Extended Warranty! How can I go wrong?!
Mar. 7th, 2006 04:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolariSo where were we? Oh, yes....
WEDNESDAY
When last we left our heroine, she was exiled for 24 hours to San Antonio while the Serfs who tilled the soil had a a showdown with the Masters of the Land. As I wasn't on the tax lists in the town, I could not be there.
SO I went home pretty late, getting in about 3AM, puttered around a bit (added a REAL sound card to my parents computer, since the hyper-proprietary board they had in there would just shut up). When it came time for bed, I turned on the light only to find the upstairs empty except for my sleeping sister., Turned out my parents had been in Vegas since Sunday.
ROCK.
On waking up, I called up my best friend Steph to setup a get together, only to find out my sister had told my parents I was home, and they were flying back from Vegas to meet me.
ANTI-ROCK.
I went to go pick them up that afternoon, had a nice Mexican dinner with them. After coming home, I saw Steph for a good amount of time (I don't see her near enough as I'd like) and finally came home.
THURSDAY
Thrusday I woke up to not enough sleep to someone knocking on the door. Turns out the maintenance guy was here to fix the broken sliding door, the missing window screens and broken window locks. This place was REALLY falling apart.
While the maintenance guy was doing that, I setup my main computer in the living room. Dean and I love playing video games. I have a TON of emulators on my computer, but Dean hates playing games on Computer monitors. He wants to play on the TV.
I've also had this idea for a LONG LONG LONG time of a "Living Room Internet Portal." A computer sitting in one corner of the living room where you could pivot on the couch and surf real quick or IM to a friend without getting up to another room. The iMac would have been GREAT for this, because it has IM programs, and IE5, and is totally compact.
However, what I ended up doing was putting our main computer out in the living room, on the breakfast bar and made a little Internet Station there. You still have to get up to use it, and have to use it standing, but it's there if you need it. I use the laptop for access around the house borrowing ::cough:: the neighbors wireless to connect back to my machine anytime I want.
The side effect of this? We can now play videogames on my PC on the TV! So we can play SNES emulated games on the TV like we should, same with the Atari 2600, NES, Genesis and Mame stuff. I get the arcade perfect emulation I want, Dean gets the TV display.
There's been a lot of MK2 in the house. ;)
FRIDAY
And so began the Super Weekend Runner II Turbo.
I woke up again much too early to a knock on the door to have the electrician come in and fix several broken switches in the house (yes, EVERYTHING here is broke), and then waited for a time for the refridgerator replacement.
Oh, yeah, I didn't tell you about that. Turns out the showdown didn't happen. After repeated calls to the landlords about the fridge and then an explanation of "We can't open it, because the smell of roach droppings permeates the house" they simply up and gave us a brand new fridge. Installed and running, the only thing it lacks is a ice maker...you don't miss little things like that till they're gone.
After he left, I got ready for the Staple! pre party at Austin Books. I wasn't sure what I was gonna do here. I write comics, yes. But not many people know that I haven't really READ a comic since the early 90s. In the early 90s, I had a bad experience with Antarctic Press that pretty much swore me off comics. Since then, I've never really picked any up (well, I picked up Mage II in 1997, but only because Mage was one of the series I kept after selling off the rest of my comics). Here I am, in a room full of comic makers, all talking about their books and I have no idea who they are or what they do.
Also, I got a taste of what was going to be a recurring theme for the Staple! convention - In a world of paper, I'm on the web. There was a wall of Staple! related comics and zines up there, and I had nothing there myself. I joked about putting a laptop up there, and hoping the batteries would hold up. But otherwise, I wandered aimlessly, scanning books here and there, reliving some old memories f comics I'd long since sold off, and generally being aloof.
I did end up talking with several artists who were incredibly nice and shared a lot of nostaligia of Old Anime with me. But in general I felt left out till Shane from Houston Comics got there, and hung out with him. Scarily enough - I saw Dean's Ex there...who parted ways on bad terms...and I was wearing one of her old tops. We talked for a bit, caught up, but it was a bit...shall we say...strained.
I left that night about 11, to talk to Emily...and also in a bit of a panic to try and get anything paper-ish to show at the actual Expo. What I ended up with was a stroke of genius - "mini-prints!" Take all of the standard wallpapers, shrink them down to 4 per page, cut them out, and sell them for $1 at the show! Sadly, it took me until 4AM to get it all working and printed and cut...so I finally got to bed at 4 only to....
SATURDAY
...wake up at 8AM. Then 8:15. Then 8:50. Then 9.
One "Oh, Shit! Shower!" and I packed up ad ran off to the show. Got there JUST under the wire and setup my third of the table:
Now the good:
I met a LOT of cool people there. I'd talked with Shane before at the Houston Comics Jam a bit, but this time we really talked and shared a bit. I met Sean McGrath, my table mate and one of the folks who helps run Making Comics Studios. After talking with him for a while, he's the me that could have been if I'd been born ten years later.
He was also a comic writer who wanted to write comics, but didn't draw much Where I had trouble finding an artist to write what I drew (and then forced myself to learn how to draw), he just put up an ad on the net, got an artist, and is now publishing. Most cool. The Internet wins again. :)
I got to talk and meet with some other great folks, including a voice actor who is doing work for the new Macross dubs and recognized my artwork as Macross-ish. We got to talking, and hopefully I wasn't totally fangirl on him. :) Not everyday you meet someone involved in a project that was literally something that changed my life overnight.
The mini-prints were a smash hit. Everyone had little cards and postcards out there, but again, none of them had professionally one 4 color cards on glossy stocks. All 24 were gone halfway through the expo. Next con, I'll make 48.
Now the bad:
I took a knife to a gunfight. Other than the mini-prints, I had nothing they could pick up and thumb through. I was passed up by people walking by over and over again, who skipped my laptop to thumb through the zines on either side of me. Of everyone who walked by, three people perused the comic. One was even somewhat impressed. With everyone skipping over me, I ended up giving everything away, even one of the posters (which I shouldn't done, but as I'm already taking a powder on those things, what the hell). I pity-sold one print (a woman who going around literally buying one of everything from everyone).
Next year if I do this again, I'll have the book at least. Shane even mentioned about possibly setting up a book signing for me when it comes out, but, well, I'm not THAT famous, you know? One of the things I get from Trinoc is an ego boost, but when the cons don't "work" it's an incredible ego drainer. A book signing could concievably a SERIOUS punch in the ego-gut. Maybe I should just stick to the cons till the comics get a little more popular.
And the downright ugly:
I donated a poster to the charity raffle. I figure I'm the only one there with a real honest to goodness 4 color professionally printed poster. So the raffle comes up, and I see my poster as one of the first items to be given away - a chance to get recognized EARLY. So what happens? They never bother to unroll the poster. It only had a rubber band on it, and not that tight. Worse, they announced it as "Some poster I haven't seen cause I didn't unroll it." They never did. The winner won a poster that no one saw, and the rest of the con went on. I was seriously crushed.
Will I go back? Sure, why not. But I won't put the effort into it that I did this year, or the expectations. When it comes to Trinoc, I'm a big fish in a little pond. In the comics world at large I'm a plankton in a sea of sharks. I'm not even big enough to warrant chewing. :)
From there, I went to Samanthas house for the Texas Independence Day Moviegasm...but...they were watching Bollywood movies. Not that I minded or anything. :) I stayed there and talked and chewed and joked till about 11, but the four hours of sleep caught up with me hard, and I came home, talked with Emily.
Now, here's something that's really starting to get to me: I few entried ago, I mentioned I was allergic to something in the house - we figured out it was the varnish on the hardwood floors. Something in them reacts terribly with me (rosin, I believe). I'd kinda managed to get around that by wearing jeans and sleeved shirts around the house, but it didn't work all that great. Then, at Staple!, I touched the botton of my shoe to my thigh under my skirt...and a whole world of pain started. Everything on me throughout the day swelled up and got itchy as the rosin in my shoes got on my clothes and that got on my skin. I was an itching fool all day long. So if any of you out there were wondering why I looked puffy and was constantly scratching, that was it.
When I got home, I showered, slept, and then woke up and showered again when I began to break out in hives. In all, I fell asleep at 3:30AM, and woke up the next day at 4:30PM. You'd think 13 hours would be good sleep, but I kept waking up itching and burning....
SUNDAY
I woke up at 4:30 miserable. I was still itchy ad scratchy, but now, the three middle fingers on my right hand simply didn't exist. There was NO feeling in them, and I was beginning to think that maybe my allergy had started some nerve damage. Those fingers had been scratching all day and were also swollen and itchy beyond belief all Saturday.
I pretty much exiled myself to the bedroom to stay away from the hardwood floors, and was seriously contemplating just never leaving the room again while I was here, but also to perhaps flee to Samantha's (who has offered a room) or San Antonio. The prospect of fleeing a home because of pain, to go and inconvenience someone else or be trapped at my parents triggered a deep deep depression in me.
Dean took me to a muted dinner at Carrabas. I couldn't enjoy the food as I was itchy and swollen again, and now my face was feeling swollen, a headache had formed, and the ringing in the rightside of my ear had gotten deafening. I finally talked to Dean about possibly just up and leaving the house, but he suggested something else: Why don't we go to Walgreens and ask the pharmacist there "Hey, what the hell will fix me?"
Doing just that, he pointed me at Benadryl tablets and said that would fix it. But he also added - "You're either going to need to get used to the allergen in the varnish on the floor, or you're going to make Bendryl a LOT of money." I took a tablet, and an hour later, I was LYING ON THE FLOOR ITSELF DRAWING COMICS. Not a single whit of pain. My right three fingers got most of their feeling back (but felt very swollen still) and I felt like Nine Hundred Thousand Bucks.
MONDAY
I woke up and the feeling in those fingers was still "off." But I wasn't ithcing, and I didn't feel totally swollen (it seems now that I'm not itching anymore, but certain sensitive area will swell up, like my lips will if I somehow touch them after touching the carnish). The only thing I worried about was a general "Warm" pain in my three fingers, under my right armpit and the right side of my neck and jaw. I'm hoping that there's no nerve damage from all the swelling, or that this is just more symptoms that are slow to go away. I still have allergy attacks (I had one just an hour ago), but popping the pills fixesit pretty quickly.
Neesless to say, though, I need to get out of the house. I can't be popping benadryl every day or so. I'm sure histamine has SOME useful functions....
And these are the Days of Our Lives
WEDNESDAY
When last we left our heroine, she was exiled for 24 hours to San Antonio while the Serfs who tilled the soil had a a showdown with the Masters of the Land. As I wasn't on the tax lists in the town, I could not be there.
SO I went home pretty late, getting in about 3AM, puttered around a bit (added a REAL sound card to my parents computer, since the hyper-proprietary board they had in there would just shut up). When it came time for bed, I turned on the light only to find the upstairs empty except for my sleeping sister., Turned out my parents had been in Vegas since Sunday.
ROCK.
On waking up, I called up my best friend Steph to setup a get together, only to find out my sister had told my parents I was home, and they were flying back from Vegas to meet me.
ANTI-ROCK.
I went to go pick them up that afternoon, had a nice Mexican dinner with them. After coming home, I saw Steph for a good amount of time (I don't see her near enough as I'd like) and finally came home.
THURSDAY
Thrusday I woke up to not enough sleep to someone knocking on the door. Turns out the maintenance guy was here to fix the broken sliding door, the missing window screens and broken window locks. This place was REALLY falling apart.
While the maintenance guy was doing that, I setup my main computer in the living room. Dean and I love playing video games. I have a TON of emulators on my computer, but Dean hates playing games on Computer monitors. He wants to play on the TV.
I've also had this idea for a LONG LONG LONG time of a "Living Room Internet Portal." A computer sitting in one corner of the living room where you could pivot on the couch and surf real quick or IM to a friend without getting up to another room. The iMac would have been GREAT for this, because it has IM programs, and IE5, and is totally compact.
However, what I ended up doing was putting our main computer out in the living room, on the breakfast bar and made a little Internet Station there. You still have to get up to use it, and have to use it standing, but it's there if you need it. I use the laptop for access around the house borrowing ::cough:: the neighbors wireless to connect back to my machine anytime I want.
The side effect of this? We can now play videogames on my PC on the TV! So we can play SNES emulated games on the TV like we should, same with the Atari 2600, NES, Genesis and Mame stuff. I get the arcade perfect emulation I want, Dean gets the TV display.
There's been a lot of MK2 in the house. ;)
FRIDAY
And so began the Super Weekend Runner II Turbo.
I woke up again much too early to a knock on the door to have the electrician come in and fix several broken switches in the house (yes, EVERYTHING here is broke), and then waited for a time for the refridgerator replacement.
Oh, yeah, I didn't tell you about that. Turns out the showdown didn't happen. After repeated calls to the landlords about the fridge and then an explanation of "We can't open it, because the smell of roach droppings permeates the house" they simply up and gave us a brand new fridge. Installed and running, the only thing it lacks is a ice maker...you don't miss little things like that till they're gone.
After he left, I got ready for the Staple! pre party at Austin Books. I wasn't sure what I was gonna do here. I write comics, yes. But not many people know that I haven't really READ a comic since the early 90s. In the early 90s, I had a bad experience with Antarctic Press that pretty much swore me off comics. Since then, I've never really picked any up (well, I picked up Mage II in 1997, but only because Mage was one of the series I kept after selling off the rest of my comics). Here I am, in a room full of comic makers, all talking about their books and I have no idea who they are or what they do.
Also, I got a taste of what was going to be a recurring theme for the Staple! convention - In a world of paper, I'm on the web. There was a wall of Staple! related comics and zines up there, and I had nothing there myself. I joked about putting a laptop up there, and hoping the batteries would hold up. But otherwise, I wandered aimlessly, scanning books here and there, reliving some old memories f comics I'd long since sold off, and generally being aloof.
I did end up talking with several artists who were incredibly nice and shared a lot of nostaligia of Old Anime with me. But in general I felt left out till Shane from Houston Comics got there, and hung out with him. Scarily enough - I saw Dean's Ex there...who parted ways on bad terms...and I was wearing one of her old tops. We talked for a bit, caught up, but it was a bit...shall we say...strained.
I left that night about 11, to talk to Emily...and also in a bit of a panic to try and get anything paper-ish to show at the actual Expo. What I ended up with was a stroke of genius - "mini-prints!" Take all of the standard wallpapers, shrink them down to 4 per page, cut them out, and sell them for $1 at the show! Sadly, it took me until 4AM to get it all working and printed and cut...so I finally got to bed at 4 only to....
SATURDAY
...wake up at 8AM. Then 8:15. Then 8:50. Then 9.
One "Oh, Shit! Shower!" and I packed up ad ran off to the show. Got there JUST under the wire and setup my third of the table:
Now the good:
I met a LOT of cool people there. I'd talked with Shane before at the Houston Comics Jam a bit, but this time we really talked and shared a bit. I met Sean McGrath, my table mate and one of the folks who helps run Making Comics Studios. After talking with him for a while, he's the me that could have been if I'd been born ten years later.
He was also a comic writer who wanted to write comics, but didn't draw much Where I had trouble finding an artist to write what I drew (and then forced myself to learn how to draw), he just put up an ad on the net, got an artist, and is now publishing. Most cool. The Internet wins again. :)
I got to talk and meet with some other great folks, including a voice actor who is doing work for the new Macross dubs and recognized my artwork as Macross-ish. We got to talking, and hopefully I wasn't totally fangirl on him. :) Not everyday you meet someone involved in a project that was literally something that changed my life overnight.
The mini-prints were a smash hit. Everyone had little cards and postcards out there, but again, none of them had professionally one 4 color cards on glossy stocks. All 24 were gone halfway through the expo. Next con, I'll make 48.
Now the bad:
I took a knife to a gunfight. Other than the mini-prints, I had nothing they could pick up and thumb through. I was passed up by people walking by over and over again, who skipped my laptop to thumb through the zines on either side of me. Of everyone who walked by, three people perused the comic. One was even somewhat impressed. With everyone skipping over me, I ended up giving everything away, even one of the posters (which I shouldn't done, but as I'm already taking a powder on those things, what the hell). I pity-sold one print (a woman who going around literally buying one of everything from everyone).
Next year if I do this again, I'll have the book at least. Shane even mentioned about possibly setting up a book signing for me when it comes out, but, well, I'm not THAT famous, you know? One of the things I get from Trinoc is an ego boost, but when the cons don't "work" it's an incredible ego drainer. A book signing could concievably a SERIOUS punch in the ego-gut. Maybe I should just stick to the cons till the comics get a little more popular.
And the downright ugly:
I donated a poster to the charity raffle. I figure I'm the only one there with a real honest to goodness 4 color professionally printed poster. So the raffle comes up, and I see my poster as one of the first items to be given away - a chance to get recognized EARLY. So what happens? They never bother to unroll the poster. It only had a rubber band on it, and not that tight. Worse, they announced it as "Some poster I haven't seen cause I didn't unroll it." They never did. The winner won a poster that no one saw, and the rest of the con went on. I was seriously crushed.
Will I go back? Sure, why not. But I won't put the effort into it that I did this year, or the expectations. When it comes to Trinoc, I'm a big fish in a little pond. In the comics world at large I'm a plankton in a sea of sharks. I'm not even big enough to warrant chewing. :)
From there, I went to Samanthas house for the Texas Independence Day Moviegasm...but...they were watching Bollywood movies. Not that I minded or anything. :) I stayed there and talked and chewed and joked till about 11, but the four hours of sleep caught up with me hard, and I came home, talked with Emily.
Now, here's something that's really starting to get to me: I few entried ago, I mentioned I was allergic to something in the house - we figured out it was the varnish on the hardwood floors. Something in them reacts terribly with me (rosin, I believe). I'd kinda managed to get around that by wearing jeans and sleeved shirts around the house, but it didn't work all that great. Then, at Staple!, I touched the botton of my shoe to my thigh under my skirt...and a whole world of pain started. Everything on me throughout the day swelled up and got itchy as the rosin in my shoes got on my clothes and that got on my skin. I was an itching fool all day long. So if any of you out there were wondering why I looked puffy and was constantly scratching, that was it.
When I got home, I showered, slept, and then woke up and showered again when I began to break out in hives. In all, I fell asleep at 3:30AM, and woke up the next day at 4:30PM. You'd think 13 hours would be good sleep, but I kept waking up itching and burning....
SUNDAY
I woke up at 4:30 miserable. I was still itchy ad scratchy, but now, the three middle fingers on my right hand simply didn't exist. There was NO feeling in them, and I was beginning to think that maybe my allergy had started some nerve damage. Those fingers had been scratching all day and were also swollen and itchy beyond belief all Saturday.
I pretty much exiled myself to the bedroom to stay away from the hardwood floors, and was seriously contemplating just never leaving the room again while I was here, but also to perhaps flee to Samantha's (who has offered a room) or San Antonio. The prospect of fleeing a home because of pain, to go and inconvenience someone else or be trapped at my parents triggered a deep deep depression in me.
Dean took me to a muted dinner at Carrabas. I couldn't enjoy the food as I was itchy and swollen again, and now my face was feeling swollen, a headache had formed, and the ringing in the rightside of my ear had gotten deafening. I finally talked to Dean about possibly just up and leaving the house, but he suggested something else: Why don't we go to Walgreens and ask the pharmacist there "Hey, what the hell will fix me?"
Doing just that, he pointed me at Benadryl tablets and said that would fix it. But he also added - "You're either going to need to get used to the allergen in the varnish on the floor, or you're going to make Bendryl a LOT of money." I took a tablet, and an hour later, I was LYING ON THE FLOOR ITSELF DRAWING COMICS. Not a single whit of pain. My right three fingers got most of their feeling back (but felt very swollen still) and I felt like Nine Hundred Thousand Bucks.
MONDAY
I woke up and the feeling in those fingers was still "off." But I wasn't ithcing, and I didn't feel totally swollen (it seems now that I'm not itching anymore, but certain sensitive area will swell up, like my lips will if I somehow touch them after touching the carnish). The only thing I worried about was a general "Warm" pain in my three fingers, under my right armpit and the right side of my neck and jaw. I'm hoping that there's no nerve damage from all the swelling, or that this is just more symptoms that are slow to go away. I still have allergy attacks (I had one just an hour ago), but popping the pills fixesit pretty quickly.
Neesless to say, though, I need to get out of the house. I can't be popping benadryl every day or so. I'm sure histamine has SOME useful functions....
And these are the Days of Our Lives
