I am currently at a work meeting, staying in a hotel, and I am continually confounded by the state of internet access in major hotels in major cities. We live in an era where internet access is often vital, where wifi access in portable devices is commonplace and yet I am astounded that the quality of that access is often worse than the rural areas I’ve visited. Not only is wifi still a rarity, but the wired access, in addition to being costly, is just plain awful. Web pages take a minute or more to load. Downloads aren’t even feasible. These are hotels that cater to business crowds. I just don’t understand it. My company is currently paying ridiculous amounts for internet access that is less reliable than the internet I had ten years ago.

And that there is probably the problem. Companies will expense out shitty internet, while the local, non-chain coffee shop in my neighborhood provides decent wifi for free. There’s no need for it in this world.

Is it me or is that backwards?

Last year was the year of attending cons for me. I was at five, all told: New York Comicon, Wiscon, Readercon, Wizardworld Chicago, and World Fantasy.

This year, however, I will be attending only one, my usual, World Fantasy. I will be a Clarion West during Readercon and San Diego Comicon, both cons I was considering attending, and I will miss NY Comicon this year.

But World Fantasy is my favorite, and the one I feel most comfortable at, and maybe, by then, I’ll have another sale under my belt. I can only hope.

If you’re going, I will probably see you there.

While watching the Donner Cut of Superman II for the first time, and doing a little web research on the film, I came across the fact that the director brought in to direct Superman II after Donner was removed from the project, and the director of Superman III, Richard Lester, was also the director of A Hard Day’s Night. The Beatles film. For some reason that absolutely blows my mind. I’m sure many out there already knew this, but it was a discovery for me.

Some of you reading this know that I am one of the founders of a website called Your Mom’s Basement. YMB, as we affectionately call it, was created to be a source for coverage of the so-called geek culture. We wanted to produce articles about the things were geeked out about – books, comics, games, movies, and more. And we have. For just about three years we’ve done articles and interviews, reviews and parodies, and even the occasional video. And it’s something we’ve been proud of.

But we are all doing this for free, and real life has a way of intruding, and lately there hasn’t been much content.

That is soon about to change. In order to increase our content while decreasing the amount of time it takes to produce it, we are moving to a group blog approach. Think BoingBoing or Engadget. Since we have some great people working with us, we selected seven, and we will be putting up content as we can, covering the same things we did before, but with a bit more of our unique personalities thrown in.

I invite everyone to come take a look at what we have to offer. There’s just the announcement right now to speak of, but there will be more to come. And there’s some previous content from the past three years that is still up and available. We’re looking forward to entering our fourth year and I’m looking forward to increasing our audience. Maybe you’ll want to stick around.

On the subway this morning, I looked across the car and a man was sitting down reading a Marvel Comics Avengers collection. To my left was someone reading a Jonathan Lethem book. To my right was someone playing a videogame on their PSP. At a later stop, someone got on reading a Terry Pratchett novel, and another person came on reading Edgar Rice Burroughs. And I thought to myself, when did the rest of the world start moving closer to me? Has there really been this shift in tastes or was I just not seeing it before?

It was a strangely surreal moment.