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Philcon was this weekend. I attended with my brother, and Jon showed up on Saturday.

I had a great time, but I always feel like I might enjoy these cons more if I weren't so omnivorously geeky. I feel obligated to see everything, when the reality is I would have more fun if I spent more time talking to people and less time running from thing to thing. If I were just an anime fan, I could just stick to the single-room anime track for the whole weekend and not feel like I was missing anything. But this con made me choose between sitting through Marvel/DC wank and D&D Edition wank, and... seriously, how could I reasonably choose and not feel that I was missing something? :P

I was probably happiest at the con on Saturday afternoon/evening, when I gave up on going to panels and just started hanging out in the gaming suite. I learned two new games that were fun, Tsuro and Smashup. Tsuro is a really elegant, casual puzzle game. Smashup is a card game where pirates, ninjas, fairies, wizards, robots, and aliens compete. It's gloriously ridiculous. And then after that we played a Dread scenario. Dread is a horror rpg that uses a Jenga tower as its action resolution mechanism. If the tower falls while you're pulling a tile, you die. The game went long, because all rpgs ever run long, and it was ridiculous and scary and funny in good measures, and I had a blast.

My other frustration with SF cons is starting to be the kinds of geekishness you can't talk about. It is almost spooky the way any reference to fanfiction is missing from the conversation, when you just know that a third of the con has some involvement in some way with fanfiction. But because of MZB-inspired paranoia, it is a mostly unspoken etiquette faux pas to mention fanfiction around published authors, since it might cause them to be eaten by brainworms. I had to swallow my tongue a few times in panels since I kept forgetting about this rule. There was a Space Westerns panel, which was actually really good, since it talked about Firefly a lot less than I'd expected and had a good, broad perspective on the idea of space westerns and what western tropes translate well to SF, but we made it through without discussing fanfic Space Western AUs, which bothered me a little. I guess I should just start going to fanfic-oriented cons, except those mostly seem to be slash fandom cons, and I am not exactly a slasher even though I have written slash. And I don't want to go to slash cons, I want to go to general geeky cons where I can bounce from the filk room to the lit SF room to the astronomy room to the anime room to the game room, and be able to talk about fanfiction without feeling like a criminal. Eh...