Go out to the farmer’s market. Come home and put stuff away. Notice the FedEx slip from yesterday’s attempt at delivering the stuff I shipped home from AC. Wonder if they deliver on Saturday.

Three minutes later, the doorbell rings. It’s my stuff.

One less thing to worry about today.

I went out for a walk. Wandered up to Ravenna Park, drifted through the central trail, then up to one of the more hidden bridges. I sat there for a while, turning my brain off and looking out at all the trees, listening to the birds and the wind.

I took a circuitous route out of the park, and ended up on the far side form my place. Close to the University Place mall. I decided to go to dinner at a pizza place there. Got a “high heat”, which is red sauce, peppers, and sausage made with a tiny, tiny pinch of bhut joloka pepper.

Waiter: Would you like some dessert?
Me: No thanks. It’d just mute the pain.
Waiter: I like your style!

Though to be honest, next time I wander that way I might ask for double sausage – it’s hot enough to tingle a little bit, but not enough to create a nice little symphony of pain that lingers on my lips for most of the walk home.

Today, I should’ve worked on the page of Rita that didn’t go up today.

Today, I should’ve gone for a walk in the sun.

Today, I should’ve gone to yoga class.

Today, I should’ve eaten.

Today, I should’ve put on some clothes and opened the window.

Today, I should’ve done more than sitting in the big beanbag chair poking at the net.

But I didn’t, and I really don’t feel bad about it. Because I spent the weekend being in a strange place full of people I had to talk to and colorful things to look at, and one day of doing absolutely nothing in a low-stimulus environment is a really, really good idea after that.

Also amusingly enough as I got to the point of writing that last thing I should’ve done, my computer brought up a notification that it would restart to apply the OS update it’d just download. It won’t do that until I tell it to, of course. But I think I’m gonna give it permission to do that, pull on some clothes, and go for a bit of a walk before the sun sets.

I’ve been using Astrid for my task-list software for a while. Started using it when I had an Android phone, kept using it when I switched to iOS. Then Yahoo acquihired the Astrid team, and decided to shut it down.

I’ve tried the several suggestions that Astrid sent out, and kinda hate them all. What are you using for task management? Will it fit in with my own preferences in task list management as listed below?

My requirements:

– must be able to completely ignore the “tasks have due dates” paradigm, I don’t work that way at all
– must be able to synch between multiple devices (at least iOS + web, more is a bonus)
– tasks must be able to be in multiple lists at once (say, some bit of bedroom furniture I want to find in “bedroom” and “shopping” all at once) or be able to organize stuff via tags instead of lists
– must have a simple checklist-oriented UI available
– must not force me into any particular task management paradigm such as GTD or whatnot

Major bonuses:

– location awareness on ENTIRE LISTS in the mobile app (Apple’s Reminders makes you set location on every single task, which sucks ass for my usage model of ‘tell me I have some stuff on my grocery list when I’m near the store’)
– either Astrid import, or some other way to feed it a big list of my existing tasks after massaging the CSV that Astrid exported into a documented format

edit. I just dumped my stuff into Remember The Milk for now, gonna see how that works. I figured out a way to massage my Astrid export into it. Might try some others later in the week.

I’m home from Anthrocon! I did my accounts sitting in the Pittsburgh airport; I’m about $80 in the red. Which is not bad when you consider that my expenses were around $1300. I think I’ll be going back next year; I could have done a few things differently and probably have had a couple hundred less in expenses and turned a little profit. Hopefully this amount of sales wasn’t a one-time thing due to pent-up demand for the Tarot deck by East Coast folks – I shipped out a box of 24 decks, and shipped back 9.

I really have nothing to say about various parts of the con. I got in around midnight Thursday, set up in the dealer’s room first thing Friday, missed that night’s dance due to being tired and jet lagged, spent all Saturday in the dealer’s room, hit the dance, spent all Sunday in the dealer’s room, and was sad to discover Anthrocon does not have an official dead dog dance. I did all of one panel at the end, which was a pretty fun discussion of “advanced graphic storytelling” that touched on various things.

Made some new friends, got photographed posing on top of the GoH’s amazing sports car (I now have a perfect author photo for Rita), went out to dinner with the Furoticon people, I mean it was a con I guess? Supposedly there were almost 5600 attendees but it didn’t really feel like it from where I was in the dealer’s room.

AC’s dealer’s room felt huge and intimidating when I first went as a congoer a few years ago. But this year? It felt modest. Probably because I showed at ECCC earlier this year. I’m kinda graduating from the furry scene, and my idea of “huge con” is changing.

Sales were weird. I made almost half my expenses on Friday, which I normally expect to be kind of ass even on a four-day con. Saturday felt dead, though I made a decent chunk when all was said and done – the fursuit parade may have been a contributor to that, what with setting it up, and with it being a super long march that I’m told left suiters pretty damn tired. Dunno. It wasn’t just me, either; Ursula wandered by my table at one point and SHE was having slow sales on Saturday.

Sales were also weird in what I sold. Normally I do a fair number of table commissions and sell a handful of prints. This con, I sold a TON of prints and only got FOUR table commissions all con. Three of the four incurred the Complicated Character surcharge, which was a little frustrating – I’m fine with doing that kind of stuff, but it’s a little frustrating to go from one complex piece to the next with no chance to take a break on a more normal character.

I will close this with a few Vine videos I recorded that I think kinda sum up the experience of, well, ANY furry con to be honest.

lonely

squeakers

bangarang

education part 1 (starring sigil and nate)

education part 2 (starring sigil, nate, and ec major’s crotch)

I just had a dude follow me around downtown for three blocks and grope my ass. Luckily he did the latter as I was going for the full elevator to an underground bus station, so I was able to embarrass the fuck out of him by saying “dude did you just grope my ass” in front of an audience who expressed some disapproval of this action.

He went a different way when the elevator opened, thankfully.

And when I got home, you can bet I changed my clothes.

I’m beginning to wonder if what I thought was constipation is actually my first hernia or something. Welcome to being an adult, Peggy.

Perfect timing if it is, too. One week until Anthrocon. Hoping I don’t have to cancel.

I’ve been watching a lot of Kickstarters lately. And more particularly, watching some people who I knew were going to have their campaigns blow up worry about basic success. I think I’ve got a pretty good sense for where a campaign is likely to end up now.

And I really wish I felt confident that I have a big enough audience to pull off a five-figure kickstarter for the next book of Rita. Well, we’ll see how it goes – I’ll probably aim a little higher this time, and hopefully there will be some new readers brought in who pump it up a lot by buying book 1 along with book 2.

I’ve watched enough Kickstarters to know that the magic number seems to be somewhere around $10k; if you can set and achieve an initial goal above that, you’re going to have a ton of inertia, and roll on through several stretch goals and a lot of units sold. And I know that ultimately being able to do that is a function of the size of your audience. Mine, I think, is just not quite big enough yet. Maybe by somewhere in the middle of Drowning City it’ll be that big. I can only hope. I could maybe squeeze out like $7-8k if I asked for it, but that would largely be on the backs of a couple large donors rather than on a ton of people buying the book, and that’s not going to build any inertia.

It’s a damn good thing I’m not counting on this to pay my rent.

Ah well, guess I’ll shower, and debate if I want to spend two hours on the bus to go pick up my wallet. I do have this nice new computer with killer battery life that’s aching for its first outing… but I also know I can’t be guaranteed the two seats I need to spread out computer and tablet. And I have a page for tomorrow that still needs a LOT of work.