I Have Returned:
Back (finally) from the big San Diego trip, a day later than planned thanks to delays and other related BS from Southwest Airlines. This is the first time I've had major flight trouble in a while, and definitely the *last* time I'll fly through Las Vegas on Southwest if I can avoid it. While our customer service in San Diego was great, friendly and accomodating in what were unbearably difficult circumstances, we got nothing but frustration and anger from dealing with the ranking manager on duty Lance Thibodeau in Southwest's Las Vegas branch. He was of course mildly more helpful than the woman who first greeted us with a surly "That means nothing to me" when we told her we were the six misconnects from Austin and got more surly and unhelpful from there, but he was basically a sarcastic and useless tool and we had to badger him to get us the hotel rooms that had been promised us in San Diego if we wound up stranded in Vegas.

Aargh. This will of course all show up in the con report on Fourth Rail in a few days. Oddly, I just finished perusing Newsarama, which has all the news that I missed while on the floor of the Con, and realized that most of it holds little to no interest for me. It's all about DC/Marvel plans, and while there are a few intriguing bits, the big hypefest books that are going to sell don't really hold much attraction to me. Does this mean I've lost interest in comics? Well, given the stacks of graphic novels and sketchbooks I picked up in San Diego, and the fact that I'll probably go read a few more when I finish typing this, not really... it just means that I'm getting tired of bullshit hype and would rather have creators doing their thing instead. San Diego was a nice reminder that there are still a ton of people out there beyond DC/Marvel, and the reports of good sales from most everyone I talked to a welcome reminder that there's interest in this kind of thing from fans as well.