Door falling off the hinges

[austin_dern]

We rejoined the con in time to take a circuit through the Dealers Room, where bunny_hugger and I were tempted by, most notably, a dealer offering to sell drawing of Your Character as Your Favourite Doctor. We also found several really interesting and tempting plushes and puppets from that dealer who sells all the Hansa plushes and the puppets; this included a mouse which fooled us because it had more of a shrew face than we would have thought right. They also had the small size of the Hansa coati plush; I set one back after it tumbled on the floor, arranged so its tail was upright because that really is one of the neat things about the dolls, and the species.

bunny_hugger bought a laser-etched piece of plexiglass. These were etched to show off different species, with scientific names and with identifying numbers like they represented scientific samples, to match the con's ``Mad Science'' theme, surely. And they're ultraviolet-reactive, so that they have this weird eerie glow, and look like the sort of transparent-glowy text that doesn't just pop out but looks like the sort of thing that cheesey 1980s science fiction movies pretended we'd use to read text in The Future. She really, really liked how they looked, and ultimately got a couple more, so she could give most but not all of them as gifts.

One of those gifts is that of a raven tag, to be given to her father. Her father has recently contracted a case of raven fandom, and their house has gotten decorated with raven pictures and vintage advertisements featuring crows or ravens and raven statues and he's even put a decal of a raven beside the word ``Nevermore'' on the door of the computer room. It's all part of the natural process of her father entering the phase of his life where he's a 17-year-old Goth girl. We can't think of any possible use he'd have for this, since we think it's not very likely he's going to a furry or sci-fi convention where he might usefully wear it, but it's still a fun thing to have around.

In the video game room --- we ended up there after the Dealers Room closed, and on finding that we weren't actually missing any panels --- we found a couple cartridges for Final Fantasy IV and Final Fantasy VI, which we smiled about because bunny_hugger has been on a bit of a retro RPG tear this year, going through Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI/III, and now Final Fantasy IV/II. What we played, though, was Rock Band, which we dropped into as there were guitars free. I have only a rudimentary ability to play stuff to a rhythm, but I somehow drifted into the bass guitar and Extraordinarily Easy mode where you can kind of get away with that, and I did at least until the guitar somehow switched into ``leftie'' mode and suddenly all the band cues were in the wrong order. We were defeated many times by the user interface of Rock Band --- and we weren't the only ones --- but not too badly by Survivor's ``Eye of the Tiger''.

Trivia: In February 1865 Confederate Postmaster-General John Reagan sent his wife and family to Texas, along with $9 million in uncut sheets of Treasury notes and $3 million in postage stamps for delivery to his agent in Marshall, Texas. Source: Look Away! A History of the Confederate States of America, William C Davis. (And now I wonder whether Traitor stamps were accepted for postal delivery in the immediate aftermath of America's victory, given the difficulty in getting anything else usable there. I've never seen the point mentioned, since it is such a tiny point.)

Currently Reading: Conversations with Isaac Asimov, Editor Carl Freedman.

PS: Looking to Euler, since I had a thought about Euler's birthday and the totient function, so why not?

Comments

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

Raven fandom for the win!

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I like them.

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

Ooh, we need photos of those tags! Or at least, a representative sample. ^_^

Did you (regrettably, if so) resist the Doctor sketches in the end?

since we think it's not very likely he's going to a furry or sci-fi convention

Stranger things, I'm sure, have happened. I await your 2014 entry where he emerges in Rainbow Dash fursuit.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

We can get photos of the tags we have left. bunny_hugger's already given the raven one to her father.

Alas, we didn't get the Doctor sketches, at least not this time around.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

I wonder whether Traitor stamps were accepted for postal delivery in the immediate aftermath of America's victory, given the difficulty in getting anything else usable there.

Early in the war, I know, both sides honoured the other's postage.

And ravens are cool :>

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Mm. Of course, tempers got a bit shorter as the war went on, too. I must find someone to ask properly.

I realize this is dangerously close to trainspotting, but it's the sort of little practical detail that's incredibly important the day the war ends, but never important enough to mention in a history book.