At C2E2. Got my GLNG #16 signed by Arron Kuder. Had lunch at a really great new food vendor at the con, called Ambrosia. It was quite good if not a little expensive. At least I won’t be starving by dinner time.
61° Mostly Cloudy
2401 S Indiana Ave, Chicago, Illinois, United States
I just received my invitation to attend Sage Summit 2013 in Washington, DC from July 23rd to the 26th at Gaylord National Hotel and Resort.
Since Sage dropped the hot potatoes it was juggling, this yearly pilgrimage is now utterly laughable and irrelevant. Not only will I not go to Washington, DC in the pit of Summer but I will definitely not be going to another Gaylord property. Those “resorts”, especially the abomination in Nashville Tennessee is a crime against humanity and an insult against nature.
My “most favored thing” today that I will do is to click the Unsubscribe button to all Sage communications. My interest drops like wet trousers around the ankles of my professional disgust. Tootles!
Comic Books. I was quite a fan of them before Mr. Johns sucker-punched me with the travesty of Brightest Day and then pushed me off the train completely with the New 52. That all being said, and in an effort to forgive some of that transgression I’ve decided to tentatively start buying comics again.
I’ve been not-reading for a very long while, despite it being very easy for me to start reading again since my Local Comic Book Store is actually in my basement, it’s all the comics that Scott has collected as he never fell off the wagon. No point in buying comics again!
Except, there is a reason to buy them again. And now we get to my three classes that I’m approaching comic books with. There are three, named, One, Two, and Three. What they mean has everything to do with how much I enjoy the books and my feelings on “rewarding” the comic book company with sales they wouldn’t have otherwise with my discretionary money.
Class Three – Comic Books I’m going to buy in digital format and catch up with. These books are my most favorite and I want to vote-with-sales the writers and artists attached to these books:
Class Two – Comic books that I want to read, but I don’t feel I want to pour money into. Since we already have these books on the premises I am going to read them. Is that theft? Reading another persons comic books? Technically I suppose if you wanted to be a huge anal dick about it you’d insist that selling a comic book has nothing to do with the paper and everything to do with the license to access the media and that license is expressly designed just for one person and not more than one person. So is reading a comic book I dig out of a white-box in my basement, theft? If so, all I really need to know is from the comic book companies, if this bothers you, please tell me and I will ignore these books below:
Class One – These are books I used to have but no longer want to read. Thankfully the ones on this list I haven’t bought in a long while and DC has actually come along and nailed them off for me. There aren’t any comics on this list.
Just in case people get really worked up about their favorite comic ending up on the Two list or the One list, know that if a comic really does well and touches me, that these are classes, not castes. I will always be open to pushing comics from One to Three or Two to Three. Just the same as comics from Three to Two or Three to One. Although it’s really quite something to ever leave Three, just so we are all on the same page.
Now it’s time for me to set up my order with Comixology. Still wishing they had a subscription model, but that’s an argument best left for another time.
I have looked into the gaping maw of the start of Con Season and lived to tell the tale. We have just returned from the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo, forever known as C2E2 with a trunkful of treasures.
One thing we didn’t bring back with us is Con Crud. Perhaps people are more careful with their expectorations or perhaps it was a benefit of us traveling by car and not by airplane, so there was no prolonged exposure to bacteria or viruses that meant us ill-will. When I’ve been taken with the urge to sneeze I have made it a general rule that I will turn my head, and sneeze into the gap between my shirt and my undershirt, in the corner. It’s called a Dracula Sneeze because that’s really what it sort of looks like. Just like Bela Lugosi hiding his head halfway in his cape, except I swap out the cape which I don’t wear for my shirt, which I do. The mythbusters proved that sneezing that way greatly reduced the chances for the ejecta to reach anyone else. My sneezing isn’t carrying anything infectious, as for me it’s just a general low-intensity hayfever that I carry around with me pretty much at all times everywhere I go. A very mild allergic response to pretty much breathing.
I bought two new tees, the first with this image of Superman:
and the second with Nightwing:
I also sprang for a lead-cast figurine of my favorite Green Lantern, Kyle Rayner. I’ll be setting that up tomorrow at my desk and it will join a posable figurine already in place on my desk. At that point people should know that I like two things in this world very much, Polar Bears and Kyle Rayner. I suppose if I had enough money I could get a DC artist to draw me Kyle Rayner riding on a running Polar Bear. That would be hilarious.
Last but certainly not least I finally have a comic art commission that I hired an artist to complete for me back when I attended San Diego ComicCon in 2010. The artist’s name is Patrick Gleason and he’s one of DC’s mainstay artists. He did a lot of Green Lantern and drew a lot of my favorite GL, Kyle Rayner. Currently he does Batman and Robin for DC, but back in 2010 he had done a lot of Kyle. I hired him for a commission and time and life (and DC Comics) got in the way. I understand that work comes first, right alongside family, so I wasn’t piss-and-vinegar when it came to completion. I didn’t want my money back and I am a very patient fan, especially for artists that draw my favorite GL. So I waited. Yesterday I made contact with Mr. Gleason and I had fallen completely off his radar and he was very shocked and apologetic. He offered me my money back, or the sketch, and I reiterated my wish for the sketch and my willingness to wait, hopefully not so long this time. Today I got a call that he had finished my sketch and I went to fetch it. As always, his work is amazing. It was well worth the wait and I bear him no ill-will. As it turns out, I didn’t even notice that the sketch was extra-special on first glance. It took me a few moments to take it all in that I discovered that he had also included another GL (which I like a lot) named Mogo in the background. For those that don’t know, Mogo is a Green Lantern. Mogo is a sentient planet, and in the comics acts as a counselor for upset GL as well as the moral compass for GL rings to select new bearers. So not only did the sketch have my favorite GL, but it had really nice touches like various chiaroscuro GL symbols, and also Mogo! My next step is to have it framed and placed next to my other sketch of Kyle Rayner that I commissioned from Tyler Kirkham, another artist who does Kyle very well, for DC. This will be the second piece of artwork that I have on my walls from Mr. Gleason. A while back Scott commissioned him to render Kyle Rayner and Saint Walker standing back-to-back. That is hanging on the wall by my bedside and I go to bed and wake up appreciating his artwork every single day. Now that this commission is complete I do feel a sense of closure, and I do know that it won’t be the last bit of artwork I purchase from Mr. Gleason. The same sentiment goes for Mr. Kirkham, assuming he will be game for drawing Kyle in the future. Time will tell.
One thing that I do notice and I say this a lot, especially after conventions is a reminder to people on how to best handle their superhero tees after they get them home. These shirts seem like silly little things to most people, but for comic book geeks like us, they mean a lot more to us than a sport jacket or a fine suit. Remember everyone, that if you want your shirts to last you have to launder them carefully. Always turn them inside out, wash in cold water, and then right when they are done from the washer, turn them right side out and hang them up to dry. Never ever ever ever put them in the drying machine!
That all being said, most of the laundry is nearly done and I’m still up writing this blog entry. One of the curses of living in the eastern time zone and enjoying a con in the central time zone is that biologically speaking I’m off by an hour. This will continue until tomorrow morning when my internal clock is realigned with this time zone. Partially I’m waiting for laundry to finish, but really I’m relaxing here writing up the C2E2 blog post and being here for my boys, who both missed us terribly while we were gone. Now that we’re home, it’s time to plotz on daddy, whichever daddy ends up being plotzable. The condition to be plotzable has everything to do with sitting on a couch and not moving at all. 🙂
I will be taking more pictures and sharing them from the hall of honor for our comic book art. Scott has a commission in-progress from Jim Cheung, for Billy Kaplan, who is a Young Avenger in the Marvel comic book universe who’s codename is Wiccan. We already have a sketch of Billy in the hallway, but I’m looking forward to this new one from Mr. Cheung. I wonder if these artists ever expect their work to be framed professionally and hung so lovingly by their fans. It’s half the reason we go to conventions as it is, to meet the people who illustrate our favorite characters and put cold hard cash right in their hands. No middlemen, no DC, no Marvel, just artist and fan, and cash. A lot of cash. And each cent spent for this work is worth it. We have a lot of wall space and a lot of fandom.
Yesterday Scott talked me into downloading DC Universe Online and joining up as a “Free to Play” player. I cleaned up my old Dell gaming PC as DCUO is a PC-only game and loaded it onto my computer at home. The client and all the content clocks in at over 20GB so it took a while to download across the network.
Once I got the game installed I had to fix DirectX, and then after that it ran. I had seen it during Sony’s beta test of the game and wasn’t terribly impressed or thrilled with the gameplay mostly because the human interface was so different from what I was used to with City of Heroes from NCSoft. I knew Scott was very keen on having me play so I relented and agreed to play the game. While going through the lead-in trial course that every new player has to go through I revisited the same issues I had before when playing the game. The mouse and keyboard controls are maddening. I was cussing and swearing while trying to button-mash. It felt like the inanity of a Playstation game, where you dispense with the pleasantries of the cut-scenes and the lame lead in until you move a figure to a part of the screen and then click like you’ve got Parkinson’s.
Near the end of playing yesterday, around lunchtime I went exploring the settings of the game and discovered to my chagrin a setting called “Invert Camera” and that singular adjustment made the game MAKE SENSE TO ME. All of a sudden the game played much more like City of Heroes and once I was beyond that obnoxious hurdle I actually really got into playing the game.
What do I think of DCUO? It’s certainly a competent game and is engaging. The mission system is acceptable and the play itself is entertaining and worth my time. The only real issue that remains with DCUO is how much lag the mouse pointer has when it’s not controlling the camera in-game. You have to have patience with the pointer as it doesn’t fly as your mouse moves, it instead feels like the game is asking the computer to manually redraw the mouse each time the mouse updates. This is irritating but not so much to make me stop playing the game.
As I play more of DCUO I’ll have more experience and will most likely refine my critique of the game and if I have the presence of mind enough I may blog about it again in the future. Or I won’t. We’ll see.
Last night I had a complicated knot work of dreams and a central theme was this epic-level conflict that happens cyclically between ages of time. It was, I’m sure, inspired surely by The Wheel of Time, but there were elements dragged into the dream by DC comics twin events Blackest Night and Brightest Day. A pillar of this dream was a central figure that provided a safety net and a structure to ensure that the conflict was always won by the right, and not by the wrong.
I woke up with this idea in my head and I started to muse about what this might mean in the fictional DC Universe. It’s been a story theme that my favorite Green Lantern, Kyle Rayner, has served to hold up everything in the bleakest of times. For a while he was the only Lantern in the stories and the writers seem to enjoy using him as a character for these situations. Now that we’ve entered The GL War we’ve got all these emotions floating around and Kyle has already proven himself capable of surpassing fear in his willpower, so he’s one of the few who can cope with actually feeling things while maintaining his abilities. While the GL universe falls apart, it struck me that Kyle could once again play the role of torchbearer-in-dark-times by handling all seven emotional-spectrum rings, and there is a little part of me at thinks that Kyle could carry the White Lantern and play the part temporarily as he did when he served as the vessel for Ion. It’s just a shot in the dark, but perhaps that’s where DC will take the GL War. I’m always very excited whenever my favorite lantern gets some action. It’d definitely be gratifying to know that Kyle is always the go-to-Lantern leaving Hal in the dust. One can hope. 🙂
And this ends the second day of C2E2. What did we learn today? We learned that DC Artists make really bad panelists when DC Writers should be featured, but they make great panelists when DC Artists should be featured. We also learned that any phrase that includes “Wally West” will force everyone who is connected to DC to slip into a vexed silence. DC panels are quite like playing a guessing game where the rules are hidden, the vocabulary is hidden, and the success of your attempts are also hidden. It’s magnificently fun and actually a delight, especially when played with annoying children who ask impertinent questions to utterly disaffected DC staffers.
We also learned that DC is wholly preoccupied with how their fans had reacted poorly to the idea that the new event, called Flashpoint would require a significant number of purchases. DC spent an inordinate amount of time trying to “cover their ass” by informing us all that the financial burden wouldn’t be that bad and that we could all read the central work and none of the tie-ins and still enjoy the work. Shortly thereafter Marvel announced their big event with the exact same protestations that nobody really had to buy the entire run but only purchase a core number of books to get enjoyment from the story. Nothing like aggressive retreat in the face of decline. Snatching the brass ring of failure from the maw of a dark and uncertain future.
It’s good to note that DC and Marvel still behave like petulant children when it comes to each other. The fans are pretty much ignorant of the distinctions and many DC fans like Marvel work and the opposite is also true. The backbiting and sniping however are quite choice. Really it’s a pissing match between Warner Brothers and Disney. It’s quite something to watch Bugs Bunny piss all over Mickey Mouse. It just helps build that image that whatever you thought about the health of your inner child is properly violated now that the two companies that you thought would never turn on you and treat you like a slab of cash-stuffed meat-product, in fact, are.
About midway today I was so tired of DC treating this as a throwaway trash event that I was close to giving up on the entire company. I read Brightest Day only because I have respect for the lead writer and I have hope that the story will go somewhere before it ends. It feels a lot like a Stephen King novel, which is to say very flat for 80% and maximally great for the last 20%. I vowed I would never read another Stephen King book sohelpmegod, and I’m getting close to throwing Brightest Day in with Stephen King.
Marvel is just an exercise in impenetrability. I fell off the Marvel wagon years ago and I have no idea where to start. Because I can’t get started again I don’t really feel like I want to start. There’s five or six, maybe, events between Civil War and Fear Itself, and I don’t really care that much to even try to come up with the right questions that might give me some traction. So Marvel keeps on publishing and have created several tounge-in-cheek comedy gold moments, like the endless Deadpool titles, the Rainbow of Hulks, and an endless house of mirrors when you bring up the word “Avengers”. Now Marvel is trying to address this with “.1” releases, but it has the same stain that these overarching events have, that it feels like a cash-grab. When I was a kid I really liked the Fantastic Four. Now that I’m an adult I read it and even after reading a dozen issues it has lost that special feeling I used to have, so I’ve stopped caring about it, stopped reading it, and I don’t really think much of it any longer. It occupies no mind-space in my head. DC used to, but ever since the blind wandering that is Brightest Day (read: The Stephen King-ization) I’ve been finding it very hard to continue interest in DC’s work either.
This leads to the next blog entry, which is a marvelous load of WTF laid by Marvel just tonight in my email inbox. That gem is coming up next.
I’ve seen this show up on Twitter quite a bit, the slowly degrading sales figures for popular comic books and what might be behind it. As a light consumer of comic books I can at least state a few things that keep me from buying many comic books:
Really the biggest point I have to make here is that by not being “The Brave and The Bold” when it comes to digital comics, people like me aren’t going to make any investment in the product and we’re just going to lurk in the dark and keep our buying power in abeyance. I’m not interested in a teaser issue with the punchline at the end being “Visit your local comic book store for more!”, sorry, but no, I don’t want to. I want to “Visit my Comic Book App for more!” when I want more. Unfortunately by not heeding the opportunity, not filling a vacuum, regular folk have filled it. Nature abhors a vacuum and in this case, certain services and new open-source file types such as CBR and CBZ have filled up all the space that could have been occupied by profit-making comic book sales. I’ve said it before and I will repeat myself here, if you fail to innovate, your customers will innovate without you and then you’ll miss the train completely and be left walking along the tracks. It’s funny to see how many old-school publisher/consumer business models failed to adapt to the Internet, you can see the bodies littered all over, Music, Movies, Television, and as unpleasant as it is to say, Comic Books. By not embracing the bleeding edge of technology each model has created subsequent vacuums and people have found ways to fill those vacuums without any one publisher being able to draw any benefit. When popular media takes technology and the Internet seriously, then you’ll see a turn-around, but not before then. As they stuff their heads in the sand, ever deeper, the erosion will just get progressively worse.
You could sum up this lesson that popular media really should learn in one really great curt statement: “Innovate or Die!” So, get busy innovating, or get busy dying.
Today flowed a lot like yesterday did. Woke up, got a continental breakfast and attended sessions. Most of the sessions were useful, one got me considering swapping out my homemade ‘clever SQL use’ for T-SQL Cursors (cue the horrified screams of SQL admins everywhere!) and we were able to enjoy a quick lunch and then have our users group meeting. Mostly we’re happy with the response we’ve gotten from Sage when we initially pitched huge fits back in Chicago, then in Denver, and finally in Atlanta during previous Sage Summit events. They listened to us and a good portion of that I believe was our particular user group writing a ‘Meeting Statement’ and sending that to Sage. By doing that and not leaving it all for the pleasantries of verbal communications they could take the things we wrote to corporate management and definitively show that the users were upset. This time around we decided to do the same document style, a written statement, but instead of being full of piss and vinegar we expressed how happy we were that they responded so well to our statements of displeasure. We also indicated some useful ideas for Sage Summit 2011 which will be held sometime in July in Washington, DC. It’s looking like I may be attending that event, but only time will tell if that’s the case.
Once the convention concluded at 3pm I figured I wasn’t going to be paying any visit to family on my trip to Virginia, which I half-expected, it’s just too much distance and too much trouble and in the end ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’. I instead helped my coworkers go through another round of shopping at the outlet malls, retail therapy doesn’t being to describe it. 🙂 I broke down and after several years of simply pocketing my ID and plastic I broke down and bought a front-pocket wallet. I didn’t even know really that they made such a thing and when I found them in a Totes outlet, even the proprietor didn’t even know they made them like that. They were in a discount rack, originally $15, marked to $9. What the hell, I figure since I saved scads of money on food and supplies last week and this week that I can certainly afford a few splurgy purchases.
Tomorrow is going to be a madhouse. Our flight leaves Richmond at 9:40am, so we have to be there by 8:40, and the people at Kingsmill said that the hour drive to get to Richmond is pretty spot on because as they said “All the Military people are travelling south in the morning, so you won’t run into traffic coming north.” So… we are planning on getting on the road by 7:30am. I’m all packed up and ready to go, all I have to do is shower and load the few toiletries into my bag and I’m ready to go. Once we get back to Kalamazoo we have to rush to the office so we can all fill out our reimbursement forms so we can be reimbursed in a timely fashion. I think right after that I’m going home, as there really isn’t any point in starting work half-way through the day.
Dinner was good tonight, we went to the Whaling Company restaurant in Williamsburg. We got a far better dinner for more competitive prices than the last place that I dinged so bad for having crappy selection and outrageous prices. Now I am sitting back, helping my one coworker polish off the beer she bought so she wouldn’t leave any behind. This is a difficult task I feel I have no choice but to accept. 😉
Tomorrow, the flight. Tonight? Sleep.
Today wasn’t as ram-tear as yesterday was. Breakfast was a continental at the resort center which was a surprise considering all the stories I’ve heard about Kingsmill, but I chock up the differences to a cost-conscious host like Sage and not because the venue just can’t get their host on.
Most of the day was spent bouncing from one room to another, learning some initially upsetting things and then as time went on realizing the inherent rightness of what I needed to do, essentially upgrade via scorched-earth policy. The best way to go from where we are with our product and where we have to go is to rip out everything, and reinstall from scratch. What was going to be an onerous task now became a sluggardly onerous task, but not insurmountable.
Lunch was quick, another continental, and the rest of the sessions went by in a blur. I caught up on my email, caught up on a huge wad of unread RSS feed material and made some headway clearing out my “favorite twitter” queue.
Dinner was shortly after that. We went to Berret’s Seafood Restaurant and Taphouse Grill on South Boundary Street in Williamsburg. The restaurant was initially quite pleasant however it was designed by the same people who assembled our ballroom office-space in Walwood Hall, it is organized like a rabbit warren, little connecting pathways between staging rooms. It’s not that I found fault with my food, it’s not that I didn’t like the restaurant either, but the menu selections were agonizingly assorted. If you wanted Shrimp you could have that, but you also got Oysters. If you wanted Tilapia, you also got Crab Cakes. The short two-page menu was rife with this sort of thing and I looked it over and frankly couldn’t find anything that I could order from the menu that I wanted to eat. Individual items, of course, but each dish was a mishmash of different seafood types and I’m not one for clams, oysters, or mussels. I ended up selecting a special, Tilapia-in-a-bag and got hosed. The dish was $26 but I got food that was really $8.99, at the most generous. The scallops that came with this dish were quarter size and nominally acceptable, but they weren’t properly washed and so I got a little sand in my diet tonight. If you are going to pump a $26 plate, wash the ingredients. In the end the meal was “very light” and that was a generous estimation from some of my dining compatriots who also had what I had. “This is it?” was what we heard up and down. I didn’t pitch a fit because it was a very high-class establishment and in the end it wasn’t my money on the line. If you are visiting Williamsburg, trust me on skipping this restaurant. I’m sure their other foods are outstanding, but if you are in any way picky about your seafood like I am, you’ll either leave hungry or upset, and poorer for it.
After dinner we decided that the night wasn’t over and some of my peers went out to get beer and wine so we could have a chat about our convention and enjoy each others company. The “party” devolved into a conference group meeting and we talked about obvious things that were on our minds, mostly about the company hosting us, Sage. Almost everything we remarked on was positive and we were all generally pleased with how Sage had compensated for their earlier problems that we chided them on in Denver, Atlanta, and our Users Group meeting in St. Olaf. Some people are apparently driven to see the two co-chairs, me and another lady, attend the Sage Summit 2011 in Washington, DC. I don’t see the reason or the justification for it since I’ve already attended here in Williamsburg, but I may have to go in order to make sure that Sage keeps in line with the wishes from our group. Only time will tell with that one.
Meanwhile, I’m contemplating going to visit family tomorrow afternoon after my last session ends, but I don’t have any method of conveyance from Williamsburg to Virginia Beach as I don’t have access to the rental vehicle that I once thought I might have had. The visit to VA Beach is still a possibility, but I haven’t the foggiest how I’m going to get there.
There are some oddities that do bear sharing. Kingsmill is a fantastic resort, but their bathrooms have been outfitted with occupancy sensors that were mounted about head-level, so when you make the slightest move, the toilet flushes and you get progressively more and more spritzed. I discovered that I could fix this … annoying problem by wrapping the occupancy sensor in toilet paper until I was good and ready for it to figure out that it was time to flush. I also noticed that in high traffic areas Kingsmill spares no expense and lays out cloth napkins to dry your hands after using the lavatory. In lesser used areas? Just paper towels. It’s not a problem, but it is kind of funny to see cleverness all the way down to how patrons dry their hands. The only other irking thing has nothing to do with the resort itself, but the obvious and annoying lack of any cellular signal whatsoever. I suppose if you are visiting for the spa, or the golf, or the grounds you don’t care so much about cellular technology. For me it would be a problem, if it weren’t for free Wifi and Google Voice.
Tomorrow is another day, up at 7ish, some more conference sessions and then? We’ll have to see…