Noreascon 4

Worldcon was teh awesome.

jducoeur's Thursday demo went well, and afterward I largely spent the evening getting my bearings. Dropped by the LJ party with no real expectations of it, but found chanaleh (whom I'd never met in meatspace) and xiphias (whom I had met briefly, but didn't know was he) and wandered over to the Nippon '07 bid party to consume sake. Hung around for quite a while with some SCA people chatting until making the lengthy trek back to bed. The Hynes Convention Center and attached complex are quite spread out, lending a feeling of enormity to the event and 10-15 minutes to my walk back to the room.

The days blend together a bit after that, but I saw lots of good panels, a few nifty readings, some very nice work in the art show, random bits of volunteering, and of course much general schmoozing; I just don't remember what happened when while the sun was up. There were a couple of notable events, though: the Hugos were vaguely interesting but mostly just because Neil was MCing (with the exception of a surprisingly enthralling retrospective of the ceremony done by Robert Silverberg, the only person to have been to all of them). The Masquerade was alright, with a good set of interesting presentations countering the usual generic entries. There was one that was so-so costumewise, but was dramatically the best piece I've seen at a Masquerade, in which Death gives up her (sic) duties to Man, since he is more apt at them. The lights went out with a 12-year-old shooting Death in the head. It was creepy.

And then, there were the parties...

Friday night anu3bis and I (and balsamic_dragon and her brother for the first half) started at the top of the Sheraton's north tower (where all public parties were) and worked our way through every party. We drank, we ate vindaloo, we laughed maniacally, we demanded chocolate in Klingon, we glowed in the dark, and we saw an astronaut leading a hula dance. It rocked.

Saturday night I got a late start, but grabbed danceboy and headed up to see what was still open. We closed several of the remaining parties, and he took off shortly after we washed up at the George R. R. Martin party (I saw no real evidence of the theme, but the party was pretty good). Conveniently I found ian_gunn and we stuck around for awhile, until following The Enthusiastic Irishman back down to the lower floors, where we camped outside of mini-Arisia. (Arisia had the cool idea of promoting their con by holding Arisia 2004.5, a 10-hour compressed version with mini-food (cupcakes, goldfish, pita... everything in miniature), mini-buttons for sale, a mini-art-show, short films, a 5 minute Cecilia Tan reading, and a 1-minute panel. It was a great idea.) The diminutive con itself was pretty crowded, but we hung around outside until it closed down, and then hung around a little bit more. jamesb, zarabee, and I were the last people to leave the con that night, and we got our picture taken against the dawn.

Sunday was pretty tame, by comparison, but some relaxed party-hopping happened, ending when we hit the "Geneva Convention" party, which I declared The Place to Be upon finding Drambuie and Amarula there. Eventually Ian and I (the last people we knew still there) wandered down to the game room, where a few rounds of fluxx happened to finish off the night.

Monday pretty much all I did was go to a panel on dead characters in SF and Fantasy - that happened to include Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Connie Willis, and Larry Niven. It was a good place to stop and go home.