Horses are good company -- The Witcher

A highlight of WisCon for me is the Vid Party.

Here are some gentle and soothing vids that were shown at this year's party.

Landsailor, The Legend of Korra, by skygiants

https://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/416273.html


Happy Little Clouds by Glitzer - the joy of painting



Clear Skies - Kiki's Delivery Service - by Wild AMV

I always have more energy in the Spring. I really need to buy a lightbox, yes, but also just the greenness, and seeing people outside, and the smell of the earth, are all cheering. The grass is lush and intensely green. Dandelions and violets are in bloom. The trees are beginning to leaf out.

Happy things:
My roommate brought home donuts.
I'm enjoying playing Xbox games.
Birds singing and hearing it through the open windows.
Enjoying volunteering at books to prisoners.

At a local dog park the other day, I looked out at the rise and fall of the land. The oak savannah giving way to open farmland. The sun shining on dandelions' happy faces. I felt an expansive joy that landscapes and nature give to me; a sense of peace. Almost an aching kind of happiness.

To help myself fall asleep I told myself a story about two queer dragon riders and their dragons.

Dragon 1 is Iris and her rider is Avery. They do search and rescue and Iris got injured protecting Avery from a rock fall and lost her right wing.

Dragon 2 is Tailwind. Her rider is Geneva. They are an engineer pair who come to the hospital to consult on making a prosthetic wing for Iris.

I don't know if I have the energy to write this story but I'm enjoying thinking about it.

Your jokes have brought you fortune and fame
but today you should be feeling some shame
if your punchline is "fat"
get off the damn mat
and come back when you've brought your A game.


CC commons licence, share and share alike, 2015

Wow! A DW user randomly gave me six months of paid time under the sponsor-a-free user program! This is so great! I got my icons back and can post polls!

Flat Out Bolli (her racing name) hails from Mobile, Alabama originally. She is a small black Greyhound with some white on her. She has a cowlick on her neck that makes it seem like she has a mohawk. She will be 3 in December. She is super chill and is already napping on the rug on the living room floor. She is interested in toys.

I plan on changing her name; I don't really like "Bolli" as a nickname. Taking name suggestions in comments!

Photo Album at Flickr

My Kobo decided to start working again. Yay! I've been reading a lot of fic of the "Live Free or Die Hard" fandom variety.

Saw the Lego movie today and enjoyed it.

A few things I've been enjoying during this long, cold, lonely winter:

I can Has Cheezburger Feed for cute and silly pictures and videos of animals.

Humans of New York (which is a Tumblr, but you can also subscribe to on FB). Portraits of people with quotes attached. Super awesome. There's also a book which I bought for my parents.

Thursday:
Shopping for Access Craft supplies with my pals which was super fun. In lieu of dinner or the readings I took a nap for two hours.
Then, Geekeoke! Met such_heights! Sang a duet with jackshoegazer. Yelled and screamed a lot.

I am very grateful to JacquelynGill for taking over blue tape responsibilities at WisCon! It's a big weight off my shoulders.

Friday I went to the Gathering, which I don't do every year due to noise, but this year I checked out the Hypnosis station (cool) and the clothing swap where I found a gray tuxedo jacket. meloukhia took the other tux jacket which was white. I wore the tux jacket for the next two days! It fits me about perfectly.

I tried to go to a panel but I was too anxious. I went to Natt Spiel for supper with some pals: laceblade, dimensionwitch, Jack, and Jaq. Then we had Opening Ceremonies, and the vid show. I attended almost the entirety of the vid show, and was in home and in bed by 2 AM. Dimensionwitch was my houseguest.

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On Saturday I ate at the hotel restaurant for lunch with some of these same buddies; I ordered a BBQ sandwich which was good but too spicy.

My 1 pm panel was lightning talks. I talked about Graphic works by women and very briefly about chickens. Another talk I really liked was by Kat Sweet who talked about using 3D printers for making sex toys. One person talked about Git Hub. The other talk was about shapes and emptiness in the universe, and how shapes are repeated large and small, over and over.

I panel surfed the 2:30 pm panels; not finding much I wanted to sit thru.

Next I attended "Food in Spaaace" which was super fun! The panelists all had great things to say. When going into space, would we pack food along? If so, how? Would we grow food on the ships? Who would grow the food and cook it? What about an edible space ship? What about having soil and mushrooms and trees on ships? Etc. There was some discussion of using 3D printers to make food. One person asked about how Star Trek replicators are supposed to work; I don't think there was a clear answer on this one. There was some discussion of military rations, of submarines and living at the South Pole / McMurdo. An audience member had been a cook at McMurdo and described that. It takes a large support staff to support 1 scientist. I asked about the ethics of vat-grown protein vs. eating a real cow, a la several books I've read, and the panelists had good things to say about that. Rich people might want the hand-raised real cow. Middle-class people might get the vat-grown protein but be lied to about where it's coming from. Also, what is the source of the original cells making up the vat-grown protein? It's hard to know the ethics of a tech that doesn't exist yet. "Firefly" came up a couple of times: food as currency, the plain food being eaten over and over again but improved with spices, the fresh fruit being high value. FUN panel.

I went to dinner at Himal Chuli with futuransky and her partner. We mushed together with some other fan people at this tiny restaurant.

I sat in for part of the Tiptree Auction, then went to the Glitch Memorial Panel. This was bittersweet but I appreciated it a lot. We talked about why we loved the game. There was a screen up and a computer; our avatars were shown and different screen shots. We all liked the whimsy, humor, and non-violence. Many of us who played are non-gamers, and we enjoyed the easiness of entry. It didn't require much hand-eye coordination, and there were no negative consequences to falling or dying. One panelist thought that the marketing failed: Glitch should have been marketed to non-gamers. Many of us discovered it by word of mouth. We all enjoyed the music and art. I especially enjoyed how there was no gender unless you wanted there to be, and the humor was not offensive. It was cooperative instead of competitive. Even the "griefing", such as tree wars, seemed minor and amusing. Conflicts such as people stealing herbs from community gardens were engineered out of the game. Altruism was built in.

I went by a couple of parties and then went home. My dog was a little stressed at being left alone all day.

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Sunday I ate lunch in the Con Suite with j00j and Claire I think.

At 1 pm I was on the "A Very Special Disability Panel." I shall rely on others to report about this.

At 2:30 I sat in on a spontaneous programming panel re mental health disability things.

At 4 I was on a great panel that I proposed called "Radical Queer Agenda"!!! With Timmi DuChamp, Mary Ann Mohanraj, Victor Raymond, and JoSelle V. This was super awesome. Futuransky was taking notes and I think someone else was tweeting it. (#RadQueer)

This was too many things in a row for me and I nearly melted down afterwards. I fled to Jesse's room for a while. Then we ate lunch in the restaurant.

I went to the Guest of Honor speeches but got restless and left before Kiini's speech. I wandered the parties for a while and ate delicious foods. At the Clarion West party I met a woman who has written for TV, and it turned out she wrote the vampire episode for Murder, She Wrote. I find it a little awkward when writers ask (at parties) if I am a writer. "Uh... no not really." "So what do you do?" "Uh...." Maybe I should work on that.

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Today I went to Sign Out and had Ellen Kushner re-sign Privilege of the Sword, which she'd signed for me in 2007 (my first WisCon!). LOL. One thing that was neat about my first WisCon was that I had just read a bunch of these books and suddenly these authors were right there in front of me!

I ate at Noodles with the fannish crew and went to the end-of-con panel and party before heading home.

Sorcha and I go to the dog park every day. She is pretty timid and likes it best when there are not a lot of other dogs there. She also likes it when she has multiple people paying attention to her. Today was the Best! Day! Ever! because we met another Greyhound. The other dog is called Zeebee and is a brindle. A young couple are her humans and they've had her for a bit over a year. The dogs ran together and then we walked a lap around the park. Sorcha seemed much more secure having another greyhound and several humans around her. She ran quite a bit and smiled a lot. We also talked to a guy and his dog that we met there the other day, and an older couple who used to have a Greyhound, so she got lots of attention.

I took a couple of rather bad photos and posted them here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sasha_feather

It was very hot and bright out today. My browser widget says it's still 74 degrees F! Now Sorcha is on the sofa with me, laying on my feet.

It's nice; even when I come home from work feeling like crap, I go for a walk with the dog and I feel better. I also talk to all kinds of people when I am walking her. I've met some neighbors with dogs, for instance, and people at the park. I talked to some Hispanic guys at the soccer fields yesterday and I think one of them had a prison or gang tattoo on his face (something by his eye? lol I'm so innocent). My roommate's boyfriend talks to me a lot more now that the dog is around. Dogs get people to talk, even me.