Number6's Journal

Yes, I survived Fan Expo 2014. Did I have fun? Honestly, no, there were a couple minor bright spots, but on the whole, it was depressing exhausting affair. I didn't even wind up taking many pictures.

I'll give a bit more detail behind the cut (feel free to ignore the whining and skip right to the pictures).

The Narrative:( Read more... )

Picture time! Not very many!( Read more... )

Oh, and the sketch I got from Adrian Alphona (Runaways artist): ( Read more... )

I think, in the future, unless there is a specific person I want to see and get an autograph from (or I ever figure out somebody I want to cosplay), I'm going to skip cons from now on. I always wind up depressed after, and it was even worse this time around. And I'm still feeling run-down and drained.

(warning, self-pity ahoy, you are under no obligation to read)

So,finally screwed up the courage to send out a short story to another magazine. And 16 hours later (before I even had the chance to post that I'd done so), rejection. I guess it's good (implications that it was so terrible that it didn't even need to be considered for a full day aside) that I got the rejection right away. It would let me send it somewhere else, if I had somewhere else to send it or the energy to do so... and it allowed me to cut out much of the mildly pleasant but ultimately corrosive vice of hope. Why, all in all I only had a few minutes while drifting off to bed to really consider it possibly being accepted.

But that doesn't make it any less of a blow, or any less likely to have sent me into a spiral of sad. :P. Possibly not the best timing to have chosen to do it before the con this weekend, now chances are I'll be depressed in advance of it and that'll make it less easy to have fun, not to mention that even if it's enjoyable I tend to feel depressed afterwards due to the whole 'lonely even in a roomful of geeks' factor.

Probably won't get much writing done this week. Need a little wallowing time. But I will continue, after all, what choice do I have? It's the last dream I have left that might give my life any kind of meaning or satisfaction, that I haven't already accepted was impossible for me. And without dreams, what's to live for, aside from minimizing the pain I cause to those I care about?

I think I will possibly indulge in a gyro after the con, if I don't decide to back out of the con entirely.

Okay, maybe two dreams I haven't given up as impossible... writing and eating gyros. Not much to live for, but it's something.

At the moment, it's looking like in my efforts to get the new HD and such to work, even temporarily as a fix, I somehow damaged my motherboard or something.

I was trying to boot up a version of linux to get some temporary functionality, maybe if I was lucky even enough to watch BSG, but the disc I was using was screwed up or (more likely) autorun configured wrong for my system, and it got to a state where the computer wouldn't turn off either with the usual key commands, or with the power button. So, after waiting a while to see if it would sort itself out, I did what I usually do in such cases, pulled the plug out and tried again. In retrospect, probably a mistake, but a dead computer isn't that much less useless to me than a living computer that is stuck in some endless loop and won't do anything unless I do what might kill it.

When I put it back in, something was screwed up, where the power would only stay on while the button was pushed - as soon as you let go, it would turn off. Suspecting a loose connection, I pushed some things gently, and that problem seemed to be fixed... only to be presented with another.

Now when it turns on, there is a loud series of beeps, and no signal reaches the monitor so I can't even get an idea of what the beeps might mean. Oddly, the no-signal thing happened earlier today (but without the beeps). How did I fix it, you ask? I have no f$!@ing idea, I fiddled around a little and it started to work. I've fiddled as much as I can this time and nothing's happening.

Looks like I have to buy a f@$!ing new computer. Even if I somehow manage to get it working, there's no guarantee I can either get things running in a reasonable time, or that something else inexplicable won't go wrong when I jiggle it the right way. I'm not exactly making the big bucks, but I've had some money set aside. But now I have to go through the painful process of finding one.

In the meantime, very limited TV (and wouldn't you know it, it happens right before I lose most of the US channels to the digital switchover). No BSG, Lost, Wolverine and the X-Men, and probably Terminator until I can DL/watch streaming again.

And goodbye dreams of making an XBox360 my luxury purchase of the year, unless something unexpectedly nice (or even unexpectedly _not bad_, in a particular case) happens, which I doubt. :P

Valentine's Day Weekend _usually_ sucks for me (the whole, 'the rest of my life is doomed to be a bleak, lonely existence' thing I usually try to ignore), but this time it sucked for way more than the usual reasons. Sometimes I think the universe and I are in a game of chicken. It tries to see how close to unbearable it can push me without me going over the line. :P Of course, that would be anthropomorphizing it to an unwarranted degree. Events are cowards, they didn't occur singly, but instead they run in packs and leap out at you all at once. Also anthropomophism, but it's a Gaiman paraphrase. I expect next up will be the announcement of C.B. Cebulski as the next Runaways writer, ruining one more thing I get pleasure out of. Or maybe the HD on _this_ computer will blow up and leave me not only computerless and out of what little human conversation I get outside the immediate family, but also having lost all of the writing I've done over the last few years. :P.

Also, Sunday morning TV, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really sucks without cable. I mean, pretty much nothing but religious crap and one newsish channel.

This whinefest brought to you by the color out of space, the number e, and Valenzetti equation. Sorry. I'll try to be back to more-or-less stoicism next time I post, but I needed to blow off some steam.

So, the latest in a series of annoyances, mostly minor with a few slightly less minor of the past week, the latest cuts in the universe's quest for 1000...

Yesterday, I woke up at 4:30am as usual to get ready and go to work, showed up at 6... and waited more than 3 and a half hours for the truck to arrive. It was apparently, running late. Then, after getting home, wanting to relax a bit before making up some sleep, I turn on my computers and... discover that one of them won't boot up. Apparently something in the HD died, or the whole HD died, I'm not sure yet. I didn't lose anything vital at least - most of my writing is here on this one, and most of the important stuff on the other computer I backed up here (and vice versa, cause I'm paranoid). Assuming the data's unrecoverable (I don't know at this point, but there's not enough there important to bother with trying to take it somewhere professional to do it, so if I can't get at it myself, it is), I think I lost a couple scripts I was working on, but those were more experimental/goofball than anything else, and the rest is all stuff I can easily (well, somewhat easily) download again, it'd just be a pain to get everything as I wanted it. The main problem is that it is my faster computer so until I get a new HD to run it off and install an OS on it, I can't watch movies (or even video clips, really). So bah. Bah I say. I mean granted right now all there is is SG:A's finale, but in the next little while will be a couple things that I won't be able to get on TV and I would rely on downloading to get my fix.

Anyway, let's get some Book Foo out of the way.
Finished: The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman (reread)
Started: Excession, by Iain M. Banks

I've already read FW many times so no detailed comments.

Finished: Jumper, by Steven Gould (reread x15ish)
Started: Otherland, Vol 2: River of Blue Fire by Tad Williams

My only comments on Jumper is to reiterate: waaaaay better than the movie.

ETA: Yay! Thanks to some magic disk utils on CD my brother had on him, I was able to get the drive to boot up again and all seems to be running. It's too early to say if it's a permanent fix, but it works for now and everything seems to be there. Now to find SGA

Cut for those people who've already read enough of these...
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