The Pros at Cons A Review of Convolution 2014: Halfway Home Part 5
Day 2 continued. Arachnid Tribbles, More Corsets, and Lasers.
Turning around I talked with a very striking and tall young lady with a shaved head whom I’d seen wondering the floor in the convention earlier. She sat at a booth of splendid little hand-made black fuzzy things that looked like arachnid tribbles as designed by Jim Henson’s creature shop (I mean that in the best possible way). The shop is called Monster Pet Emporium and the young lady was named Alice, I think (I didn’t write it down because I’m not a very good journalist). You can find them on Etsy or Facebook and the monsters are made by someone with the handle of Grue, which I also dig. (The facehugger image I pulled from Dave’s horror movie t shirt collection and seem appropriate especially given the next paragraph)
I was feeling a bit fatigued by then and went to a dim corner where the dudes who run Corset.net, Ben and Dan, were hanging out and talking about other upcoming conventions they would be attending either as fans or as vendors. They were going directly to Gilroy after the vendor room closed that day to party with the Northern California Renaissance Faire people. Then in February in San Jose they were talking up Panthea Con, an alternative and pagan spiritual con. They also had some really beautiful stuff at their booth, from Elizabethan era recreations to very high-fashion modern boned corsets, but unfortunately I had already found the only corset for me and I was anxious to leave the vendor’s room at that point.
Next to them was a small booth with a young man sitting and he seemed a bit ignored with all the larger booths surrounding him so far from the entrances to the hall. So I stopped to talk to him. His name is Barry Figgins and he is a laser-smith at his own company, called Lyris, which sounds every bit as awesome as it in reality is. He had hand made (well, laser cut from fitted wood pieces a Settlers of Catan game board to look like it was actually made in medieval times. I don’t play that game, but I know a ton of people who would love that kind of thing. What really spoke to me was that he had a bunch of cool functional art pieces that he’d made, like a wood box held together with tiny magnets to hold dice or a 3-d map of San Francisco. Plus, he was laid back and cool in that way that makes nerds think, “This is the kind of guy I want to show up at my weekly game”, regardless of what type of game it is you’re running. He handed me a wood carved, laser inscribed business card and told me he has more free time than sense, so it’s actually a lot more cost effective than it seems.
Funny how perceptions change
So I went to movie night last night at a friend’s house and we watched John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness. I actually watched it in high school in a theater and thought it was pretty good. However, watching it in 2010 and it was pretty awful.
The worst part was the bad 80’s hair. Seriously, the women all looked like they were wearing crash helmets. Also the main character had one of the worst porn mustaches I have ever seen. The story made little to no sense (Jesus is actually an alien, and scientists from the future (1999) are beaming tachyon messages back in time that the characters can only pick up in their dreams in order to prevent the Prince of Darkness returning through a mirror), Alice Cooper is leader of a demonically possessed gang of homeless people (all right, that part made some sense), and scientists are willing to spend the night in an abandoned church with thousands of dollars worth of high tech (DOS based, for the most part) equipment in order to study a spinning light display box that I think I have seen in Spencers Gifts. Also, the really cute brunette was second to be possessed by the evil (and somehow still looked uber hot) yet the mediocre red head (her hair looked like a furry R2D2) was last to go. Overall horrible, yet I liked it at age 16. Go figure.
The only thing redeeming about it was Vincent Wong (Egg Chen, from the great Big Trouble in Little China) plays a squinty eyed physics professor who can somehow read Latin fluently. The main character is some chump I don’t remember in anything else (and apparently survives through the protective power of his uber mustache).
Anyway, the whole thing is hardly worth mentioning, except for the fact that I actually liked it years ago. Weird. I am suggesting we watch a good movie next week. My suggestion was Carrie, as seen on this shirt from the horror movie t shirt section. Don’t go out of your way to see this movie, unless big hair turns you on.
