Dalekboy

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

Hello my dears, well Preston was a tough gig for all sorts of reasons.
( Find out why... )
Got home late and so left late to visit Phil and Frances. I needed to shower and drink a fair bit before I was right to go. Needless to say my lovely wife Sharon did all the driving. It was a great night. We ate nachoes, talked about all sorts of weird stuff and watched the "Don't Open 'til Doomsday" episode of the original Outer Limits, which was very cool. The character of the old bride is over the top but in a nicely desperate and creepy way.

Phil also loaned me a handful of Residents Cd's. I love the Residents and have a lot of their early stuff on LP which I simply can't afford to replace with CD's. I'm hoping to do a panel on the narrative aspects of their work at Continuum 3 since so much of it has genre elements. It's so nice to have the chance to hear them again. I don't love all their stuff, I find some of their early stuff a bit too discordant, but some of their later work like the Mark of the Mole trilogy and God in Three Persons is interesting and insightful. Thanks Phil!