yup, still alive.
Currently I’m in San Pablo, CA – part of the San Francisco Bay area, and tomorrow we head off to Toronto.
Last week was Worldcon in Anaheim.
Worldcon was pretty good, although I think I was most interested in seeing how a con of that size functions. They had some quite good ideas that unfortunately probably require that size to be useful.
One interesting fact – Total amount of non useful advertising in the con bag: 2 items.
As far as the programming went, it was very much a Science Fiction convention. Very meagre pickings for a fantasy fan. In fact pretty much the only fantasy related panels were ridiculing it in some way, but I guess that’s probably to be expected. I’ll have to make it to a World Fantasy convention some time.
The dealers room was amazing, and a terrible, terrible trap.
The art show wasn’t bad, but I don’t think it was anything special either. Just a regular con art show, scaled up to Worldcon size.
The masquerade was an interesting experience. It seems that just like Australian masquerades it’s completely lost the meaning of what a masquerade is. It’s just done it in the other direction, so it’s a big overblown, and slightly tedious fashion show.
It’d be interesting to see a con in which they managed to pull the two ends back together – combining serious costuming competition with a free form party.
The thing that really stood out though, was the general infrastructure and running of the con – it really felt like it was being run by people with a lot of experience that really knew what they were doing.
All in all I was pretty impressed. I didn’t make it to quite as many sessions as I would have liked, but it was fun just being there.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it!
