Charloween

1. My love for Moonlight abides even a year after I'd last watched the show. I was thinking of buying the DVDs, but decided to hold out. firstgold can tell you that I do, in fact, enjoy Moonlight enough to want proper DVDs.

2. The Spadina streetcar from Harbourfront will never be as fast and heading back to Union and taking the subway. Never.

3. If you trust in the power of your body to move with fluidity, you can get enough power to slice a man's throat with a business card. Improvised weapons for nerds also include breaking the arm off your glasses and using it as a two-ended pointy-hooky weapon.

Other awesome facts from today's Self Defence seminar - equal parts women's self defence and defence for professional personal security types, taught by a guy who's trained military dudes and the police in hand-to-hand - included:
- if you're being picked up/grabbed from the front, do a bitey-vampire number on the attacker's neck;
- don't worry about doing a fist when your open palm will to more damage to an ear; and
- if you move to kick a guy in the junk you can do a quick re-direct and stomp out his knee instead.

Yeah, I signed up for 10 more hours of instruction.

( Pictures! )

Polaris is very different con to the FanExpo. It's smaller, less commercial, and tends to have an older crowd. More Klingons and fewer teen anime fans, that kind of thing. Being smaller and friendlier than some other cons, and staged in a hotel rather than a convention center, the big-name guests tend to wander the same halls as the peons who pay to be there.

It can get quite surreal, quite fast.

Sure, I was planning to get Jason Dohring's autograph, but then later when we passed each other in the hall the little voice in the back of my head is trying to process that Logan Echolls just nodded at me in the hall. And yeah, you see an actor doing a Q&A and autograph sessions, and they're live-and-in-person, but there's still a performer/audience split going on. It breaks down when you see Gareth David-Lloyd wandering past the Harvey's window on his way (you notice, because the line is long and not moving fast) to buy smokes at the Shell station across the street.

Didn't mean to get all philosophical. Yay! Con! Screenings! Attending three of Jim Butcher's appearances! Panels! There was one neat panel called "How To Get Fired From Torchwood", where every fireable offense was met with, "Yes, but they didn't fire the guy that kept a WMD in the basement". It was an interesting combination of being totally silly and mocking the lack of personal responsibility held by any of the characters. Oh, fandom.

The best part (for me) was running into old friends (sorry we missed each other, hoskie), people I haven't seen in a long time that I used to work with at the renfaire here. Teagan got the whole con experience, from the hanging out in someone's hotel room, to the meeting actors and authors, to the people who take their nerdery far more seriously that I ever could/would be willing to show off in public... good times.

Four days until we leave for London! And Cardiff!

1. I need more Moonlight and I need it now. It has unexpectedly eaten my brain. There aren't many shows that'll have your vampire main character bouncing up and down all giddy and happy. ( minor spoilers, if anyone else even watches this thing )

2. The drain in the tub is acting hinky again so I'm going to maybe have to call the super on this one. I was having such a good day, too. Grrrr.

3. The History class is cancelled on Monday, which means I can use all that time to get ahead on the Massively Evil History Paper OF DOOM (And Also Pirates).

4. I bought an SATA II drive BUT only an SATA enclosure for said drive. *facepalm*

5. The "Shakespeare in Performance" class is going to be v. interesting, because it's Shakespeare's more controversial plays as taught from a director/producer perspective, not an acting or English lit (*hiss*) point of view. Our major final project is to propose an alternate staging for one of the five plays we're reading this term... which, to me, is just like saying "Go Forth And Write A Shakespeare Xover!". The Tempest, set in the FBI! A Civil War-era The Taming of the Shrew! The Merchant of Venice in a high school locker room! Measure for Measure in the White House! Othello... in the Old West!

(Speaking of Othello, the prof was telling us about a recent British version of that play, with Christopher Eccelston as Iago. The prof wanted to know if anyone knew of "this actor" and what else he'd been in. Three guesses who spoke up.)