Balticon

Balticon was a last minute decision- freeradical42 reached out to me a few weeks before the con, told me they'd booked a hotel room, and asked if I wanted to come along. So I decided to go. Then they bailed on me for Shabbos even last minuter, so that was annoying, but eh...

I got to the con Friday afternoon. After settling in, I went to a panel on the Orville as the ostensible return of 'optimistic SF', which the panelists to my relief quickly reframed as 'realistic SF', and then moved on to babble for an hour about how much fun The Orville is and how fresh its take on the Star Trek mythos is.

Then I made kiddush and ate Shabbos dinner in my room, and studied the parasha a bit. Afterward, I went to the con's first of three panels on fanfiction, "Fanfiction as Critique and Commentary", which was the most "Justify the Existence of Fanfiction" panel of the weekend, but was mostly fun anyway. The panelists were a little too disparate in fandom experience to be able to talk too directly with each other about specific critiques, but the general conversation about the way Fanfiction is a tool for interacting with canon was in good spirit, and I hung around afterward for a while talking about Newsies fanfic and YoI fandom and so on. Someone gave me their AO3 name and promised they'd write Jewish!Sarah. I am eagerly reloading their AO3 page every couple days now with undying hope. Eventually, I went back to my room to read and go to sleep early.

First thing Saturday morning I studied parasha a bit on my own and then went to Rabbi Nove's parasha discussion. He used Michael Carasik's translated Mikraot Gedolot to go through several passages in Naso, which is one of the weirder parashayiot, in my opinion. The princes' gifts alone would make it a difficult section of Torah to study, with their endless repetition making Naso the longest parasha in Chumash. But you also have sotah, nazir, birkas kohanim, all sorts of obscure, non-obvious pieces of Torah. We spent a lot of time talking about nazir, because Rabbi Nove CLEARLY did not want to talk about sotah with the feminist women that mostly comprised the group. I don't really blame him. I have no idea what to say about sotah. But nazir is plenty interesting on its own, with its own special paradoxes. We talked a lot about why someone would want to take such a vow, and whether the Torah looks favorably on it or not... whether the chatat sin offering they offer at the end of their term is atonement for the vow itself, or atonement for whatever sin led them to choose to make the vow.

I spent most of the rest of the morning in panels on the science track, which was way better than I'm used to seeing at SF cons. They mostly had individual scientists/science interested people give presentations, rather than trying to assemble panels discussions, where the range of expertise of the panelists is typically too wide to allow focused conversation. This let the experts really flash their expertise, and it worked great. I went to a presentation on the history and chemistry of blue dyes, a presentation with a paleontologist fanwanking Jurassic Park's more egregious science problems, a presentation by Catherine Asaro on the moral questions posed by some new biotech, like organs grown in the lab, a presentation on current technology for mind-reading... All were fascinating, hitting this perfect balance for an SFF con between just being inherently scientifically interesting and offering new ideas for SF.

I made kiddush and ate Shabbos lunch in my room, then went to the second fanfic panel, which was about "Slash of our Ancestors," or at least the history and evolution of fanfic fandom. It was kind of mixed between '70s/'80s zine fic people and fans of my generation who grew up on email lists and LJ fandom. I enjoyed the reminisces of late '90s/early '00s fandom more than the '70s/'80s stories, by and large. Memories of my baby fandom years. Afterward, I briefly bumped into ambyr on the stairwell, and we arranged to meet up later at the SF trivia contest. I went back to my room and read for a bit and napped for a bit and ate dinner, and then went to the Jordin Kare memorial concert.

I'm really, really glad I caught that. Kare's music and scientific spirit meant a lot to me, and he was kind and friendly when I met him at Loncon. A medley of Balticon filkers covered all of the songs I most wanted to hear one more time, including "Psi-Nought", "Heart of the Apple Lisa", and of course "Fire in the Sky", which had the whole audience in tears. And they told many wonderful memories of Kare's generosity and sense of fun and wonder. And, er, punder.

Afterward was SF trivia. I didn't do so well- we were slightly ahead of ambyr's team in second place in our heat, until the final question of the heat, on Mieville's Perdido Street Station, knocked us out when ambyr beat me to the buzzer by a second. Particularly annoying since ambyr apparently hasn't even read the damned book. :P In the second round, I watched from the audience cheering as ambyr's team won the whole event in a tight battle.

Afterward we went to the gameroom and I bungled some Hanabi, and then ambyr left to track down the Super Sekrit Ada Palmer reading and her trivia teammate (imaget?)and I attempted SHH, a word-formation microgame that we had to play twice before we managed to play a full game by the rules. The premise of SHH is that players alternate playing letters from their hands to form words, and no communication is allowed between players about what letters they have and what words they're trying to build. It's fatally flawed as a co-op microgame- you usually want microgames to be social and casual, but this one restricts communication. We won the game, but I would have rather played a game that allowed more talking.

Then imaget realized that she'd lost her wallet, so I ran around backtracking her prior locations while she doublechecked that it wasn't buried deep in her bag, and then we went to Con-Ops to check if it had been turned in. Which it had! Seems she'd left it at the registration table, which is about the best place you can lose a wallet at a con. After that, we were worn out and decided to call it a night. I went back to my room to wait for freeradical42 to show up, which happened around 12:45am. We chatted for a bit while he frantically finished his panel presentation for the morning, and then went to sleep.

Sunday, I went to freeradical42's 9am panel on the most recent scientific understandings of the immune system, and then... that was kind of it for me and panels at the con for the rest of the day. freeradical42 and I went to get a late breakfast at the Van Gough Cafe, the only kosher restaurant in the area, and so we were a little late but I caught the second half of the panel on Jews in SF, and then I'd made plans to go visit metamorphage and gingerrose, which turned out to take more time than anticipated.

[Context:

A) Balticon for a long while was hosted at a suburban hotel just outside Baltimore, with plenty of free parking. Recently, it moved to the Inner Harbor, with insanely expensive parking. Last time I went to the con, I hadn't planned for parking well enough and I think it socked me for something like $80 for the long weekend. freeradical42's solution is to take the train, but I feel like I need to drive, if it's possible, to have enough schlepping room for my food for Shabbos and all the things I want to have with me. I also, by preference, wanted to bring my bike with me, as I've been biking more lately and Memorial Day weekend in the Inner Harbor seemed like a nice opportunity to bike. But I didn't want to have to pay that much for parking.

B) So I developed a plan! Since I was bringing my bike anyway, I could drop off my stuff at the hotel, drive out of the city to a free park and ride, and then bike back to the hotel. By making it a park and ride rather than a random dropoff, I had a backup plan of taking the bus to my car if the biking idea failed, and if the bike plan worked, I could get some extra exercise.

C) On the bike ride back to the hotel on Friday, my bike rear derailleur somehow got messed up. There were only a few gears I could ride in without chain grinding, making the ride much harder than it otherwise would've been, but I made it. So I was looking to minimize the biking anyway, and then it was raining most of Sunday, so I was settled on taking the bus to my car for the drive to metamorphage and gingerrose.

D) FUCK THE BALTIMORE BUS SYSTEM

]


So anyway, I had a lovely visit with metamorphage and gingerrose. I haven't seen them in a couple years. It was nice to see their house and walk around town a bit and have a beer. I convinced metamorphage to come back to the con with me with promises of getting to see freeradical42 and allandaros. But I didn't make it back to the con until almost 7PM because of the bus that drove away when I was running toward it, and the bus that didn't show up at all, and then the bus that took its sweet old time making its way downtown, and when I got to the con, allandaros showed up and neither he nor metamorphage had a badge, so I basically ended up missing the whole rest of the con that day. Which was mostly fine, I'm usually burnt out on con by Sunday afternoon, but I wish I'd had a little more time so I could've seen ambyr again. After allandaros went home, we went to the hotel bar and watched Game 7 of the Celtics-Cavs series, which was a pretty fascinating game. After which we said, "The Cavs just won the right to get beaten by the Warriors," which turned out to be dead accurate.

Monday morning early I rode my bike out to the park and ride and brought my car back to get my stuff from the hotel room. There weren't really any panels I wanted to see, so I hung out with freeradical42 for a few hours, said goodbye to a few people, and then drove home. I'd hoped to visit stvcmty and family on the drive back up, but unfortunately the kids were sick, so I skipped that and was home, dead exhausted, by about 3PM.