Asimov and a whole bunch of famous people in the voice cast before that was common). At another I got a bootleg 4-DVD set of the early 1980s Incredible Hulk cartoon, which I remember watching once on video way back in the day (on Betamax!).

Con closed at 7. Got beer & dinner at the ThirstyBear brew pub/tapas bar (Golden Hallucination ale is good, Menage a Frambois not so great, tortilla española really good, fried calamari too salty, olive tapenade for bread tasty). Then home.

Going back tomorrow (er...today. How'd it get this late?)

Looks like my decision has been made for me. The Roky show is sold out.

Strangely, this makes me feel better. It's out of my hands, so I won't regret my decision.

Did see the documentary on him tonight. It was very good. I did know that he was sent to the psychiatric hospital for marijuana possession, but I didn't now that he'd already had a psychotic break and been diagnosed as schizophrenic before that point, or that he was originally sent to minimum-security hospitals but was sent to the high-security one because his girlfriend kept helping him escape to her place to drop acid. Also, Roky comes by his crazy naturally: his entire family is messed up beyond belief. Even the most outwardly stable-seeming of them, his youngest brother Sumner, is definitely damaged goods.

Had beer & snausages with a friend in the Mission afterwards. Then home and to bed.

This Sunday I found out that one of my favorite songwriters, Roky Erickson, will be performing in San Francisco this Thursday. AIUI, he doesn't tour very much, so this is a rare opportunity. Unfortunately, Thursday is Game Night for me & my friends. Normally I'd just skip game night, but we didn't game last week and I'll be skipping it for sure next week (to see Night of the Lepus as part of the Parkway Theater's Thrillville b-movie series with some friends from work). So that's three weeks down, two of which my character* won't be leveling up with the other characters, which would put him pretty far behind, and he's already one of the weaker party members. And, well, I've kind of been fiending for some D&D action (I'm not proud). Either way I'm going to regret my decision.

Oh well. I'll be seeing a documentary on Roky tomorrow night, and I can make up my mind then.

*Kamandi, a Wild Elf scout. It's a prehistoric D&D campaign. Dungeons & Dinos!

This year's haul:

• Joe Satriani's "Is There Love In Space" album
• A classical CD including a piece by Yardumian, who is awesome
  
• The Best American Comics 2006, edited by Harvey Pekar
• The Spirit Archives vol 1
• Supreme: The Story of the Year trade paperback, which collects the first part of Alan Moore's run on Image Comics' Superman pastiche, turning him from a "grim badass '90s hardcore" Superman-as-insufferable-asshole to a kind of paean to the silliness and unseriousness of the Silver Age Superman.
• Fearless and The Big Lebowski on DVD
• A framed poster I've wanted for years, a book cover titled "An Introduction to Error Analysis: The Study of Uncertainties in Physical Measurements". The illustration is a black-and-white photo of an old steam locomotive having crashed out of the second story of a building, with the engine nose-down on the pavement outside.
• and of course a bunch of chocolates, candies, and little knick-knacks in my stocking
  

I got my dad a bottle of Old Potrero rye whiskey (there's a funny story about that I probably should have posted last week when it happened, but eh). Didn't realize it was the rye when I got it, since I knew he liked the whisky, but it turns out he likes rye and hasn't had any in a while, so it was a hit all the same. For my mom I got a portable DVD player (actually, my dad is the one who bought it, since I don't have a Costco card, but I'm paying him back). She's happy with it too and can't wait to try it out. I feel like I did all right with my gift-giving this year.

We had our traditional Christmas dinner. We started off with shrimp cocktails, then the main course was rare roast beef, yorkshire pudding (made with the beef fat), stuffed mushrooms, and creamed spinach decorated with grated egg yolk and toast stars. For dessert we had trifle. This year's was made with sherry, cherry brandy, and morello cherry jelly and candied cherries from Fortnum & Mason, obtained on my mom's last trip to England.

I hope you all had merry Christmases or equivalents as well!

Had an appointment with a personal trainer today (one session is free with gym membership*). It went pretty well. He showed me some good exercises (I'll be lucky if I can remember more than a couple though) and gave me some valuable pointers on how to use the seated row, lateral pull-down, and counterweight pull-up machines (turns out I'd been doing it totally wrong). Nice guy. I'm considering springing for a series of sessions, to build up a routine I can work on, but dear jeebus it's expensive.

Anyway, after that and about a half hour on the elliptical trainers, I went to the locker room to wash up and change into my street clothes...and discovered I'd forgotten my combination. I ended up having to go to the front desk and borrow the lock clippers to bust it off. I feel like a complete tard. Afterwards I went stright to Walgreen's and bought a new lock with a key.

*The first one is always free...

Hey animal_co

( Don't you wish you had some of this right now? )

"You need to be baptised in Clorox, my child."

I think it was an insult. Not entirely sure though.

Tired

Photos later

Sleep now

Well, I shall be leaving for San Diego Comic Con shortly. Of course, this means I will most likely be netless (horrors!) for about a week. I'll see some of you down there, and talk to the rest later!

Try not to break anything while I'm gone!

False alarm. I had put in for Wednesday off. For some reason I'd gotten it into my head afterwards that the drive down started on Wednesday night, however. So I was just having a brainfart. Scared the hell out of myself.

In other news, there is a new addition to our family!



Her name is Godiva. Isn't she adowaboo?

The cell phone camera doesn't do her justice.

I just received a Christmas card and gift from craziesunshine!

An It's Walky! soundtrack. 2 CDs! It is MADE OF AWESOME.

Thanks, Maggie!

I'd been wanting to see a live taiko performance for a long time, so when I found that the S.F. Taiko Dojo was selling tickets to the U.S.-Japan Taiko Festival I snapped up a few when I went to the Cherry Blossom Festival last weekend. So this Saturday I took my folks to it, and had a blast

Taiko, if you're not aware, is a Japanese form of ensemble drumming. It also includes some elements of dance, with stylized swings of the drumsticks, and players sometimes moving from drum to drum. It had actually become neglected in its country of origin (it was traditionally an art of the lower classes, and therefore never gained the esteem and preservational interest given to, say, the koto), until grandmaster Seiichi Yahata moved to San Francisco and founded the S.F. Taiko Dojo, basically rescuing the art form from destruction. The S.F. Taiko Dojo's touring and advocacy rekindled interest in taiko in Japan, and since then many groups have been formed, including some who tour worldwide such as Kodo and Soh Daiko. It uses a wide array of drums and percussion instruments, including a pipe-like cylindrical bell, a marimba-like instrument, frame drums, and small tom-tom-like drums, but is most closely associated with very large drums: an ensemble will typically have several kettledrum-sized drums, and a very large two-headed drum that frequently takes center stage and can be played by two people at once. A taiko group going full-tilt can make one hell of a noise.

First up was Akita Tensho Taiko, an all-female(!) taiko group from Akita Prefecture. They were quite good. Then the S.F. Taiko Dojo did a very high-energy set of three pieces, including a new composition by grandmaster Seiichi Tanaka, and a Japanese-style lion dance by a lion dance master (who was a riot to watch). I was a little disappointed that they didn't do their big number, Tsunami. After an intermission, they had a performance by asian new age superstar Kitaro on bamboo flute backed by synthsizer. The flute playing was good but over-amplified, and overdrive did not improve the tone. The synth was better when it sounded like an asian string instrument rather than generic synth washes. Part of that set included additional backing by Yahata on a frame drum and the lion dancer on Buddhist bells, and a butoh dancer. That part, frankly, nearly put me to sleep. The dancer had a neat costume and makeup, at least. After that, the Taiko Dojo returned for a final piece, which was Tsunami. I should have realized that they weren't done since the big drum was on the side of the stage but had not yet been used. They dedicated the performance to the victims and survivors of recent natural disasters, including of course the hurricanes in the gulf states, the south asian tsunami, and earthquakes in the middle east. It absolutely brought down the house. Even Kitaro got a guest solo on the big drum—while his movements were clearly not as graceful as the regular drummers, his sense of rhythm was surprisingly good, and he really pounded that thing. I didn't know he had it in him. Afterwards, the performers were given plaques commemorating the event (although the Akita group did not come out for theirs for some reason). While leaving the theater, my dad commented that Tsunami made him want to "tear something down or build something up". It made me want to go to a taiko group and take classes, because it looks like a blast.

I thought that the performance was going to end at 10, but fortunately the Cherry Blossom Festival schedule was wrong about it and it ended earlier, which gave us time to get some dinner (theater popcorn doesn't cut it). We went to a Juban, a Japanese BBQ (actually pretty indistinguishable from Korean BBQ) place on the ground floor of the Kinokuniya building. The food was excellent, capping off a great night of entertainment.

Sunday morning I got up early (well, early for a Sunday), still unsure whether I wanted to go to the final day of the Cherry Blossom Festival or to the first ever Language Creation Conference at Cal. I planned to go to the conference, stay for maybe the first talk, then take BART to SF and see the parade, and finally BART back and catch the last bit of the conference. However: I'd stupidly left my camera on and drained the batteries, and no place carrying that kind of battery was open that early; it was rather dreary out, which made the parade seem a lot less appealing; that plan would have involved spending a lot of time I could have been at either event riding around on or waiting for public transit, which seemed like a waste; I'd probably miss the kendo performance anyway; and frankly the first couple of talks were so interesting that I didn't want to leave. So I wrote off the Cherry Blossom Festival parade and just spent the whole day at the conlang con. I don't regret it, either (there's always next year for the festival—but I do really want to see it sometime).

The real highlights of the conference were Sally Caves (creator of Teonaht, and also Star Trek character Reginald Barclay) talking about conlanging and the Internet, Ithkuil creator John Quijada (who looks like he could be The Rock's older, less-athletic brother) talking about cognitive linguistics and how ideas from it can be applied to conlanging, David "too many conlangs to name" Peterson's introduction to word-and-paradigm morphology (which more or less abandons the entire concept of morphemes in favor of relations between words), and lojbanist John E. Clifford's introduction to the concept of semantic primes. Clifford's talk was quite a bit more interesting than I expected, since I don't normally mess with philosophical languages, but he made a good case for its applicability to all conlangs, especially with regards to teaching them. Matt Pearson's talk on cases and argument structure—actually more on using cases for things other than just labelling the participants in an event, through split ergativity and such—was also interesting but I was running out of gas by that point. All of the talks were good, really. The only problem was that Jeff Burke, who was scheduled to give a talk on diachronic linguistics and conlanging (which sounded interesting) never showed and was unreachable on his cel phone.

Quijada's and Peterson's talks were particularly interesting, because the things they were talking about were totally new to me, and were about things going on "under the hood" of language, which among other things make sense of seeming irregularities or at least make them easier to deal with. For example, Quijada talked about how English uses the preposition "out" for both "the fire went out" and "the sun came out", even though they have opposite results (after the one, you cannot see the fire, but after the other, you can see the sun), and why. And while I'm still rather attached to morphemes (and have been known to invoke the dreaded "null morpheme" on occasion), I can see how word-and-paradigm can in some cases make things easier to explain. I'll have to play around with it a bit. It helps that both of them are very engaging public speakers.