|
Friday
Kirby and I flew out on Friday afternoon, arriving at the Portland
airport in reasonable time and finding a shuttle to the hotel. It was
surprisingly cold -- well, perhaps not surprising to people who live in
places with real weather, but surprising to me. Upon arriving at the
hotel we went immediately to registration, picked up our stuff, and
then to the front desk to find our room -- which, it turned out, was in
the overflow hotel. A long trudge across a parking lot (and under a
bridge) led us to the correct place. Our roommates (Chuck/Zingaro and
St. Emily the Just) had arrived before us, so we dumped our stuff
quickly and went off in search of them.
We ran into Beth Moursund while we were hunting for Chuck & Emily; I'd
first met on PernMUSH back in 1991, so it was truly amusing to meet her
in person. We spoke briefly, and then wandered off to hunt for Chuck
-- only to see him coming down the hall. Finding Emily was just about
as simple, and she introduced us to the person she'd been hanging out
with, and next thing I knew we were glotting around the upstairs hall,
chatting away merrily.
I spent the rest of Friday evening wandering around with Chuck, being
introduced to people and catching up. We hadn't had a real chance to
talk in about a year and a half, so it was extremely nice to go from
place to place chatting. Eventually we found the dance, and danced
until they quit playing 80's music, at which point we went back to the
room and failed to sleep because of Emily and Kirby showing up and
talking. Conversation lasted for many hours.
Saturday
The alarm went off at 10am so that I could get up, get showered, and
wander with Chuck over to the con hotel to see a few panels.
Sense of Place in Fantasy was thoroughly interesting;
Patrick Nielsen Hayden went on at length about a book called
Landscape and Memory by Simon Schama (probably mispelled
-- I have it correctly in my OryCon program, which is at home). I
laughed a lot and enjoyed myself.
The next panel was one about villains who are more interesting than
heroes, and I have very little memory of it because I just didn't find
it too interesting. It probably hurt a lot that I hadn't read any of
the authors who were on the panel. I'd gone into it thinking about
Avon from Blake's 7, and the people on the panel wanted to
talk about how villains committing terrible deeds serve as an emotional
release for the dark sides of reader personalities. Whatever.
Chuck went to the poly panel, so I went to Ask Dr. Genius,
where I sat with Anita and laughed a lot. The idea of the panel is that
the audience asks weird questions and then the panellists give even
weirder answers. I, of course, remember neither the questions nor
the answers, but Jon Singer and David Levine were seriously funny.
Afterwards Anita introduced me to Jon, who was quite pleasant to chat
with. Then we rounded up Chuck, hunted down Luke, and had lunch.
More convention report another day. That's about as much as I can
write about it without going into serious detail-mode, and my wrists
are starting to ache.
|