Open filk Saturday night ran somewhat later than Friday night, with a good crowd until about 2:30 when things broke up. We got back to the Hampton Inn (the current Balticon hotel sold out long before it occurred to me to start making plans) and paused at the front desk to report some jackass who had parked across two spaces (including a handicapped space -- no, he didn't have a plate or tag for that, and stupidity and moral turpitude don't count as "handicaps" in this context). I started writing an LJ entry for the con, until 

starmalachite needed the laptop to look up some things for a filk she was writing, which shall be revealed to the world in due course.

Sunday was a bit quieter; I caught a few art/comics/techie panels, the FuMP concerts, and open filk (which didn't run quite as late as Saturday; people were winding down a bit). Monday I hung around the dealers' room and FuMP table for a while, then went to gaming until they finally closed down the function space. I played a couple games of TransAmerica and Thurn and Taxis, but my brain fatigue was clearly taking a toll, and I more or less crashed in the lobby until we left for home.

 

 

I got to Balticon with starmalachite fairly late Friday evening after a rush to get our wedding invitations in the mail, tweak the Conterpoint web site a bit, and take care of a few other bits of administrivia. We got to the registration desk, caught part of Paul "Dr. SETI" Shuch's concert, and then joined the open filk until it broke up (fairly early; people tend to pace themselves on Friday to stay up later the rest of the weekend).

Yesterday, I met partiallyclips at the FuMP table. After asking if I was the same person who posts on the Erfworld forum as "SteveMB", he thanked me for my participation and contributions toward raising the signal-to-noise ratio. I thought I was just reading and commenting, but it's nice to know that the author thinks I have that kind of positive effect.

I got to a few interesting panels (more than usual, actually): a "What's New In Comics" panel that gave me a few pointers toward some other webcomics I'll need to check out (free time is overrated...) and a "Writing For Webcomics" panel with a few interesting observations on pacing when presenting an ongoing story at the rate of one page every few days.

Another highlight was the Bohnhoffs' concert set, including a few of their standbys and several songs I hadn't heard before, including (obvously) one that was being performed for the first time.

After dinner, we got to the masquerade. We lucked out and got second-row seats behind the judges -- we weren't that early in line, but apparently the first wave avoided those seats because they thought the judges' table lights would interfere with their view (I didn't notice that being a problem, so the joke is on the people who passed up the great seats). The one that most sticks out in my memory is, perhaps not surprisingly, a horrible pun: a children's division "Dark Dorothy and Toto-rantula".

starmalachite says she needs to use the laptop; more later.