Well. This has been a very different con from what I’m used to.

It’s a small show. Bigger than most furry cons that are not Anthrocon, but smaller than most of the comics shows I do. (And of course my standards there are skewed what with one of the five biggest comic cons in the US being my hometown con.)

But I sold like crazy. I brought twenty copies of each volume of Rita; I sold out of volume one around 2PM on Saturday. Which was three hours after the dealer’s room opened. This is a crazy outlier compared to all the other cons I do; normally I’d be bringing some of those things home with me, I sold most of the twenty copies of v2 I brought as well; I think I have like maybe eight at most sitting on my table right now. And one Tarot deck out of what I brought left.

Walking around the show during setup was interesting. Very strange to walk around a comics con and not see any walls of Marvel/DC fan art. I saw one person affixing a Spider-Man balloon to the top of their sign as an eye-grabber, and later I saw a few bits of what might have been Fifth Element fan art at one table. But largely it was people selling their own creations, and, if my sales were any guide, people buying those personal works in volume. I will probably be applying for 2016. And I will be shipping a lot more books.

Then I got to go to the Ignatz awards and see my room-mate fail to get a brick for ‘Best Online Comic’. Welcome to the club, Blue; there will probably be a few years to go until you sweep the Ignatzs, or some other award, with ‘best new creator’ and a couple other works. And then I hit the dance, about which the best thing I can really say is that it made me really realize what one of the things is that I’ll miss if I never do another furry con again – furries put on amazing raves, in big ballrooms full of people dancing in crazy light-up costumes, with fandom DJs who have a huge collection of high-energy electronic dance music and a fine sense of mixing for the crowd. This was… well, once the DJs changed it was okay, but it was smaller than some dead dog parties I’ve been to at furry cons. Furries know how to party.

I’m writing this on Sunday morning. I’ll probably hold down the table working on Rita, and maybe selling a few v2 to people who only took a chance on 1 and devoured it last night. I get one or two of those most cons. But first I need to go have breakfast and have my fifteen minute long pitch meeting with Nickelodeon, who’s actively soliciting them here. Will they be interested in my show? Who knows. The best I’m really hoping for is “holy shit this is neat but it’s so far outside of what we could ever do, sorry, good luck!”. Unless they are secretly looking for something to compete with the several continuing shows over at Cartoon Network.

…A bit later. They were interested in my pitch, but they are explicitly looking for proposals for 2-3 minute cartoons. I have a week to figure out how to fit the basics of the whole setup into that much space, and send them an outline. I went and sat out in the sun with a bagel and some water in the time between my pitch and the show floor opening; I now have a first draft of a cartoon, based on their suggestion of having the two teams compete for something, and Kin’s idea from last week of having one of the first episodes on both sides be a rescue, so as to establish them both as Good Guys. When I get home I’ll see how badly it fits into the alotted time, and decide how many optional things I have to leave out and how many essential things I have to grit my teeth and cut.

Now I am sitting in the dealer’s room for the second and last day. Not really bothering to try and pitch anyone very hard. I may get up and wander some, possibly even buy a few comics? Wish I’d brought more merch. Next time.

…Later, in the airport. Scott McCloud stopped by my table and said hi during his swing through the dealer’s room. SENPAI NOTICED MEEEEEE. Nothing much else interesting. Blue and I finally got a chance to hang out and chat before we left the hotel; our tables were nowhere near each other, and we basically saw each other as sleeping shapes in the bed for most of the con. We bonded over the game of “Who Directed This Warner Bros. Short?” as we packed, then chatted on and off as we rode the subway through a series of insanely brutalist stations to the airport.

I have several hours of airplane ahead of me now. I’m going to be so damn glad to get home.

Problem: tons of money is concentrated in the hands of about 1% of the American population, who have largely taken it out of the American economy.

Solution: Start creating money at a higher rate, deliberately designed to create inflation. At the same time, we instigate a basic income for all Americans; the size of this income is not defined as a dollar value, but rather as a percentage of all of the dollars in existence. Possibly with some kind of relationship to some kind of measure to the cost of living – renting a 1br apartment in the most expensive city to live in, for instance, if we want to be really aggressive.

So the value of the dollar drops into the ground. That’s fine, because everyone is getting a basic income guaranteed to have about the same amount of purchasing power no matter what. And the money that the 1% are sitting on rapidly becomes worthless; eventually everyone is getting the amount of money those folks are sitting on every month.

Disclaimer: I am stoned as fuck right now. Feel free to discuss exactly why this is a terrible idea and how it could be better. Take as given that I have mind-controlled the POTUS, Senate, and the Congress, or some other equally unlikely method of making it happen despite the way folks with tons of money will be fighting against this happening.

In 1976, my parents and I took a trip to Washington, DC. We did the Smithsonian, we saw 4th of July fireworks from the Capitol grounds. It was a pretty cool thing to do for my fifth birthday.

What I only found out much later was that this trip had another purpose: my father had been offered a job at NPR, building out their network, after doing a great job getting the New Orleans classical/NPR station going around the same time my mother was pregnant.

Ultimately they decided against it, preferring to stay in New Orleans.

The thing I just realized: One of the things I often suspect may have been a contributor to my being trans? Drinking New Orleans tapwater. Sure, they filtered out the poop. The stuff they knew was bad. But we are talking about water that comes at least partially from the Mississippi. Which I lovingly refer to as “the cloaca of the nation”. Rivers in more than half of America flow into it. And everyone dumps their effluvia into their rivers. I grew up drinking a crazy soup of all of the industrial runoff of most of the country.

I mean, from what I hear the Potomac isn’t that clean either. But it’s only draining from four of those tiny little Northeastern states. There are less opportunities for someone to pour industrial runoff into it.

So in the alternate world where they decided to move to DC… did five years of not drinking all the stuff in the Mississippi result in me not needing to transition? (I started to get the first rumblings of it around eleven.)

I’ll never know, of course. And I don’t blame my parents for deciding to stay put; they made the decision they felt was best for themselves and me with the data they had. Still. That’s a heck of a question to suddenly ask myself.