summer is half over already!
Jul. 26th, 2023 10:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davemerrillOh my god! It's July 26 already! Jeez, what has been going on.
We had Anime North and it went really well. Record numbers, no resultant COVID outbreaks, everybody seemed to have a good time. Shain and I worked Panels staff and spent some time in front of doors checking badges, getting attendees into lines, getting panelists set up and running. I really enjoyed it. You know, I've been doing the nerd convention thing for a long time. I've done pretty much every sort of job. After a while the veterans find themselves kicked upstairs to being the admin that stays behind desks or tables or in offices, coordinating and connecting and making calls and texts and emails and organizing while the show goes on. I've seen some con directors who spend the entire weekend in an office. And me, I'd rather be on the floor, on the front lines, interacting with the actual attendees, solving their problems, making their weekend run better. That kind of ground-floor action is where it's at. Especially at a show like Anime North where the fans are really a positive bunch, I don't know if it's a Canadian thing or what, but they are just polite and friendly and happy to be there in the crowd with everyone else.
I did some checking around after the show and I saw exactly one person who tested positive for COVID after the convention. Masking was optional this year and I'd say it was maybe twenty-five or thirty percent masked. The Beguiling had pipe and drape around their booths and they were requiring masks for everyone who shopped there, and that worked fine for them. We had our masks on the entire time we were in the vendors hall, period, end of story. It got crowded in there.
Since then we've been to the drive-in, I did an Eyesore screening of Japanese Ultraman/Space Giants/Spectreman/Giant Robot shows, I streamed it online a week later, and then a week after that we streamed "Warped By MTV 2". We went to the beach at Sibbald Point and we went to the beach at Chub Point north of Cobourg. We've done a bit of bike riding. We had a few waves of smoke from wildfires making their way through the city, making things spooky and apocalyptic and wheezy. We've been to the antique malls in Barrie and Cambridge and Woodstock and we've done a little woods walking and gotten a little mosquito bitten.
Rolling into the back half of the summer the plans are to (a) hit the drive in again, (b) go to some more beaches, (c) have our anniversary dinner tomorrow, (d) go to the CNE, and (e) try to get out to Toronto Island again on the bikes. Before you know it summer will be over and it'll be back to sweaters and jackets.
YES I got a Bluesky account and it is terebifunhouse.bsky.social and you can join me there. Twitter is now "X" and it's going down in flames like the end of a Dead Boys song.
We had Anime North and it went really well. Record numbers, no resultant COVID outbreaks, everybody seemed to have a good time. Shain and I worked Panels staff and spent some time in front of doors checking badges, getting attendees into lines, getting panelists set up and running. I really enjoyed it. You know, I've been doing the nerd convention thing for a long time. I've done pretty much every sort of job. After a while the veterans find themselves kicked upstairs to being the admin that stays behind desks or tables or in offices, coordinating and connecting and making calls and texts and emails and organizing while the show goes on. I've seen some con directors who spend the entire weekend in an office. And me, I'd rather be on the floor, on the front lines, interacting with the actual attendees, solving their problems, making their weekend run better. That kind of ground-floor action is where it's at. Especially at a show like Anime North where the fans are really a positive bunch, I don't know if it's a Canadian thing or what, but they are just polite and friendly and happy to be there in the crowd with everyone else.
I did some checking around after the show and I saw exactly one person who tested positive for COVID after the convention. Masking was optional this year and I'd say it was maybe twenty-five or thirty percent masked. The Beguiling had pipe and drape around their booths and they were requiring masks for everyone who shopped there, and that worked fine for them. We had our masks on the entire time we were in the vendors hall, period, end of story. It got crowded in there.
Since then we've been to the drive-in, I did an Eyesore screening of Japanese Ultraman/Space Giants/Spectreman/Giant Robot shows, I streamed it online a week later, and then a week after that we streamed "Warped By MTV 2". We went to the beach at Sibbald Point and we went to the beach at Chub Point north of Cobourg. We've done a bit of bike riding. We had a few waves of smoke from wildfires making their way through the city, making things spooky and apocalyptic and wheezy. We've been to the antique malls in Barrie and Cambridge and Woodstock and we've done a little woods walking and gotten a little mosquito bitten.
Rolling into the back half of the summer the plans are to (a) hit the drive in again, (b) go to some more beaches, (c) have our anniversary dinner tomorrow, (d) go to the CNE, and (e) try to get out to Toronto Island again on the bikes. Before you know it summer will be over and it'll be back to sweaters and jackets.
YES I got a Bluesky account and it is terebifunhouse.bsky.social and you can join me there. Twitter is now "X" and it's going down in flames like the end of a Dead Boys song.
