I suppose I should mention that I was off at a convention-meeting that is, in itself, a convention entire. The staff for said anime convention has grown so large that there are more staffers than there were attendee/members at the first convention, back in 1994. I'm theoretically more active in staffing than I have been for years, but I can't claim that I was all that active last weekend. I sat and read a book during the interminable discussions over revisions to the bylaws on membership definitions, and when I finished the book, I took off, while they were still working item e or f of sections a through, hrm, k maybe?

[The book was SM Stirling's Conquistador, his latest love-letter to colonials and imperialists. Well, that's a tad unkind, but really, I'm starting to spot a trend, here, what with the Draka, the Nantucket trilogy, the Peshawar Lancers, and so on. The gist of the story is that a Virginia vet found a way into an alternate-history dimension in post-WWII Oakland,CA, and founded a "Commonwealth of New Virginia" with his war buddies, and what seems like every displaced colonial population produced by the second half of the 20th century. Stirling seems to like to play with the tension between colonial racism and what he sees as the cultural, ecological, and economic virtues of the colonial lifestyle. Personally, I think he exaggerates the environmental wisdom of his hypothetical New Virginia, but hey, it's his soap-box. And you gotta respect a SF writer who spends his spare time baiting the tools on Democratic Underground.]

Otherwise, I mostly spent the weekend playing games with other staffers, and catching up with Todd Dissinger, who finally made it back up from Alabama for a ComCon. Everybody was going on about playing poker on the mailing lists, but I couldn't find a single game all weekend, which kind of irked me. So, instead, I found myself playing the old stand-bys - Citadel, History of the World, etc. We only got three rounds into History of the World - everybody got tired and bored, and called the game less than half-way through. Wimps.