Bristolcon is done and dusted
There were minor panics here and there (e.g. we discovered we had no string for hanging up the banner, so used spare badge lanyards instead), but otherwise all went well. All the attendees I talked to seemed to be having a good time, and we've already had about a dozen people sign up for next year.
My talk (Humans Are Weird) went okay, and finished on time, despite starting 5 minutes late due to our lovely tech guy Chocolate Jon taking a while to get the laptop to speak to the projector. It always ran to around 46 minutes when I rehearsed it at home, but came in at 40 - obviously I'm more focussed and/or talk faster when I have people staring at me! Lots of folk said they enjoyed it, which was nice of them.
I went to 3 panels - 'Worldbuilding', 'How Science Got Its Groove Back' and 'Plausible Critters', all of which were fun. Plus I was on one called 'My World Is Not Your Sandpit' about the pros and cons of fanfic, and how writers feel about it. I think we could probably have talked on that topic for another hour at least!
The designers of the Tripods board game were demonstrating it in the evening, so I had a go and was impressed. Fun, fast to learn, a mixture of strategy and randomness. Our game was civilised and well behaved, with people blocking each other's men, and stealing their horse and carriages, and even nobly sacrificing themselves to defeat the Martians rather than each other. The game next to us was much more aggressive, with people killing off each other's men all over the place. A side effect of this was that they managed to allow the Martians to create a ridiculously hard tripod. Oooh laaaa! I've signed up to the Indiegogo campaign for the game: Tripods board game
Edit: BTW all this was done on 2 hours sleep the night before, due to my stupid neighbours and their idiot friends.
My talk (Humans Are Weird) went okay, and finished on time, despite starting 5 minutes late due to our lovely tech guy Chocolate Jon taking a while to get the laptop to speak to the projector. It always ran to around 46 minutes when I rehearsed it at home, but came in at 40 - obviously I'm more focussed and/or talk faster when I have people staring at me! Lots of folk said they enjoyed it, which was nice of them.
I went to 3 panels - 'Worldbuilding', 'How Science Got Its Groove Back' and 'Plausible Critters', all of which were fun. Plus I was on one called 'My World Is Not Your Sandpit' about the pros and cons of fanfic, and how writers feel about it. I think we could probably have talked on that topic for another hour at least!
The designers of the Tripods board game were demonstrating it in the evening, so I had a go and was impressed. Fun, fast to learn, a mixture of strategy and randomness. Our game was civilised and well behaved, with people blocking each other's men, and stealing their horse and carriages, and even nobly sacrificing themselves to defeat the Martians rather than each other. The game next to us was much more aggressive, with people killing off each other's men all over the place. A side effect of this was that they managed to allow the Martians to create a ridiculously hard tripod. Oooh laaaa! I've signed up to the Indiegogo campaign for the game: Tripods board game
Edit: BTW all this was done on 2 hours sleep the night before, due to my stupid neighbours and their idiot friends.