32 Comments on “This is My Life This Weekend”

1. Looks releasing. I’ll be paying bills, going to the gym, and taking the boys to a park with a big, fancily appointed playground today.

2. That looks like a good way to spend a cold January weekend.

   We’ll be doing the usual weekend stuff, shopping, housecleaning, laundry, napping – you know, the normal stuff. Which I appreciate, to be honest, because way too many weekends over the past couple of months have had not-normal stuff that I haven’t enjoyed very much.

3. I’d like to see a big bag of cheese puffs on that table and orange smudges on the signature pages! It’s 28° here in South-central Indiana so I’m going to listen to a Marc Maron podcast while on my exercise bike, take a hot shower, chow down on some leftover Chinese takeout, then lay around the rest of the afternoon watching season two of “The Man in the High Castle” on Amazon!

4. Did you hear that Warner announced a third full season of Young Justice, their much more serous Teen Tiitans show? Now if we could get another Batman animated show, I’d be very happy!

5. My local Costco is out of Coke Zero! I have to do with Diet Coke.

6. Knitting brain hats for the science march. :)

7. My daughter and I LOVE TTG (yay Tara Strong!). Enjoy!

8. Do you use any particular or special pen for your signing and handwriting, or just whatever ballpoint is handy? Just curious.

9. Spending my Saturday getting my bubble busted. “Signature sheets?” I wonder, “What are signature sheets?”

   My one concession to fanboydom has been signed books. I’m not one to obsess over celebrities. If an entertainer can act the part or sing the song, that’s enough for me, don’t need to know about their personal live, don’t want to own memorabilia, couldn’t care less about ever meeting them in person. It’s a different story with a writer. Someone who can weave words together with eloquence and humor rises to the highest level of admiration I’m able to feel for someone I know only through their art. It shouldn’t matter, but somehow I can enjoy a book just a little more if I have a copy that an author not only wrote, but handled for a moment; if only long enough to add a signature.

   Now, after typing in the search terms “author signature sheets”, I’ll no longer be able to get that little bit of extra fun thinking the author held the book. I’ll have to settle for…

   Held this one page.

10. This weekend I’m fighting off a cold and showing my young daughter Sailor Moon.

11. My family spent a few hours today holding our friend’s two 5-week-old puppies. It was exactly what I needed after the last 24 hours of political news.

12. You should do signature sheets for e-books. It would take less time.

13. Our weekend’s off to a great start: eating far too much food at the local dim sum restaurant to celebrate Chinese new year. (Xin nian kuai le!) Tonight, we’ll spend a couple hours being entertained by a choir that has several friends, all excellent vocalists with impressive genre range. Life’s good!

14. Watching the Super Bowl
    Dining in French Restaurants
    Soaking in the sub on the Riviera

    You know … alternate activities :P

15. The Donald will be proud of you – here you are giving a job to an American when that signature signing thing could have been contracted out to the Chinese.

16. What are signature sheets? I’m guessing they get bound into books at some point, but I’m not really sure. I did google “signature sheets” and, in one of those things that happen in this age, I get a google page listing luxury bedsheets.

    It doesn’t look like your signing bedsheets today, unless they’re for very small beds…

    My activity today: errands, running, rebuilding the home network/wifi, cooking, desk paperwork that I didn’t get done during the week. Maybe hack on a bit of code for fun. Routine stuff.

17. I’ve never been a fan of signature sheets. I have a couple books with them, but they’re usually easy to spot. I realize that not everyone who wants a signed book can get to a reading, but still, I much prefer it when it’s clear that the author personally signed the book itself.

    For the record, I have over forty signed SF first editions, including five by OGH. All five of those were signed in the actual book, and four in my presence. Most of my signed books were obtained personally by me at readings.

18. BTW, Malcolm: Signature sheets are pages that are signed by the author in large numbers, and then bound into the books. It’s so the publisher can make lots of signed books available without inconveniencing the author too much.

    Very often, though, the signature page is obvious because it’s on higher-quality paper than the rest of the book. Sometimes it even says “signed especially for this edition” or something similar. As a collector and bibliophile, I REALLY don’t like those.

19. Do you prefer the original Teen Titans or Teen Titans Go! ?
    I watching Netflix, prepping to teach about the Counter-Reformation, and trying to keep my cat from actually sitting directly on the keyboard.

20. I’ll spend the weekend pondering the difference between Coke Zero and Diet Coke. Next weekend, Diet Pepsi vs Pepsi Max.

21. I drove in to Knoxville to get more pink yarn and some tips on hat knitting. (People who sit around knitting together in yarn shops are more subversive than you might think.) And I’m storing up choice things to say to my Senators / Congressman when their offices open on Monday.

22. Today was a Phandemonium board meeting and then a Capricon comon meeting. Tomorrow I have an afternoon shift at the reference desk at work. Busy, yes. Have fun with your weekend.

23. So far I’ve spent my weekend (and most of the past week) being flattened by the weather. There’s a real difference in comfort levels between a Perth summer where you have access to air-conditioning and a Perth summer where you don’t. I think it makes the difference between “am I able to do something?” and “stuff it, I’m going to do nothing because that keeps the heat generation down to an acceptable level”. The house consequently looks a bit like a bomb hit as a result.

24. Now I understand how Barnes and Noble was selling so many “signed by the author” books the past couple of holiday seasons. I had thought that the various authors were signing thousands upon thousands of books in a warehouse, and really didn’t understand how the store got so many signed. Now I know.

25. Brian: It’s so the publisher can make lots of signed books available without inconveniencing the author too much.

    Actually, as I understand the situation, it’s as much to save postage as anything else–or airfare to bring the author to the publisher’s warehouse, at least.

    FL Transplant: Now I understand how Barnes and Noble was selling so many “signed by the author” books the past couple of holiday seasons.

    I’d be willing to bet that the signed books you saw were from B&N author signings, possibly gathered from several stores over the year or something like that. Signature sheets tend to be bound into limited editions, sometimes from small press publishers in conjunction with publication by a larger, more mainstream. While B&N may sell some limiteds, they are more likely to have the regular editions of most books.

26. We should be a bit realistic about signature sheets. Assuming they don’t have Scalzi fly in to sign, a task that would be costly and consume a lot of valuable time in travel, is it a reasonable option to ship 400 books to his home? That’s about 500 pounds of books and at least a dozen boxes. They would have to be hauled around, unpacked, signed, packed, shipped again. Yes, I know he does lots of author signings (Yah!), but that’s also a reading and a public event, very different than hanging around a warehouse for a day signing books in isolation; slowly going mad as the scribbles on the page begin to crawl around the page, seeking to escape from that high quality paper to all gather in war on all mankind.

27. I’ve spent my weekend so far viewing various twitter feeds and watching the Trump Oval Office (you can’t really say “Trump Administration” because it looks like most of it was uninvolved) get the snot slapped out of it by most people over this vicious EO he signed on Friday. For those wanting a legal point-by-point analysis by a lawyer who’s a pretty hardcore supporter of anti-terrorist government activity, go here:

    https://lawfareblog.com/malevolence-tempered-incompetence-trumps-horrifying-executive-order-refugees-and-visas

    He stomps it into the ground.

28. Actually got a fair amount of work done this past week. Shocking what that does to endorphin levels. I was almost giddy the past two days. Wife and son thought it was drugs. Procrastination be damned!

29. Finally saw the all-female Ghostbusters reboot this weekend. Pretty funny.

    Dont know who controlled the visuals, because the overalls were ugly as sin and the pink highlights everywhere were distracting. But the characters and dialogue were good/funny.

30. I did wind up adding one spontaneous unplanned activity to my otherwise humdrum and mundane weekend. Purely by happenstance, no relationship whatsoever to anything in the wide world, I decided yesterday afternoon to renew my membership in the ACLU.

31. This weekend? Spent it crashing on a deadline.

32. John, Does your last signature match the first one? I know that when I worked under GMP procedures and had to sign 20 or 30 times a shift that my signature degraded between start and finish.