Strange Starts/EFNW · 5:11pm Aug 9th, 2023
Things I wasn't expecting about my trip (as of present) to Seattle:
- Sometime within the past week, the planned bus stop restructuring in the city removed all the bus stops within a one mile radius of where i live. I was intending to catch an even earlier morning bus just to be safe, and hoo boy i'm glad i decided to be safe, because the end result was me having to take the original early morning bus after walking a mile, blustering and furious and having a lot of time to kill in the wait until the next bus out of the city, but hey, if i missed that bus then my whole trip would have gone into disaster mode, so i'm thankful i had the peace of mind to give myself leeway in case i wasn't on top of things (because i wasn't).
That likely means that I'll consider leaving my apartment next year, since bus access is absolutely mandatory for me and "bus access but after walking a mile" doesn't sound ideal at all. Shame, I like my current place, but mom does that thing she always does where she nags incessantly about having me move between apartments as if the place i'm always in isn't good enough for her, so that should placate her for a bit.
(Really, I know she wants me to come back and live with her, but honestly I really, really like the freedom of living on my own, and i feel like we'd drive each other crazy enough [on top of me going crazy from living somewhere i'd rather not live] for it not to be worth saving money. So if she's going to make demands that say one thing but mean another, i might as well fulfill what she's saying if i adamantly refuse to do what she means with it.)
- The interstate bus made the trip an hour ahead of schedule. It must have simply not stopped anywhere during my entire transit. Guess this is just the year of "closing down bus stops" or something, and while it worked to my advantage on this ride (i like getting through security without worrying about missing my flight) I'd still rather have adequate bus coverage in my area.
- For the first time in a while, Airport Security did not look at the scan of the contents of my luggage and assume that the various card games i have in there are loads and loads of c4 charges. That said, I got frisked anyway because the full body scanner reported something erroneous both in my ass and in my crotch. Thankfully, they didn't get invasive with it, but i still got patted down by an airport security officer that looked like a middle-aged Morgan Freeman.
Oh, and said security officer liked Project: Horizons. He namedropped it when asking about my shirt. To say I was baffled would be the understatement of the century.
- Despite being up really early and having all the time in the world last night, I still forgot a fair amount of things: my wood-carved badge (at least it won't break this way, which happened to my last one and necessitated a replacement), my custom lanyard and pins (A bummer for sure, though hopefully people won't be looking at my neck all that much; I'm not sure there's a lot of overlap between the vampire underground of Seattle and convention-going bronies, save for if the former sees the latter as fast food, but I feel like any vampires operating in the area would probably feed carefully since drawing attention from out-of-state investigators and possibly the feds would be a very bad look...)
...uhh, right, that was a digression, where was I?
Oh, I forgot my hat (hopefully I won't be out in the sun all that much) and disposable masks (probably the most pressing issue, though i would be really surprised if there wasn't a convenience store that sold disposables, and given that i'm showing up early i likely won't be in serious doo doo over that mishap.)
Y'all might be wondering: "But Petri, if you got so little sleep, why are you so woefully underprepared and forgetting so many things?" Short and long answer is that i have addictive tendencies, simulation and strategy video games hit those tendencies hard and several very enjoyable things came out during the steam summer sale, which has vortex'd up a lot of my free time where i could be productive or social into a neverending spiral of trying to make things better over some arbitrary measurements, because I like to watch things grow. (Seriously: I treat Tropico the same way other folks treat Cities: Skylines, desperately trying to make insatiable people happy while rationalizing that putting up flophouses without electricity or any kind of central air system right next to dirty industrial factories is still a benevolent thing or just how much of my income is built on plantations and the exploitation of unskilled labor.)
When all's said and done, though, EFNW's going to be fun and I'm looking forward to it. Meant to get more riding done on the way to the terminal than i did, or while I was at this terminal, but i've been in a fair amount of internet blackout recently and then spent way too much time whipping up this post. Uh...here's to hoping the plane flight's more productive?
Anyways, if you'll be there and you want to chat, hit me up. I haven't looked at the 2023 schedule, but assume that i'll be going to a lot of writing panels and basically anything Wanderer D/Flashgen are involved in. Sadly, my also aforementioned laziness means that I didn't wind up publishing something to sell at the bookstore, but part of my hoof-wringing on that front was due to feeling like i didn't have a publishable enough portfolio of stuff to tie together under a unifying theme, and padding stuff with author's notes could only take me so far. And not everyone wants a saucy breakdown between the wildly improbably romance between a fictitious dragon and a fictitious horse.
-Petri
Speak for yourself, that sounds like fun!
Enjoy the con n_n
I'm going myself - first con ever, very nervous. It'd be cool to meet up with you if possible!
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Wait, people read anything other than that? TIL
this makes me feel much better about my situation, where there is a bus stop right outside my apartment complex, but I just don't use it most of the time because the walk is good for me :B
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n_n
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That's because Kate is a Walker.