Convention report: AggieCon 42 (Life, the Con, and Everything)

[emurphy42]

This was my first visit to Texas A&M in about a decade, this time with Alex (fellow fan and prospective aerospace engineering major; A&M has always had a strong engineering department) in tow. ariel10575 and I went to AggieCon back in 2000 or so - she was demoing Pokemon and some casual card gams for WotC - I think Alex may have been with us, but too young to remember much of anything.

Nice to run into a couple people I knew back in the day, and to see that fans are still basically the same all over. OTOH, because they're basically the same all over, there's no strong motivation to spring for plane fare for a return visit any time soon.

Friday: Drove from Austin, toured campus for a couple hours, rested up.

Saturday:

• Missed the Matthew Bey reading due to not getting up early enough.
• Cepheid story time.
• Cat Valente panel.
• Monty Python Fluxx.
• Killer Bunnies and the Quest for the Magic Carrot.
• Rise of Aester, a steampunk LARP set on an airship traversing toxic skies. Alex struggled with the separation between what he noticed and what his character noticed, but ultimately did okay.
• Dropped Alex off at the motel, returned for Rocky Horror.

Sunday:

• Hipster or Nerd panel. IIRC it was mainly about "there's a difference between the fan who knows a lot about Star Wars and stops there, and the fan for whom Star Wars is a gateway to many other works".
• Ten Best SF Movies of 2010 panel. A couple (Never Let Me Go, Splice) are still on my watch-at-some-point list.
• Closing ceremonies.

Monday:

• Drove back to Austin.
• Visited a large comic book store down the block from my sister's house.
• Mom and her SO (dad passed away years ago) drove down from Waco. Sister's fiance did basic "laptop is slow" analysis for them while we watched part of Zombieland, then we got lunch before heading back to the airport.