It’s only just begun! A view along Artists Alley for all you dear readers. It is slightly low press, as compared to previous years, which is remarkable and somewhat less distracting. Which I like.
Also, today is brought to you by trolley and bungee: 
BCW, Braunschweiger, Copernicus, and Wittgenstein. Classic names in comics.
The Hyatt could give any newspaper away for free. This is what they chose: 
Not the USA Today or the Times or even the Chicago Tribune. No. The Wall Street Urinal.
That’s targeted and meaningful. No. This is Chicago. Not New York. And even still, if it was New York, then it should be the Times anyways! Not this toilet paper rag. Tsk tsk tsk.
I’m going to liveblog throughout the con for as long as WiFi, LTE, and the Good Folk of the Battery Blessing Way are with me.
The hotel, the Hyatt Regency at McCormick is quite good. The bathroom is a little haha and the lack of plugs only demonstrates that they don’t really understand technical people. Also, the power plugs by the bedside are switched with the primary room lights, so, your phone charging and the doofy little alarm clock they give you are functionless if you turn the main lights off by the door. It’s not a feature, its a mistake. But how do you fix it? Rewire the joint. LOL. Nah. It’s not worth it.
Soon we’ll migrate down to the queue lounge and wait in line from 8am to 10am. Then the con starts at 10am, and it’s an instant hustle for some. Some to artists alley, some to exhibitors, some just because it’s the way of the con. I’m going for social support for Scott. Plus it gives me a chance to keep on trying to catch up with my comic reading.
The time is right again, the stars are in alignment and the Great Lake has receded to reveal the Convention Center of the Old Ones, the Display Space of the Insane Damned, McCormick Place in Chicago Illinois! Tentacle monsters, inexplicable seaweed tresses, and the definite sense that maybe Jim Butcher used the entire building as inspiration for the Harry Dresden stories.
We have purchased snack foods and purified water supplies. Healthy snacks with an eye to fiber and protein that we can carry with us on our travels without having to purchase an $8 cuppa coffee or a $17 hot dog or a $25 dollar slice of microwaved pizza. We can sit down and enjoy our snacks in the places reserved for buying patrons and enjoy when frustrated concessioners make their precious frowny faces at us as we enjoy our own treats.
I probably have enough for a two week adventure, and that’s okay. It’s all shelf stable and not going anywhere, and it’s all good for me anyhow, so I can drag anything to work and use it to battle low blood sugar hangries.
The cat sitter is set. I have to get a few more cans of food for Ysy, that’s tomorrow during lunch. Then we will be off for a cavalcade of sitting and watching and enjoying as geeks, dorks, and nerds celebrate pop culture, comic books, and social and economic planetary domination over the uninteresting residuals of the species.
We’re all judging you. With our little plastic wrapped booklets of artwork and our little trollies full of collectibles worth more than your entire educational experiences combined. Then we’ll store all of it in perfectly airless preservation solutions until we remember much later that we have any of it and how much is stacked up…?
And we will laugh, privately, and amusingly while the residuals go out to buy diapers and formula.
Bailey and Keeley, laying together. Totally relaxed and apparently squished together tete a tete. They play fight, but it’s scenes like this that show how close they truly are.
I haven’t logged into Facebook in quite a while and I’ve been doing bits and bloops around the network, like connecting MOD Pizza to my FB account and vastly lower interaction metrics. The Facebook security watchdog noticed!
So they locked me out. I could get back in if I could identify my friends in a quiz format. Fine. Took the quiz, passed. Account password changed and updated.
Hilarious. Facebook is like herpes. I hardly miss the cold sores.
So far it has happened to me twice. I have received contact from people who are very much no longer with organizations that I have a relationship with. The first contact was from a telecommunications technology company, obviously remaining nameless with the offender also remaining nameless. I had recognized the name from a previous connection when I was working with a current telecommunications company that is related to my workplace. The messaging was catered to create a fear response and panic move on my behalf to drum up business for the account executives commission. They had my name and my email address, they worked at a new company, and there is no reason why they should contact me as there was no prior contact with their new company for any purpose where I should expect contact. Essentially they copied their customer list in one company, and then when they went to another position elsewhere just uncorked the list and hit up all the contacts, in a targeted fashion. The first time was remarkable, but I thought it was a situational outlier.
Today, after I got the mail out of my home mailbox, I found another card from a previous contact with which I had made a few financial arrangements with the person, they were no longer with the financial institution that I do business with on personal terms, but a wholly new company, whom I had never had contact before. Again, the person copied their customer list from one company and carried it with them to another company.
I find all this to be wrong. It could even be regarded as corporate espionage. Right now it’s a simple matter of just tossing all these cold contacts suddenly warm again right in the secure recycling bin. There is no way that I’m going to contact any of them, but because I regard this as wholly inappropriate use of privileged information, each time I spot it, the relationship is dead on arrival. I don’t want to talk to these people, and doing this underhanded thing is worth exactly what I’m willing to pay for it, which is to throw it all away and not even give it a single thought. You stole the list, you are attempting to be clever and sneaky. I will not be a party to it.
I, of course, won’t identify companies or name individuals, but I find this to be utterly reprehensible, and as a practice, I’m calling it out. If you quit a job where customer lists are handy, you leave those lists behind, and you find a more wholesome and honest way to approach customers. So, off the offending mail goes, off to the recycling bin!
Noticed with USPS Informed Delivery that the car insurance was going to be in the mail today. Due on April 11th, leverage credit, pay at the end of the month. I won’t even notice the cost.
I laughed heartily at that.
While talking with a friend about meditation and the buddhist idea that the world is occupied with a force called maya, that wants you to stop seeking awareness, and perhaps making an effort towards enlightenment by plying you with distractions. Maya could be summed up as all the things that disturb your meditative awareness. Everything from a ringing phone, a neighbor kid ringing the doorbell, or an itch on your nose that is driving you to distraction. It’s all maya.
Then as part of the conversation, an image from a beloved movie appeared in my head, of the Junk Lady from the movie “The Labyrinth”. She is all hunched over, surrounded by Junk in the Junk Fields where she makes a home, and spends all her time trying to dissuade the purpose of the main character with objects that she once loved. Handing them to the main character one after another, in a rapid succession to confuse and derail the greater effort of the plot in the movie.
The more I think about the Junk Lady, and that whole scene, the more it resonates. That maya is like that. An itch here, a ringing phone there, a screaming cat downstairs, a plane making the house rattle because its too low, or whatever else happens that tries to interrupt your focus on whatever it is you have selected. A word, an emotion, or your breathing. This force is also within as well, the little mind some call it, when you are trying to focus and all of a sudden, because you aren’t doing anything and that is strange and wrong for the little mind, it starts to run around like an agitated monkey, rummaging around and throwing out memories, stray thoughts, whatever it can get its clever little fingers around and bring to the big mind to get it to stop being quiet. Trying to count breaths and before you know it, you’re thinking about pulled pork and BBQ sauce as your stomach gurgles. That is maya, in a nutshell.
Finally found the perfect recipe for poached eggs for my morning breakfast. An English muffin, toasted. Then a smear of Kerrygold Butter. Then the eggs. I suppose you could call it a firm poach. I have little silicone poaching cups I got for Christmas years ago, a little spritz of nonstick spray. Then put those in ceramic ramekins, put those in the Instant Pot, a cup of tapwater, seal. High pressure for 7 minutes and 7 minutes of NR, then a QR. Put the eggs on the buttered muffin halves and a little scratch of pepper and salt. Perfect. The yolk is just ever so accidentally runny, but right on the edge of being set. Perfect.