Hillary Lipko: Frustrated Bunny

When you're at a con, sometimes you just need to relax and regroup.

With convention season in full swing, and having seen a number of comments about certain difficulties and annoyances about attending a crowded, days-long convention lately, I felt that now might be a good time to provide my own contribution to the body of knowledge (and yes, there is one) regarding con survival. I intend this to be a multi-part series, with this part being mostly an overview of some of the things I’ll talk about in more detail in later parts.

Being of somewhat limited means, I don’t attend many conventions, but the ones that I do attend are fast-paced, crowded, tons of fun, and when I go, I go balls to the wall, if you’ll excuse the expression. I make it a point to attend at least two conventions in the Atlanta area every year: Dragon*Con, which is held downtown in the Hyatt, Marriott, Hilton and Sheraton hotels over Labor Day weekend; and MomoCon, which is held on Georgia Tech’s campus in March, the weekend before the beginning of the school’s spring break. I have attended both conventions since 2005, which was MomoCon’s inaugural year. I have worked on staff at MomoCon for the last two years, and this year will be my first year working on staff at Dragon*Con. MomoCon is the largest free anime and gaming convention in North America, with an estimated 7,000 attendees in 2009. Dragon*Con is significantly larger and significantly more expensive–membership costs have ballooned in the five years I’ve attended to a whopping $100 for a 4-day pass purchased at the door–and it makes MomoCon look like a small family gathering. Estimates of attendence range from 30,000 to 50,000 for the four-day weekend. (more…)

I never had seasonal allergies until I moved to Georgia. I always figured it was something I’d grown into, as it seemed to get worse the older I got. (I was out sick for a week my senior year of high school because the spring pollen orgy, and I found myself heading to the doctor 4+ times a year with allergy-induced tonsillitis during my first three years in college.) Aside from allergies, I don’t get sick much at all. But pollen and mold can turn me into a useless lump of flesh and mucus for weeks at a time. Over time, I’ve devised and discovered various ways of coping, and lately, I’ve gained some further insight into why I’d always get so sick.

Recently, I discovered something shocking: my allergies really aren’t that bad. In the past year or so, I’ve been able to stay off of antihistamines entirely, with the exception of the few weeks in late September/early October and the March-May period that see pollen counts that really make me question the standard scale for pollen counts. (For those of you not familiar with Georgia’s allergy season, it’s not unusual to see pollen counts in well in excess of 1,000, when the standard scale starts counting “very high” at 151.) Even crazier than my ability to tolerate life without the daily regimen of obscure prescription allergy medication that has been the only thing that’s kept me functional during allergy season since 2003, I can suddenly tolerate most days during pollen season whilst taking Loratadine, which I’d thought stopped working for me when I was 15. (more…)

I got my backpack back from Jansport yesterday, and I must say that I am more than impressed with the quality of the repairs. In fact, I’d say that they went well above and beyond the repairs I sent it in for. In the letter that I included with the backpack when I sent it, the only repairs I mentioned were that it needed the main compartment zipper replaced, and I needed the straps replaced. The zipper had contracted the dreaded “zipper disease,” and the foam in the straps had compressed so much that it might as well not have been there anymore. (Provided, these problems had occurred after about eight years of continuous use, which I think is pretty damn good.) Not only did they fix these things well beyond my satisfaction, they also replaced the handle on the top of the bag, the zipper pull that had broken off the front pocket, and the fraying of the fabric on some of the inside seams of the bag. None of those things bothered me, but I am beyond pleased that their repair center apparently takes time to assess the returned bag for everything that needs fixing rather than just relying on what the customer tells them.

So, to get down to specifics, the zipper that they replaced the original with is a heavier-duty zipper than what was on the bag to begin with. I think that at some point in the last decade, they switched over to using these heftier zippers on all of their bags due to the propensity of the zippers like those on mine to get zipper disease. So, on one hand, the zippers don’t match anymore, but on the other hand, it’s a lot less likely I’m going to have this problem again. Also, the zipper pulls on the new zipper don’t have the spiffy ‘JS’ that the rest of my zippers have (and that the old zipper had), but again, I’d say that the minor aesthetics are a small price to pay for a fully-functional backpack. The zipper pull that they replaced on the front pocket, however, does match the old ones, and that is more important than the main compartment zipper pulls matching, as the one on the front is most visible. In addition, they tied new leather bits to the ends of the replaced pull and one of the pulls on the new zipper, so when it was returned to me, it looked more-or-less the way it would if I’d bought it new in the store (except mine has decorative patches on it ).

I am also incredibly happy with the new straps. I honestly don’t remember the original straps being this nice. Again, I’m thinking that the straps have beein improved on Jansport bags in the decade since I bought mine. The foam is thicker and firmer than I remember the original straps being when my bag was new. The adjustment clips on the straps are different than the original ones as well — they have a more rounded profile. Again, likely a change/improvement in their bag construction. I also find the way that they replaced the straps to be interesting. I suppose that since they had to open up the top seam where the handle is to put in the new straps, they put in a new handle as well. The old one was just fine, in my opinion, though it was a little worn from having been used to hang my backpack from the latch on my locker in high school. What they did leave as original, however, were the lower mesh adjustment straps, which makes sense since there was nothing wrong with them, and they’d have had to take the whole bag apart just about to replace them. So their repair process is quality and efficient.

So, in short, I highly recommend Jansport’s warranty repair service for anyone who has a Jansport or Eastpak bag that needs to be fixed. Their turnaround is just about exactly what they say it is, the work is just about perfect, and it’s about as low-hassle as it gets. They don’t require receipts, product registration, proof-of-purchase…nothing. I am incredibly happy with it. I just can’t say that enough.

Continuing with what appears to be a theme of posts about my favorite things, this post is about my favorite pen. I found it on the ground…somewhere…a couple of years ago. It is unusual in most respects, particularly compared to most pens that I’ve ever used. First and foremost, it has a nib width of 0.4 mm. Yes, you read that correctly, and I did not make a typo. Outside of specialty pigment pens and imported pens, the smallest nib you can find here in the U.S. is 0.5 mm. The narrower and more precise line is what made this particular pen the favorite of all of my writing utensils. (Before finding this pen, I was partial to an aluminum-body, 0.5 mm Zebra mechanical pencil.)

However, it probably wasn’t the functional product of this pen that first endeared me to it. Frankly, it was cute, and I LOVE cute things. (Give me a break, I’m a girl. I’m allowed.) The style of the design on the barrel of the pen looks Japanese. And let’s face it, the Japanese made an amazing discovery that you can put a face on just about ANY inanimate object and automatically make it cute and endearing. I mean, really…if they can do it with poo, they can do it with anything. But I digress. This pen has a happy-looking little coffee mug and equally happy-looking to-go coffee cups. It also has a bear that looks a lot like the San-X Happy Memorial Sky Bear character, though I don’t know if the pen came from that line, as I have not been able to find anything that looks even remotely like this pen, which brings me to the point of this post. (more…)

The flame patches sewn over the front zipper on my backpack. I got to leave these on when I sent it for repair.

I have had the same red Jansport backpack since I was about 14 years old. It had taken a good two years for me to convince my mom that it was worth it to invest $40 in a backpack, particularly when every other backpack my younger sister or I had ever used lasted for a maximum of two years. From her vantage point, it made sense. If you don’t spend more than $15 or $20 on a backpack, and it lasts two years, it’s more cost-effective than spending $40 on a backpack that lasts two years. However, I had a lot of friends with Jansport bags. Most of them had been using the same one for at least two years already at that point, and they were all still in really good condition. And as I already mentioned, I was 14, and all my friends had them.

When the backpack I’d been using at the time gave out after its requisite 2 years (the bottom fell out, if I recall, despite being heavy nylon reinforced with leather) I had finally convinced my mother to let me give that long-coveted Jansport backpack a try. Being a highly industrious 14-year-old that was probably too smart for her own good, I presented my mother with my calculations of cost-per-year for the backpack that had just failed ($12.50 per year) and the projected cost-per-year of the Jansport. I told her that if the backpack had to be replaced before its cost-per-year reached less than $12.50 (a little less than 4 years), that I would pay her the difference. At that point, it was probably unnecessary for me to do that, as in retrospect, I think she’d already decided to give in and get me the backpack.

I noted the “lifetime warranty” guarantee when I removed the tags from the bag, and immediately forgot about it. In my experience to that point (and even my experience up to now), a “lifetime warranty” is rarely that — it only covers their estimate of the lifetime of the product, or it only covers the product while the company still makes it. So while I figured the backpack would last me through high school, I figured I’d have to retire it after graduation. I had a few moments of private surprise in my last year of high school that my bag had survived all that it had and was still intact. I’d sewn decorative patches on it, caught it in lockers, closed it in car doors, taken it on numerous trips and concerts and urban camping trips, yet the only damage it had suffered was one of the zipper pulls breaking off (which I remedied with a key ring attached to the zipper and the non-broken side of the pull) and a tiny bit of the stitching in the leather bottom coming unraveled, which I fixed with a needle and deep-sea fishing line (and has endured as a repair for about 7 years). While I’ve given it a rest a few times since graduating high school, I seem to keep pulling it back out and using it for travel, toting notebooks and textbooks, and more recently, hauling my laptop the 1.5 miles between my house and my department’s building. (more…)