Demicon 29 is over...
This last weekend, I was down in Des Moines, at the 29th Demicon...the Des Moines Science Fiction Convention. While I'm not sorry I went, it wasn't as much fun as other cons I've been to.
For starters, I had no interest in the Guests of Honor this year. I'm sure they're very worthy people, but I hadn't been exposed to their work and had no particular reason to seek them out. This has happened before, but I'm not the starry-eyed neofan I was back in 1985. I'm a grizzled veteran of many, many cons (I honestly am not sure how many I've been to; a lot depends on what you do and do not count) and the first thrill is long since gone.
Secondly, some people I usually like to meet up with at these things weren't there. One of them had to attend his stepson's college graduation, and I don't know where the others were.
Thirdly, and this applies to cons in general: One of the big things that first drew me to these events, namely, the booksellers, is all but gone now. Thanks to Amazon, Abebooks and the Internet in general, a lot fewer people are willing to hump hundreds of pounds of books from city to city to try to flog them at these events. I understand, but I miss the old booksellers. The only one who's still with us is Glen Cook.
And I am getting increasingly disgusted with stinking Wikipedia. Every time I try to edit an article, it seems like my work gets zapped within a few hours. Do people really have nothing better to do than to obsessively monitor that site? It's not like I'm deliberately trying to vandalize entries; I'm often trying to clarify things or add facts that weren't in there. Between that and their taking down of some very useful articles, I'm getting rather fed up with them. At least TV Tropes treats me politely.