Like a Little Kid.

Not to geek out too much, but I met Stan Lee.

When I mentioned this to my wife, It was as if I said I'm met some random mope off of the street. She had no idea, but when I said that Stan Lee was the guy who co-created Spider-Man, The X-Men, The Hulk and the Fantastic Four, she was like "OooooooH" Still didnt know who I was talking about but she recognized the names of those characters.

So It's not like I got to hang out with the old d00d, I was on line to get a book signed by him took a few pictures and when I got up there I said something corny like "It's nice to meet you, thanks for creating Spider-Man. With great power comes great responsibilty are words to like by" or something like that. He smiled nodded and said thank you and I moved on. It was a short exchange but you could tell that he appreciated the comment. Watching him interact with people you can tell he LIKES his fans and doesnt hold them in contempt like a few other creators I could name. Now granted there are a great number of comic book fans who deserve the contempt, but the typical comic fan is actually pretty normal and Stan treated everyone who approached him with enthusiasm and respect, which made me feel good to be a comic book fan. For me meeting him was like a baseball fan meeting Cal Ripkin Jr or Hank Aaron or Babe Ruth. I don't get nervous around famous people, but I did feel the butterflies a little bit. I felt like a little kid...and that was a good thing.

New!!! With MIDDLE FINGER ACTION!!!

Yeah, so before I get back to talking about the NYC Comic-Con, I got into some trouble the other day for sticking my middle finger up at someone at my job. Yes, I know it was wrong and felt bad about it almost as soon as I did it, but this woman triggered a bit a of a flash fire of rage that I responded so quickly.

Basically, this woman, this carribean born black woman made a comment about black men in general. It was a combination of the context of what she was saying and the almost venomous inflection of her tone that triggered my response. Basically she was making a reference to the fact that when black men are in interracial relationships they take the scraps from the other races and that basically we have no standards. That's not what she said verbatim but that was the jist of it.

Now I'm not in an interracial relationship. I'm married to a black woman, a smart lovely, driven good hearted black woman. But I have dated outside my race in the past. In fact I have a preference for latinas, pretty much everyone who knows me at least a little knows this. I've dated exactly one white girl and probably will never do so again. Not because of the particular girl, but mostly because of the hassle of having to deal with a bunch of ignorant fuckwits outside of the actual relationship. It made her uncomfortable and to a certain extent made me uncomfortable as well as occasionally hopping mad. None of these women that I dated in my past were what I considered scraps. But still it was a sentiment about black men that she'd stated before in my presence and on this day it set me off and she recieved the middle finger for her trouble.

It was at that point that she threatened me with going down to HR and reporting me. I told her go ahead as long as she told them what was said to set me off, be my guest. She walked off in a huff and eventually went to HR. It became a THING that I'll try to detail a little later on, but in a nutshell, we both agreed that what she said was wrong and my reaction was wrong. For a while it seemed that it was my reaction that was going to be considered the more wrong (which honestly was going to piss me off more than the inciting incident) but that wasnt the case and our HR person was very down to earth and real (while still being the consumate professional) about hearing both sides, which incidentally involved a reshaping of the actual inciting comment from the woman, but that's niether here or there at this point.

Except that it makes her a big frakkin' liar, but WHATEVER.

Anyway, I promised not to do it again and apologies were made via Proxy of course, and that's that.

Next time... more cool comic-con stuff!!

Or not.

Over one year later...

Anyway, I just attended the 2nd NYC Comic-Con at the Jacob Javitz Convention Center over the weekend. Needless to say I'm pretty tired but all in all it was a better con than the one that was held last year. Everytime I go to one of these, I say to myself that it's going to be the last one and I'm getting too old for this sort of thing, but I usually end up at one sooner or later. I find this odd because as much as I like my hobbies I really have a large amount of contempt for my fellow fans. It doesnt matter whether its RPG's or comic books thanks to the internerd I get to see more of these people speak thier minds under almost total anonymity, and 80% of the time they come off like cynical, bitter fanboys, usually sexist, occaisionally racist, mostly stupid. Especially on places like Newsrama, which is a comics site. For RPG's, it's RPGnet for crass behavior and for gronard bitterness and RPG pedantry it's ENworld.org. Of course every now and then it's worth going to these places becasue they are good places to find out about things that you wouldnt normally find elsewhere, but my GOD, the nitpickyness and the utter stupidity of some of the people.

I really need to remove those places from my bookmarks, but they keep callin' me...

I'll post more pictures from the con when I can. For now I'll just post my picture with the cheerleader from Heroes, Hayden Panettiere. She seemed personable, really sweet and obviously cute (yeah she really does look that cute in person). She's also, really young. I think that she's 17, so any impure thoughts were followed by severe guilt and a mental image of me roasting in the hottest fires of HELL.
It's a strange little picture as I'd been at the con since 5am (that's a story in itself) and the picture was taken at the end of the day (around 7:30pm). I was afraid to get too close to her because I thought that I might stink. I gotta say though, that compared to some of the test subjects walking around the con that day (I'm looking at you cat-piss man, who sat next to me on the floor near the Dabel Brothers booth...JESUS CHRISTMAS man. BARS OF SOAP. USE THEM.) I probably smelt like roses...

Like I said, more pictures later...