   Current Post On Trae’s Blog:
My grandmother died last night. This wasn't a shock or a surprise. Her health has been on the decline, and she's been in hospice for the last month. She lived a long life, and in her final days she was surrounded by her three adult children.
My grandma was a kind woman. She wasn't perfect, but I always felt loved in her presence. She was a retired kindergarten teacher, and was still working when I was a kid. I have so many happy memories sitting at her kitchen table, and I'm going to carry those with me for the rest of my life. She was also proof that anyone who claims that you get more conservative as you get older is full of shit, because she certainly didn't.
I think it's interesting how the body processes grief sometimes. I don't know that I'll cry, but over the past month, knowing this was coming, I've felt a tension in my gut. Now that she's passed, instead of relief that tension is replaced by a sense of emptiness. That something is missing that should still be there. Something has been taken away, and I feel it.
Of course, as I wrote that, I immediately started crying... so I guess my body processes grief in pretty ordinary ways too.
I wanted to come up with something profound linking this to Beltane, which we sit in the middle of right now, but it just seemed hackneyed. Like I was trying to dig out some greater significance when the truth is death comes whenever it wants. The only predictable thing about it is that it's the end of all of our journeys. I hope that when I pass I'm so lucky to have lived such a long life with people that I love around me in my final days.
For the record, I will be fine. I just needed to get these words out while they were still in my head. I don't have some rousing conclusion or deep insight to tack on here at the end, just that gut feeling that something is missing.
Because it is.
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Story of my life. “Wait, what am I doing here? When did I become staff?”
Yeah, that happened to me too XD
Mine is more something i signed up for years and years ago and they’ve never removed me from the list… I got birthday cards from McDonalds for something like 20 years.
As someone who a) just got a smartphone, b) knows tons of people without smartphones, and c) uses paper schedules anyway, I want to punch Roy.
I hated the thought of cons not printing out programs… until I finally got myself a smartphone. Now I get all weirded out any time I’m at a con that DOESN’T use Guidebook or some other online thing.
One of the things that cheeses me off about RI Comiccon is that while they PROVIDE a program book, it doesn’t have a schedule of events in it. You have to go to the lobby and copy down whatever it is you want to see that they’ve put up on a whiteboard!
Isn’t that the same con that had to have fire marshals step in because they oversold the event?
Paragons of effective management, really. 😛
Yep, that’s them. I went to lunch early enough that I got back into the con before the hammer came down. A friend I met the next day told me HE’D been locked out because they were over crowded. It’s a thing. I remember Phil Foglio did a strip about a NY Star Trek con where Ticketron oversold the con and something like 14,000 people showed up. Last year they had to make refunds for the people who paid extra for the “Batman” section of the con. Yvonne Craig cancelled months before the event and Julie Newmar (who I’D been looking forward to seeing) had her flight cancelled because some one shot up LAX! Adam West and Burt Ward did the best they could, but they were bored and it showed.
I keep every program book from every con I have attended. Not having one at Otakon just felt weird… I wanted something physical I could bring back to show the staff here, but they were pretty much electronic-only (I heard later there WERE program books, but there were very few printed.)
Oh, we’ve had this debate many a time, but it comes down to this:
Everyone wants one. But most folks leave their pocket program guide in their hotel and asks for another one. We go through 500 extra every convention.
We made Conbooks an optional grab and cut printing of them by 20-30%, but people want the printed program guide, even if it’s online.
Live with it – you print up a batch of schedules (one or two sheets generally does the trick), put them out for people to take as needed, and put up a big one as a poster behind the information desk for when you run out. Yes it’s a good idea to have an on-line schedule – be sure you can update it on the fly. But don’t dare Murphy by depending on it solely. The number of things that can go wrong is scary…