Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 09/06/24

Away Team Austin 2025 edition

Your administrator is feeling exhausted and much older in that emotional and psychological way when you hear about someone’s ill health, terminal cancer diagnosis, et.al., and the realization that I’m in the phase of my life where I look at other people, shake my head and say “He was so young. It’s too soon,” has sunk in and is plinking around in my skull like a pachinko ball. Rest assured, we will be using the gravitational pull of ArmadilloCon to attempt to sling us around and pull us out of our somber thoughts.

Away Team Austin 2025

We are at ArmadilloCon, doing a bunch of ArmadilloCon stuff. There will likely be pictures throughout the weekend on other social media platforms, and I’m certain there will be at least a summary of events in next week’s missive. For now, just trust that I am “Old Man Clouding” my way through a city I’ve grown to really hate for not being exactly like it was over 25 years ago, a position which is totally grounded in reality and rational in thought.

Despite these turns of events, I’m home, insofar as the convention is concerned. It’s already been extremely therapeutic to reconnect with the various members of my tribe, many of whom I have known for 20-30 years, and a number of wonderful folks, fans, and fen that I only see every so often at these shows. It’s nice to sort of unplug from your own life and just enjoy talking about the craft of writing, or rpg game design ,or editing, or of SF/F in other media—you know, the stuff I tend to talk about anyway, but it’s much better as a dialogue and not as a monograph delivered to thundering silence in my office.

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Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”