After five years of living in Toronto during which I typically found the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) a nuisance, I finally took in some shows this year at the urging of my girlfriend. (It helps that I no longer live near any of the venues or ritzy hotels where the celebrities stay, so my [...]
The fourth day of Worldcon was also a big one, and quite full.
We started at 9 AM once again, with a panel on “How Not to be a Jerk Online”. I went to this because John Scalzi—whose blog and work I am a fan of—was one of the panelists, and I suspected it was a [...]
After a quick lunch, my girlfriend had hoped to take in the panel on “Montreal Local History”, but it was apparently cancelled. I headed to “Building Realistic Worlds”, but it was so full that there wasn’t even space to stand at the back of the room, so I went to my other option, “How Are [...]
Day 3 of Worldcon was a very panel-heavy day for us.
We started with “Writing for the Non-Adult”, which had a nice mix of panelists that played off each other well, and talked about the difficulties of writing for children and young adults, both in terms of craft and the market. This included elements such as [...]
When last we left our heroes, they were heading back to the Con for the Neil Gaiman signing, tickets to which they had acquired earlier that day. Arriving at 3:30 PM (for the 4:00 signing), there was already a massive line of ticketholders ahead of us. So, we had a half hour wait before the [...]
This was a long day, very full of delightful things.
The morning started early, as we went to line up to get tickets for the Neil Gaiman signing. We arrived at about 8:30, and (thankfully) the line was still pretty small then. We got moved around a little bit, but by 9:10 they started handing out [...]
Oi! It is early on the second day of Worldcon, so I thought I’d post about the first day, as promised.
The first thing I noticed about Worldcon was the scale. It’s big. Very big. I mean, granted, I have little basis for comparison, other than Ad Astra, with was a more local/regional con, but I [...]
So, I have a zillion things to post about, which I’ll get to once the journal paper I’m working on is finished and my research is under control. There will be a number of movie, book, and concert reviews to catch up on, as well as some more thoughtful essays as I try to produce [...]
In the last issue of The House Always Wins…
The intrepid investigator House had scoped out the Pulp Show and Sale, but that was not the only mission that lay before him. After completing his search there, he set out to the Toronto Reference Library, to battle the faceless hordes of the 2009 Toronto Comic Arts [...]
In recent months I’ve had the good fortune to take in a number of concerts by bands that I love. I want to talk about two in particular, both of which were excellent but vastly different experiences: The Police and Vanessa Carlton.
I saw The Police at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto on November [...]