WonderCon day zero

I flew out to Anaheim for WonderCon today. After a fairly lengthy trip out here, I’m now happily eating chips & hummus in my hotel room and winding down for the day. Adjusting to Pacific time is going to be a little hard, I think. I got up at 4:30am Eastern time today, and I’m feeling like I want to go to bed right now, but it’s only 6pm Pacific, so I think I need to at least try to stay awake until 8 or 9, if I can.

A bunch of little things went right today, so that helped. The Uber driver for my trip to the airport showed up on time. I got through security at the airport pretty quickly. (Though I got a rather intrusive “inside the waistband” screening today after something about my ass looked suspicious on the scanner.) The flight itself was pretty smooth. (Though it took off an hour late.) The hotel I’m in is pretty nice. And I got a nice falafel wrap for dinner from a place that’s right around the corner from hotel, and will probably be my go-to dinner spot for the rest of the con.

I think I learned some lessons about my limitations when I went to Redmond on business last year. That was the first time I’d been on a trip to the west coast in several years. This time, I took my Claritin with me, so I can hopefully avoid allergy problems. And I took some melatonin, in the hope that it’ll help me sleep. And I have some Breathe Right strips, and Flexall, and Advil. So I hope all that will get me through.

I took a walk to the convention center this afternoon, to make sure I knew where it was. It’s only a ten minute walk from my hotel. There were a few people milling around , since they were open for badge pickup today. (I got mine in the mail, so I’m all set on that already.) I’d never been to the Anaheim Convention Center before. It’s pretty big. Not San Diego big, but still pretty big. And I’m pretty sure the con uses the whole thing. So WonderCon is definitely a lot bigger than it was the last time I went, back when they were in San Francisco.

I’m looking at the panel list for tomorrow, and there’s a few really good ones. The one I’m most interested in is the Mark Evanier & Sergio Aragones panel. I’m also hoping to get to Scott Shaw’s Oddball Comics panel. These are both panels that have existed, in some form or another, for 20 years or more, at SDCC and/or WonderCon. (So, yeah, I’ve got a little nostalgia going on. I’ll try to find something current to get interested in too, to balance it out.)

So I guess that’s about enough incoherent rambling for today. I was mostly writing this to kill time, to be honest. I’ve managed to kill about an hour, so that’s something. Now I just need to read or watch TV for an hour or two, then I can go to bed.

C2E2

In my post about WonderCon yesterday, I mentioned that Marvel didn’t seem to have much of a (comics-related) presence planned. Now that I’m looking at the news coming out of C2E2 this weekend, I guess it’s because they’ve got a lot of stuff going on there instead. They made some (relatively) big announcements there.

I’ve never seriously considered going to C2E2. It’s run by the same people who run NYCC, so it’s similar to that convention, only farther away and in a city that’s generally colder than it is here. I’ve been to Chicago, and I don’t have anything against it, but, in March, I’d rather be in Anaheim, where it’s going to be in the 70s, rather than Chicago, where it’s currently in the 40s. It’s probably a great convention to go to if you’re already in (or near) Chicago.

more Apple stuff

Since this post in December, I’ve replaced my iPhone and Watch, but I’m still limping along with my five-year-old iPad Air. I had been considering buying a 6th gen 9.7″ 128 GB iPad, since Amazon has been selling them new at a $100 discount. (Still on sale at $329, as of this morning.) But I knew that new ones were coming, so I waited.

The new 10.5″ iPad Air is tempting, and I’ll probably buy one, but I’m not sure. The 64 GB version is $500, and the 256 GB version is $650, so that’s a lot more than the discounted 9.7″ one. (And there’s no 128 GB option.)

I’m also starting to think about buying a pair of AirPods. I’ve resisted the urge to get these, or any Bluetooth headphones, so far, but I’m tempted now. The two things that are still stopping me are the (probably non-existent) cancer risk and the short battery life (along with the impracticality of replacing the batteries). So I’m still a bit reticent about buying a pair of these expensive little things if they’re only going to last for two years before the battery dies.

Either way, I’m going to wait on any new purchases until after I get back from WonderCon. It would have been nice to have a new iPad for the six-hour flights to/from California, so I could spend that time reading comics. I can probably use the old iPad for a couple of hours, but I’m pretty sure the battery wouldn’t last through the whole flight. (Which is fine, since I have more than enough stuff to read on my Kindle, which will have no problem lasting through a six-hour flight, assuming I remember to put it in airplane mode.)

Getting ready for WonderCon

I’m leaving for WonderCon on Thursday, so I need to do a little bit of prep this weekend. I’ve gone through the schedule and picked out some stuff that I’m interested in. WonderCon is using some third-party system called “Sched”, so I had to register an account with them, and go through their interface to create my “schedule”. As these things go, it’s not that bad, and signing up for it doesn’t seem to have opted me in to anything horrible. I took a quick look at their TOS and privacy pages, and I guess they’re not too bad? Anyway, the old days of printing out a PDF and going over with it a highlighter are gone, I guess. (That was so much simpler…)

Here’s an article with some coverage of the TV and movie panels at the con. I’m interested in a few of those, but not necessarily the big “blockbuster” ones. And here’s an article about DC’s plans for the con. I’ll probably go to one or two of those panels. And here’s one more, about Marvel’s plans (mostly just the TV stuff). I might go to the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and/or Cloak & Dagger panels, if it’s convenient. (I’m not interested enough in them to wait in a long line though.)

It doesn’t look like Marvel is doing much at the con, outside of the TV stuff. I’m not seeing any comic book panels from Marvel on the schedule at all. DC has a few, mostly related to Batman’s 80th, and a “Meet the Publishers” panel with Jim Lee and Dan DiDio. So that kind of works out for me, since I’m not currently reading any Marvel books, and I am reading a handful of DC books, including a few Batman family books.

I’m glad to see some old familiar favorites on the panel list, including a few Mark Evanier panels, like the Mark & Sergio one, Cartoon Voices, Quick Draw, Cover Story, and a Jack Kirby tribute panel. I think he did all of those at the last WonderCon I went to, in 2008, and they were all great. And I just followed a link on Mark’s site to the WonderCon Quick Guide, which is a PDF including schedule grids that I can print out and go over with a highlighter, so now we’ve come full circle. I should spend more time looking at the Toucan blog today, since there seem to be a few things on there that I’ve missed.

SXSW 2019 and streaming music

I’m not paying a lot of attention to SXSW this year, but I’ve run across a few references to it. NPR has a good bit of coverage, which can be found here, along with their Austin 100 playlist. They used to make that available for download as a big file of MP3s, but this year, it’s just out there as a streaming playlist, on Spotify or Apple Music or a couple of other streaming services. I’m a little disappointed by that, but I guess that’s the way things are going lately. Back in 2005, you could download 750 MP3s from SXSW, via BitTorrent (legally).

Also, I think it was called “South by Southwest” back then, and SXSW was just an acronym, but I guess now it’s officially just SXSW? I’m getting too old to keep up with this stuff. Anyway, there’s some good music coming out of that. Today is the last day.

I’m still a holdout on this whole $10/month streaming music thing, but it’s getting harder to stick to my guns on that. Spotify has a new deal where you can get a free Hulu subscription with Spotify for $10/month, though it’s the ad-supported Hulu option, not the ad-free one. And honestly there’s enough stuff in my Netflix and Amazon Prime Video queues to keep me busy for years, so I don’t really need another streaming video option. But it’s tempting.

I’m seeing some interesting things, like this Austin 100 playlist, that are only being made available as Spotify and/or Apple Music playlists lately. It seems like the assumption is that everybody is subscribing to one of these services now.

My own tastes, right now, are leaning more towards stuff that can be found on Bandcamp though, and they’re still going with the old-fashioned “give us money and we give you MP3 files and/or a CD” model. (Though they also let you stream anything you buy from them. And, technically, they let you stream almost anything on their site, even if you don’t buy it.)

I do listen to Amazon Prime Music sometimes, and there’s some good stuff on there, but that’s part of the overall Prime subscription, which I’d probably pay for even without the music. So I guess I can still hold off on giving Spotify (or Apple Music or whatever) ten bucks a month for streaming music.

 

WordPress and PHP

I got a bill from 1&1 / IONOS last week for PHP 5.6 Extended Support. I was a little surprised by this, since I thought I’d already taken care of updating PHP to a supported version, but it turns out that I was remembering updating from 5.4 to 5.6 three years ago. (Tempus fugit.) It looks like 5.6 reached EOL at the end of 2018. So I guess I’m paying $7 now for not having upgraded PHP in a while. I went ahead and updated to 7.2.15, so I should be good now for a while, though I guess I should update to 7.3 at some point. And I’ve got WordPress updated to 5.1.1 too. Everything still seems to be working, which is nice.

Every once in a while, I think about switching to some kind of managed WordPress install, so I don’t have to worry about this stuff anymore. Maybe just the $5/month plan from wordpress.com or something like that. But I still like futzing with this stuff a little, so for now, I’ll stay with the traditional web hosting plan, where I’m free to mess things up and forget to update PHP and stuff like that. But I think I’m getting close to the point where I’m going to want to hand this stuff off to somebody else and just concentrate on the blogging and not worry about the sysadmin side of things. Maybe in another three years.

Usagi Yojimbo

I was really surprised to read today that Usagi Yojimbo is moving from Dark Horse to IDW. (And also surprised to read about it in the NY Times. I never really thought of Usagi as being mainstream enough to warrant a NY Times article.) There’s more detail at The Beat.

I’ve been reading Usagi for many years. I gave up on the regular comic back when I gave up on all my regular books, in 2009 or thereabouts. I’ve been buying the trade paperbacks since then. I’m really surprised to see Usagi leave Dark Horse. Stan Sakai has been with them for almost 25 years.

I’m getting a little worried about Dark Horse. I hadn’t previously seen the news about them being mostly owned by a Chinese company now. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that…) They’ve lost Star Wars, Buffy, Conan, and now Usagi. I guess Hellboy is the last big property that they still publish. (My idea of what’s “big” may be out of date and entirely wrong though. Their video game tie-in books are probably popular with the kids, but I’ve got no clue about that stuff at all.) I’ve always been a Dark Horse fan, going back to the days when they were publishing Boris the Bear. They’ve published a lot of great stuff over the years.

Anyway, I’m glad that Stan is still doing Usagi. It’s always been a great book, and a nice change of pace from most of the other stuff out there. And Stan has always been a really nice guy. I’ve met him at the San Diego con several times over the years, and gotten some of the early trade paperbacks signed by him.

I’m actually several volumes behind in my reading right now. I still haven’t read Senso, and I think I’ve got volumes 27 to 30 of the regular series on my “to be read” shelf. Maybe I should read one of those this weekend.

Spring Cleaning

Inspired a bit by Marie Kondo, perhaps, I’ve been doing some spring cleaning this weekend. I haven’t actually watched her Netflix show or read her book, but it’s hard not to run into references to her work lately. I caught her appearance on Colbert, for instance, and listened to a Pop Culture Happy Hour episode about the show recently. And I’ve gotten a kick out of some of the anti-Kondo backlash that’s been showing up on Twitter and elsewhere on the internet. I know that it’s all exaggeration and/or misperception, but some of it is entertaining. This Washington Post article is a good example.

Anyway, it’s a three-day weekend (for me), so I’ve got some extra time. I thought I might get an “easy win” by going through a box of old college papers and throwing most of them away. I assumed the box was mostly full of notebooks from my RPI days; I don’t really have any sentimental attachment to old differential equations notes, so those could be easily discarded. Alas, the top few inches of papers were actually from my K-12 days, including stuff from grammar school, middle school, and high school. Most of my old notebooks from those days had already been discarded, so this was stuff that I’d previously decided to keep.

I managed to talk myself into throwing most of this stuff away, after scanning it in. So that slowed things down a lot. I only got through maybe the top inch of stuff in the box between today and yesterday. (And the box is about 12 inches tall.) So, visually, it doesn’t look like I’ve put much of a dent in things.

Since having to reinstall Windows 10 a while back, I’ve been trying to come up with a good solution for scanning. I couldn’t quite manage to reinstall the old Canon software that came with my printer/scanner, and that I’d been previously been using. For now, I’ve settled on using the Microsoft Windows Scan app for scanning to JPG/PNG format, and the freeware NAPS2 for scanning to PDF. I’m not completely happy with either, but they’re actually a little better than the old Canon software in some ways.

Anyway, I’ve been scanning old photos and single-page documents to PNG, and multi-page documents to PDF, for the most part. I’ve come up with a naming convention that starts with the year, so my First Communion certificate is named “1975-first-communion.png,” for example. (And the actual certificate is now in a garbage bag in the dumpster behind my apartment building. Sigh.) I’ve been putting them all into a folder in OneDrive named “Andy-childhood”. My intention to to stick anything up to my high school graduation in there. Having the file name start with the year will make the files appear roughly chronologically.

Spending time on all this seems a bit self-indulgent, but I’m ok with that. It’s not like I spend a lot of time rummaging through old grade-school report cards, in general. I don’t think I’ve looked at the stuff in that box in twenty years.

I’ve come across some pretty funny stuff in that box, including a short story I wrote, titled “An Interstellar Christmas,” which is all about Santa making an appearance on an interstellar spacecraft on Christmas Eve. I didn’t put a date on it, but it looks like it’s probably from 1979, when I was 12.

I also found an issue of my middle school “newspaper,” also from 1979, that had a page devoted to a creative writing assignment that included submissions from three students, including me. The assignment, I guess, was to write something resembling a haiku about several people we though were interesting. (It wasn’t really haiku, but I think it was supposed to follow some kind of pattern.) My entry covered Aesop, Ben Franklin, Agatha Christie, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Francis Scott Key, Charles Schultz, and Lou Ferrigno. (Another kid covered Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Mark Twain, Muhammed Ali, James Bond, and Dracula. I’m not sure if the exercise was supposed to include fictional characters, or if this student just thought James Bond and Dracula were real…)

My best find, though, was in yet another box (which I started to poke around in, and quickly gave up on after realizing it also wasn’t going to be an “easy win”). It was a notebook from my senior year high school English class. It was a journal that we were supposed to keep over the course of the year, and hand in for grading occasionally (probably once a month). So it had entries from September through June of my senior year. This was really a goldmine of oddball stuff. Early in the year, the teacher had us write about specific reading assignments, so there are some one-page reports on essays by folks like J.B. Priestly, Winston Churchill, and Virginia Woolf. Stuff like that. Later, he gave us looser themes, so there are little essays on Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Will Eisner, and my feelings about the college application process. Very late in the year, I wrote some fairly personal stuff relating to how I felt about leaving home and going away to college. Since we were handing this book in to the teacher regularly, and getting it back, there are notes from him throughout, such as “you, without doubt, are an interesting person!” and a scribble asking if he could borrow the Harlan Ellison book I was writing about in one entry. (I don’t remember if I ever lent it to him, but if I did, he gave it back, since I still have it.)

I also came across a reference to the old Fahrenheit 451 video game that I’d been playing around that time. That sent me off on a little side quest, since I had really fond memories of that game. The game is playable from this page at archive.org, if you want to try it out. It’s also playable and downloadable at myabandonware.com. The description there makes it sound like it’s probably not as good a game as I remember, though.

So, anyway, I had a lot of fun reading that notebook. I went as far as scanning the whole thing in. It was 70 pages, so it took a while, but I was listening to an audiobook while I was doing it, so I was using the time wisely.

I also managed to shred some of my parents’ old bills while I was doing all this stuff, so, between the old school paperwork, the shredded bills, and a bunch of other ephemera, I managed to fill two garbage bags.

Star Trek Discovery Season Two

A quick follow-up on my ST Discovery post from last week: I just noticed a reassuring observation about season two in Paul Duffield’s Twitter stream:

So that’s a good sign.

Star Trek: Discovery

The internet probably doesn’t need another opinion about Star Trek: Discovery, but I binge-watched the first season over the weekend, so… here’s another opinion about Star Trek: Discovery.

I avoided this show when it first aired, since I didn’t want to pay for CBS All-Access. It’s out on DVD now, so I picked it up that way. I’ve been a Trek fan since watching reruns of TOS on channel 11 (WPIX) when I was a kid, and I’ve watched every show since (TNG, DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise). Ever since Enterprise went off the air, I’ve been hoping for a new Trek show, in the same vein as those shows. In particular, I’d have loved to see a show that continued on from the TNG timeline, rather than a prequel or alternate universe show. Well, Discovery is a prequel show, and honestly feels a bit like an alternate universe show too. Which is fine. Enterprise ended in 2005, and TV has changed a lot since then, so this is a new show that’s more in the style of the 2004 Battlestar Galactica reboot than it is to any previous Trek series.

Here’s a review from the NY Times that I mostly agree with. The Times even has recaps/reviews of every episode of the first season. Their recap of the season finale makes some good points.

Overall, it was a fun show to watch. But there were parts that really didn’t hold together well, or make much sense. A lot of the plot twists were predictable. And there were a lot of clichés, including a Groundhog Day episode. (I’m starting to think there’s some kind of legal requirement that all sci-fi TV shows must do at least one Groundhog Day episode.) The TV Tropes page for Discovery is quite long (and fairly amusing). The season felt a bit like the creators were desperate to keep up a stream of big reveals and big plot twists. There weren’t too many moments where they slowed things down for character development or anything like that.

Season two is running on CBS All-Access right now, and is up to episode four, I think. I haven’t looked at any reviews too closely, to avoid spoilers, but from what little I’ve read, it might be off to a good start, with some course correction from season one. If I stick with the “only watching it on DVD” plan, I won’t get to see season two until, probably, this time next year. I’m OK with that. I have plenty of other stuff to watch. But I will probably buy those season two DVDs when they come out.