Perth! (part the second)
Hello everyone!
So, when last I left you it was Tuesday and I was at my Dad's house in Perth shortly before going to SwanCon.
SwanCon started on Thursday evening. hespa had got in ridiculously late the previous night and crashed in dalekboy's hotel room (he stayed at the hotel where the convetion was held, something I wound up slightly envious of as things went on), so when Dad dropped me off around midday I was reunited with Hespa and there was much hugging and Danny said we were cute. I dumped my bags in Danny's room and Hespa and I set off for the Perth CBD, only a short walk a way, and spent the rest of the afternoon slowly finding our bearings in a non-Euclidean labyrinth of a shopping centre, looking for costume accessories (sword for me, ray gun for her, with the eventual conclusion for both of us being that we couldn't find anything that would look better than just not having the accessory), hair dressers that would be open on Saturday, a few other small items, and I wound up getting Easter chocolate for my family.
Then, Thursday evening. Registered for the con and got bag of Stuff(tm) including the programme. The opening ceremony was entertaining. They had a very silly video, and introduced the guests (the only two of which I actually remember were Elizabeth Moon and David Gerrold, both science fiction writers, because Elizabeth was usually interesting on the panels she was on, and David was usually annoying), and threw tribbles around. At some point Hespa and I met up with justadecoy, whose house we were going to be staying at during the convention, and went and had dinner with him. I believe that was our discovery of the Indian restaurant on the corner of the tiny one-way lane the hotel was bizarrely situated upon, at which the food was very good, but unfortunately we ordered something that was very spicy the first night, which meant Hespa couldn't eat most of her dinner and I had to steal half of the cup of yoghurt of someone else with whom we were eating.
There were a couple of panels on that evening that we went to (one on fanvids, which included an amusing Smallville music video that fasangel and beckyrat42 would probably like) and one on heirarchies/celebreties in fandom.
Brief aside here at that word. I've been a fan of fantasy and science-fiction my entire life, but only in the last 4 or 5 years have I discovered the concept of being a fan, and of fandom as a whole. It still feels kinda weird. Of course, it took me until late high school to realise that there were OTHER forms of literature really. But I'd always thought of it as sort of on par with statements like "I like crime drama" or "I like jam on toast", and then I discovered that it apparantly made me part of this whole community thing. Twas interesting.
Anyway, justadecoy took us and our stuff back to his place, and we claimed a spot on his loungeroom floor and went to sleep (after a few adventures with geting bedding sorted out).
Friday! Friday was going to feature getting up at urrrgh in the morning (after getting to sleep about 2am) to go to the Dance Dance Revolution Aerobics session at the con at 9, but we slept in and justadecoy's girlfriend's car broke down (she was supposed to be coming over before we all went to the con together) and we wound up sauntering in at around... I don't know. I believe it was lunchtimeish, but looking at the programme now I can't figure out anything that I went to until 4pm. I believe we had lunch with a group of people, and there was probably some hiding away in the games room (the con had a room devoted to nothing other than playing various board games, so there was a lot of amusement to be had there). I think I may have gone to the art show on Friday as well while Hespa was off doing something else, which was hidden away on the 2nd floor and quite hard to find, as no stairs actually go above the 1st floor. One of the two elevators was out of order, but the other took me up there after I gave up on stairs, and there were shiny pretty things, and then the discovery that the other elevator had broken whilst I was looking at the shiny pretty things, so I eventually had to find the fire escape and come out in a car park behind the hotel and walk round the block to get back in. The fire escape of course has doors on every floor, but they all only open from the hotel, not to get back in. Later the fire escape doors were propped open with chairs to allow people access to the art show.
In fact there's only 4 panels I can definitely remember going to on Friday (one on video game design, "The Word Came From Outer Space", Swancon QI, and "Marketing First, Movie Later), so I figure there was quite a bit of games rooming. I believe this is also when we were invited to someone's room to learn how to play Martian Coasters, which is a very neat game I'm tempted to try to acquire now. Eventually got home quite late, cause justadecoy and his girlfriend were both staying late rehearsing for the big event they were part of the next day (see below).
Next day again got off to a delayed start, this time because we got sidetracked to go jumpstart a car bringing 3 other people involved in the big thing I'll get to talking about in a bit, including Kaneda who was actually organising it. So there was a bit of frazzlement going on.
Anyway, Kaneda's thing was the first one we actually got to, and was entitled "Blade Attraction Zero - Back to Basics". It involved Kaneda talking about swords and being funny, lots of hilarious cheesey re-enactments of fight scenes from the Mortal Kombat movie (we got to see justadecoy being beaten up by his girlfriend, which was fun), some demonstrations of Aikido and Capoeira, and at the end of it all Kaneda proposing to his girlfriend of 10 years, while still in his Scorpion outfit from the Mortal Kombat stuff (without the mask, but still with the yellow contact lenses). She said yes, and it was very n'awwww. I don't think they'll have trouble remembering that moment!
Rest of Saturday. Lunch from a weird Asian bakery selling weird and extremely nice breads (mental note: go to BreadTop more often, you will like it). Panel that was supposed to be about using cliches and doing them well, but actually wound up being about cliche-breaking and bad experiences with copy-editors, panel about putting real world characters into stories. Hijacking dalekboy's hotel room bathroom to shave my legs (necessary for my costume for the masquerade ball that evening), then sitting in a loungey area sewing buttons onto the coat for my costume while hespa maliciously played Martian Coasters in front of me in a deliberate attempt to distract me. But it all got done, so hah!
Then there was dinner. Someone attempted to organise a group dinner outing to a place I cannot remember how to spell or pronounce the name of, that apparantly has very nice vegetarian food billed on a "pay what you think the meal is worth" system, but it was packed and the line to order was out the door and down the stairs. Apparantly Easter Saturday was Buddha's birthday. So we wound up back at the Indian place, and this time had less spicy and very very nice dinner.
After dinner, preparation for the masquerade! For various sensible reasons mainly related to Hespa getting her makeup done this took place in Kaneda's hotel room (here's part of why I'm thinking if I go to SwanCon again [not unlikely seeing as I have family in Perth now] it would be very good to have a room at the convention). It took us a little while, so we missed the first 45 minutes or so, but we got there. Hespa was going with her Servalan costume from last year's Continuum, since the Perthites hadn't seen it and it had been such a success there. I was going as Captain William Lawrence from the Temeraire books, which basically involved looking like I was in early 19th century British naval uniform, but with a green coat instead of a blue one. The coat had been found at Savers as an old MET ticket inspector's coat, and Hespa had had to teach me how to sew (as well as just helping a lot) over the weeks before she left Melbourne to completely change the look of it, and it turned out fantastic. I never realised just how fantastic it did look until much later that evening when Hespa borrowed dalekboy's digital camera to take a photo of me and I got a look at the outfit form another person's perspective. Photos will definitely be making an appearance here on LJ once I have them (there's a CD in the mail apparantly *rubs paws*).
There were lots and lots of fantastic costumes. Probably the ones that stuck most in my mind were the couple dressed as giant versions of the plushy microbes. It took me a few minutes to figure out why an amorphous yellow blob was wandering around poking people and telling them "You've got disentary" but when I did it was very funny. And there was a fantastic dragon fursuit!! And several other characters from Blake's 7 that Hespa had to pose with for photos. Oh, and justadecoy and girlfriend had fantastic Obelix and Asterix outfits respectively.
Hespa and I got downstairs just in time for the costume parade, which was neat. Then there was dancing, which had me feeling very silly and fun, and also overheating quite a lot (coat over waistcoat over shirt will do that), went to get a drink of water, came back for the awards announcement and I WON A PRIZE!! There were 2 major prizes (free membership to next year's swancon) and 3 minor prizes ($20 tab at the bar), as well as a host of mentions-without-goodies and I got one of the minor ones for "best literary costume", which was a category they invented and probably means that one or more people on the judging panel a) was happy to see a costume that wasn't from movies/TV and b) liked the Temeraire books. But it was fantastic. :)
The rest of the evening was spent in the following activities:
- dancing with Hespa
- being soppy with Hespa
- playing air hockey
- trying to guess what a figure dressed in black robes with a hood and black cloth covering her face so she couldn't talk was supposed to be ("Faceless Minion" after many many underlines of the word "no" on a convenient whiteboard)
- posing for a few photos
- going to a room party in dalekboy's hotel room
- getting a taxi back to justadecoy's place and collapsing into bed (they had gone home earlier, being tired out after finally having gotten the martial arts thingamajig over and done with)
Saturday was definitely the highlight of the con for me though. Loads of fun stuff, neat people, having my costume idea work so spectacularly after all the effort we'd put in, seeing Hespa so happy for me and happy with me and just generally grinning our heads off. Was good.
Anyway, on with the con. Sunday. I got up a bit late and there was a bit more clash with the bathroom than usual, so Hespa and I didn't get breakfast before we got to the hotel at 9. Kaneda was doing a panel on caffeine (including taste tests) and justadecoy had had to bring him something. I was intending to go to that, but was quite hungry so wound up decided to skip it. Had buffet breakfast at the hotel restaurant, which was quite expensive but all-you-can-eat, so I ate too much in an attempt to get my money's worth. They had very good pastries though. Went to a panel that was supposed to be "Original Reasons for an Alien Invasion", but almost didn't discuss this topic at all, being more about why alien invasion was implausible as far as I can remember. Then Dad arrived at 11, as I'd arranged for Hespa and I to go have lunch with my family. Was nice to see everyone again for a bit, and Gran and Grum came over too (my step mother's parents; I now have 4 sets of grandparent-like figures, and not a single ambiguity in the way they are usually referred to, interestingly). Lunch was good, chocolate was exchanged, and Grum drove us back to the con at about 4.
The only other panel I went to that day was "Magic in Space" after dinner. Would've spent the time playing games, going and seeing the pilots of a couple of shows in the video stream (The Dresden Files which looked quite interesting, and Primeval which was hilariously bad), having dinner with people, and then going home early by mutal agreement with justadecoy because we all needed sleep.
Got everything packed up on Sunday evening and Monday morning and took it all to the hotel and dumped it in dalekboy's room again, as Hespa and I were going to be going back to Dad's place that evening, since she and I and the_fibber all had plane tickets for Tuesday. We got there at 11 for the panel about the new "season 8" Buffy comic and a panel entitled "The Future of High Fantasy" that got mostly bogged down in trying to define "High Fantasy" but was interesting nonetheless. Then we went and had lunch in front of pothv and his daughter, with whom Hespa had promised to meet up while she was in Perth. Hespa continued to hang around with pothv while I went back for to attend a panel called "Getting the Physics Right (or Wrong) in Space Battles", which I thought would be a good idea given that I'm (still) developing a computer game largely concerned with space battles with realisticish physics. It was worthwhile. Clever people made a number of interesting points that I hadn't thought of, most of which I'll have to ignore for efficiency reasons (I reckon I can populate a star system with a few thousand space ships, but there is no way in hell I can handle having every shot that missed its target floating around in space until it hits something else, not if I want to have a pretty graphics engine runnning at 30 frames per second [actually that's not true with my design, the main problem is the memory for storing all these objects that will likely never be referenced again]). And at one point said some rather sillier things about using computer-based attacks, which was entertaining. :)
After that, I went out to meet pothv and co again for ice cream! Then it was back to the hotel for the closing ceremony, then games and dinner and hanging around in dalekboy's hotel room in an attempt to stop the con from ending, and eventually getting picked up by Dad and going back to his place and getting a good night's sleep for a change (despite sleeping on a matress out in a common room in a house with kids that get up at some early time and cook porridge for everyone for breakfast - very good porridge at that!).
And that was pretty much it. My Perth/SwanCon adventure. We got on a plane the next day at 12:50 and were back in Melbourne sometime after 6, got picked up by my brother-with-a-car-who-couldn't-get-time-off-work-to-go-to-Perth and were fed dinner at Mum's place, Mum dropped Hespa and I home, and we we went to bed. And then I spent the next week writing a livejournal post about it, and am finally up to posting it right about now. *click*
EDIT: cutify to save on friends page scrolling
EDIT 2: fix the cuts (apparantly in my head the closing tag for is )
So, when last I left you it was Tuesday and I was at my Dad's house in Perth shortly before going to SwanCon.
SwanCon started on Thursday evening. hespa had got in ridiculously late the previous night and crashed in dalekboy's hotel room (he stayed at the hotel where the convetion was held, something I wound up slightly envious of as things went on), so when Dad dropped me off around midday I was reunited with Hespa and there was much hugging and Danny said we were cute. I dumped my bags in Danny's room and Hespa and I set off for the Perth CBD, only a short walk a way, and spent the rest of the afternoon slowly finding our bearings in a non-Euclidean labyrinth of a shopping centre, looking for costume accessories (sword for me, ray gun for her, with the eventual conclusion for both of us being that we couldn't find anything that would look better than just not having the accessory), hair dressers that would be open on Saturday, a few other small items, and I wound up getting Easter chocolate for my family.
Then, Thursday evening. Registered for the con and got bag of Stuff(tm) including the programme. The opening ceremony was entertaining. They had a very silly video, and introduced the guests (the only two of which I actually remember were Elizabeth Moon and David Gerrold, both science fiction writers, because Elizabeth was usually interesting on the panels she was on, and David was usually annoying), and threw tribbles around. At some point Hespa and I met up with justadecoy, whose house we were going to be staying at during the convention, and went and had dinner with him. I believe that was our discovery of the Indian restaurant on the corner of the tiny one-way lane the hotel was bizarrely situated upon, at which the food was very good, but unfortunately we ordered something that was very spicy the first night, which meant Hespa couldn't eat most of her dinner and I had to steal half of the cup of yoghurt of someone else with whom we were eating.
There were a couple of panels on that evening that we went to (one on fanvids, which included an amusing Smallville music video that fasangel and beckyrat42 would probably like) and one on heirarchies/celebreties in fandom.
Brief aside here at that word. I've been a fan of fantasy and science-fiction my entire life, but only in the last 4 or 5 years have I discovered the concept of being a fan, and of fandom as a whole. It still feels kinda weird. Of course, it took me until late high school to realise that there were OTHER forms of literature really. But I'd always thought of it as sort of on par with statements like "I like crime drama" or "I like jam on toast", and then I discovered that it apparantly made me part of this whole community thing. Twas interesting.
Anyway, justadecoy took us and our stuff back to his place, and we claimed a spot on his loungeroom floor and went to sleep (after a few adventures with geting bedding sorted out).
Friday! Friday was going to feature getting up at urrrgh in the morning (after getting to sleep about 2am) to go to the Dance Dance Revolution Aerobics session at the con at 9, but we slept in and justadecoy's girlfriend's car broke down (she was supposed to be coming over before we all went to the con together) and we wound up sauntering in at around... I don't know. I believe it was lunchtimeish, but looking at the programme now I can't figure out anything that I went to until 4pm. I believe we had lunch with a group of people, and there was probably some hiding away in the games room (the con had a room devoted to nothing other than playing various board games, so there was a lot of amusement to be had there). I think I may have gone to the art show on Friday as well while Hespa was off doing something else, which was hidden away on the 2nd floor and quite hard to find, as no stairs actually go above the 1st floor. One of the two elevators was out of order, but the other took me up there after I gave up on stairs, and there were shiny pretty things, and then the discovery that the other elevator had broken whilst I was looking at the shiny pretty things, so I eventually had to find the fire escape and come out in a car park behind the hotel and walk round the block to get back in. The fire escape of course has doors on every floor, but they all only open from the hotel, not to get back in. Later the fire escape doors were propped open with chairs to allow people access to the art show.
In fact there's only 4 panels I can definitely remember going to on Friday (one on video game design, "The Word Came From Outer Space", Swancon QI, and "Marketing First, Movie Later), so I figure there was quite a bit of games rooming. I believe this is also when we were invited to someone's room to learn how to play Martian Coasters, which is a very neat game I'm tempted to try to acquire now. Eventually got home quite late, cause justadecoy and his girlfriend were both staying late rehearsing for the big event they were part of the next day (see below).
Next day again got off to a delayed start, this time because we got sidetracked to go jumpstart a car bringing 3 other people involved in the big thing I'll get to talking about in a bit, including Kaneda who was actually organising it. So there was a bit of frazzlement going on.
Anyway, Kaneda's thing was the first one we actually got to, and was entitled "Blade Attraction Zero - Back to Basics". It involved Kaneda talking about swords and being funny, lots of hilarious cheesey re-enactments of fight scenes from the Mortal Kombat movie (we got to see justadecoy being beaten up by his girlfriend, which was fun), some demonstrations of Aikido and Capoeira, and at the end of it all Kaneda proposing to his girlfriend of 10 years, while still in his Scorpion outfit from the Mortal Kombat stuff (without the mask, but still with the yellow contact lenses). She said yes, and it was very n'awwww. I don't think they'll have trouble remembering that moment!
Rest of Saturday. Lunch from a weird Asian bakery selling weird and extremely nice breads (mental note: go to BreadTop more often, you will like it). Panel that was supposed to be about using cliches and doing them well, but actually wound up being about cliche-breaking and bad experiences with copy-editors, panel about putting real world characters into stories. Hijacking dalekboy's hotel room bathroom to shave my legs (necessary for my costume for the masquerade ball that evening), then sitting in a loungey area sewing buttons onto the coat for my costume while hespa maliciously played Martian Coasters in front of me in a deliberate attempt to distract me. But it all got done, so hah!
Then there was dinner. Someone attempted to organise a group dinner outing to a place I cannot remember how to spell or pronounce the name of, that apparantly has very nice vegetarian food billed on a "pay what you think the meal is worth" system, but it was packed and the line to order was out the door and down the stairs. Apparantly Easter Saturday was Buddha's birthday. So we wound up back at the Indian place, and this time had less spicy and very very nice dinner.
After dinner, preparation for the masquerade! For various sensible reasons mainly related to Hespa getting her makeup done this took place in Kaneda's hotel room (here's part of why I'm thinking if I go to SwanCon again [not unlikely seeing as I have family in Perth now] it would be very good to have a room at the convention). It took us a little while, so we missed the first 45 minutes or so, but we got there. Hespa was going with her Servalan costume from last year's Continuum, since the Perthites hadn't seen it and it had been such a success there. I was going as Captain William Lawrence from the Temeraire books, which basically involved looking like I was in early 19th century British naval uniform, but with a green coat instead of a blue one. The coat had been found at Savers as an old MET ticket inspector's coat, and Hespa had had to teach me how to sew (as well as just helping a lot) over the weeks before she left Melbourne to completely change the look of it, and it turned out fantastic. I never realised just how fantastic it did look until much later that evening when Hespa borrowed dalekboy's digital camera to take a photo of me and I got a look at the outfit form another person's perspective. Photos will definitely be making an appearance here on LJ once I have them (there's a CD in the mail apparantly *rubs paws*).
There were lots and lots of fantastic costumes. Probably the ones that stuck most in my mind were the couple dressed as giant versions of the plushy microbes. It took me a few minutes to figure out why an amorphous yellow blob was wandering around poking people and telling them "You've got disentary" but when I did it was very funny. And there was a fantastic dragon fursuit!! And several other characters from Blake's 7 that Hespa had to pose with for photos. Oh, and justadecoy and girlfriend had fantastic Obelix and Asterix outfits respectively.
Hespa and I got downstairs just in time for the costume parade, which was neat. Then there was dancing, which had me feeling very silly and fun, and also overheating quite a lot (coat over waistcoat over shirt will do that), went to get a drink of water, came back for the awards announcement and I WON A PRIZE!! There were 2 major prizes (free membership to next year's swancon) and 3 minor prizes ($20 tab at the bar), as well as a host of mentions-without-goodies and I got one of the minor ones for "best literary costume", which was a category they invented and probably means that one or more people on the judging panel a) was happy to see a costume that wasn't from movies/TV and b) liked the Temeraire books. But it was fantastic. :)
The rest of the evening was spent in the following activities:
- dancing with Hespa
- being soppy with Hespa
- playing air hockey
- trying to guess what a figure dressed in black robes with a hood and black cloth covering her face so she couldn't talk was supposed to be ("Faceless Minion" after many many underlines of the word "no" on a convenient whiteboard)
- posing for a few photos
- going to a room party in dalekboy's hotel room
- getting a taxi back to justadecoy's place and collapsing into bed (they had gone home earlier, being tired out after finally having gotten the martial arts thingamajig over and done with)
Saturday was definitely the highlight of the con for me though. Loads of fun stuff, neat people, having my costume idea work so spectacularly after all the effort we'd put in, seeing Hespa so happy for me and happy with me and just generally grinning our heads off. Was good.
Anyway, on with the con. Sunday. I got up a bit late and there was a bit more clash with the bathroom than usual, so Hespa and I didn't get breakfast before we got to the hotel at 9. Kaneda was doing a panel on caffeine (including taste tests) and justadecoy had had to bring him something. I was intending to go to that, but was quite hungry so wound up decided to skip it. Had buffet breakfast at the hotel restaurant, which was quite expensive but all-you-can-eat, so I ate too much in an attempt to get my money's worth. They had very good pastries though. Went to a panel that was supposed to be "Original Reasons for an Alien Invasion", but almost didn't discuss this topic at all, being more about why alien invasion was implausible as far as I can remember. Then Dad arrived at 11, as I'd arranged for Hespa and I to go have lunch with my family. Was nice to see everyone again for a bit, and Gran and Grum came over too (my step mother's parents; I now have 4 sets of grandparent-like figures, and not a single ambiguity in the way they are usually referred to, interestingly). Lunch was good, chocolate was exchanged, and Grum drove us back to the con at about 4.
The only other panel I went to that day was "Magic in Space" after dinner. Would've spent the time playing games, going and seeing the pilots of a couple of shows in the video stream (The Dresden Files which looked quite interesting, and Primeval which was hilariously bad), having dinner with people, and then going home early by mutal agreement with justadecoy because we all needed sleep.
Got everything packed up on Sunday evening and Monday morning and took it all to the hotel and dumped it in dalekboy's room again, as Hespa and I were going to be going back to Dad's place that evening, since she and I and the_fibber all had plane tickets for Tuesday. We got there at 11 for the panel about the new "season 8" Buffy comic and a panel entitled "The Future of High Fantasy" that got mostly bogged down in trying to define "High Fantasy" but was interesting nonetheless. Then we went and had lunch in front of pothv and his daughter, with whom Hespa had promised to meet up while she was in Perth. Hespa continued to hang around with pothv while I went back for to attend a panel called "Getting the Physics Right (or Wrong) in Space Battles", which I thought would be a good idea given that I'm (still) developing a computer game largely concerned with space battles with realisticish physics. It was worthwhile. Clever people made a number of interesting points that I hadn't thought of, most of which I'll have to ignore for efficiency reasons (I reckon I can populate a star system with a few thousand space ships, but there is no way in hell I can handle having every shot that missed its target floating around in space until it hits something else, not if I want to have a pretty graphics engine runnning at 30 frames per second [actually that's not true with my design, the main problem is the memory for storing all these objects that will likely never be referenced again]). And at one point said some rather sillier things about using computer-based attacks, which was entertaining. :)
After that, I went out to meet pothv and co again for ice cream! Then it was back to the hotel for the closing ceremony, then games and dinner and hanging around in dalekboy's hotel room in an attempt to stop the con from ending, and eventually getting picked up by Dad and going back to his place and getting a good night's sleep for a change (despite sleeping on a matress out in a common room in a house with kids that get up at some early time and cook porridge for everyone for breakfast - very good porridge at that!).
And that was pretty much it. My Perth/SwanCon adventure. We got on a plane the next day at 12:50 and were back in Melbourne sometime after 6, got picked up by my brother-with-a-car-who-couldn't-get-time-off-work-to-go-to-Perth and were fed dinner at Mum's place, Mum dropped Hespa and I home, and we we went to bed. And then I spent the next week writing a livejournal post about it, and am finally up to posting it right about now. *click*
EDIT: cutify to save on friends page scrolling
EDIT 2: fix the cuts (apparantly in my head the closing tag for