Fanboy Scouts has launched a series of Merit Badges for Geeks including achievements for Speedster, Mt. Doom, Tie Fighter Pilot, Away Team, and more.- Privacy in terms of contextual identity. How you present yourself to your friends is not how you present yourself to your colleagues, and what you’re willing to share in each context is going to be different.
- XKCD is probably right about the future of “old-timey” speech. “Forsooth, do you grok my jive, me hearties?” We have a hard enough time getting the mid-twentieth century right, and that’s with people around who lived it!
- Darryl Cunningham debunks the Moon Hoax in comic-strip form.
- The new Kindle looks nice. They’re starting to get to the price/feature/polish point where I’d be tempted. (Well, except for that pesky DRM…) Also, Amazon launched Kindle for Android recently, but I haven’t tried it out. While it will run on Android 1.6, it’s a bit big for my G1 unless I clear out some other apps.
Comic-Con 2010: Thursday – Crowds and Costumes
A busy day of crowds, lines, costumes, DC Comics, Scott Pilgrim, bad science, twisted genres, Naomi Novik, Geoff Johns and more.
The last few years, we’ve driven down to San Diego on Wednesday afternoon and stayed for the entire length of Comic-Con. This year we drove down early Thursday morning.
Getting There
The drive was a lot smoother than I expected, and we didn’t really run into traffic until we passed Oceanside. We made it to our hotel around 10:00, figuring we’d store our luggage, then come back to check in when we could. In a stroke of luck that surprised me even more than the traffic, the hotel had a room available at that hour, and we were able to drop things off and move on to the convention center without worrying about having to come back.
The Sheraton Suites at Symphony Hall isn’t exactly close to the convention center, but you can walk it in about 20-25 minutes. To get a sense of the area, we walked that first trip, spotting signs of the convention along the way: a movie screen being set up in a parking lot. The Scott Pilgrim banner on the Hilton Bayfront. Flynn’s Arcade. The marine layer hadn’t cleared yet, so the walk was quite comfortable (if a bit gloomy).
Finally we arrived at 5th and L, the hub of off-site convention activity — not to mention a serious bottleneck for pedestrian traffic. SyFy had a giant purple balloon, Green Hornet had a car and booth babes, there was the Scott Pilgrim Experience across the street, and people were handing out flyers, cards and promotional comic books everywhere you turned around.
The zombies hadn’t shown up yet as near as I could tell, nor the “religious” protesters, nor the vegan activists, nor the boothless babes promoting gaming sites, nor the pirate band…
Dilemma: Spam or Not?
I hate receiving an email ad from a company that I recognize when I can’t remember for certain whether I signed up for email or not. Did they just reactivate an old list that I’d forgotten, or have they been acting shady, picking up email addresses but not permission?
If it’s an old, forgotten list that I really did sign up for, I should just unsubscribe and have done with it. Reporting them as spam would be irresponsible and would actually make spam filters less reliable.
On the other hand, if they harvested or bought my email address, I should report it as spam…and I shouldn’t trust the unsubscribe link.
Internet Access at Comic-Con
As near as I can tell, there were two main wifi networks at the San Diego convention center this year: “Comic-Con 2010” was open and free…and bogged down. It was enough to post snippets of text one line at a time, but it took forever to start the console for Cover it Live, though, and it wasn’t worth it for uploading photos.
AT&T also had a wireless network, but it required you to either be a customer already or buy access. One of the perks of U-Verse service: free access to AT&T wifi hotspots! Since only paid customers were using it, it was a lot faster. Faster even than our home internet access, in fact.
This was in the lobby, hallways and meeting rooms at the convention center itself. I never really tried to access wifi on the exhibit floor (who has room to sit down, other than people staffing a booth?), and didn’t spend much time on my phone either, except for sending and receiving text messages.
Over at the Hilton, however, access was virtually nonexistent: No wifi as near as I could tell, and even phone access was spotty. I saw people texting in the Indigo Ballroom, but the ones nearby were all on iPhones (AT&T) or Verizon. I had absolutely no T-Mobile signal in that hotel, even though it was perfectly fine everywhere else. Katie had the same problem at Indigo last year, and we were hoping it might have improved. No dice.**
One reason I didn’t worry too much about having constant net access: I spent way too much time last year online. Liveblogging aside, this year I wanted to focus more on actually being there. Last year I posted about 30 messages a day to Twitter. This year it was closer to 10 posts total.
So of course, now I’m spending lots of time after we get back writing things up…online.
*Yes, I know the photo is of a cell phone tower, not a wifi hotspot, but I didn’t take any pictures of wifi routers and this is the next best thing.
**Actually, there was a whole booth full of dice, but it was over on the main floor.
»Full index of Comic-Con posts and photos.
Comic-Con Quotes: Twisting Genres
One of the panels I hit on Thursday was called “Twisting Genres,” and brought in a bunch of authors who had all written books that mixed and matched traditional genres. (western and horror, historical fiction and dragons, etc.) It was essentially the same topic as the “Blurring the Lines of Genre” discussion I saw at Westercon, but with a completely different set of authors who stayed a bit more on-topic (possibly because they had a moderator).
Of course, just because they stayed on topic doesn’t mean they weren’t funny.
Quotes
“Where do you shelve that?” Maryelizabeth Hart on the impact of mixed-genre novels on bookstores.
“I’m part-Australian, and required by law to put Australian content in my book. It was either that or the Sydney Opera House.” — Scott Westerfeld, explaining the presence of a Tasmanian Tiger in the Leviathan Trilogy.
“You have these ideas in your head and they start having sex with each other, and these strange webbed babies come out…” — Daryl Gregory(?) on how genre mash-ups are born.
“Awesome plus awesome does not always equal two awesome. Sometimes it’s an abomination, like a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.” — China Miéville, a few minutes after Naomi Novik cited them as an example of how mixing things does work.
“It’s Dinosaur Love Story!” China Miéville on the classic Hollywood “X+Y” pitch.
Stories
Something that came up at both this panel and the Westercon discussion was that mainstream literature is a genre in itself, with its own sets of rules and expectations. I think it was China Miéville who described it as a genre with a successful thirty-year marketing campaign to convince people that it isn’t a genre.
Justin Cronin explained that he crossed over from mainstream literature when his nine-year-old daughter was terribly concerned that his other books might be boring, so he launched a project with just one rule: it must be interesting. He eventually submitted The Passage under a pseudonym so that his name wouldn’t set up the wrong expectations.
Robert Masello said he once had an editor try to “help” him by explaining that they could take the supernatural elements out of his story and it would work just fine… (Ouch.)
One author had a friend who had written a serious novel with the word “Spices” in the title, and got on a radio show to promote it. The host hadn’t read it, and introduced it as a cookbook. So he spent the next half hour giving out recipes. “Why didn’t you correct him?” “It’ll sell more as a cookbook.”
The question was asked whether there are any two genres that are inherently disastrous. Naomi Novik suggested that no two genres were automatically so. China Miévelle said that his brain immediately responded to that question by trying to think of ridiculous combinations…and then figure out how to write a brilliant book with them.
But yeah, a driver’s manual with an unreliable narrator is probably a bad idea.
»Full index of Comic-Con posts and photos.
Comic-Con Quotes: Epic Fantasy
Quotes from “Once Upon a Time,” a panel at Comic-Con International in which fantasy authors discussed whether epic fantasy requires larger than life heroes.
Brandon Sanderson: “I would say, if Tolkien did it, it’s okay.”
Christopher Paolini: “I write…Mary Sues, and that’s okay.”
Maryelizabeth Hart: “We’re gonna start with Patrick [Rothfuss] so he can’t argue with anyone.”
(later)
Patrick Rothfuss: “I just wanted the opportunity to disagree with myself.”
Megan Whalen Turner on the typical vagueness of prophecies: “What if there was a prophecy that said, ‘The One will come. And he will have a 63% chance of defeating…”
Brent Weeks on the X saves Y structure: “I mean, is there…nobody saves nobody?”
Megan Whalen Turner: “They all die.”
Brent Weeks: “And that’s George Martin.”
Panel held Thursday, July 22, 2010.
»Full index of Comic-Con posts and photos.
Comic-Con Crowd Weaving
Sometimes, weaving through the crowds at Comic-Con is easy.
Sometimes it’s like being herded.
Sometimes it’s like swimming upstream.
And sometimes it’s like playing Frogger, looking for an opening and moving with traffic even though it’s not going in the direction you want.
This being San Diego, perhaps tacking a sail might be more appropriate.
»Full index of Comic-Con posts and photos.