Legends of the Sun Pig

Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3

Worldcon started with a road trip for us. We set out in our rented car on Wednesday morning and made it down to Calais just before 15:00 for our ferry. Abi took the drive to France. It was the first time Abi and the kids had been on a Channel ferry, and the first time I had been on one in over twenty years. Alex and I had a bite to eat in the restaurant. Abi and Fiona spent a lot of time on the deck outside, trying to ward off sea-sickness. The weather was not great and we didn’t see the White Cliffs at their best, but at least we’ve been past them now. Abi remains unconvinced about passenger ferries as a viable means of long-distance transport.

I took the drive from Dover to London. We arrived at our hotel, the Ibis Styles on Victoria Dock Road, at just after 18:00. We had booked a studio apartment with a double and twin singles, but it took a couple of attempts to get this combination right. The first one they offered us had two double beds. Alex took one look at the double bed, one look at his little sister, and said, “I’ll sleep on the couch.” After trundling all our luggage back to reception, I got a look at a second apartment, which featured one colossal king-sized bed and one single. The third one they offered us was goldilocks — a double and a twin, all in one big room with a kitchen area and a sitting room. Perfect for our needs.

We settled ourselves in a bit and freshened up before walking over to the ExCel Centre itself. Despite being just across the road, it was still a bit of a walk to get to the con registration area, because the ExCeL is huge. We crossed the road at the Custom House DLR station at the West entrance and walked the length of the concourse to the registration desks at the East entrance. This was exactly the right time to do that, because hardly anyone else was there. We got our badges and booklets, identified the main features of the con area, and then walked back West to find some food.

We located a Tesco not too far away, grabbed some bread, cheese, cereals, and other room-food, and wandered back to the hotel. Alex and Fiona had been used to sleeping very later for most of the summer holiday, and we’d all had to get up early that morning. We were exhausted, and so we didn’t stay up very late.

Bella Caledonia and the Scottish Independence Convention have been running a poster design competition for the independence referendum. This one by Andrew Mac is my favourite from the long list:

I haven’t been actively hunting for new music in the last month. Mostly listening to stuff from my library, and also these three albums I acquired just after getting back from France in July:

La Roux – Trouble in Paradise. I liked her first album, but didn’t love it. The new one feels richer, denser, and has more of a bass-y heft to it. Favourite tracks: “Cruel Sexuality”, “Paradise is You”, and “The Feeling”.

Curiously, my brain has shourt-circuited La Roux with Laurie Penny. It’s something about the name (Laurie – La Roux) and the nickname (Penny Red – The Red). I had hoped to catch one of the panels that Laurie was on at Worldcon just to convince myself that she wasn’t going to spontaneously burst into song, but the timing didn’t work out. I will forever wonder.

Anushka – Broken Circuit. Varied electronica with lovely vocals, running from sweet and summery to deep and dub. Favourite tracks: “Never Can Decide”, “Atom Bombs”, “Broken Circuit”, “These Things”, “Mansions”.

Röyksopp and Robyn – Do It Again. An intense five-track EP. The central track, “Do It Again” is unashamedly upbeat and poppy, but it is nested inside much darker and moodier pieces like a dark chocolate with a fruity centre. I’ve usually had this on later in the evening rather than during the day.

In terms of reading matter, I signed up for the special Comic Con 99 cent trial of Marvel’s “Unlimited” app, and I’ve been trying to find out just how much superhero action I can handle over the course of a single month. The answer: quite a lot. Favourite discoveries: Kelly Sue DeConnick’s Captain Marvel and the new Ultimate Spider-Man with Miles Morales. I hadn’t read much Spider-Woman before, and I do enjoy Jessica Drew’s snarky attitude. Nova and Guardians of the Galaxy are also good, but the cosmic-ness gets a bit much after a while. Right now I’m trying to get through all of Civil War (with its numerous tie-ins) before my special offer month runs out. Don’t think I’ll quite make it. But there’s so much value in the Marvel’s back catalogue that I might keep it on for a bit longer.

Juist in time (well, maybe) for Worldcon, and after having talked about it for literally decades^*, I am finally starting to put together a catalogue of my Bob Shaw collection. I’m at the point where, apart from translated editions, there are only minimal gaps in my collection of his novels. It would be annoying to find myself face-to-face with a shelf of books in the dealers’ room at Worldcon and not know which ones I should be targeting^**.

“For the truly compulsive hobbyist, there comes a time when a collection gathers weight — metaphysical, existential weight. It becomes as much a source of anxiety as of joy.”

The Brazilian Bus Magnate Who’s Buying Up All the World’s Vinyl Records

Also, sensible advice from Jen, “If you don’t do anything with it, it’s just hoarding.”

^* two
^** Again

Alex doesn’t approve of selfies, but I caught him in one anyway. This is the three of us after an hour of trampolining at Bounz. Alex hurt his ankle part-way through. Fiona and I just exhausted ourselves for the whole hour.

My back is going to regret this in the morning.

Last Saturday morning Abi and I got up early and took a 14km walk northeastish: into Zaandam, up through Koog, following the curve of the Zaan round through Wormerveer, and finally to Krommenie. We found some faces in the path on the the stretch between Wormerveer and Krommenie.

We took the train back to Zaandam and did some shopping. We got some kibbeling at the market for lunch, remembering that we’d got kibbeling for lunch after the Dam-tot-Dam wandeltocht last year.

It was only about 13:00 when we got back home. The PC components I had ordered arrived just half an hour later, and I spent much of the rest of the afternoon assembling the new machine, which I’ve named Groot:

• Cooler Master Elite 130 mini-ITX case (small enough to sit on my desk, big enough to take a full-size graphics card)
• AsRock H81M-ITX motherboard
• Intel i5-4460 CPU with stock cooler
• Sapphire Dual-X R9 270X graphics card
• Power supply, hard disk, memory, Windows 8

The only component mismatch is that the motherboard does not have a header for connecting the two USB3 ports on the front of the case. It has a header for the USB2 port on the front, but any USB3 devices will have to connect at the rear of the case. Not a problem. Apart from that, it seems pretty solid.

Groot’s main workload will be leisure activities, such as Wildstar now, and Elite: Dangerous very soon. Wildstar just needs a better graphics card than I have in my laptop. Even dropping all the graphics options down to zero and playing on its own screen rather than on an external monitor, my high-end MacBook Pro can only squeeze about 20-25FPS out of the game in quiet scenes. (That’s running Windows natively in a Boot Camp partition – not in a VM.) I might have taken a cheaper i3 processor instead of the i5, but I hear that Elite will actually use the i5’s four cores instead of letting them idle.

I have to say that playing Wildstar is a completely different game when you can play it at a good framerate, on a big screen, with all the graphics options on. It’s a game with a hard learning curve. Blurry graphics on a cramped screen didn’t feel like enough of a reward to make up for the difficulty. But on the new machine it’s smooth and fun. I haven’t played Elite yet, but…soon. There’s a high probability it will take over my life for a while, and I have a couple of side projects I’d like to finish off before that happens.

On Sunday the kids and I went to the cinema to see How to Train your Dragon 2, and I taught them how to pick pin-and-tumbler locks.