Hello, Portland. I am in you.

More precisely I’m in the Portland Doubletree with a belly full of half of a double burger from a place called LARDO’S, after hooking up with SIgil and Bazeel for dinner. I gave Sigil my minion badge, since I have no minion for my table and she wanted to hit the con I’m here for.

The con? Rose City Comic-Con. Attendance last year was 18k; I got email from them yesterday telling me that online sales were twice what they were last year at that point. Two-day passes and Saturday-only are sold out.

I have no idea how much or how little to expect out of this con. Last year I think I mostly broke even and had a good time, plus picking up an interesting new pro-level fan; this year I’m expecting absolutely nothing beyond feeling confident I’ll break even again now that I have two volumes of Rita to sell. If something more happens then YAY.

The show floor is no bigger than it was last year. Kinda small, really, compared to ECCC. Like last year, I’m close enough to the entrance that I don’t need to worry about being lost in the hinterlands. So things are looking positive. I grabbed an early signup sheet for next year, and need to spend a little time away from my table considering the crowdflow – do I want to stick around the Alley next year, or switch to a booth? Or even multiple booths shared with friends like I’m doing at ECCC15? We will see.

I still kinda want to just be at home sleeping and finishing up Kickstarter shipping but hey. This is what I need to do this weekend. If you’re in Portland and doing the con, stop by table I-9 and say hi; if not, then you can probably attend it vicariously through my sarcastic tweets listing the costumes I see, unless business is booming too much for me to be twittering.

And when I get home I need to throw together the grope controllers for Duck Duck Poison, and go to Rainfurrest. That should be low-key after this, to be honest – after doing a couple years of Serious Comic Cons, furry cons feel like training wheels now. I’ll be there to have fun and dance my ass off, you know?

I also got the art for the shirt for the Kickstarter mostly done on the train down here. It still needs some finesse but NOT NOW; I want to sleep, and hit the con bright and early tomorrow, to be ready for the horde I suspect may be coming in.

We are coral reefs.

We secrete these structures of calcium. We live within and upon them.

We pull against these structures to move them about.

It's a pretty good gig. It's luxurious enough that we can afford to blow a significant chunk of our energy on a knot of coral that just talks to itself. And comes up with ways for us to pull against our calcium structures to make the world around us even more luxurious for us.

Or at least that's the way I like to look at my body sometimes. (Yes, I know we are not descended from coral. It sounds a lot prettier than “colonies of cells”.

Starting to experiment with contact lenses is having interesting effects: I’m starting to feel like I want to move my style around a little… and I feel like it may be time to get my nipples pierced.

The latter is probably a really bad idea on the week before three back-to-back conventions*. But I’m dropping this here to make it easy to remember ‘hey how long have I been thinking I want my nipples pierced again?’ if it’s still sticking around after cons are done.

I dunno. Seeing myself in the mirror without glasses for the first time in something like twenty years is subtly powerful. The last time I wore contacts with any regularity, I was still Paul. Now I’m Peggy, and I’ve worn glasses for the entire time I’ve worn that identity. It is also possible that I’m having a subtle reversion to Who I Was When I Was In My Early 20s due to this change in the apparent shape of my face, and now want to act like a Young Adult instead of a crazy fortysomething lady…

* Rose City Comic Con, Rainfurrest, and APE, if you happen to be attending any of those.

While reading some critical essays on the women of the Discworld, I was struck by an urge: I would like to re-read Discworld. All forty books of it. In publication order.

I could probably get them all for free with a minimum of searching. Hell, I might even have them sitting around my computer. And arguably I would not be making any major moral mis-steps by doing this, as I used to own copies of them, purchased one by one as they were written. But it’s not without its toll; I’d have to trawl through various sites that are more interested in serving up ads and viruses, or guiding me to pay memberships, than they are with spreading culture. And the files I’d acquire that way would be of dubious quality – they might be copies of the official e-books, or they might be a badly-OCRed scan of the book, with pages missing, and probably no cover image.

I could also probably get them all as used paperbacks without any significant searching. But I’m loathe to carry physical books on the plane now that I have the iPad; I read fast, and I have no desire to return to humping six or seven books around in my bag just to make sure I have sufficient things to amuse myself during the flight. (I’ve tried to draw on the flight, but laptop plus wacom tablet takes up more space than I can routinely expect to have, and then of course there’s the lack of oxygen as well.)

Or I could spend six bucks apiece on Amazon and be done with it. I like that plan. The time I’d spend hunting down good copies feels worth that.

My time has value to me. Truly, I am an adult now.

Another fall begins in the University District, bringing with it new upstairs neighbors who have never lived in an apartment building before and need to be politely reminded that there is a bedroom right beneath them and can they please be so kind as to refrain from playing dance music at 2AM.

They look younger every year.

(I always try to be as chill about this as possible. It is my hope to never be that cranky old bitch downstairs.)

Today I wandered down to “Seattle Indy Expo”, which was basically ‘some local devs who couldn’t get into PAX putting on a n event near PAX’. There were several competitive multiplayer games. I tried a few.

Within two or three rounds, I was beating the pants off of everyone who was not a developer of the game I was playing. I feel like I have discovered a skill I didn’t know I had.

I guess this is what happens when you play video games for like thirty years, and never try competitive multiplayer stuff except in game genres you never play – I mean, try to get me to play Smash Bros and I’m just lost, because I don’t have much Fighting Game skill.

Today I wandered down to “Seattle Indy Expo”, which was basically ‘some local devs who couldn’t get into PAX putting on a n event near PAX’. There were several competitive multiplayer games. I tried a few.

Within two or three rounds, I was beating the pants off of everyone who was not a developer of the game I was playing. I feel like I have discovered a skill I didn’t know I had.

I guess this is what happens when you play video games for like thirty years, and never try competitive multiplayer stuff except in game genres you never play – I mean, try to get me to play Smash Bros and I’m just lost, because I don’t have much Fighting Game skill.