Conventional Wisdom

Yeah, I wasn’t in the con hotel this weekend, so I resorted to my old standby of stashing a cooler full of supplies in the van so I could just run over there rather than driving all the way back to the room… or actually buying convention center food, because come on.

BUT that also meant a lot more walking around in the cruel summer heat, in full costume, than I EVER like to do at a con. This was right up there with some of my worst Otakon experiences in terms of sheer Knock you Around Till You Nearly Pass Out heat.

…and believe it or not, THIS is why the Hoshicon update was so late. Well, partially. I also didn’t get anywhere near as much Far Out There material done ahead of time as I should have, on the assumption that I’d be getting most of these comics drawn AT the con rather than after. But no, most of that time I was sitting around the con not doing anything, it was because I was SERIOUSLY ABOUT TO DIE FROM THE HEAT. You guys gotta understand, I’m basically made out of snow. I do NOT handle high temperatures well at all. So when I sat down someplace, I was too bust chugging vast quantities of fluid to replace everything I was sweating out, then staring off into the void to curse the very existence of the sun, to actually pull out some paper and think of funny things to draw.

(Historical Notes: In case the parking comic didn’t make it clear, the public lot where I stuck the van was several blocks away from the convention hotel, so getting anything out of there wasn’t just a matter of running across the street or something.  Not that I was going to be running anyway.  I mentioned before that half the reason I wandered all over Charlotte on Thursday night was because I still had a little Washington DC in my system.  I almost never actually DID anything while I lived in DC aside from work, most of my free time consisted of just wandering around on foot for hours on end.  For all the maddening isolation and severe emotional distress I went through while living in that dumpster fire, at least I could say I got in GREAT shape from all the exercise I was getting.  Of course, all that came to an end when I moved back to the suburbs, and think it was around this point that I finally began to realize just how out of shape I was getting.  And boy oh boy, did it only get worse…)