Well I did another day at Sakura-Con. I can’t say I got quite as many good pictures this time around. While there were plenty of people in costume there weren’t many of the “professional” cosplayers so there wasn’t that many good poses for me to work with. The best (at least from my perspective were a group of musicians playing music from video games and My Little Pony.
Still it was fun to watch and a useful exercise.
I must admit I haven’t done Sakura-Con for a while. I used to, in fact I was the official photographer for the first three years back when it was still called Baka-con. I’d spend the whole weekend there and when I say that I mean the WHOLE weekend doing a totally masochistic marathon mastering the art of sleeping in film rooms (Sit near the projector that way security is less likely to notice things provided you sit up straight and change rooms frequently) But gradually I stopped.
There were several reasons the fact that they started having it on the same weekend as Norwescon and with Youtube and anime going mainstream. I no longer was dependent on it for discovering all of those hard to find titles. On a more embarrassing level all of the cosplayers started triggering an instant midlife crisis for me. While I’m not so pathetic as to go to a con to find love at the same time realizing that you’re probably going to have to ask anyone you talk to for ID begins to get to you after a while. After a while I’d find that the only reason I’d really want to go was to look for hard to find art books in the dealer room and I refuse to pay for the privilege of shopping.
However it was a nice day and it occurred to me it was a nice day and I could probably zip downtown and do a little bit of people watching and maybe get in some extreme sketching in. If it didn’t work out there’s lots of other things to do on a nice day in downtown Seattle. Turned it worked out pretty well there were lots of cosplayers hanging out in the Freeway Park behind the convention center and I was able to get at least three pages in. 
Well as everyone else is counting the hours til Sunday’s premier of season 3 of Game of Thrones this Sunday I have my own treat I finally got the audiobook for A Feast For Crows from the Library.
It took me a little while for me to get into Game of Thrones… (Yes I know the actual name is A Song of Ice and Fire but thanks to HBO it will always be Game of Thrones) Most of this can be blamed on me doing most of my recreational reading these days through audiobooks and unfortunately some books lend themselves to this format then others. The main reason for me is that in a regular book you can increase the speed of your reading. You can linger on the interesting bits and more importantly you can gloss through the bad stuff as quickly as possible (and let’s be honest with ourselves, Game of Thrones has lots of bad stuff.) You can’t do this with an audiobook (well you can but it’s not precise and unless you have the actual times written down you miss more than the bit you want to miss) Therefore everything occurs at the same pace which means you have to go through things like the fate of Ned Stark and the Red Wedding at the the same excruciating pace as all of the stuff you enjoy. Because of this I lost interest after the third hour of the recording.
However for the most part I knew my initial disinterest had nothing to do with the quality of the material and most of my friends told me I should give it a second chance and I did… after I watched the first season on HBO.
Now I’m totally geeking out over it.
It’s funny, normally I’m one of those really annoying critics who insists on being familiar with the original material before he watches an adaptation so that he can judge it as an adaptation as well as a work in its own right. I’m finding reading the book after I watched the show I’m finding it fascinating to see all of the choices and sacrifices the creators made in order to turn all of this text into a show that works.
But back to the audiobook.
One thing I’m enjoying is that for all practical purposes Roy Dotrice‘s reading counts as a different and separate performance from the HBO production. As an example let’s compare his Tyrion Lannister with Peter Dinklage‘s… Dinklage (and make no mistake this is one of my favorite performances in the whole show) play’s Tyrion as bent but definitely not broken, pretty much the embodiment of the following quote.
When he opened the door, the light from within threw his shadow clear across the yard, and for just a moment Tyrion Lannister stood tall as a king.”
Dotrice reads Tyrion with a sarcastic high pitched voice in what I’m pretty sure is a Welsh accent. You can almost imagine him with a permanent sneer. This is an angry little man whose terrible life has left him bitter with the discomfort he causes in other people one of his main sources of satisfaction.
The rest of his interpretations on the rest of the cast are equally different and fascinating.
So since I don’t get HBO and I’m still waiting to get my copy of the second season I have the fun of finding out what happens next in the book.
Well as I mentioned earlier this week. The Seattle Art Museum was packed to the gills this Sunday so I didn’t really get into my zone at all as far as the sketching was concerned and so I just ended up doing a whole lot of people watching. The only pictures I finished the day with that were not complete disasters were these three from the museum’s African Mask.
The first is from the a Lipiko mask of the Makonde people. The middle one is Hemba and the Last is Congolese Luba.
Just a little side note to my bike ride to Georgetown. Just as I was starting to head back north I saw a Shrub Jay foraging. I wasn’t completely sure at first after all It’s not like I have my copy of Peterson’s on me at all times. But I got a good enough look at it to be ninety percent sure and be able to confirm my identification when I got back home.
I’m not completely sure this was a lifer for me as I might have seen one in the Grand Canyon (unless what I saw back then was a Pinyon Jay.) Either way it was pretty cool. I knew they were around here but I wasn’t completly sure where the border of their northern most territory was (my neighborhood is mostly Stellar country.)
Well the experience with the new bike is coming along nicely. It’s not that much faster than my old clunker but it handles hills like a dream and half the time feels like my usual long distance jaunts are no effort at all (almost feels unfair as I’m also doing this for exercise) Which almost makes me continue to work on doing more of it.
Which brings us to my day
As I’ve said numerous times my comfort in riding about Seattle for reasons of safty and endurance has been a gradual. For the longest time I wouldn’t go frarther south then the canal then I gradually went as far as Mercer Island until I finally got over my fear of downtown traffic enough to start going all the way. Well today I took a next step, Georgetown.
The Seattle Chapter of the Graphic Artists Guild has been having it’s monthly workshops down at the Washington Design Center and since it takes twice as long as it should on the bus due to a very long wait for a transfer downtown I’ve long to at least try to find out if it would be feasible to bike down. And for nearly as long I’ve been wimping out over any excuse like rain or any other straw I could grab. With the new Bike I decided I’d give it a try figuring if I wimped out I had my new ORCA card to rescue me.
Turns out it worked out fairly well once you get past down town it’s mostly flat flood plain so I was able to kick it into high gear so I did the 13 miles in about an hour and a half. Later I took my own sweet time going back north taking care of several downtown errands. I think I can start to make a habit of this…
Of course at the moment I feel like a wet noodle with radiation poisoning but “what does not kill us” right?
