With my computers all being busy running models, I took to opportunity to spend the day in San Jose. Of course I had an ulterior motive. Neil Gaiman was doing a couple of readings there today. I caught the noon one, after which I had lunch with Neil and various other folks and chatted about books and stuff.

As usual, Neil did a fabulous job of entertaining the audience, and I was favorably impressed by the fact that the guy from SJSU hosting the event knew Neil’s work quite well and was therefore able to ask intelligent questions. Indeed, over lunch he even mentioned having read Anne Murphy’s blog where she had talked about looking after Neil at cons. (And yes, we did have sushi for lunch.)

Lots of interesting stuff was said, not all of which I can remember, but here’s one snippet that impressed me. Neil’s Beowulf film is being made using a motion capture technique. It is a system that was first used on Polar Express. Neil commented that the first version of the system had a few problems because the eyes of the characters just didn’t look realistic. (Being Neil he described them as looking like dead babies.) The current version, however, has a nifty new feature. The actors now wear small electrodes above and below each eye. These capture the actual movement of their eyes, resulting in much more realistic eye movement when the characters are rendered.

Neil did another reading this evening, and is probably still signing books as I type (11:30pm). But I had to head back into downtown as Kevin and I had an evening engagement at the Fairmont. The Convention & Visitors’ Bureau had invited a bunch of local SF&F convention runners to a reception to try to encourage us to run more cons in the city. Yes, seriously, they did. I’ll leave it to Kevin to get into details (he’s heading off to bed now and has just offered this). I”l just say that it is indeed nice to be wanted, and no, you cannot have enough sushi.