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May 4th, 2012
03:00 pm - Clue-nemic
Is there some handy or clever word to refer to scientific ignorance?
There's been a bit of chatter on the PennyGems comment area about whether or not pennies need to be cleaned before stickering. (Answer: no.) In addressing this, I went back to a couple of sites that talk about cleaning pennies.
1) They almost universally are NOT talking about cleaning pennies, but polishing them. Practically every method I found is some variation of "drop in acid" (vinegar, ketchup, Arby's Sauce, taco sauce, cola, oxalic acid, et cetera) and/or "rub with abrasive." (baking soda, toothpase, Brasso(tm), salt, et cetera)
But I come today not to rant about people who don't understand the underlying science of folklore-based metal polishing. No, it's the oft-repeated comment usually found attached to the "soak coins in cola" technique. "If it does that to a penny, imagine what it does to your stomach."
{taps head gently against wall while sighing loudly}
Now, as it happens, Coca-cola(tm) is one of the most acidic soft drinks on the shelf, with a pH of around 2.5, which is still less acidic than the average stomach. Hydrochloric acid, people! Your stomach is full of hydrochloric acid!
I mean, WT*? That was one of the coolest things I could imagine when I first learned that. Especially for a kid growing up in a non-nuanced, sound-bite world, details like the actual pH level, the buffering, the dilution; these aren't important. What's important is that your stomach is full of acid! Famous acid! Mad-scientist-horror-movie-grade acid! Coke gets its acidity from some B-list junk called phosphoric acid. Sneer. Everybody knows if you need to dissolve a body or eat a hole through a safe door or cause somebody to shriek in unendurable agony, you go with sulfuric acid or hydrochloric acid. Duh. I remember wondering how come when somebody barfed, their vomit didn't eat a hole through the floor.
The equally fascinating question of "how can my stomach do that without being destroyed?" had a dismayingly un-cool answer, though. Mucus. Mucus? Eeewwww! I don't care if it's providing an impenetrable barrier against the flesh-destroying hydrochloric acid in my stomach. Even that isn't enough to make mucus cool.
I suspect, when somebody parrots back a stupid comment like "if it does that to a penny, what does it do to your stomach," it's not because they are unaware that they've got acid in their stomach. All the companies that make acid reflux medicines work hard to teach people that. It's probably because they don't understand A.1. Steak Sauce makes a penny shiny because it has vinegar in it, instead of magic. And I promise, if anybody ever says that line to my face, to politely explain that it probably won't do anything to somebody's stomach other than dilute it a bit, rather than laugh out loud.
I can't promise to not roll my eyes, though. I'm only human.
Current Mood:  dismayed
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December 1st, 2011
11:15 pm - Drugology (part 2)
The other drugology fact that seems to be entirely absent from general medical awareness is, I think, a serious oversight. I don't take Ritalin, myself, but I do take medication every day to treat my ADD, and none of the four or five medical professionals involved with my medication over the years ever came close to getting the dosing schedule right. This same issue is relevant to just about anybody who takes some kind of medication on a daily basis, especially if, like me, you don't want it to be doing its thing 24/7. I'm going to go back to methylphenidate for my example of the Big Mistake that appears to be endemic to the medical community.
While every individual is, well, individual, kids and adults treated for ADD and taking Ritalin often have similar time tables for medication. Take one tablet in the morning (say, around 8am), and a second one around noon. Adults in particular might take a third one at around 4, and possibly a fourth one around 8pm, although usually we want the effects to start wearing off before bedtime. A pretty common dose would be a 10mg tablet.
The problem is, this schedule completely fails to include "blood serum half-life," the rate at which a drug is cleared from your bloodstream by your liver and kidneys. At noon, there's not enough methylphenidate left to have the desired effect, but that doesn't mean that it's suddenly gone from your system. There's a lot left, just not enough to get the job done. Taking another full dose means, well, let me draw you a picture...
Chart 1: Blood Serum Levels 10mg tablets at 8am and at noon 
The scale is rather arbitrary, since it's hard to relate how much medicine goes down your throat with how much ends up in the bloodstream. But let's say that "5" is the amount required to produce the desired effect. Sure enough, the total medicine is dropping below 5 right around noon. Time for another pill. Add the red line to the blue and you get, gosh, way too much!
Chart 2: Blood Serum Levels 10mg tablets at 8am, noon, and 4pm. 
Good grief. During dinner, our archetypical person has twice the amount of methylphenidate required to be effective in their bloodstream. Now, like most stimulants, methylphenidate is actually extremely safe. Aspirin could only wish it were as harmless as Ritalin. (You might think Adderall is an exception, since that's the brand-name for prescription methamphetamine. However, keep in mind that somebody "on speed" will usually administer a dose of meth about equivalent to an entire month's worth of prescription Adderall.)
Safe or not, dumping needlessly huge amounts of medication on your liver and kidneys just doesn't make good medical sense. Also, this same overdosing curve applies to any daily drug. High blood pressure meds, allergy pills, depression, and so on, and many (most!) of those medications are not as safe as methylphenidate.
Chart 3: Blood Serum Levels 10mg tablets at 8am, 2pm, and 8pm. 
Chart 4: Blood Serum Levels 10mg tablet at 8am, 5mg at noon and 4pm.
Why, yes, that is a huge improvement! You can see the red and yellow lines, representing the individual doses contribution to the overall medicine level, are half the size of the morning dose. Overall levels of medication in the bloodstream are enormously more stable and even. Yes, there's a problem gap between around 3 and 5 pm. That's an easy fix. Let's just move the afternoon dose up about 45 minutes, to 3:15.
Chart 5: Blood Serum Levels 10mg tablet at 8am,
5mg at noon and 3:15pm.
So compare Chart 5 to Charts 1 and 2. With the 10/5/5 dose, we're getting a far more even level of medication and taking only 2/3rds as many milligrams as before. It's true that the meds drop out on chart five right around dinner time, whereas on chart 2 they were good until 9 at night. That's an easy fix: five milligrams at 5:30 extend the effective range until about 9:30. Even better would be four milligrams at six, but you can't get Ritalin in 4mg tablets.
A few years ago, I did, in fact, try to get a prescription filled so that I could actually take the right amount of medicine at the right time. "I'm sorry, but two different sizes of pill are considered two different prescriptions, and won't be covered by your insurance." Yes, insurance companies are well known for being institutions of poop-headed-ness. Fortunately, as with my example here, the solution was to have the prescription written for four 5mg tablets per day, and I just took two of them in the morning.
It's really stupid that the insurance companies don't grok the idea that maybe I need the same medicine at different dosages during the day, but it's still just one condition and one prescription. But then again, obviously doctors aren't ever prescribing serum-aware medication, so there's not really any reason for the insurance companies to bother changing.
I spent quite a few years trying to figure out when was the best time to take an afternoon dose of my medication before it finally occurred to me that my problem was not "when," but "how much." Being aware of this issue has made a very serious change for the better in my life, and I cannot believe that it isn't vitally important to uncountable thousands of other people on chronic medication. And yet, I have never had any doctor suggest taking half a tablet or some reduced amount during the day, nor have I found any general awareness of this on line.
Is it really just too complicated to bother with? It is complicated. I didn't just construct those serum level curves out of wishful thinking. The key numbers are "time to peak" (how long after swallowing the tablet does the amount in the bloodstream reach its highest point) and the aforementioned blood serum half life. Methylphenidate is particularly uneven, with a time to peak (in children) that ranges from 20 minutes to two hours. I found conflicting opinions on the half-life; one source said "two hours," and another one said "three." Neither one provided a reference, alas. So these graphs are based on researched averages, but any particular individual might have a significantly different response, and thus require a different dosing schedule. The medication I currently take typically has a peak serum time of around 120 minutes, but it's closer to 150 for me. (I haven't actually had blood tests done every 30 minutes for a few hours after taking it, so I don't really know for sure; I'm guessing based upon my response to it.)
I did happen to turn up some interesting evidence that this mis-dosing isn't just in my imagination. There was a study done in 1999 comparing Ritalin and Adderall in treating ADD in kids. As part of the conclusion, the authors said (emphasis is mine) "Time-course results indicated that the afternoon dose of medication seemed to have a larger effect than the morning dose, raising the possibility that afternoon doses of stimulant medication may be able to be reduced relative to the morning dose without a corresponding reduction in efficacy. This practice . . . is almost never used in empirical investigations and no studies have systematically investigated the practice. Our results suggest that systematic studies of a reduced midday dose are indicated."
They almost sound surprised, as if the very idea that some of the first dose is still in the blood stream hadn't even occurred to them. If so, it wouldn't be the first time that some particular idea was totally obvious to me, and completely invisible to everybody around me. But this seems so obvious, so completely non-mysterious, that I'm left scratching my head. It's not rocket science! It's adding one plus one and getting two! Or maybe it's adding 12mg and 18mg, but it's still just basic arithmetic.
It's generally not too hard to find out the half-life of a drug, if you know you're looking for the information. Quite often, it's just listed in the side bar on Wikipedia. Wellbutrin, for example, has a half-life between 22 and 30 hours! That means if you take it once a day, it will be at least five days before the amount in your bloodstream levels out, and it'll be about 25% lower in the evening than it is in the morning after you take it. Zoloft has a 26 hour half life. Prozac is especially tricky. Regular use causes it to inhibit its own metabolism, so the half-life starts at around 2 days, but becomes 4-6 with ongoing use. Modafinil has a half-life of 12-15 hours, and, according to Wikipedia, is sometimes prescribes in two doses, one in the morning and one at midday. I rather doubt that patients are being advised to make the midday dose only 50mg, while taking 100mg in the morning. If not, then, as illustrated, the afternoon dose is causing a needlessly huge spike.
If you, Dear Reader, are taking some regular medication, please feel free to print out this essay, or perhaps just some of the charts, and discuss this with your doctor the next time you see them. I would be most interested to learn of the results.
Current Mood:  annoyed
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08:50 pm - Drugology (part 1)
I am not here today to rant about the incompetence of the medical system, or of doctors. Generally, I've been pretty satisfied with the doctors I've interacted with. However, there are a few important aspects of medication that have come to my attention over the years that, for some reason, doctors seem to mostly be unaware of, and that can have a profound effect on me, and perhaps you.
The first one is the "generic vs. brand name" question. The following excerpt from the book "Running on Ritalin" (as quoted by PBS), is a perfect example of the generally-held opinion: "Unless a family insists on Ritalin, I prescribe generic methylphenidate because it is less costly. (An article [in the leading child psychiatry journal] reported on two children who responded differently to the two different preparations, but the psychiatrists could not account for the differences.) I have trouble accepting that the two versions of the drug really are different."
There's a lot of on-line speculation and opinionation about companies with poor quality control and the like, but the puzzled psychiatrists should have started by doing something that most people do every time they go shopping: read the label! Check the ingredients! Yes, both the brand-name and generic methylphenidate should contain (for a 5mg tablet) between 4.5 and 5.5 mg of 'methylphenidate hydrochloride' (the FDA allows a plus-or-minus variation of 10% for prescription medication). But what else is in there? Well, that depends on who made it.
If you get your tablet from Novartis, the company that makes brand-name "Ritalin," your 5mg tablet will also contain lactose, magnesium stearate, polyethylene glycol, starch, sugar (sucrose), talc, and D&C Yellow No. 10. If you get it from Mallinckrodt (a big maker of generic drugs, who sells methylphenidate under the brand name "Methylin"), the tablet contains lactose monohydrate, magnesium stearate, microcrystalline cellulose, and talc.
I'm pretty sure "lactose" and "lactose monohydrate" are the same thing, so the big difference is that the Mallinkrodt version does not have any sugar, starch, polyethylene glycol, or Yellow. (Their tablet is white.)
If you get a tablet from UCB/Geneva Pharmaceuticals, you'll get a tablet similar to Mallinckrodt's, except no talc, but with starch and FD&C Yellow. Watson Pharmaceuticals has lactose and magnesium stearate as well, but they go with silicon dioxide and sugar as the other ingredients.
For most people, the variations in inactive ingredients will be irrelevant. The FDA has a fairly short list of "stuff you can add to medicine without having to file a bunch of paperwork and run a bunch of tests," so manufacturers stick to the stuff that's been approved. (By the way, the proper term for 'stuff in medicine that isn't the medicine' is "excipients.")
However, *some* people have allergies. Some of them have undiagnosed allergies, for that matter, and for such an individual, the presence of polyethylene glycol might irritate the intestinal wall and interfere with absorption. There's also been some inconclusive but suggestive research on the effects of artificial colorants on kids with ADD, so maybe that FD&C Yellow is partially un-doing the effect of the medicine.
So yes, Dear Reader, you and your doctor cannot blithly assume that the generic version of anything you've been taking is exactly the same as the brand-name version. More importantly, pay attention to which company supplied the generic form, because that can vary from one prescription to the next, something that this person is obviously quite unaware of. (Hey, dummy, you just told them the ingredients of Watson's tablet, not anybody else's.)
But this is a fairly minor peeve. Stay tuned for Part 2...
Current Mood:  peeved
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November 8th, 2011
12:23 am - Work of Art, 2.3
Episode "Make It Pop." Make a work of Pop Art. I didn't really have strong feelings about who won and lost in this episode. I was too distracted by trying to figure out what constituted 'pop' art. My first thought was to fabricate a 4' tall blue "f" like the Facebook logo, and hook it to a VanDeGraff generator so it would give anybody to touched it an electric shock. I decided that would be pretty difficult, and probably not very effective. I then went to a series of funhouse mirrors representing the various social media companies (Facebook, Twitter, GooglePlus, and whoever else I decided to include). Then they announced a budget of $150. OK, maybe not. I shrank it down to a set of smaller mirrors, maybe one foot square, mounted on a wall, contained in sort of a box. The mirror would be against the wall, and then there'd be a box bottom and sides, but no top or end. In order to see the mirror, you'd have to be standing at the open end of the box, which meant you would have to stand where you'd see your own reflection. The mirrors wouldn't be glass, but rather metallized Plexiglass. I can easily warp Plexi mirrors by just submerging them in boiling water for five minutes or so, then pulling them out and laying them on some kind of lumpy surface. The outside of the box would have the logo for a social media service. Thus, all these companies reflect you back, but your image is distorted in the process.
Assuming I had time, I thought maybe I'd also build a box for me to wear on my head, and then I'd stand at the end of the row of boxes during the showing. I couldn't decide what to label the "me" box, though.
My problem with this idea was, I wasn't sure it was really "pop art." Simone, when he critiqued the artists, often expressed the same concern. At that point, I scrapped the mirror idea, and came up with something new.
If I'd been a contestant, it's quite possible that I would have come up with this new idea before we'd gotten to the art supply store, since I came up with it about ten minutes after the first idea. Or, maybe I would have already blown my budget, and would have had to do this other idea on the cheap. Hard to say.
Assuming I had the budget, my new idea involves finding a sign making shop, and having them run their vinyl cutter to make me a thousand or so blue facebook "f" stickers. I would create a portrait of myself, probably using one of my existing self-portraits, and print it and mount it as a traditional photograph. I'd be sure to shrink it down then blow it back up, in order to get some of that weird blocky artifacting that results from highly compressed JPEG images. Then, I start sticking down Fs all over it, around the wall, onto the floor, and off to other areas. There would be so many Fs on my picture that you wouldn't be able to see all that much of my face, but the Fs would get sparser as they got further from the portrait.
Then, during the show I would ask people "Would you mind being my friend?" If they said "yes," then I would stick one of the Fs onto them. Sleeve, hat, leg, shoe, ear, wherever. Other people, I would sneak an F onto by putting it on their back or such. I would definitely be sure to get Fs on the judges, hopefully by having them "friend" me. Later in the show, I would be sure to come by and peel the F back off one or two of the judges, as well as off some of the other people in the room, "de-friending" them.
This whole idea really does tickle me. The 'computer portrait me' almost smothered by those insidious blue Fs, with them getting loose and spreading through the room, stuck on and circulating with the audience, and then having some people have to deal with the only thing worse than having one of those dumb F's tagging you is having somebody just wander past and casually snatch it away again.
Yum.
Current Mood:  artistic
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November 7th, 2011
07:48 pm - Work of Art, 2.2
[Reposting my commentary on the 2nd episode. For those of you reading these, either here on LiveJournal or via Google+, I would be very interested in what reaction, if any, you have to the artworks that I'm imagining I would have created were I a contestant.]
Watched episode 2 of "Work of Art." I am mystified by Bayeté's selection as winner. I am entirely in agreement with the three lowest positions. [Addenda: having read judge Jerry Saltz's blog entry, I'm much less mystified. He specifically emphasizes that Bayeté's piece, seen on television, 'looks like nothing,' and also felt that runner-up Michelle's piece fails to come through in the broadcast.]
What would I have done? Well, if I were on Team Digestion, I would probably have done something with waving villi, but I thought that theme was terrible. For "Migration," I was all set to have five or six sets of footprints setting out from a common point. One would be bare feet, there's be a set of sneakers, some boots, some high heels, and so on. One set would walk out of the gallery. One set would fade away. One set would end in some kind of explosion. I didn't figure out what the others would do, because that's when Simon made them scrap their themes. "Migration" turned into "Playground," and I had a lot more trouble with that. In the end, I came up with a swing (hopefully suspended from the ceiling), set to swing left to right, with some kind of really nasty {splat} on the wall in front of it, as if somebody had let go at the top of the arc and plastered into the wall. The swing would have been weighted to be as heavy as possible to cause it to stay swinging for long periods of time. I didn't like that one nearly as much as the "Migration" idea. Title: 'Higher! Higher!" Hmm. It just occurred to me to add "bloody" footprints leading away from the splat. Uneven, staggering, and fading out as the 'blood' wears off the shoes, leaving the final fate of the rider unknown. That helps a little.
On the other hand, I really liked what I came up with for "Circles" or balls or loops or whatever, the "Digestion" team's (lame) new theme. A large container of some sort, maybe a five-gallon bucket?, with a tube rising up, then a track spiraling downward from it that eventually led back to the container. At random intervals, an Arduino board would close a relay, sending a ping-pong ball out of the container, up the tube, and onto the track. The ball would roll down the track and back into the container. The balls would have words on them: "run," "fly," "leap," and such would be written in green, "fall," "crash," "trip" would be in red. The track would be inclined so that the balls moved slowly enough for a viewer to see that there were words on them, but fast enough to make them difficult, or impossible, to read. Title: "I Need to Get Out More."
"Higher! Higher!" would have been a fairly weak piece on the winning team, and "I Need to Get Out More" would have been the only piece actually demonstrating motion on the losing team, so I think, either way, I would have been safe from elimination. But, as always, one never knows.
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07:46 pm - Work Of Art, 2.1
[I've decided to move back to LiveJournal for posting my ongoing commentary regarding the second season of "Work of Art: The Next Great Artist", broadcasting on Bravo. So first I'm going to republish my first two posts, which were originally entered at Google+]
Well, I just finished watching the first episode of "Work of Art." Take some kitschy work of "art" and transform it. I would have sent a different artist packing than the one they sent, but for me, in the end, the key question is "What would I have done?"
In this case, my first choice would have been to grab the wooden(?) figure of a girl(?). Not the blindfolded woman, but the one that one of the artists ended up wrapping in clay. I would have taken that figure, sliced it into components (arm, leg, face, whatever else would be recognizable), and placed it in some kind of shallow box. Then, add some expanding foam from the hardware store. This would fill up around the pieces, leaving them partially exposed, partially submerged in this billowy organic-looking surface. Also, a tentacle (probably made from modeling clay or the like), and a glass eye. Once the foam had set, I'd airbrush on some disconcerting colors (probably blues and greens).
Then I'd title it "Love."
If I hadn't been able to get that item, then I would have gone for one of the flat works. Any portrait would have been fine, like the clown, or Gandalf. Mount it to, oh, possibly gatorboard or hardboard, and then cut it apart along obvious boundaries. For example, an eye would be one piece, part of the face, the hair, a collar, the background, and so on. Larger pieces (hair, background) would probably then be subdivided. Each piece would be mounted on a short dowel, or possibly suspended with string or wire (in some way that would keep it from moving about). From most positions, you would see just the various parts placed in what would seem a pretty random arrangement. There would be one particular point that you could place your eye where all the pieces would line up to re-create the original image. Call that the "front" of the work. The pieces would be scattered along, oh, probably about three feet of space. So, about a foot in front of it (too close to get between the work itself and this point), I would put a black acrylic circle, sized so that when you moved around in front of the work, you'd be able to see the parts start to come together, but before you could quite see the whole thing reassembled, your view would be obstructed by the disk. The title is "Not Today, Dear, I Have A Headache."
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September 12th, 2011
01:18 pm - Epic Betrayal
I spent this last weekend hanging out with a big glob of friends and friends of friends, and one of the things I did was rope some people into a midnight game of "Betrayal at House on the Hill." If you don't know it, it's a very light and light-hearted game that drops the players into a classic horror-movie situation. Everybody's wandering around a creepy old house; various scary things happen (you fall through a secret door in the bookcase; spiders drop from the ceiling and crawl all over you; you find a sinister toy monkey; the walls ooze blood; et cetera); and at some point, The Haunt Happens. Generally, this means that one of the players suddenly turns Evil in some way, and now it's Them against Everybody Else. The game comes with fifty different scenarios, and somebody's written twenty more, so until the shoe drops, you have no idea if this horror movie is about zombies trying to eat your brains, Dracula trying to nibble you all to death, a carnivorous plant spreading through the house, swarms of insects stripping victims to the bone, or, well, you get the picture.
This game started with five players. Three were newcomers, one had played a few times, and then there was me. In general, the later in the game that The Haunt occurs, the more likely it is that the Good Guys will win. In this game, it happened right about at the mid point. The scenario that materialized was one of the newer ones, which are generally a little bit more complex. Specifically, #52. Some very vague semi-spoilers follow.
( spoilers )
Starting a game at midnight is always kind of risky. If a game runs long, and/or if a player feels they're in a bad position, the late-night fatigue tends to amplify negative energy. Tempers are shorter, even as the game gets longer because players start dragging. But not this time. We were all astonished when we discovered that what I had assured everybody was usually a 45-minute to 1-hour game had actually gone for three hours. This game was full of great moments, like when one of the characters was deep in the basement with a demon coming at them, and somebody on the second floor ran out of the room, down the grand staircase, through the foyer, and into the basement, then gave the Spear (or maybe the Revolver, I forget which) to their Dog. The dog scampers through the house, delivering the desperately-needed object to the desperate hero in the nick of time. So fun!
Current Mood:  amused
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August 23rd, 2011
02:31 pm - Renovation: Programming (not)
Well, I just spent almost two hours writing up my experiences with programming at Renovation. LJ has been happily telling me it was autosaving my drafts the whole time. Flash, I think from UStream, managed to f*** up Safari to the point i had to kill it. But my draft is saved, so that's not a problem.
Log back into LJ. "Restore from saved draft?" "Yes, Please." "OK"
Blank screen.
Y'know, if LJ hadn't been telling me it was saving drafts, I would have been cut-and-pasting versions of it into my text editor just in case. But I believed it, so now all that work is totally gone.
And yes, I tried opening LJ in another browser. Same "restore?" same nothing.
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05:04 am - Renovation: Where's Hugo?
As most of my readers probably already know, I designed the base for the 2009 Hugo Awards given out in Montreal. For reasons not worth repeating here, I didn't manage to fulfill the original quantity ordered by the time of the convention. I did get enough done so that everybody who won had one; as usual, there are a few spares after it's all over. A few of the extras became the ones provided to Phil, Kaja, and Cheyenne, but there was one last base left. It cost me about $25 per box to ship bases to Canada, and a box held up to four bases. I was too cheap to spend that to send one base, so I've been holding on to it, planning to just hand it to them at the next WorldCon.
That would have been last year, but as things worked out, I just couldn't afford the time or money to go to Australia. God knows I really really really really wanted to, because there was a chance that they were going to call my name at the 2010 awards, to walk on stage and be handed a Hugo award for "Best Fan Artist." The only art I'd managed to actually get done in 2009 was Montreal's award base, so I was, in effect, in danger of being awarded a Hugo for a Hugo.
Well, in the end, I came in second. Still, it absolutely is an honor to be nominated. Also, it means I get a lapel pin. All nominees get a pin in the shape of the Hugo about an inch long. Every WorldCon, especially on Hugo Night, you can see these pins appear on apparel.
Unfortunately, I'd never received mine. The Hugo packet administrator, Kate, had emailed me for my address last spring, but I'd never gotten anything in the mail. I figured I'd find somebody from the Australian committee and finally get my hands on what would likely be the closest I ever get to "my own" Hugo award.
I happened to mention this to Howard Taylor, the brilliant and terribly charming creator/cartoonist who does Schlock Mercenary. He's been nominated for Best Graphic Story all three years this category's existed, and lost to Girl Genius every time. He told me "I disagree. I think it's very likely you'll make the final ballot again. They say 'Lighting doesn't strike twice,' but of course, that's completely false. Having struck once, there's now an ionized path that makes it more likely it will strike again." By which he meant, having made the ballot once, my profile is higher, so if (when?) I do something else that might warrant making the ballot, the chances that I will are higher. He's right, and since I am actually trying to get to design another Hugo base one of these days, as well as planning to increase the quantity and quality of art I'm doing, it's not like I'm not still standing around in an open field with a spear in my hand or something.
In the end, I didn't manage to run Kate down until Sunday afternoon, so I didn't get to wear my little silver rocket on Hugo Day, which was a little frustrating, although, realistically, the number of people at WorldCon who have piles of silver rocket pins is high enough that I doubt anybody would have commented on my one little missile.
* - * - *
It's also true that I probably could have had my little rocket on Saturday if I'd started trying to get my hands on it starting Wednesday, but I was distracted by a bigger problem. Along with the last Hugo base, I also had a special custom-made holder for the 2009 plaque, to be used with the Montreal Hugo that was part of the "Hugo Exhibit," a selection of about 20 Hugo awards from previous years that is on display at WorldCons. The plaque is fairly delicate, and even though the people who pack up the exhibit are careful, I figured it was only a matter of time before it got bent, so I'd made a holder to help keep it nice.
The award exhibit was on the way to the art show, so I checked it out on Wednesday.
The 2009 Hugo was not in the case.
Moreover, there wasn't even a space for it.
As a result, most of my spare time on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday was spent trying to find somebody who could tell me where 'my' Hugo was. Elayne Pelz suggested I talk to somebody at fanac.org. They told me they weren't in charge of the Hugo exhibit. Marc Olsen suggested Mary Mormon. I caught up to her the next day. She had been one of the people who set up the display, and she was quite certain that the '09 base hadn't been in the cases. They'd come from . . . Elayne Pelz. Back to her. She told me that the Aussiecon folks had told her that when they'd set up the display last year, there had been a Hugo missing.
Unfortunately, Aussiecon couldn't tell her which one was missing, because they're not shipped with a manifest. I don't know how they even knew they were one short.
Why is there no manifest? Because, in the end, there is nobody who is actually responsible for these Hugos. Previously, Bruce Pelz had been providing space to store the exhibit in between conventions. The exhibit comes in big black flight cases; somebody at some point spent serious money to provide these Hugos with high-quality shipping containers. Bruce has passed on, and his wife Elayne doesn't want to deal with them. I can't really blame her; they're really heavy, and there's a lot of them. Moreover, they're only part of a much larger group that includes hundreds of photos of fans and pros, and I'm not even sure what all else. Probably the 100+ t-shirts from previous conventions, at the least.
Renovation is over, and at this time, I still don't know what happened to the exhibition's Hugo. The most likely explanation is that it was put into a separate flight case that didn't actually have the word "Hugos" on the exterior, so it didn't get sent along with the rest. Elayne says there are a couple boxes still in the storage unit that she thought only contained bubble wrap. At first, I was a little skeptical, since a box with bubble wrap, and a box with a Hugo (especially a granite Hugo) and bubble wrap would be really obvious as soon as you tried to lift one. However, if the box in question is actually a 2x2x3 flight case, then it already weighs so much that you might not notice the different weight, never mind that she would almost certainly not even lift it in the first place.
The alternative is that somebody stole it. Unlike some of my friends, I consider this to be a very low-probability event. There weren't very many opportunities for somebody to steal it, for one thing. If it really didn't get to Aussiecon, then the only chance would have been in Montreál, after it had been put in the case. I watched it get packed, and at that time, only authorized personnel were allowed into the hall, so very few people could have gotten in afterwards to pull it back out, and I can't really believe anybody who was volunteering at WorldCon and working well past closing, would steal a Hugo.
So I am reasonably optimistic it will eventually reappear, and if it doesn't, well, fortunately, there's a spare. If we have to use it, then Anticipation's going to have to arrange to have a new plaque made, and we're going to have to talk one of the upcoming WorldCons to let us have a rocket to attach to it, but these are pretty manageable hurdles.
* - * - *
Then there's the matter of the 2011 Hugo base. Let's face it; would any of you be surprised if you learned that, secretly, I was hoping it wouldn't be as nice as mine? On the other hand, I really like Patty Wells and all the people she drafted to do this convention, and I wouldn't want them to have a mediocre base. The Hugo base is really the most enduring component of a WorldCon; many of the previous WorldCons are now more well known for their base than for anything else. (NolaCon is one exception, but, really, if a convention did something so noteworthy that they're known more for that than for the tangible artifact they left behind, that's usually not a good thing.)
This year's base design contest winner was from France, so René Walling, the chair of Anticipation, was also providing translation services for her when her English wasn't quite up to the task. I'd put her name here, but I can't find the business card she gave me, and the Renovation web site doesn't seem to have anything at all regarding the ceremony or the results. Anyway, she's a glass artist, and the base features fused glass with inclusions and hand-drawn sea creatures. It's thematically appropriate, and very elegant. Like mine, it's not all that flashy when seen from the front, so it's the rocket that is the featured component. The base comes into its own when you get closer and look down at it. It was a relief to be able to go up to her after the ceremony and be sincere when I said "I think it's a beautiful piece of work."
Current Mood: aggravated
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03:59 am - Renovation: Art Show
So, back to the Peppermill to pick up my box, then to the con to set up my panel. I'd forgotten that this art show's policies were actually geared much more to small numbers of more expensive prints: there's a $1 entry fee for each print in the print shop, whether it sells or not. Since I am at the very far end of the spectrum with many many very cheap prints, this isn't so good for me. I'd only pre-paid for ten prints, and Elayne the art show director informs me that she's very short on space, so no, I can't add more prints now that I'm here.
I know better than to argue with an art show director, even though this was completely idiotic. If I were a more traditional artist, and had brought, oh, ten prints representing three different pieces of art, as 8x10 prints with mats, they would have taken up most of a 4x4 panel. My parking stickers, in their packages, are mostly 2x3, and I tend to do 10 of each. To display all 140 stickers I'd brought would have taken less than half a standard panel. (Also, there were at least four 4x4 panels next to the prints that were empty the entire convention.) But sales of the stickers have varied wildly in previous years. I did not want to have to pony up $140 to place all my stickers out and then have only ten or twelve of them actually sell. One time, at another art show, I arranged to come back mid-con and add more stickers to my panel, so I was refilling the ones that were selling without having to prepay for all of them. Other cons have charged me based on the number sold, not the number placed. But that wasn't how it was going to be this year.
Oh, well. This year, for the first time, I had multiple years per design available, so I created some bundled sets. One "print" was either four stickers for BuyNLarge, four for Global Dynamics, or five for Hogwarts.
I took care of the prints Thursday morning. Wednesday, I focused on getting my art up. I arrived at the con around 10:30, and I was on programming at 13:00, so I needed to stay focused. I had a steampunk-themed version of Constantly Ticking, which I set at a minimum bid of $130, a version of the Atomic Clock (with really groovy new color-shifting paint, although it was hard to see it on the panel), for $80, and a small table-top clock featuring carefully-researched Klingon numbering for $45, entitled "A Good Time to Die". At one point, I'd intended to have my Fanucci deck displayed, but I'd totally forgotten that, and I'd also planned to have a Luminarium, but my Luminaria are large 3-D objects, and I never figured out how to display it without getting a table as well as a panel, and a whole table for one thing seemed dumb, so I scrapped that. That left only one "new" piece: Dream of Ramadan. It's a five-panel abstract graphic piece, and it's big: 18 inches wide, and just under five feet tall.
(I ran into Scarlettina at Phil & Kaja's dealer's booth on Sunday and asked her if she'd seen my panel in the art show. Yes, she had, and thought my clocks looked great. "What about 'Dream of Ramadan'?" "Which one was that?" "The really big one? Five feet tall?" "Oh, that was yours? It's so different from your other things that I just assumed it was somebody else's." Well, it *was* on my panel with the rest of my things, and, as I pointed out to another friend later, the easiest way to spot my work is to look for something that doesn't look like anything else I've done; but to be fair, two other friends had the same reaction. They also had seen my panel, remembered the clocks, and not realized that "Dream of Ramadan" was also my work. )
So I'm filling out my paperwork, and I hit "Minimum Bid." And I'm stopped in my tracks. When I first started doing the clocks, I set minimum bids of $30-$50. One version of Constantly Ticking collected enough bids to go to voice auction, and eventually sold for over $300, so over the years, I've been pushing my minimum bids for those upwards. "Dream" was a different matter. I knew it should be at least three figures, but beyond that, I really wasn't sure what made sense. Price it too high, and I'm taking it home. Also, I know that I had seen (occasionally) an artist set a minimum bid on a work that would be appropriate for a pro like Bob Eggleton or Jeff Sturgeon, but they weren't that good, and I know that I lose a little bit of respect for artists that overprice their pieces.
On the other hand, while I don't lose respect for artists who underprice their pieces (although Mark Roland underprices soooo far that I often shake my head), too low a number tells potential buyers that I don't value my work all that much. If it *is* professional-grade work, the minimum bid should reflect that. As it happened, my panel put me in amazingly good company. I had two of the four panels in my little "bay," with two other artists on the other two. The two bays to my left were filled with art by Bob Eggleton and his wife, and to my right was a bay with Girl Genius artwork from Phil and Kaja, so I was in seriously good company. Bob had this absolutely gorgeous painting of a dragon demolishing a tower, which was awarded a Best of Show ribbon (I think for 'original oil' or the like). The minimum bid for it was $4,200, and it was easily worth that. Whoever bought it (and somebody did), is going to feel differently about it than if they'd managed to get it for $500. In the same way, I wanted my minimum bid to make a statement about how I felt about the quality and value of my piece. Too high, and I look foolish (and don't sell the piece). Too low, and I'm telling buyers to not take me seriously.
So I took advantage of the fact the dealer's room was next to the art show, and hauled Phil over to get his opinion, and ended up setting the minimum bid at $500.
Thursday night was "Art Night," and that included having the artists in the art show so people could talk to us. I'm afraid I consider this seemingly good idea rather a failure. Not that many patrons came through, and I think way less than half the artists showed up. However, I did get a chance to ask Jeff Sturgeon to give me *his* opinion on an appropriate minimum bid, and his advice was pretty much the same as Phil's.
Friday night at a party I got to talking art with Ctein, who'd also seen my panel, so I gave him the same query. He suggested $600-700, so now I had three major professional opinions, and they basically all agreed. I was feeling very comfortable. Now, as of Friday night, I only had bids on two of the clocks, and I didn't really expect to *sell* Dream of Ramadan, but it was at least as important to me to plant some stakes in the ground to try to move myself into "pro" territory as it was to actually sell the artwork.
Ctein had some other things to say to me which set me back a bit, in a good way. I was explaining that part of my intention was to try to move my position as an artist from "hobbyist" to at least "semi-pro."
"You're not a hobbyist," he replied. Now, to my way of thinking, somebody who makes just enough art to hang on a single panel at WorldCon once a year (at most), is pretty obviously just doing art as a hobby. What Ctein was saying was that the *quality* of my work was not that of a hobbyist. He clarified this when he said that one of my current problems was that the prices I could command for my work were not in line with the respect in which I was held by the art community.
Huh. As I'm writing this, I find I'm actually starting to tear up a bit. For anybody reading this who isn't familiar with that name, Ctein has been an exceedingly well-respected professional photographer and imaging specialist for as long as I've known of him. If he painted as well as he does what he does, he'd have a shelf full of trophies and awards. (Maybe he does.) To have Ctein tell me, in effect, that if the buying public were paying me what my fellow artists think I'm worth, I'd be getting four figures for my pieces, is amazing. John Hertz made a comment elsewhere at the convention that was fairly similar, so I think it's probably true. At this point, I really didn't care if Ramadan didn't have any bids. Not selling could mean either (a) I'd priced it too high, or (b) I just hadn't connected with the right buyer. But after this feedback, I wouldn't have to worry about going home and fretting about (a), because it was clearly a case of (b).
Art show sales closed Saturday night, with pick-up and tear-down on Sunday. Sunday morning I showed up to take down my panel, and found that I had sold all three clocks, and Ramadan.
{blink}
Well, {expletive redacted}. "Dream of Ramadan" had sold!!!
What Phil had told me when he was looking it over was "Make sure you set the minimum bid at a number that will make you happy if it sells for that." Now, the number that had been floating around in the back of my head had been $300. "Would you be happy if it sold for $500?"
"Oh, yea, totally!"
"What about $250?"
"Um, well, yea, I suppose . . . '
"Set it for $500."
So, yea, it had felt . . . extravagant. Pushy. A little bit like I was claiming to be better than I really believed I was. But somebody, somebody with some money and a space on their wall, disagreed. They wanted my art, and they were willing to pay at least $500 to have it.
Wow.
And there's more. Later that day, I'm trying to rendezvous with Kate Kligman at the closing ceremonies (see next post for why), and I push through some curtains to stand behind the back row in order to get out of the flow of people leaving. There's a woman sitting in one of the chairs, and she glances at my badge and goes "Oh! Dave Howell! Oh, my gosh! You don't know me, but I just bought some of your art!"
"Wow! Cool! Thanks! Which one?"
"Dream of Ramadan."
She's going to hang it in her office, so that when work stresses her out, she can turn around and look at something beautiful.
I gave her a parking sticker; it's the least I could do.
Current Mood: euphoric
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snarke's journal