I'm sick and tired of washing my contact lenses everyday, and my dog Malcolm recently broke my glasses with his teeth. That's why I'm thinking about getting Lasik. ... More.
I was visiting my friends' house in the Hollywood Hills, and noticed a built-in niche under the stairs in the living room. My friends don't know what the niche is for.
The house was originally built for Jean Harlow in the 1930s. When I tweeted these photos a couple of days ago, my twitter follow... More.
Some guy called Joel Johnson reckons that Apple Just Tried To Assassinate Laptops. The proposed formula has that faintly absurd but strangely convincing Cupertino formula: ask why most consumers buy them, then aim at that restricted set of needs without much regard to what tech fans consider importa... More.
Bernard Pietenpol wanted to build "a plane that was affordable and easy to construct for home builders." He designed and built the AirCamper which flew using an automobile engine... in 1928! The same plane can now be built for less than $2000 and there's a
small cottage industry devoted to selling ... More.
Etsy's Undead Ed continues to produce nightmarishly wonderful plush toys, like this "from scratch" hairy spider.
Kellandra The Spider Gremlin Ooak Plush
(via Super Punch)
Previously:Mutant teddy bear Boing Boing
... More.
We are starting up a shiny new SF convention in downtown Toronto, called SFContario. The inaugural convention will take place November 19-21st 2010 at the Ramada Plaza Hotel in downtown Toronto. It's a lovely hotel that overlooks Allan Gardens and is a stone's throw away from all the restaurants and attractions downtown Toronto has to offer. Our confirmed guests of honour are:
RSS Feed
That alien's facial expression creeps the hell out of me.
Happy happy joy joy
Wickidniss...
...The good kind.
While I appreciate a new non-hobbystar con in toronto... register almost a year in advance? That's a bit... worrying. I mean, how do we know this even goes off at this point?
There's a fundamental difference between commercial gateshows (e.g. Hobbystar's events) and fan-run events.
If a gateshow's organisers fear they won't turn a profit, they'll just fold up their tent and run. Fan-run events are labours of love, and the organisers would sooner max out their personal credit cards than let the con collapse. Their fannish reputations depend on it!
Sure, there have been fan-run events which have spectacularly imploded, but generally they've been 'run' by well-meaning neofans with big dreams but little or no experience.
Whereas, with SFContario, the concom members have been doing this sort of thing for years. Epic fail? No, not with this bunch.
Regarding the comment from anonymous:
In most cities, conventions are planned well over a year in advance, not least so that people attending this year's convention can be informed next year. We are following a planning time frame similar to other well-run conventions. In fact, given the way some authors and other guests make plans in advance, we've already begun planning our second convention in 2011.
I have put down a deposit on the hotel contract. Please feel free to go to our committee page at http://sfcontario.ca/html/concom.html if you have questions about who we are; collectively we have over a century of convention running experience, so the "neofan" label doesn't apply to us. (I think one of the reasons Cory was kind enough to mention us is that I have known him personally for twenty years and I saw him a couple weeks ago at his reading at the Merril Collection.) I personally have been on the concom of at least eleven different conventions in Toronto, not to mention a dozen Worldcons. I've run or attended conventions and con-related meetings across the continent this year on my own dime, from Vancouver to Raleigh to Montreal, which is to say, I could personally cover all of the expenses of this convention, and I'm not the only person on our committee able to do so. We have a budget on our internal web site, and our preregistration is running slightly ahead of plan (thanks again for the buzz, Cory). It is a new convention and I can't honestly say we won't make any mistakes at all, but the convention will happen.
Sounds interesting though it does seem a bit odd that registration is open, when it's a year away. I guess next October when i'm putting together our November convention page we'll see if this new conventions actually takes place.
http://www.igp-scifi.com/conventions.html
AVT_Tor, are you Alex von Thorne?
No "e" in my last name, but yes, this is similar to my LJ handle.
Looking forward to seeing some new fiction. I hope some of the web platforms will be there. Like scifi times and newfiction.com