Saturday night, we went to the B.A.D. Girls roller derby bout. I took a bunch of pics, but the lighting was really horrible and it’s the first time I’ve ever shot something like this. (These girls are moving a wee bit faster than children’s soccer. heh) Most of the shots are from where we were sitting, or just down on the floor from there. The later shots turned out much better, of course. Someday, if & when Annette is skating, I’ll be moving around the track more to get better shots.

I was happy to have BossHog, the official B.A.D. Girls photographer and founder of DerbyDude.com, confirm that it was a really hard venue to shoot. I can’t wait to see his shot though. He’ll have made it look easy.

The bout itself was awesome. SF ShEvil Dead vs the Oakland Outlaws. They all skated hard and kicked ass. This might be my new favorite spectator sport. (The fact that it’s played by a bunch of cool, strong, attractive women really doesn’t hurt. Derby girls are badass.) The halftime show by the SVRG was fun too. I look forward to the next bouts. (Too bad we will be out of town for the next one on October 5th, though.)

There’s a great Russian Cafe & Deli in Campbell. The deli section has a meat counter with some awesome meats.

And some meats with pictures of kids on the packaging.

Am I the only one to find this kinda creepy?

Inspired by missing a couple of recent sci-fi and gaming conventions, I starting researching what cons would be coming up throughout the summer. Turns out, Super-Con 2007 was going on this weekend in San Jose and I had nearly missed it. I had more work to do (the theme of the weekend), but I decided to put it off four a couple of hours, grab my camera and head down to the convention.

Super-Con is a pretty small convention, and it turns out there wasn’t much to shoot. (There were a few costumed folk, but Saturday was probably a better day for that.) I took quite a few pictures still, since I decided it was a decent time to experiment with some of the more complex setting for my camera. Consequently, I deleted more photos than I kept. Oh well, nothing important.

The best thing about comic conventions has to be meeting indie folk who are putting out their own work. I really enjoyed talking to Martin Robaszewski, who’s writing a new comic called Zecta. It’s a sci-fi story based off a video game he was designing, but apparently shelved. Valentine by Dan Cooney at Red Eye Press (not to be confused with RedEyePress.com) looked interesting.

Another highlight is meeting and chatting with the fine folks at two of my favorite charitable organizations: The Hero Initiative and the CBLDF.

The Hero Initiative is a not-for-profit organization set up to financially aid comic book artists and writers in need. Creators from the Golden and Silver Ages of comics were fairly screwed by the big companies they worked for. (To be fair, Marvel and DC are now involved with the group. (On the other hand, still: Fuck the both of you for trying to trademark “super-hero”.)

CBLDF is the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. It’s a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of First Amendment rights for members of the comics community. It’s been around since the mid-Eighties and it’s almost surprising how necessary this anti-censorship organization is. I’ve been a fan since the beginning.

As always, mixed in with the big names like Jim Lee and Frank Cho, are a bunch of odd semi-celebrities. The two that jumped out at me the most were Herb Jefferson Jr. (Boomer from the original Battlestar Galactica) and the Soup Nazi. Now that’s exciting, eh?

That is, until I came across what seemed to be the biggest non sequitur… Jane Wiedlin (official site) of The Go Go’s. While not a comic book fan, she is a big sci-fi geek, and got asked to attend. They had a Q&A with her that I attended. It was billed as a “Truth or Dare” but nobody came up with any questions she wouldn’t answer and that angle quickly faded. She’s delightfully cute in person.

Oh, and John Dolmayan (drummer for System of a Down) has the coolest drum kit I have seen in a while.

Anyways, now I’m ready for Comic-Con. :)

Edit: TheGreatWhiteSnark has a bunch of fun Super-Con photos.

Sunburned face, tired feet and a nose full of ash*. What’s that add up to? A day at Maker Faire 2007!

Once again, the robots, geeks, nerds, hippies, hackers, freaks, kids, and guys-on-segways came together to put on and attend the Maker Faire. It is, in their own words, a “two-day, family-friendly event that celebrates arts, crafts, engineering, science projects and the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset. It’s for creative, resourceful folks who like to tinker and love to make things. We call them Makers.”

Annette and I took Liam today, it was a blast. So much to see. I took (probably) over 300 photos, and we didn’t even cover everything. I’ve uploaded a crapload (i.e. 160) to flickr.

Our friends, Toast and Jillian (aka BecauseWeCan), had a booth again this year, showing their wares. The LED Coffee Tables were a BIG hit.

The day ended with a show by SRL. It f’n rocked. We were in the stands, but it was too loud for Liam (despite the earplugs) and so Annette took him some place safe. That turned out to be a good thing, since the bleachers got flooded with smoke, ash and, of course, noise. Groovy.

If you missed it this year, I suggest you try for next. (edit: If San Mateo let’s them come back! Takling with one of the SRL crew, I found out their machines got impounded. Now you know it was a good time. edit2: Turns out it wasn’t the cops that had the machines, it was the fairgrounds. They were a bit grumpy about the mess.)

*=ash provided by SRL. ;)

The Beach Resort view of Monterey Bay @ night, originally uploaded by r3v||cls.
We went to Monterey for wine tasting last weekend and I took a ton of pictures. I finally got around to picking the not-so-sucky ones and uploading them. Take a gander, if you care.

The photo here is the only night shot. It’s awesome and I need to figure out how to do it better.

This is the only pic of the new GTI so far. It at night and with a cellphone, but it’s not horrible. I’ll get some better pics sometime soon. Probably after Vegas.

Don’t have a heart attack here, originally uploaded by r3v||cls.
Don’t have a heart attack in my building. The automated external defibrillator is imaginary.