No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons (Re-reloaded)

This whole writing retreat thing is stranger than I remember it. This is the approach to my bedroom.  My bedroom door is the pale green thing with the poster taped across it:

For those of you with teensy monitors, here’s a closeup of the sign outside said approach:

Yes, you read that right.  My bedroom is [...]

I’ve always had ambivalent feelings about Polaris. Formerly “Toronto Trek”, one of the huger local cons, it changed its name a few years back and started featuring sf novelists in an attempt to expand into the literary end of the sf pool. Their media roots have always remained front and center, though. [...]

If you’ve noticed the new “Coming Attractions” element on the sidebar (which only renders properly if you insert its code into the middle of the calendar elements, for some reason — some day I really gotta figure out this php stuff from scratch instead of just poking it to see what happens), you may have [...]

Back in Frankfurt for a couple of days (no, don’t get your hopes up— I’m not), and am too wiped after the flight to either check my rss feeds or venture out into my temporary neighborhood.  So here instead are some pictures from my permanant one:

That last picture is courtesy of one Emma Sweet Rossiter, [...]

Last of my panels: Fermi/Drake, which, despite its Disneyfied title— and despite being held at 11am on the last bloody day of the con— was so jam-packed we had to move to a larger room halfway through the session.  It was the panel on which I talked the least, and learned the most.  I’m trying [...]

…being one of my favorite quotes of the con so far, courtesy of Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman during an 80-minute Q&A on how science fiction led him into economics.  The night before, a couple thousand of us got to be flies on the wall for another hour-and-a-half free-form conversation between Krugman and Charlie Stross.
You gotta [...]

People of Colour Meet & Greet.  Do you identify as a person of colour (racial minority, nonwhite, not of European ancestry, mixed race, etc.)? Come meet other fans of colour on Friday at 11:00 by the Programme area near Registration; we’ll leave at 11:15 and go someplace to eat, talk, and just hang out. All [...]

Okay.  Valve and Tull t-shirts packed, technical pdf’s lined up for reading en route, computers synched.  Next time you hear from me, it’ll either be from Worldcon or after (depending on whether I can find some spare bandwidth— am I the only person who finds it outrageous that every cheap-ass Motel 6 on the planet [...]

Quick informal survey here.  I’m a bit undecided about what to choose for my Worldcon reading, and since I’ve only got twenty minutes in the spotlight I don’t want to spend a chunk of it polling those attended (especially since the majority of them probably aren’t there for me anyway).  So I thought I might [...]

So.  Montreal.  Next week.  Worldcon.  That thing where you spend some of your time on panels; more of your time feeling guilty about all the other panels you should be attending if you could just get your ass off the barstool; and hardly any of your time sleeping (well, except in your panels).  I guess [...]