Well, my hangover was starting to wear off and my bitchiness was starting to kick in... So I had to run for cover.  Cloei was getting really worked up over her upcoming webcam panel, Dawn was wanting to find something exciting and challenging, and Lily was having issues over an incident involving a corset.  I wanted nothing to do with any of this.  For the record, I'm hard at work exorcising all the Drama from my life, so when the stress level starts rising around me, I tend to chuckle and find a corner to sit in for the best seat in the house.  In this particular case, my sticky brain fluid and my awakening seat of consciousness was telling me that the best seat in the house was by myself in some dark room where no one could find me.  So when I found Jester Fred getting ready to do his panel on E-zines, I plopped down as one of 5 or 6 spectators.

Strangely, this panel on a topic I had never pondered or considered turned out to be both interesting and helpful.  I'm an aspiring columnist <if you can't tell from all the work I've put into this piece of dated garbage>, and I've been seeking ways to promote my writing and possibly get a paycheck for what I'm doing in my spare time.  Some of the panelists that showed up had thoughtful and serious commentary on the state of internet publishing, and there was even a luke-warm debate over the future of corporate sponsored sites vs. private home-spun sites.  I walked away feeling challenged and happy to have been involved.  I expected some privacy and got inspired.... Talk about windfall!

Bonnie had come through the panel shortly before it ended and promoted a special effects panel across the hall, so I dropped in to see what was up... another delightful surprise!  The group who was speaking had done some work on Star Trek: Voyager, and I walked in on a fast-forwarded, plot-cropped replay of the episode where Seven decided to rejoin the Borg collective.  WOO HOO!  What a great episode!  They won an Emmy for the special effects, btw... heh.  After that, they popped in a tape containing one of their teammate's promotional reels.  To inspire potential employers to give him a chance, this guy had put together a little piece called Tie-Tanic.  In it, Darth Vader and the Moffs from Star Wars Ep#4 plot a scheme to make sure that the Star Wars movies maintain their dominance of international box office receipts.  To ward off an upcoming rival, they send and imperial force out to destroy James Cameron's Titanic and kill everything on board.  The iceberg has a big AT-AT atop it, firing down on the ship... waves of TIE fighters unload on it, breaking the stack and sending dead ewoks flying.  It's one of those things that is clever, yet silly enough to be fun.  HOORAY for me not missing that.  Afterwards, they ran reels of private work they have done on the Starship Troopers animated series, where they take the characters and put them in a gap commercial and such.... TOO Funny!

pictures stolen from this guy

If you haven't figured it out yet, I have nothing but good things to say about any panel I attended at Fantasm.  I ended up feeling like I had gotten invited to the "super-secret party"...  You know when you're at a party and it's time to shut it down, but you know the owner and so you get to stick around after everyone else gets kicked out?  Well, that's how much I enjoyed the programming here.

Enough ass-kissing, you guys just want to see the nudie pictures, don't you?