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November 14th, 2010
 | 12:25 am
Again, a busy day at the SF convention, Tuscon.
We were up fairly early, had the not very impressive free breakfast again, and then out to the panels and discussions. I listened to a talk about costuming by John and Bjo Trimble, stopped to pick up a Jim Butcher pb novel I hadn't pursued, and then went to a slide show narrated by Bjo about the history of Trek, which was filled with amusing anecdotes. Next, I sat in line waiting to get some items signed by Jim Butcher. As GoH, he had quite a line, but I had gotten into in fairly early, so I had the two RPG game books and the latest hc (a story collection; I'll talk about it later) signed. He was very gracious, but I must admit that I was very early in the line. Over two hours later, he was still signing books. The concomm had stated that you could only get three items signed at a time, and then you had to go to the back of the line. To me, this seems fair. However, a number of people who were at the front of the line had more than twenty items with them to get signed, and they were pissed. I'm sorry, but that just seems unfair, exhausting him at the start, and making it much harder for him to interact with his fans in a positive way. In the end, it looked to me like he took care of them, in any case, and if they wanted it so badly, then let them wait.
In the same line,  forestcats had gotten a number of fabric swatches signed by all the attending authors, including Butcher's wife, Shannon, who writes paranormal romances, and Jim Butcher himself. She's planning to use the fabric swatches someday to make quilts that will contain an enormous supply of authors of SF, Fantasy and Horror novels. Very cool.
We rested for a short while after that, and then Katie, our matron-of-honor, called. We met her at the entrance to the hotel, and she took us for dinner to a place called Cafe Poca Cosa, where we had a wonderful gourmet meal of a mostly Mexican style. The food was wonderful, and it was great seeing Katie again, as we haven't run into her for a very long time. Contact has been mostly emails or the occasional phone call, but if we decide to continue our relationship with this convention, I suspect that we'll be seeing a lot more of her.
Once we finished eating, we took a stroll in downtown Tuscon, during Second Saturday, when apparently the district has a number of food kiosks/trucks open up, and lots of street musicians and whatnot appear on the sidewalks. A few stores remained opened past 8PM (gasp!), and we browsed one or two, including a gallery of eerie artworks. We did NOT partake of these food trucks; they aren't like the ones we've been hunting in the LA area. There was even a group of break dancers (is it still the 70s?), none of whom were black, one, who had to truly be a gymnast, was white, and the rest were Hispanic and Asian; they worked out to salsa rhythyms and industrial music. Whoa.
We got back to the car, and were returned to the hotel after hugs and farewells. We got to the con as the Masquerade was under weigh, and apparently only missed a costume or two; the interim entertainment while the judges deliberated was a belly dance group who danced to Gogol Bordello, something from the beginning of the 20th Century that sounded like it had been digitized from a cylinder, and something Arabic/Industrial. They were pretty solidly good, and for the most part, danced in very well-choreographed motions.
After that, we wandered into something called What's that Byte?, where we were asked to identify variously the movies, actors, or characters of a variety of .wav files from all sorts of sources. I managed to answer several, while screwing up occasionally, and it was an amusing way to burn through a couple of hours.
Then, back to the room, and posting.
We'll head back in the late morning or early afternoon, to be home fairly late in the evening. Hopefully, brushette and corveys won't have destroyed too much in our absence.
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