I guess collecting is sort of the point with a lot of media tie-in packaging (well, that and cross-promotion, of course), but I really have to wonder how people typically collect food packages. I mean, do you keep the can unopened and hope it doesn’t leak? Do you drink it even though the can won’t be in mint condition anymore?
Oh no. I just had a horrible thought about those Minions-labeled bananas!
I stopped frequenting Barnes & Noble a while back because they were so determined to sell you a Nook and get you out of the store, never to return. (That, and for a while we had a great indie bookstore nearby.)
Now they’re selling vinyl records.
And holding events.
They’re doing Throwback Thursdays and a Fangirl Friday.
I don’t know if it’s a desperate attempt at relevance or a brilliant return to form.
I certainly know it’s not corporate-wide, though — or at least not evenly distributed — because a week later I went to another Barnes and Noble, one near a full-blown mall, and walked straight into the giant NOOK pavilion.
No sign of any events aside from a mention of filming during the Harper Lee book launch. Vinyl was being plugged in the music section in the back, but not right up front.
On the other hand, no one was staffing the NOOK pavilion, and half the tables were empty. So maybe it’s still being phased out?
Mira Grant has been writing yearly novellas set in the world of her Newsflesh trilogy. A generation after the zombie apocalypse, humanity has survived, adapted, and rebuilt civilization. While the trilogy focuses an a core group of characters, journalism, social media and American politics, the novellas have opened up more of the world.
“Countdown” reveals the early stages of the Rising, including a look at what two messed-up background characters were like before everything went to hell. “The Last Stand of the California Browncoats” looks at what would happen if an actual zombie plague wiped out Comic-Con. “How Green This Land, How Blue This Sea” jumps across the world to Australia, where the people take a very different approach toward managing the zombie virus. “The Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell” explores the implications of life with zombies on the school system, and it’s really freaking disturbing. The newest one refers back to it (not in any detail — it goes out of its way to not describe what actually happened), and it hit me again. That story sticks with you.
“Please Do Not Taunt the Octopus” is the latest, and picks up the tale of Dr. Abbey, who runs an underground virology research lab where they’re trying to cure the zombie virus without the politics constraining mainstream organizations like the CDC (which has its own issues), as they deal with industrial espionage, hackers, and some…surprise visitors. She grudgingly accepts the label of “mad scientist,” though she insists that while she is angry, she’s not crazy.
It’s a surprisingly upbeat story considering the setting, as is “How Green This Land…”
One interesting observation: It’s now 2015. In the Newsflesh world, the Rising took place in 2014. We’ve now branched into alternate universe territory, but there are references to historic events and pop culture that happened after the first novel came out in 2010.
Another observation: I followed this up by finally reading Unlocked, a novella detailing the background of John Scalzi’s novel Lock-In. It’s an interesting parallel, in that both Newsflesh and Lock-In pick up a generation after a devastating virus has swept the globe, killing and transforming people — in one case taking over the bodies as the mind dies, in the other leaving the mind intact but cut off from the body — and the technological, social and political changes made to deal with the new normal.
I’ve gotten so used to this Round Table Pizza restaurant using movie quotes on this sign that it wasn’t until after I’d snapped a picture that I realized just how freaking appropriate this one is.
You might say it’s the Holy Grail of movie quotes for this particular chain…
We’re both long-time fans and have been going to conventions for years. I grew up in a fannish family and my parents took me and my brother along to sci-fi/fantasy cons when we were younger. So when our son was born, we didn’t plan to stop going to Comic-Con.
We did have to change our approach for him to get the most out of it.
Some cons have kids’ programming or kid-friendly activities, though most of what’s out there seems to be aimed at ages five and up. Some cons (such as SDCC) offer childcare, which is a great way to give the child something to do and set aside a block of time when both parents are free. The rest of the time there’ll be a lot of trading off who’s going to a panel and who’s got the kid.
TL;DR: For children under five, it seems to work best if you can leave them with someone for the first day (or several) and bring them on the final day. That gives you a chance to meet most of your goals and scout out things that your child might like. And it gives your child a chance to enjoy a slice of the con without overwhelming them. (Also, please do everyone a favor and use the smallest stroller you can. Cons are crowded, and some, like SDCC, ban oversized strollers on the main floor.)
Obviously, your child’s personality and interests are going to alter the balance, but here’s our experience so far.
We didn’t even think of bringing him to a con before he was one. Comic-Con became a one-day trip. We left the baby with relatives, took the train down to San Diego in the morning, and took the train back in the evening.
Of course, this only works if you’re within commuting distance of a convention. We skipped WonderCon’s final year in San Francisco, since it would have been an eight-hour car trip.
Smaller cons might not be so bad at this age if you time things right. I remember a couple with a very small baby who was sleeping through Long Beach Comic-Con. Still, if your kiddo is too small to have gotten critical immunizations (do they even have a shot for the Con Crud?), large crowds anywhere are probably a bad idea.
WonderCon’s first year in Anaheim was our first experiment as geek parents at a con. At 14 months, he didn’t have much sense of what was going on, but he loved exploring. We only brought him on Sunday afternoon, and he spent most of the time riding in the stroller except when I found an out-of-the-way spot for him to run around.
Strollers make crowd weaving a lot more difficult, but it didn’t really sink in until Comic-Con. People in crowds don’t see them. They see an empty space and try to walk through it. I can only imagine what it must be like for people in wheelchairs.
Four months at that age is a huge difference, and WonderCon went well enough that we brought him to SDCC. Not the whole time, though. The two of us went Thursday and Friday while he spent the first day with one set of grandparents and the next day with the other. Next a family trip to the zoo, and finally we brought him to the con on Sunday for Kids’ Day. (The balance was good, but the daily commute to San Diego was exhausting, which is part of why we haven’t tried this again.)
That’s how we discovered that SDCC’s Kids’ Day programming is mostly for children around 5 years old and up. We took him around the floor and showed him things we’d seen, and again found an area upstairs where he could run around, but mostly he just fell asleep in the stroller. I think he was overwhelmed. Like everyone else at the con.
A couple of months later, we brought him to WorldCon in Chicago. That was a totally different experience, because we were all out of town together for a week including sightseeing. A WorldCon is mostly about the events, not so much about the dealers or display floor (though he was fascinated by the Chaos Machine), so we did a lot of trading off and exploring the hotel and nearby parks. In one case we split a panel, one of us reading with him in the hall and the other in the room, switching halfway through.
We did bring him to one panel that we both wanted to attend. It was a humor panel, and we stood in the back while he sat at our feet playing with everything from the bagel we’d bought for him to the contents of his mom’s purse to our shoelaces.
SDCC has a childcare service for both attendees and exhibitors. You can pay hourly, ahead of time or as you arrive, though they recommend reserving ahead of time so that they know how much staff they need.
For two days at Comic-Con 2013, we brought our son with us in the morning and put him in two hours of childcare during the afternoon. It worked out pretty well for everyone’s attention span and gave us a two-hour block in which we were both free to do whatever we wanted. (Well, mostly.) Then Saturday morning we wandered the outdoor exhibits before going home.
The LEGO booth is a great place to bring kids if they’ve run out of attention span for anything else, though you might have trouble dragging them away for things like, you know, lunch.
Wondercon didn’t work out so well the spring he was three. A bit more rambunctious, but still not interested enough in what else was going on at the convention. To make matters worse, we had to reverse our usual plan and bring him on Saturday instead of Sunday, which meant we had full access on the shortest, lightest day of the con and had to wrangle kid duty on the busiest, longest day.
I ended up spending most of my time on Saturday finding things for him to do. The R2-D2 maker’s booth fascinated him, and I bought him some toys, and we did lots of exploring around the convention center.
Comic-Con worked out better, though. We were able to find more stuff that interested him at the con. LEGO of course, and there was at least one publisher (Oni?) that had a kids corner at their booth. He was able to spend a longer part of the afternoon playing at the child care, and the events that interested us turned out to be spread out enough that neither of us ended up being exclusive guardian for most of a day.
Now that he’s four, we’ve turned a corner. He doesn’t need the stroller anymore, which helps a lot with mobility. Since he’s already walking most of the time, we don’t need to set aside extra time to let him run around and stretch his legs. (Not to say that he never ran off…)
More importantly, he can appreciate exhibits and stuff now, so at this year’s WonderCon the toys, costumes and displays were interesting instead of background noise. Impulse control is still an issue, but he enjoyed checking out random stuff and we kept him from breaking anything. Some of the kids’ activities, like drawing, appeal to him now.
And then there’s cosplay. He wanted to be Spider-Elsa for the previous Halloween, so we stitched together pieces of a Spider-Man costume with aqua fabric and attached the mask to an Elsa wig. The costume still fit in April, and not only did he wear it like a cosplay pro, but the icy wall-crawler was a big hit. We’d explained the concept of a secret identity, and he happily made sure his mask was in place when people asked for photos. He was still going strong when chocolate ice cream forced us to break out the backup costume: a yellow shirt with blue overalls.
We still only brought him on the last day of WonderCon, but he loved the experience this year–and he got a lot of great material for show and tell!
Check out our full list of Tips for Comic-Con at Speed Force.
On June 30, 2015, Venus and Jupiter lined up very closely in the night sky as seen from Earth, just 0.3 degrees apart — closer than the diameter of the full moon!
The day of the conjunction was muggy and cloudy, and I really didn’t expect to see them at all. To my surprise and relief, it cleared up and cooled off after nightfall.
You really don’t notice how much brighter Venus is than Jupiter until they’re right next to each other. Jupiter is much bigger, so it reflects a lot more sunlight, but it’s also a lot farther away.
Also, that conventional wisdom about how stars twinkle, but planets don’t? Not true. In turbulent air, planets absolutely twinkle.
Two nights later on July 2, I walked outside facing west. The sky near the horizon was still orange, but the two brightest planets were clearly visible against the deepening blue.
And just to show you how fast Venus moves across the sky, here’s the view 10 days before the conjunction, on June 20:
I didn’t have a tripod handy that night, so I used the top of the car, which conveniently lined up with Jupiter and the chimney.
I’m not sure this fence is entirely stable.
Update: Here’s another section of the fence that I don’t think I’d want to lean on!
Photo album on Flickr: Del Cerro Views
Originally posted on Instagram
