BayCon summary

[hrj]

I haven't been to a BayCon for years -- no single reason, but I fell out of the habit while in grad school when it fell right after the end of the school year and I was desperately in need of down time. The main drive this time was social. I wanted to spend some face time with people I've been interacting with on-line, and I had someone to introduce to the world of sf conventions. And as it turned out, going to a convention with no agenda other than hanging out and socializing seems to have been the key to enjoying myself immensely.

I'd made advance plans to meet up with ritaxis, and therefore by the transitive property with julesjones and we ended up having similar enough interests (along with vague enough goals) to spend most of the day together, starting with the Broad Universe reading session that Jules was reading in (which convinced me that maybe some gay male supernatural romance is worth tracking down and buying after all) all the way through to the after-dinner Alien Sex panel (which started off pleasantly enough as a survey of the interesting variety of sexual strategies available among earth species, but in the Q&A descended somewhat unpleasantly into the regurgitation of ignorant prejudice and bigotry about various human social systems).

Sunday, the agenda was to introduce scotica to her first sf convention -- which goal turned out to be a success. We started out at the "Interesting Ways to Kill Your Characters" panel which -- as I pointed out later -- by the strongly transitive grammatical construction of the panel title seemed to have skewed the speakers to talking primarily about murder (characters killing other characters) rather than character death in general (authors killing characters). The Harry Potter speculation panel was fairly predictable, but the joy was in watching a superbly talented moderator work the room in a way that kept things moving and balanced in the face of potential chaos. (I made sure to compliment her on it afterwards!) We bumped into my cousin C. on the way into lunch but she was waiting on a friend and didn't join us. After lunch we hit the art show and dealer's room, including a long chat with klwilliams who, when sounded out about dinner, invited us along on an expedition that included Esther Friesner. We dithered between an interview with fantasy GoH Diana Paxson and one entitled "CSI: Dark Ages" on writing crime in medieval settings. We settled on the latter, acknowledging that it would be either extremely interesting or extremely dire (my prediction: "know-nothings wanking off"). It was, alas, the latter. In the first five minutes, the panelists moved quickly from defining the dark ages as "feudal society" (a reasonable mis-step for non-medievalists), to explaining that medieval society consisted of only two groups of people: peasants who did all the work, and nobles who lazed around enjoying themselves, but when the panel moved on to explaining that there wasn't really any statutary law in the medieval era, just some remnants of the Justinian code and some vague customary law, we knew that we were in "dire" territory. When one panelist then explained that writing a medieval crime involved understanding the difficulties in identifying which law had been broken -- that, for example, the pregnancy of an unmarried woman might equally be construed to involve fornication, rape, or seduction by an incubus -- we turned to each other, muttered, "know-nothings wanking off" and adjourned to the GoH interview. (It could have been a very interesting and informative panel. Maybe they could try it again some time with people who are actually familiar with medieval history and the history of legal systems. There's no reason to expect someone involved in modern criminology to be able to speak intelligently about medieval criminology any more than you can expect a modern cook to prepare a medieval banquet.) After the DP interview, we figured the improv storytelling session "A Shot Rang Out" would be amusing -- which it was, although it was often a bit too in-jokey to be intelligible. This was followed by going to Esther Friesner's reading which, in addition to being enjoyable, seemed an efficient way to end up in the same place as our dinner companions. Dinner was at an excellent Chinese restaurant (and has supplied me with some leftover crispy roast duck that will flavor an as-yet-unspecified soup).

I didn't try to get to the masquerade, since space was so limited that you had to wait hours in line Saturday afternoon to get one of the entry bracelets (and besides which, I didn't want to find something conflicting with whatever dinner plans I ended up with). I didn't go to any of the filking -- somehow, somewhere along the way, I've stopped getting much enjoyment out of filking. Not sure why (well, I have some ideas, but they're neither here nor there). But I had a lot of random conversations with people I don't ordinarily have time to have conversations with. And that's what made it a fun con.

Today, I will mow the lawn. After all, what are holidays for? And Happy Birthday Mom!