(no subject)
May. 31st, 2016 10:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretBalticon was pretty fun. The alumni guest of honor thing meant that I could pretty effectively ignore GRRM's presence and make my own con experience with alternate GoHs Connie Willis and Kim Stanley Robinson. With cameo appearances from Larry Niven and Joe Haldeman and Harry Turtledove... I mean, it is something else to spend a whole weekend listening to that many of your childhood heroes speaking.
KSR did a great panel looking retrospectively back on the Mars Trilogy from a perspective 25 years on, how he's changed his thinking about colonization and Mars and so on. A lot of those changes were evident from Aurora, which I just finished and will review soon, so it was interesting hear them reflected backward. He also did a great panel that was just him talking over a slideshow of photos from a mid '90s visit to Antarctica.
Willis and Niven were joined by Alexandra Duncan, Fran Wilde, and Charles Gannon on what was for me the most inspiring writing panel of the con, with all of them talking thoughtfully about how to balance science and story and how to fold research and ideas into characters. I left the panel full of ideas and wanting to write more, which is really good.
Socially a pretty good experience otherwise, getting to see and talk to a bunch of fans I've gotten to know at other cons, meeting some cool new people, including very unfortunately briefly,batyatoon. (We were at a panel on the intersection of Judaism and fantasy and the things she was saying about Tolkien's dwarves sounded very familiar... and then I realized we'd had this exact conversation before. Unfortunately it was the last panel of the con for me and I had to hit the road afterward, but we at least said hi.)
I was also the winner, with a randomly selected teammate, of the Balticon trivia contest. I've never come close to winning a con trivia contest before because usually the trivia skews too old for me, involving lots of '50s SF stories that the long-time con-goers are deeply familiar with. The questions skewed a little younger, and I think I also benefited from format, because I can say, with little modesty, that I dominated the competition.
The format was largely pyramidal toss-ups, which are designed to reward the player with the broadest knowledge base, but I think also reward players who are familiar with the format and know how to pull together assorted individually insufficient clues to build a mental image of the right answer. In any case, it's always fun to play trivia and it's even more fun when you win.
The actual... logistics of the con were less fun. Moving to downtown Baltimore was annoying in a bunch of ways over the suburban setting of recent past Balticons... Parking, food prices, lots of other things like that were just irritating. I did think the actual function space was generally better- more concentrated, easier to get from one event to the next in a different section, for one thing, but elevator access was a problem for people who couldn't use stairs, and the concentration sometimes meant congested hallways, particularly when GRRM had an event people were lining up for in the hallways. And there were rooms that locked when you closed them, a huge problem when people wanted to move in and out of them in the middle of a panel.
Even bigger logistical problems were present in the scheduling. The con acknowledged this with an apology in their final program update, which had more errata than I've ever seen at a con, and promised changes for future cons. Let's hope that's true. A few scheduling mixups are understandable, but there were dozens. I heard a story about two cancelled panels for the same function space where nobody'd been told that either was cancelled, so they convened a panel merging both cancelled panel concepts together.
But eh, all in all it was a really good weekend.
KSR did a great panel looking retrospectively back on the Mars Trilogy from a perspective 25 years on, how he's changed his thinking about colonization and Mars and so on. A lot of those changes were evident from Aurora, which I just finished and will review soon, so it was interesting hear them reflected backward. He also did a great panel that was just him talking over a slideshow of photos from a mid '90s visit to Antarctica.
Willis and Niven were joined by Alexandra Duncan, Fran Wilde, and Charles Gannon on what was for me the most inspiring writing panel of the con, with all of them talking thoughtfully about how to balance science and story and how to fold research and ideas into characters. I left the panel full of ideas and wanting to write more, which is really good.
Socially a pretty good experience otherwise, getting to see and talk to a bunch of fans I've gotten to know at other cons, meeting some cool new people, including very unfortunately briefly,
batyatoon. (We were at a panel on the intersection of Judaism and fantasy and the things she was saying about Tolkien's dwarves sounded very familiar... and then I realized we'd had this exact conversation before. Unfortunately it was the last panel of the con for me and I had to hit the road afterward, but we at least said hi.)I was also the winner, with a randomly selected teammate, of the Balticon trivia contest. I've never come close to winning a con trivia contest before because usually the trivia skews too old for me, involving lots of '50s SF stories that the long-time con-goers are deeply familiar with. The questions skewed a little younger, and I think I also benefited from format, because I can say, with little modesty, that I dominated the competition.
The format was largely pyramidal toss-ups, which are designed to reward the player with the broadest knowledge base, but I think also reward players who are familiar with the format and know how to pull together assorted individually insufficient clues to build a mental image of the right answer. In any case, it's always fun to play trivia and it's even more fun when you win.
The actual... logistics of the con were less fun. Moving to downtown Baltimore was annoying in a bunch of ways over the suburban setting of recent past Balticons... Parking, food prices, lots of other things like that were just irritating. I did think the actual function space was generally better- more concentrated, easier to get from one event to the next in a different section, for one thing, but elevator access was a problem for people who couldn't use stairs, and the concentration sometimes meant congested hallways, particularly when GRRM had an event people were lining up for in the hallways. And there were rooms that locked when you closed them, a huge problem when people wanted to move in and out of them in the middle of a panel.
Even bigger logistical problems were present in the scheduling. The con acknowledged this with an apology in their final program update, which had more errata than I've ever seen at a con, and promised changes for future cons. Let's hope that's true. A few scheduling mixups are understandable, but there were dozens. I heard a story about two cancelled panels for the same function space where nobody'd been told that either was cancelled, so they convened a panel merging both cancelled panel concepts together.
But eh, all in all it was a really good weekend.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-06-07 02:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-06-07 09:23 pm (UTC)WisCon
Date: 2016-06-22 01:29 am (UTC)I am glad that next year I'll be able to enjoy WisCon more because its scheduling won't conflict with PyCon's. (This year, I had to fly from Madison to Portland on Monday (Memorial Day), which was inconvenient and a downer.)