Back!

I'm back from the wilds of Yorkshire, where I've spent my time up hills, walking dogs, playing Ticket to Ride, reading Ted Chiang (cheers to whichever of coalescent and greengolux recommended his short story collection to me) and writing up Worldcon (it's on my PDA, you'll have to wait for me to unpack it and do a synch).

I had a lovely time, and have spent the last couple of hours largely recovering from it while checking 5 days of LJ, Slashdot, comics, etc.  I've skip-read _everything_, so if something happened to you that I ought to know about, feel free to let me know in a comment.

The best news is, of course, that my cable provider are upgrading me to 4MB for free!  I'd even be willing to pay the extra £10 a month for 10MB, if only I could think of a use for the extra bandwidth.

Now. I believe that the first two episodes of Lost are waiting for me on the Tivo...

Two straight Canadian men to marry each other

There's an article here about two straight men who have noticed that there's a significant tax break for married couples - and are planning to take advantage of it.

Which, I think, just goes to show, that if you allow people to do things for one reason, they'll do it for their own reasons too.  Or as William Gibson once said "The Street finds its own uses for things."

How long, one wonders, until marriage is broken down, and you get to form your own contract using a CC-style choose-your-own-license?

I would like {Insert Name Here} to (a)inherit all my worldly goods (b)have power of attorney (c)love, honour and obey me (delete as applicable)

Worldcon

I spent the last four days in deepest Yorkshire, with 13 family members (including 3 under 6 years old) and 4 dogs.  You can thus imagine that I might spend a few hours sitting in my room with a PDA and a keyboard, writing up a Worldcon report.  I didn't mean to write 3,500 words, but such are the perils of young children.

Herein you will find mention of various people, including surliminal, nhw, coalescent, greengolux, the entirety of the Plokta Cabal, zarabee, swisstone, repeated Mike Abbott's and many more  - I know that I saw many more people than this, and can only humbly apologise for missing you out, but a 10,000 word write-up would seem extreme.  I've included mainly those people I was actually seeing at a panel, out to dinner with or otherwise thrown into extended contact around.  flickgc will undoubtedly complain that she's not mentioned at all.  I was writing this some distance from an internet connection (about half a mile, to the village shop), and thus have used real names, as my only reference was a copy of the Con Guidebook.  If you know the people you can undoubtedly match them up to their LJ tags - which is more than I can generally manage.

Looking back at my Eastercon write-up (handily at my side, thanks to its inclusion in Lilian's final (ha!) fanzine), I note that it finishes with me looking forward the Worldcon, thankful that it's significantly closer to Edinburgh than Hinkley is.  In hindsight I can now appreciate that this proximity is both a blessing and a curse. 

This was my third convention (not counting Corflu, which I didn't actually attend any of, the delights of Las Vegas far outweighing the pull of aged fanzine creators - with a few exceptions), and I was looking forward to chatting to The Plokta cabal, Third Row fandom, miscellaneous Cambridge people and the others who had repeatedly surfaced at previous events.

My brother Mike, on reading my Eastercon write-up, pointed out the obvious - which is that write-ups of events tend to end up as lists of "things wot I went to", so rather than attempt to find a way of subverting that format, I'll play straight into it, with a list of panels attended, meals eaten, etc,and then attempt to stick in some context and opinion at the end.
( Read on - if you dare )

Pictures of Yorkshire

This is where I spent the last few days. Well, this is a hill I climbed, and Alfie, the biggest dog in the world.
( Read more... )

Worldcon photos

More camera-phone photos. One of these days I'll remember my camera.
( Read more... )