Just a stranger on the bus.

Getting down to the wire now. I'm back at work, and will be until I leave for Boston, so time to get ready is reduced to what little extra time I can manage to stay awake before and after shifts. That includes packing. Ugh.

It doesn't help that things don't seem to be as easy the second time around. I've just about got the staff sorted out, but the wig has turned out to be obnoxiously troublesome. I burned the heck out of my fingers while making a mess of the new bun today, which hopefully can be saved, but I also made a minor error in the construction of the stub which could lead to the whole thing coming apart if I'm not careful. :\

On the plus side, though, it looks like I may just barely get all this done before I fly out on Wednesday.

Reposting my to-do list so I can keep track of it easier. (Also FYI, due to the below I haven't been able to keep up on my flist lately. It'll probably be that way until mid-April, I'm afraid.)

by Anime Boston

• Lightly sand, then repaint, glue and clear-coat the top of my staff.


• Style my replacement wig.


• Make earrings.


• Obtain necklace. Ash has told me it's in the mail. :D


• Buy new lipstick and do a makeup test.


• Make an improved choker.


• Figure out how I'm going to get my staff on a plane.


• Burn SMDP DVDs for the Sailormoon panel.


• Prepare handouts and discussion questions for the fanfic panel.


• Formally sign up for the AMV Editor dinner, if KellyMae is interested in going. aarana, if you're reading this, wanna go?


• Call the hotel and alter our reservation.


• Order .moon business cards and self MOO cards (dunno if there's enough time at this point).


• Render updated version of Azumanga AMV and upload to the internet.

by Sakura-Con

• Get bento lunches planned out and organized.


• Print Renaissance Festival photos for Vay.


• Check on hotel reservation.


• Add a pocket to my dress.

by Anime Detour

• Assemble the fanfic contest entries and send them out to the judges.


• Read and judge the fanfic contest entries myself.


• Stock up supplies for Iron Pen.


• Obtain a prompt item for Iron Pen.


• Print up 2008 entry forms for Iron Pen.


• Obtain awards for fanfic contest and Iron Pen. ORDERED


• Finish WTF contest entry.


• Update Ops documentation.


• Create the "Ops Bible" - staff contact list, ops manual, department docs - printed in two binders.


• Gather Programming documentation.


• Update food locations map.


• Misc. stuff to do with The Plan.

Other

• Send out final acceptance/warning notices to UFO nominees.


• Send out nag emails to unresponsive UFO nominees.


• Set up for 2007 UFOs Round 1 voting.


• Get a move on judging the Anime North fanfic contest entries.


• Order my sister's birthday present.

The loneliest number since the number one.

Some unrelated stuff.

LiveJournal is owned by a bunch of money-grubbing bastards. This is hardly news, but it bears repeating given recent developments. In case you haven't already heard, LJ has done away with the Basic (free + no ads) account option when creating a new journal. There is now no way to join LJ (or create new socks or communities) without generating revenue for SUP. And of course, they attempted to slip this by everyone hoping the existing users wouldn't notice. When they got caught, they tried to feed the angry masses the absolutely asinine excuse of three options being "too confusing" for new users.

Also, I stumbled on this website today, and got sucked into an interesting article about humor. [direct source - the entire article has plenty of comedic value itself.]

Essentially, the incongruence theory of humor suggests that an event registers as "funny" when it starts out by conforming to established patterns, but then defies the person's model of reality by taking an unanticipated but logically valid detour.

What this makes me realize is with "The Bad Crack" AMV, I essentially created one of those really irritating "comedy" fanfics where a ton of random stupid crap happens and it's not actually funny at all. There's no pattern, no logic. And like those clueless authors, when it failed I didn't understand why people didn't find it amusing.

On the other hand, it could be that I was aiming for the other half of the paragraph:

In a similar way, humor can occur when a nonsensical sequence suddenly reveals an underlying coherence, a method frequently used in joke punchlines.

i.e., "Look at all this random craziness in Azumanga Daioh! omgwtf? Aha, they're all on drugs!"

Still, the failure. It seems to me that cons are looking more for the first kind of humor. At Anime North 2006, for example, there was an Excel Saga video of the second type that I thought was absolutely brilliant. I downloaded it later and watched it a million times. But it lost the contest.

Just some thoughts.