ChiCon Sunday - 31 Hours Logged With Mission Control
I'm thinking that it took me a while to warm up to this convention, because while the first few days were a bit flat, I'm kind of getting into it now.
I'm really sick of the hotel restaurant & their breakfast decaf (actually stepped off the no caffeine wagon for a spell yesterday; I'm having a lot of trouble staying awake in panels unless they're really funny or require a lot of attention), so I grabbed a couple of pain aù chocolat and a decaf mocha & headed down to registration to do ... Well, to be honest, to hang out with new friends and do very little work.
I DID get borrowed by the facilities (or operations) people to move some audio equipment; It seems that registration is overflowing with people, while Gophers, Facilities, Operations etc are crying out for people.
(A sad thing happened a few days before the con, when the head of Facilities (or Operations) dropped dead. Though this is callous, what made it worse is that most of the information was in his head.
The new dept. head went through 6 months of emails in three days to reconstruct what needed to move where and when)
I eventually made it back to Gopher HQ to get my sexay yellow Mission Control lanyard, where it was discovered that I've done 31 hour equivalents so far this con, (pre-con stuff counts double) so I also got a $22 voucher for the place which does convention t-shirts.
Conveniently, the London 2014 bid won, and they're launching their new t-shirt. Oh Noes!!!
At 10:30 I went to my earliest panel so far, a thing on Collaboration Between Writers; Fittingly, this was shared with panelists at DragonCon via video link.
I went to one of these at AussieCon 4, and I THINK this one was better, or at least less sidetracky. If that's a word.
Something which DID get mentioned was that collaborations mean that both people do 2/3 of the work.
Following that was a panel on Podcasting, which included Mur Lafferty as a panelist.
This was a good one, wobbling between hardware, software & misc.
Makes me want to take another bash at The Big Red Couch.
I THINK I took a lunch break here, and bought some shirts; The voucher I was given only covered ChiCon 7 merchandise, in an effort to get rid of it, so I now own a ChiCon 7 shirt with a dragon on it, AND the new Loncon 3 (London in 2014) shirt.
There was another shared panel after that, this one on Asteroid Mining, featuring NASA Astronaut Story Musgrave & self-funded astronaut Richard Garriott, among others. It was interesting, but I did find myself wondering how many of the DragonCon panelists were already investors in asteroid mining.
That panel ran right up against the time limit, and I couldn't make the next one, so I went off, grabbed the appropriate stuff, and made sure that my Loncon 3 membership was sorted out. Turns out that it's automatic, and that I had the presence of mind back at AussieCon 4 to give my NZ mailing address, so I'm all set for London in 2014.
My last panel of the day was a thing on Military Fantasy & SF, as done by a panel of military or military-adjacent people, and was a pretty good one.
The queue for entry to the Hugo Awards was already into a pedestrian concourse when I got out of the panel, which meant that it had wound through a foyer, down a corridor, up an escalator somehow, across another foyer, and was making it's way to another building when I saw it.
So I didn't go to the Hugos; I went to dinner instead, then put my feet up in the suddenly-quiet lobby & read a book.
Oh, and wrote some of this.
Once the awards emptied out I ended up chatting to a couple of people who'd been there, one of whom turned out to be Fred Saberhagen's widow. She'd been enjoying the con, and seemed to be pretty well into the whole convention scene; Told me I should go to her local New Mexico con if I ever got the chance.
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