I was originally going to distribute this to the ATC Board as an envoi of sorts when I left in 2007, but I let myself get talked out of it. Enough time has passed since then that I doubt anyone will be offended by what I had to say, and if so, too damn bad. Attentive readers will note that there are close similarities in a number of places to the "Anime Detour Philosophy" post, previous. This is not accidental.
( Thoughts of the Former Chief Wombat )
Obviously changes have occurred since I left. It's y'alls' convention now, and I really have nothing to say about how it's run these days. I'm also not inclined to sit back and snipe from 1100 miles away based on hearsay and rumor; in fact, I may not even be there this coming year if the job situation doesn't improve. Enjoy, or not, an it please ye.

Hooked up the old 80MB IDE drive yesterday but didn't have a chance to rummage through it. This has been corrected, and there was a lot of old Anime Detour stuff on it which some of you may or may not find interesting. It's behind the cut to spare the f-list, especially those parts that don't care about Detour.
( Anime Detour Philosophy )

Ganked from rinnytintinny on Facebook.
It made me think for a minute about how much time I've spent at conventions and/or working on them.
( Would you like to know more? )
I don't tag people, but I am curious about my friends' experiences, especially oldermore experienced fans like badger2305, materia_indigo, chebutykin, qob...you know who you are, people.

My ask/tell post about Anime Detour on the Something Awful forums.
So far I'm disappointed in the weak efforts of the trolls.

( Hyperion )
Related: Definitely going to the PRSFS meeting tonight to talk about SF. What a concept! A SF fan club that actually talks about SF! MADNESS!

Sort of related: Since my sponsor into Goonfleet had the bad grace to not only quit but get himself banned from the forums, I am casting about for a new sponsor and thinking glumly that I just might have to fork over my $10 to Lowtax and start posting at somethingawful.com. thaadd thinks I ought to do an ask/tell thread about Anime Detour. It could happen. UPDATE: It did happen.

Definitely related: Previous post about the League of Wonder provoked a lot of comments (props to burnunit for dropping by and responding) and if it does nothing more than put the LoW on notice that there's a lot of fans suspicious of the concept, then good. I don't know how much time I want to spend on the subject, since as I explained, whatever they do will have minimal impact on me since it's all going to happen in the Ninth Circle of HellMinnesota and not down here. Still, as one of the founders of Detour I feel some responsibility to keep an eye on "my" convention and occasionally stick my oar in, especially when major stuff like this heaves into view.

michaellee has been pimping this website aggressively of late, and I have some gut reactions. I'm posting them here because, well, I'm not really part of Twin Cities fandom any more. My future in fandom, such as it is, will be defined by whatever I do here in the Baltimore/Washington are. So I don't think it's my place to shit up League of Wonders with my comments.
( So what? )

Wound up doing my good deed for the decade by hauling a pizza out to P's place for various reasons she can explain if she wants to, but it was worth it to get caught up on all the Detour gossip/drama** as well as getting her take on this year's Convergence (now with 400% more SEX, LOL) which included pole dancing, go-go dancers at the Oddcon party, and a kissing booth for some worthy cause that featured increasingly scantily-clad young ladies as the weekend progressed. Judging from the photographs posted so far by verrant, among others, Allen Carpentier's criticism of femmefans* no longer applies, at least not at Convergence where, apparently, attracting da yoots of Minnesota is not a problem. :)

Nothing much of any consequence accomplished today otherwise; hope to change that tomorrow.






*"Half-pretty women half-dressed to show it." Inferno, chapter 1 IIRC
**Relax, stuckintraffik, it's all good. ;)

Yeah, you can't get away from annoying people who want to strike a political pose, even at the orchestra. (Instapundit)

Of course, one of the ways people can be an asshole in response to this kind of nonsense is to hit organizations like this where they live: not just in the wallet, but in the tax exemption. This is something I always worried about with in respect to Detour. I didn't want even the appearance that we were partisan one way or the other because of this, and I don't know that I was always clear to people about why. Putin jokes OK, maybe even jokes about the LDP (which would actually have been within our ambit) but for Kami-sama's sake, no campaign wear. It only takes one person to start a mountain of problems.

Crossposted from Facebook, where I ganked it from bam2: Someone needs your help.

To refresh your memories, Bob & Emily were guests of ours at the 2006 Detour and are really great people besides. I don't often post stuff like this, but damn it, we take care of our own. I'm unemployed, but I'm kicking in some cash because I know what it's like to lose family.

The Ohayocon link Greg referred to is here.

I think it's a cliche that people join fandom looking for community. Traditionally, this has certainly been the case, and to some extent continues to be the case for some people, but now that SF and fantasy have become part of the mainstream I don't think it's quite as common as it used to be. The result of this is that fandom is less of a ghetto than it used to be, and some of the social aspects have weakened as a result.
( Would you like to know more? )

The AD 2009 Post-Mortem and ATC Annual Meeting were last weekend, and while I don't care so much what happened at the post-mortem, I'm curious about the annual meeting & elections. Who's in charge these days? Where's all the money going? Why isn't there an animetwincities.org website up yet? Somebody ought to be posting an annual report of sorts, even if it's only on their LJ.

I had fun this year, don't get me wrong, but I came too late and left too early and as a result didn't spend enough time at the convention. Not that I begrudge StippleAPA, thaadd, materia_indigo or yuusui one minute of the time we spent together Saturday and Sunday, but I did miss a lot of the convention and didn't spend nearly enough time hanging with friends on staff, guests, vendors, etc.

I did come home with some great music (and some really filthy music) and a signed picture of Bun-Bun that I now have to get autographed by John Ringo. Pete Abrams commands it!

Well, next year at the Sheraton, Thursday through Monday. The way it used to be, and the way it really should be. Because this shit of having to take a taxi from the Metro station because you got to the latter from Reagan National at 2345 sucks. Off to change bandages, set up the nose hose, and crash hard. More comments on Detour tomorrow night, fatigue and laundry permitting.

(moar like Day 1.1, c/d?)

Original plan to get up relatively early, hit the breakfast buffet and see bam2 before leaving for the collation failed utterly. I attended neither of the panels, missed bam2 and the buffet, and wound up eating lunch at Erbert & Gerbert's before boarding the bus to the Stipple collation and arriving half an hour early, much to Jeanne's surprise. Collation was entertaining; it was good to hang out with luned and the other folks and talk about Stuff.

C. showed up right at 1700 and we headed south to Edina and Q.Cumbers; dinner of good quality (and much roughage) was had, and then we went up to her office to do taxes, watch YouTube videos, do taxes, look at stuff in EVE, do taxes, drink tea, and basically act all ADD while taking care of her taxes for the last three years (MN and Fed). Hopefully the state and Feds won't screw her too badly on the penalties and interest. She pressed a couple of CDs on me of Funker Vogt, Combichrist, and some really filthy Russian ska by Leningrad. Reminded me of the famous DLI Obscenity tape, only set to ska music and sung enthusiastically. OMG, is it foul.

Got back to the hotel about 0100 or so in the snow, hung out for a while near ops with gohanvox, geekboyonline, kurai_tsuki, revolutionaryjo and others in various states of drunkenness (or not, as in the case of stuckintraffik and probably dejana) and headed upstairs about an hour or two later. Getting up in a few hours for breakfast will be painful but necessary; tomorrow I hope to actually see more programming, but I suspect this won't happen.

10:24 4/3/2009
Slept through most of the flight to STL, despite being as cramped as a 400-pound guy in Economy class always is. Almost got the chance to cash in my ticket for later flights and $300 since the flight was overbooked, but unfortunately there were enough no-shows that I was able to board. :(

10:27 4/3/2009
STL airport cops ride Segways. Every bit as lame as it sounds. Electric scoots would be much cooler, to say nothing of intimidating. Also, Wolfgang Puck's sandwiches suck.

Embraer 145s are too small for my enormous butt and even if I didn't weigh ~400 pounds they're too short for me to either fit in the seats or stand up in the aisle. Slept all the way from STL to Minneapolis.

Met up with most of my AD peeps Friday, did dinner with jamestrainor at Subway, failed to get out and get bandage scissors. Palace of Funk not yet filled with funk, but I am told Jeff's disco suit is indeed pimparrific. Hoping to see it tomorrow before dashing off to the collation and other non-AD things. Having had only 3 hours sleep in the last 48, it's time for me to crash. Tomorrow will be a day of taxes, conventional fanac, buffets, and almost certainly EVE.

Booked my flights to & from the Twin Towns of Terror for Anime Detour. Since uncertain job situation is uncertain, I booked the flights for Friday morning and Sunday night, which means I only need to take Friday off. One financial hurdle down, two to go.

Finished my tax returns tonight; will be getting ~$500 from the Feds (soon) and paying ~$475 to the state (on April 15). I think they screwed me out of the 20% discount I was supposed to get, at that.

Put in four hours at H&R Block tonight and will be doing the same for the rest of the week. We'll see what happens over the weekend. I'm currently looking at banking the federal refund and using the H&RB pay to build up a fund for Detour and Balticon. Or seeing a wound care specialist, if Kaiser doesn't repent and let me back into their HMO. There's other insurance available through the NRA, but if I can get coverage through Kaiser, I'd much rather do that. They already know what's going on, after all.

With that, I'm toddling off to bed. It's going to be a long couple of days ahead...and sometime in the next couple of weeks, I need to clean up and empty the living room some so onsenmark has someplace to crash the Thursday before Katsucon.

Oh, yeah, burrito: since I didn't get home until almost 1700 today and got called in to work at H&RB immediately, I wound up doing dinner at Chipotle around 1900. Good as usual, and maybe better without the expensive guacamole.

Southwest Airlines to start serving MSP in March 2009. Just in time for Anime Detour!

In other news, reserving most of my paycheck for rent; some of it will probably be sent off to pay for internets, and the rest will no doubt be wasted on gasoline, funny books, and artistic women, e.g. beatonna, after which I will huddle in the burrow until next payday. Here it is October already; can the dreary rains of winter be far off?

Unrelated: Jonah Goldberg describes the hideous expansion of the original shit sandwich into...well, he's the feelthy pro opinion columnist, and I'm not. Short, but satisfyingly bitter. Over at Don Luskin's place, economist John Seater wants to know WTF the crisis is, and has some pretty reasonable arguments as to why this is just another stampede of the lemmings, spurred on by the media.

Lastly, I'm not wasting my time listening to the debate. I suspect 70% of those who are going to vote in November have already made up their minds and are lying to/evading the pollsters, and the remaining 30% who haven't made up their minds need to get back on their meds and pay a little attention.

To acdragonmaster!
Plus, a shoutout to all my Detour peeps who are partying/picnicking today. For this day only, wish I was there.