hanging my tomorrows on the bones of yesterday

The Bad: I spaced out a lot at Flipside, and then again at A-kon. I thought it might have been the heat at Flipside, but A-kon was indoors and mostly air-conditioned. :\ There really are a lot of budgetary concerns for my attention. The more things there are to pay attention to (like 16,000 geeks in one place) the easier it becomes to drop all of it, and I'd forgotten about that. No wonder I was such a space cadet in school.

As far as bad things go, that's not that bad, and the software changes that I'm trying out seem to be functional.

The Good: I got to spend four days with art freaks and then another three days with anime nerds. MY PEOPLE! I LOVE YOU ALL. I have bathed in weirdness and belonging, and my soul feels clean. Clean enough to identify some goals!

The Thinky: Some of these goals require successfully predicting the behavior of large groups of people, figuring out ways to put safety features into social technology, and
The Make Dallas Weird project is going to take about 90 years, I think. I'm going to have to become a political creature in order to make the city ordinances more accepting to the things that attract geeks to a city. And I need a second branch of this plan to transform nerds into geeks so that the ones we have already become visible.

Listing out unfulfilled human emotional needs will help us predict the shape of the future. Basically all the people who've ever been right about what the future had in store went with predicting that humans want emotional fulfillment, convenience, comfort, and fun.

In other news: I am now reading Soulless by Gail Carriger. It's a steampunk Victorian comedy of manners, the kind of book the Anita Blake series could have been if it had an ounce of proper decorum. It is hilarious, and I owe many thanks to mig_unit for it.

I may be getting $90 back from the IRS? Score. I hope it's here in time for A-kon.

My brain is coming slowly back online after the crowds, their noise, the fan videos, the costumes, and all the fun and bright lights and snack foods. So much geekery! After a while you're tired 'til you ache, like that hum of happiness is a muscle you're not used to using, and in addition to how your face hurts from smiling, your soul hurts from sustaining intense joy.

Next year, we will be stronger and withstand more.