Last weekend, starmalachite and I went out to the Maryland RenFaire. Along the way, somebody suddenly cut across to the exit, producing a chain reaction of braking and collisions -- we were at the tail end of it. We almost avoided it completely, but the last car that took a serious hit bounced back and fishtailed a corner into our front end. The car was still driveable, with a dented and slightly bent hood, but we were delayed until about noon while the police came and took a report.

Once we got there, things went rather well (but more crowded than I've seen it any other time).

Most of this weekend we were at Capclave. There were some pretty good panels (I remember one on alien communication in particular), and the evening filk was fairly good for a con that's trying to get it going as a new activity (the room kept going for about two hours each night, peaking at about a dozen people, including several newcomers). One moment I recall was starmalachite springing "Self-Inflicted" on a few people who hadn't heard it before.

With all that, I didn't do as much gaming as usual, but I did get to play (and win) Thurn and Taxis and Settlers of Catan: Cities and Knights. I was especially pleased with the former, as I hit the trifecta of 1)first eight-city route, 2)first player with all colors, and 3)first (and only) player to gain all of Prussia (if you don't know the game, suffice it to say that each of those is worth a relatively large point score).

We skipped the last day of the con to catch the last day of RenFaire, without adventures en route this time. The highlihgts were two of the featured musical performances from the Mediaeval Baebes and Volgemut; starmalachite also got some of our Christmas shopping done. After a minor mixup (we forgot to set a place to meet when I went to the final joust while she went to the closing pubsing), we had dinner at Red Robin and headed home.

Give the old white cat her subcutaneous fluids and go to sleep now.....

I just booked flights to OVFF for me and starmalachite and double-checked that I have everything set for the rest of my con plans: TCEP this weekend, possibly day-tripping T-MODE next Saturday, Capclave (likely skipping Sunday for the last day of Maryland RenFaire), OVFF, Philcon, and Darkover.

See some of you there!

I've got the arrangements made for the next couple of conventions on my schedule:

TCEP 15 -- The Elder Party (8/29-9/1)
Capclave (10/17-19)
OVFF (10/24-26)

Other than that, I've been fiddling with a few minor projects and converting a batch of documents from my miscellaneous entertainment files to Mobipocket form to carry around on my phone and read while waiting for the Metro (is it just me, or has their service been going downhill a lot lately?). I got a couple of crashes and lockups at first; I think I've traced it to synch problems when an old e-book document is directly replaced by a new one instead of deleting, rebuilding, and letting the annotation synch do its thing.

We headed out last night and did some clothes shopping to take advantage of the sales-tax holiday. I found a couple pairs of pants, but only one suitable shirt -- manufacturers are a lot more experimental with men's shirts, and some of the results are Things Man Was Not Meant To Know Wear.

starmalachite  and I got to the hotel Thursday night. There was one trivial snafu with the front desk not being set up to process her guest reservation without someone actually presenting a credit card, so I gave them mine for the time being -- if that's the worst thing that happens with one of your guests, you're doing pretty well.

We chatted with some of the concom a while. There was talk of a dinner expedition, but it turned out that most of the local restaurants were closing at 10:00, so we just found what we could and turned in.

Friday, people started trickling in. There was a minor adventure when the hotel power went out for a while, but otherwise everything went fairly well... at least, until the thumping bass in the other section of hotel function space started up. I gather that the hotel had offered less-than-accurate reassurances to the convention that the other scheduled events wouldn't be a problem, but not being on concom I don't know the full situation. Eventually, the open filk migrated to the two smaller function rooms which were separated from the noise.

Saturday had several of the highlights of the con, including the benefit concert for filkertom, with Christine Lavin emceeing and cell phone telepresence by filkertom  and Tom Paxton. The main thing I missed was the Interfilk auction. (Our dinner expedition ran a bit late because the hotel's local restaurant information listed a Chinese buffet that wasn't there anymore, and we had to search to find an alternative. We ended up splitting up, partly so I could avoid any risk of fish in the air at the Japanese place part of the group settled on.)

The thumping from the other function space started up before singingpatient's scheduled Retro-GOH concert. Several of the group (I particularly recall osewalrus) started responding with rousing singalongs of numbers such as "Old Dun Cow". Eventually, we resorted to the ultimate weapon... the bagpipe. The bass was still going on when the concert finally did start, but as far as I could tell it didn't interfere too badly.

Sunday, as usual, was relatively quiet. The Rotten Apple filk lasted from after people got back from dinner until well past 2 AM.

Monday morning, I started hauling stuff to the car while starmalachite  finished getting showered and dressed, and said goodbye to a few of the folks who were trickling out (I recall most of the MASSFILC crew, partiallyclips, & scifantasy  , and might be forgetting a few others). Once we got out of the room and checked out (and confirmed that the charge was no longer on my card). We then headed for Six Flags for the day as a birthday/anniversary celebration (the date for both is actually today, but we both figured that we'd probably be spending today vegetating around the house to recover). The most memorable ride was the "El Toro"; in tribute to George Carlin, I had a couple of his seven words running through my head during the first drop-off.

A couple random moments of egoboo:

1. partiallyclips  mentioned being pleased with the page (warning: spoilery) I added to an informal Erfworld wiki project, combining two map views showing the plans and available intel to both sides onto a common map grid, thus possibly clarifying a few things about the battle.

2. After I trotted out "How You Play The Rules" (the result of listening to "How It Is Applied" while reading "Knights of the Dinner Table"), scifantasy  commented that "That's how Miles would play D&D.

starmalachite and I are hoping to get on the road by about Thursday noon. The usual mad flurry of preparations is underway.

The cats (well, the two brighter ones) seem to have figured out that their humans are planning to leave again, even though the suitcases haven't actually been packed yet. Even Heidi (usually the stereotypically independent-minded creature) is acting clingy and needy, and Vir has gotten even more demanding than usual. Satin still seems oblivious.

We got on the road a bit later than planned on Friday, and ran into a bunch of holiday traffic, but nothing too serious. About fifteen minutes before we arrived, madfilkentist  called; apparently either I didn't get his name on the room or they lost it from their records. Other than that, checkin at the hotel and con was uneventful (I made sure they had ccrazy 's name on the room, and as far as I know she checked in without incident when she got there).

We got home around midnight last night. The cats were being particularly clingly -- Heidi (in icon) actually imitated Vir's (the tabby-point Siamese) standard chirp for attention (which is especially unusual for her; usually the only time she speaks up is to complain that she can see the bottom of her food dish).

More later.

We got to Lunacon a bit late Friday (between traffic and a the road signage not agreeing very well with the Yahoo Maps instructions). I spent a few hours at the open filk and crashed early to wake up for my 10:00 and 11:00 panels.

Not surprisingly, the panelists outnumbered the audience for most of the two hours. The first one (on running conventions) was mostly an exchange of anecdotes. The second one (on feeding the fen) was the "WTF am I doing on this one?" panel; I did manage to contribute one possibly useful observation (finding out about people's food restrictions is more critical for a small con, because the "buy some of everything and everybody will have something" strategy is less viable with small groups).

After that, I wandered for a while between the game room and various panels; the one I recall best was one about bad science in (nominally) SF movies. Somebody mentioned the Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics page, which I'll take a look at later. At one point, I joined a game of Munchkin Blender, which I ended up winning. The player to my left seemed to get all "screw you" cards and tried a strategy of blackmailing people to give him treasure; I decided not to pay the Dane-geld and took the lumps until he started focusing on the other players. That may be part of the reason I ended up winning.

Sunday was fairly low-key; after we lugged stuff to madfilkentist and starmalachite's cars; I caught a couple more panels and hung out in the main filk room as people gradually left. We eventually headed out at about 5:30, stopped at a diner in Edison for dinner, and arrived back home at about 1:30. I'd arranged to take today off, and slept in.

starmalachite and I are preparing to get on the road. The cats (or at least the two brighter ones) have gotten clingly after figuring out that The Humans Are Leaving.

Hope to see some of  you there.

Saturday had a very good lineup of concerts, and a showing of some of Brian Richardson's DragonConTV videos. After the batch of 2x10 (two songs/ten minutes), there was a break for people to get ready for the banquet. As usual, the banquet entertainment was excellent; I only joined in one dance myself, but there was generally as large a crowd as the portable floor (that had to be moved back into place a couple times as it drifted too close to the control board) could accomodate.

I don't recall the exact amount raised by the Interfilk auction (but it was fairly substantial); the item that particularly impressed me was the calligraphic rendering of "Rich Fantasy Lives" (autographed by the authors, filkertom  and partiallyclips ) went for (IIRC) $300.

The Saturday night open filk went fairly strong until about 4 AM, with occasional pauses into chatting mode toward the end. A guitar and bag was left in the room; the folks in the other room weren't completely sure but thought it belonged to filkerdave; starmalachite and I took it to our room and she left messages with every known contact route for him.

I got up around 11:00 Sunday, and just after I got dressed filkerdave called and confirmed that it was his guitar and bag. He dropped by to pick it up; then I finished getting myself together and headed down to programming (after going back to the room to get my checkbook to prereg for next year, and then back again because I'd forgotten something else -- I forget what).

People hung around chatting for a while between closing ceremonies and dinnertime. During a conversation in the hall, a bit of techno-neepery broke out, and partiallyclips   let us take a look at his Wing (one of the possible phone/PDA combination devices we've been considering now that our current T-Mobile phone contract is up). The features look good; on the other hand, he mentioned that the batteries tend to run out fast; on the gripping hand, I doubt that I'd be using it nearly as intensively as Rob does (e.g. "...adding a couple more CD sales to the FuMP records... go over the next section of Jillian's backstory... etcetcetc...").

We joined a dinner party to a local barbeque place (I'll just refer you to thatcrazycajun  's description, since he sums it up so well). Afterwards, we settled down for the dead dog, which ran well past midnight before the last remnants (including me and starmalachite ) broke up.

Monday morning, starmalachite   and I checked out and hung around the lobby with a few of the folks who were still around (including the Bohnhoffs and Peter Beagle) until we caught the airport shuttle and left the hotel to the upcoming convention of card shuffling experts. There was still plenty of time before Peter Beagle (and his companion whose name I'm blanking on) and the two of us had to catch our respective flights, so we had lunch at the Chinese place in the Councourse A food court. Afterwards, we made the long march down to our gate and caught our flight and got home without incident (except that  starmalachite  's filk-gear bag lost a wheel -- not a major loss, as it was starting to fall apart anyway).

starmalachite   went to Monday night dance group; I stayed home partially to soothe the cats' wounded psyches and partly because I was starting to crash out (I ended up going to bed before she got back).

 

starmalachite and I caught our flight (the timing was a bit close for comfort, but we didn't run into any snags and got to the gate just as boarding was beginning). I was a bit worried that we'd have to wait for our luggage, but it showed up normally.

We got to the hotel and met some of the other early arrivals. Then, we went back to the room for a while; starmalachite took a nap while I worked up a LOLpic from an idea I'd gotten on the flight. (The image is from the latest page of the webcomic Erfworld, and the humor of the pic, such as it is, probably doesn't work all that well if you aren't familiar with that context.). I then returned to the function space and picked up my badge, There was still a bit of time before opening ceremonies, so I played a game of Thurn and Taxis with mnemex and mrgoodwraith.

I met starmalachite at opening ceremonies. Con attendance this year looks pretty heavy, judging from the crowd there (and the fact that some people I knew were coming hadn't arrived yet). After the ceremony was the traditional GAFilk quiz show and instafilk writing entertainment, followed by filkertom's concert (which was excellent even by the standard I expect from him).

The con then broke into open filk mode over several rooms. I wandered a while, but was starting to fade out and crashed around 1 AM.

I'm back from Philcon -- the con organization left a few things to be desired, but in general I had a good time. I spent less time gaming and more at panels than usual (including a particularly interesting webcomics panel that was the start of partiallyclips' marathon of six panels in eight hours -- I mentioned something about the con organization, right?)

I might comment more later, for now I'll just throw out a few random items:

New custom button: Terrorists can attack freedom. Only governments can destroy it.

Notable dealer's room acquisitions: Caylus: Magna Carta; a batch of Erfworld postcards; Dr. SETI's latest CDs and the two I needed to fill in my FuMP set.

Now to give Satin her subcutaneous fluids and crash out for the night.

starmalachite and I are doing final packing and preparations for Philcon; I may or may not occasionally get online in the meantime. My pants will probably be at least on a tight budget; if there's anything you think I really need to see post a comment here.

After finishing up our packing while being pestered for attention from three cats who had figured out that The Humans Are Leaving, starmalachite and I headed for the Metro station and from there to National Airport to catch the morning flight to Columbus. Fortunately, the trip went off without any interesting incidents; I mostly zoned out until we landed.

While I was watching out for the shuttle, someone else noticed starmalachite  with the luggage and asked if she was headed to the same hotel. She turned out to be a relative newcomer; we (mostly starmalachite , really) chatted about some of the people she'd heard of and described a few other items of interest and general Filk 101 pointers.

We checked in, took a brief swim in the hotel pool, and then took a nap until dinnertime. After that, the con proper got underway. As usual, the Pegasus concert went very well (I thought the brief intermission was a good idea for letting people who were still pondering their votes recharge their mental batteries). Open filk Friday went on until about 3 AM (as far as I recall); I was still awake enough to hang out and chat with partiallyclips and maverick_weirdo until the breakfast buffet opened at 6:00, (IIRC, maverick_weirdo turned in before breakfast, but jannyblue joined us at the restaurant.)

I spent about as much time wandering around as I did at the various concerts Saturday afternoon. I enjoyed the Pegasus banquet, with hearty congratulations to the winners. The Interfilk auction had one T-shirt I was briefly tempted to bid on, but before I decided to jump in the bids had gone a bit above my temptation level. As usual, open filk ran later Saturday night, with about a dozen survivors heading for the breakfast buffet when it finally wound down. (AFAIK, I was the only one who kept awake through breakfast both days. That surprised me, actually; the last few cons I've been at I conked out by 3:00 or so).

Sunday had a few events leading up to the traditional jam session, followed by a mass exodus to BD's Mongolian for a dinner run and then the dead dog party, which was still going on when I finally crashed out at about 3:30.

I got up at about 11 Monday morning; we packed up and headed for the lobby (we were lucky enough to get a room on the ground floor right near the rear lobby entrance), where we met Kathy Mar and split a cab ride to the airport. There was one disconcerting moment when we got back to Franconia/Springfield station and couldn't find our car at first; it turned out that it was around a corner from where we first looked for it. That problem solved, we headed home.

Tired now.

starmalachite and I spent Friday evening at a Jonathan Coulton concert opened by Paul & Storm. The opener had some good numbers (I recall a "Schoolhouse Rock" style counting-to-ten number, but they lost me with a funny-for-one-minute but lasted-for-many-minutes "If James Taylor Were on Fire (&c)" number. The main act was great, as Jonathan Coulton always is.

We got to the con and played a few games of Ingenious before I crashed out for the night. Saturday, I had time to settle in to the con and play a few games, among which I was introduced to Winds of Plunder. As always, the crowd was small but friendly.

Sunday night, a group of us including angel_vixen and blackpaladin played a truly accursed game of Shadows Over Camelot, that ended with seven black swords and only one white one. (Even if you don't know the game, you've probably guessed that that's bad. It is.) About the only redeeming feature is that there was, in fact, a traitor subtly working against the rest of the group -- if we'd done that badly against the pure mechanics of the game, even I would have had to suggest some silly gamer-superstition ritual to break the curse.

Monday, the con ended, entirely too soon as usual. We played half a game of Cities and Knights before moving out of the function space, and then half a game of Alhambra: The Dice Game in the lobby before adjourning for the dead dog dinner. We checked out a few Labor Day sales, without much luck at finding anything useful; at that point, starmalachite and I concluded that I was fading a bit too much to hang around for the Three Left Feet meeting and headed home.

starmalachite and I are going to a Jonathan Coulton and Paul & Storm concert at the Birchmere. After that, we'll be spending most of the weekend at the local gaming relaxacon, TCEP 14 -- Gamers of the Carribbean. The hotel apparently has free wireless, so I may be online occasionally, but less often than usual.

We set out Wednesday night for our usual pre-Confluence trip to Kennywood, arriving at the hotel at o-dark-thirty and crashing. We spent Thursday at the park -- as luck would have it, the crowds were particularly thin (thunderstorms had been predicted, but never materialized) and we were able to go on all the interesting rides two or three times each before closing time.

In general, Kennywood is a survivor of the old-fashioned type of amusement park. One exception that we remembered not-so-fondly from last year was the "old mine" ride, which had been rebranded as "Garfield's Nightmare" and converted into a 3-D day-glo ad for Frito-Lay products. We rode it once to refresh our memories of how tacky it was.

For some reason (I blame residual dizziness), I was inspired to create an Erfworld fanmix around a set of visual puns, which I whipped up and posted to the site forum after we got back to the hotel. Afterwards, I crashed out, my work here being done.

Friday morning, we packed up and headed for Confluence. There was a slight complication when it turned out that we hadn't printed out directions from the Kennywood hotel to the Confluence hotel, and the "PrintMe" system that was supposed to send documents to the hotel desk didn't work as advertised. I ended up copying them the old-fashioned way with stone knives and bearskins pen and paper, and we hit the road.

We made it to the con without incident, and as luck would have it a place called "Primanti's" that starmalachite wanted to search out for lunch turned out to be right across the road. We ate, got settled in, registered, and enjoyed the con.

Other than one or two of William Tenn's panels, I mostly alternated between the concerts, open filking, generally hanging out with people, and occasional Web surfing. A good time was had until we headed home Sunday evening and arrived at o-dark-thirty Monday morning.

Next: Sunday, The Wedding, and post-con homecoming and recovery.

I'm currently sitting at the Conterpoint registration desk improvising temporary badge holders until starmalachite returns with an additional supply.

I'd thought a box of 100 and a supplemental packet of 24 was going to be overoptimistic. May this be the biggest problem at your convention.

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.

Today, starmalachite and I went out to discuss our dessert-reception arrangements (for our wedding at the end of Conterpoint) with the kosher bakery we heard about from gorgeousgary and the_sheryl. Their offerings look promising, and less expensive than I was expecting for a good dessert buffet.

(On the subject of Conterpoint, it's worth mentioning again that madfilkentist would like submissions for the convention CD/songbook by May 15, the hotel block closes on the 22nd, and preregistration closes at the end of May. We now return you to my irregularly unscheduled random commentary.)

We then went to see Spider-Man 3. My overall impression is that it's better than most of the reviews give it credit for, but not as good as the first two; they probably would have been better off to use fewer characters and develop them more thoroughly. The angst level was pretty high, but then it generally was in the comics.

There were a couple of neat promo items in the theater lobby -- a sofa with a set of life-sized Simpsons plastic statues (and a space for somebody to sit down with them and get a picture taken) and a life-sized Silver Surfer figure, complete with surfboard, advertising the upcoming Fantastic Four movie.