There are other things to do at this convention, like finding out what the next Star Wars movie is called or seeing a preview of the Firefly movie, but we wouldn't know - we're in the dealer room pretty much the whole time. Con attendees know perfectly well what dangers exist in there, such as the dangers of buying expensive bullshit with your food money, and that's why they leave it from time to time. Imagine some depraved Vegas invention which could, in a single iteration of its evil purpose, obliterate your savings and replace the real artifacts of your life with convincing replicas of the sword from Lord of the Rings. This is not some dark fantasy. This is something that can actually happen, if you lack the cunning to contend with the treacherous dealer room and its huckster denizens.
Eventually, "Having To Go To The Bathroom" was the useful lie, the gaudy pavilion beneath which all manner of commercial acts were committed. Right about the time I had assembled a search party and sent them into the stalls, that fuckface would emerge from a crowd dressed entirely as a Tusken Raider or some other occupant of the Star Wars bestiary, shrugging his hairy Wampa shoulders in a science fiction approximation of our human gesture. I won't lie to you, I'm not entirely without fault - I snuck out to the Alien Hominid and WizKids booths and, heaped high with goods like the tines of a forklift, navigated the convention over a dense knot of merchandise.
In years past, the girls that came by the booth to talk to us were largely here on some kind of surgical, get in, get out type mission - they had typically been sent by their boyfriends to obtain a sketch of the "fruit robot." That was absolutely not the case this year. In fact, girls would approach the booth with boyfriends who were not readers, and they could be heard defining the odd cosmology of Penny Arcade in a hushed voice. I found this phenomenon mystifying. We do not go out of our way to make our site overtly hostile to women, our robotic rapists notwithstanding, but at the same time we are not women ourselves and have our own interests we tend to indulge in this space. At any rate, welcome aboard. It is good to have you.
I wanted to apologize to everyone who attended the Syndication panel on Sunday, at least, apologize to those who survived that guy from The Norm's fucking interminable sermons. He was so boring that I literally thought I would die if he didn't shut up. Maybe his strip is the bee's knees, I honestly don't care, but I have serious doubts regarding that man's ability to evoke joy.
Like all old people, he is convinced that his suffering is somehow more genuine, his wisdom more relevant, or his victories more enduring than those of younger people. Things got underway with Gabe saying that syndication was "worthless," and things degenerated from there. The Social Entropy forum tried to interject some lighthearted amusement into those dire proceedings, but the deck was stacked against them. The man absorbs and annihilates humor.
(CW)TB out.
we'll all float on
