On second thought, I forgot the Javits Center where NYCC is held had been converted into a field hospital for the COVID-19 response, so I am pretty sure that will take NYCC out of play.

-M

It's not the size of the shield that's important, it's what you can do with it...

It's great news that they are most empty.  They prepared for the worst, but thankfully haven't had to use it much.  In Milwaukee, they're setting up in our State Fair Park an auxiliary hospital space for hundreds of beds that will hopefully never see use.

It sucks that many things we looked forward to are now cancelled, but it's a small price to pay.

Well I am making progress on finishing the study/comic room/library I am making out of the finished attic in our house. I finished building the last of the quick built-in media shelves today. This allowed me to move out all the power tools and work benches that were taking up space out to the garage. I've finished about 90-95% of the painting, with just some touch up and trim left to do in one corner and on the stairwell going up to the attic. I've sorted and shelved all by DVD & blurays, sorted and shelved all my DC trades and all my Indy trades. I still have a small bit of Marvel trades, comic strip collections and art books left to shelve, but most of that is going to go into the corner I need to finish the painting in. The big thing I am working on now is sorting, organizing and shelving all my prose books (mostly paperbacks). I am currently getting all of them upstairs (some were stored down in the basement and stuff I wanted access to was on the main floor while the room is in disarray. Then it will be time to face the music and get that all sorted and shelved. After that it is finishing touches-hanging art, prints, posters, and displaying toys and tchotchkes. Then I can finish sorting my single comics (I was about 75% done before this all started) and decide what will go upstairs and what will stay down in the game room in the basement. But most of the home improvement parts of it are done (or just about done), which is a relief (I dislike doing this kind of stuff but it needed done, so I tackled it).

There is some stuff that will have to wait until we are on the other side of sheltering in place, things requiring more significant purchases we are not willing to make while things are uncertain because they are not necessities (a futon to give the space to act as a guest room if needed if my mom or friends come to visit, replacing the all-in-one stereo w/CD player and turntable that did not survive its time in storage, upgrading the TV in our living room so I can take the old TV upstairs, and getting a new DVD player) and some of it because I need a second pair of hands to get heavier pieces upstairs (like our extra recliner) and my wife is not capable of helping me get it done, so I have to wait until social distancing requirements are lessened.

My hope before the pandemic hiatus hit was to get it all done by Labor Day weekend on what days off from work I could devote to it, but with the time I have had, I should have everything done hopefully by May 1 and by Memorial Day (with the exception of the aforementioned purchases) at the absolute latest.

It will just be nice to have all my stuff organized and accessible for the first time since late 2017.

-M

Yeah, it won't feel like Memorial Day Weekend without my 3 days of Phoenix Fan Fusion this year. Gonna have to pop in some Anime DVD,s and spend the weekend digging through the few long boxes I have and sorting out what to keep and what to get rid of. At least I can have the "sensation" of a con in the luxury of my own home. 

My wife wanted me to snap some pics of the progress of the upstairs so she could check it out without having to climb the steep stairs to get there and walk around the mess up there. Since they are already taken, I thought I might share a few...

To give you a sense of the space, it is as long as our entire house, as it was the attic space that was finished before we ever had the house. The stairs come up in the middle of the room somewhat dividing it into to sides. For simplicity sake, I'll call the side where the stairs open up the near side, and the other side the far side. The far side is closer to done.

Here's a look at the right hand part of the far side...



and the left side (anyone looking for something to read, I got plenty )



Turning around, along the side of the stairwell, we inherited a built-in bookcase...



the unit on top is a repurposed bookcase that was too tall for the upstairs, it was tall and narrow, I removed the shelves repainted the frame to match the color scheme of the room, laid it on top of the built-ins and it serves as a long unit that replaces magazine size comic boxes. All my Savage Sword and Heavy Metal issues, plus whatever other magazine size books will fit will be in there (some are already but a lot is still stacked on top).

Along the wall opposite of that built-in I set up the cubicle-cases I had used for trades when the comic room was downstairs (They are now filled with my DC trades). At the end you can see the last corner I have to do the trim in (my wife thought the band between the straight lower walls and the upper slanted walls that are part of the ceiling would look better a different color to highlight the difference in colors between the two. The bottom are dark gray, the top light gray, and we initially painted the band black-but seeing it I didn't like it. I only did a small area there and in one other place, which were the first two areas I painted when I started the project, but haven't gotten back to repaint the band there yet, which is one of the last painting things to do. I need to touch up the baseboards in that corner too.



The rest of the near side-with the big closet on the right that runs form the window to the top of the stairs...



I ended up building 4 new built-in type shelves. You can see two of them here empty in the corner of the far side of the room. These will be filled with prose paperbacks once I finish sorting them and start to shelve them. The built-in bookcase along the stairwell will also have prose books.



This one was built on the small piece of wall that backs the staircase in the far side of the room, and was filled with the first batch of blurays and DVDs...



next to it is the opening to a small niche closet (about 2 feet wide) and then the corner and on that corner I built the 4th shelving unit (also with blurays and DVDs)



Next to that shelf is a storage unit/bench/media stand I built from re-purposed parts. It's made from two wooden storage crates painted black to match the color scheme of the room (all the trim is black). The bench/shelf was an unused long shelf that was designed to sit atop the corner desk I have in the basement gameroom, but we chose not to add the shelving units to when we assembled it, so we had more table room to use the desk as a drawing table too. We saved the shelves though, and they had been sitting unused for a decade, so I grabbed them and attached them to the top of the crates to make a bench height unit. Currently it is covered by piles of books stacked in plies alphabetically that will get shelved in the next couple of days. When all is said and down, the TV and DVD player, plus some displayed toys/statues will be on the shelving unit...



I built a second one of these (different color shelf, I chose not to paint it black but keep it the natural wood color, the other one was already black) to put under the large window on the far side of the room. This one too has stacked piles of books as I sort them, but it will be where the stereo/turntable will go when all is said and done.



Next to the shelf is a couple of bookcases I upscaled by repainting and reinforcing them...they are the start of the shelving for my non-Marvel & DC trades but have stacks of prose paperbacks on them still waiting to get shelved...



In the corner between those shelves and the window shelf, I have experimented with decor, seeing how well command strips work for hanging framed art (very well) and how well the command strip poster strips work on the slanted walls (not so good, the Michael Cho Doctor Strange poster keeps falling off, a corner shelf I altered (it was too tall to fit under the slanted walls so I shortened it to fit by taking off a level of it) sits in the corner with some Dr. Strange themed toys and merch to see how it all comes together. Haven't decided if I like it yet or not, but it was more to test the way things would get hung/displayed than a final look...



and finally some sample shelves that are done...

an old 2 shelf bookcase I've had since the 70s, sanded, reinfored, restained and then mounted atop a pair of the repurposed/repainted wood crates. All my DC Showcases, Chronicles, Archives and the three from the 30/40s-70s volumes are shleved on the 2 shlef case. More non-Marvel/Dc trades shelved in the crates below...



The remainder of my DC trades are shelved in those white cube units, two samples (there are 15 cubes filled with DC trades) with all the Omnibuses, over-sized deluxe hardcovers shelved atop the unit...





I have 2 more boxes of prose books to sort and place in the piles alphabetically, then I will start shelving the book which will make a lot more space in the room and remove a lot of clutter. I should also get the last of the painting done in the next couple of days. Then it is a matter of finishing the stairwell itself (needs trim & touch up painting) and then I can start focusing on decorating.

-M

I have a question here regarding subject matter that will seem a little dark. Recently, I listened to the latest episode of one of my favorite podcasts called Ear Hustle. It's basically stories about life, and politics inside prison, largely centered around San Quentin prison in the California bay area (where I'm originally from). The most recent episode was maybe the most heavy-handed I've listened to thus far. It was about child molestation, and the hosts interviewed two people in prison (one in incarcerated for a sex crime) who have a history with child molestation both as aggressors and victims. The wife of a man who was sent to prison for looking at child porn is also interviewed. As a father of a two and half year old boy, this was very hard to listen to. At the beginning, I was pretty sure I wasn't going to reach any kind of "understanding" regarding whatever was said by the interviewees. By the end, to my surprise, I could at the very least say every situation isn't as black and white as I would have initially thought. If you want to listen to the episode you can click on the link below. It's episode #40.

www.earhustlesq.com/episodes

As for my question, I want to know if you as parents, or who will be parents are going to allow your child commence with sleepovers at someone else's house? Because I'm not too keen on that idea for my boy, and after listening to this I feel like my fear is justified. Now I understand that you can't protect your children from everything big or small, but this is one potential danger I can't see myself ever rolling the dice on. As a kid I slept over some friends' houses, and nothing ever happened to me. Still, I'm most likely going to hold my ground. Unless it's my parents in-law, since we basically live with them here in Macau off and on. Honestly, I'm not even sure sleepovers are a thing here, but never-the-less I wanted your opinions. Thanks.