Of the pre-Nullarbor rush, songvids and Sharon.

Life is good but I'm knackered. Been trying to take it easy and I'm still knackered. I had a ten hour sleep and woke up so tired I could barely move. If the tickets weren't so pricey, I would actually bow out of going to Weird Al tonight - I'm that tired.

So, I'm behind on everything and have ceased to be concerned by it. I'll get done what I can before I leave so long as it doesn't drain my mind or body too much, and the rest can go to buggery. It's not worth risking my safety, or the safety of Hespa, by mentally or physically exhausting myself before a long trip. I'm still recovering from the last few weeks. I'm certainly likely to get to Perth and go thud.

On the bright side, I've got a character for the masquerade. I was annoyed that I may not have something this year, so glad I had the idea. Best thing is, I don't have to buy anything! Some may view it as tasteless, but I don't. I view it as humourously honouring a person I really genuinely liked.

As I type, I've got a bunch of my old clips dumping to DVD courtesy of a DVD recorder. I've got the clips by Richard Freeland and Tom Marwede that inspired me to do my first clip, my first Doctor Who clip, my first clip ever, and at the moment I'm dumping the 20 minutes of mixed DW and general SF clips I did for a DWCV event. Okay, they're called songvids or something now, in my day they were called clips. I could find most of the important tapes, about an hour and a half of stuff.

Anyway, one of the oddities is a 24 year-old videotape will play fine, but the DVD recorder will have all sorts of problems and artifacting as it records the playback. I know the reason, the recorder is too sensitive. It takes a rough edit or bad enough image quality and can't deal with it, so the image will freeze and flicker, or go blank. So the DVD recorder is actually making my clips look worse, but at least it will give me copies of this stuff in a reasonable format when the tapes are finally unwatchable.

So far I've only done one clip on computer, the Continuum 3 opening ceremony. Everything else I've done was done on two VCR's.

So if one or my other co-panelists wants to send me her mailing address, I'll send a DVD of clips winging it's way to her. This post has comments screened, so you don't have to worry that people will see your home/mailing address.

And in a final little bit of news, Sharon is now coming to Swancon. We found some last minute cheap airfares (she'd umm-ed and ahh-ed initially and missed them early, so figured it was too expensive), and so now she's going. Yay! I'll be doing a lot of resting, so feel free to drag her off to restaurants and the like.

Cheers,
Danny

Swancon

Now a head's up to my Perthian pals - you're unlikely to see me at too much of the con. Based on recent experience, I'll manage an average two to four hours a day (including the panels I'm on) of con-going and the rest will be spent resting in my room. And if you think I may need a break, ask if I need a rest, it'll make me stop and take stock of how I'm doing, rather than just continuing to run because I haven't thought to stop.

Yes, I am that dumb.

So once I get to the con, if the door on my room is ajar, I'm open for visits. If it's closed, you are welcome to SMS me to see if I'm around/awake. If I'm sleeping the phone is on silent, so you won't be likely to wake me unless you try to ring, in which case the constant vibration noise will - so please don't ring unless it's important.

Will be hanging in Perth until the Thursday after the con, but may stay through the weekend if I'm still really tired, rather than start the trip back on a sleep debt.

Know I will catch up with most of you at the con, but particularly want to mention I'm hoping to catch up with khoath and ghoath as I know you guys are unlikely to be there. Don't know what we can organise between us, especially since the con will leave me stuffed, but if we can bump heads it would be good :)

The rest of you, look forward to catching up. And someone tell the %&*$ing Robin Pen he better turn up to buy me a drink in the bar!