Recently in Conventions Category

Mountain-Con III starts today at the University Park Marriott (480 Wakara Way, Salt Lake City). I'll be posting reports on the con over the weekend. Hope to see you all there!

We got back Tuesday. Things have been a bit preoccupied since, so this final day report is a bit late.

Monday morning I thought I'd see if I could get tickets for the last two game sessions. If not, there were other things I could do, instead. As it happened I managed to find gaming registration (many signs giving directions had already been taken down, and one hotel employee told me I was welcome to remove the one I had found leaning against the railing), and there were tickets left to buy. So I played another session of Living Greyhawk.

At the end I was awarded the table prize, which I had to exchange for a DragonCon coin at the gaming registration desk before 2 pm. The coin in turn was supposed to be worth $5 in the dealer room. Who would pass up $5? Not me. I hurried to gaming registration, exchanged the prize for the coin, found there was still enough time to run to the Peachtree Center food court and buy something to eat, and made it back in time for the second session.

I was looking forward to the second session when those of us waiting there were told that the module we had signed up for was only available in APL 6 and higher. However, there was another APL 2 module available, and we were told to go play that one, instead. I had sat down and the game master started reading the module's pre-amble. It sounded familiar to me. Oops. I had already played it.

So back to the fellow in charge to explain my predicament. He told me that there were no other Living Greyhawk modules for that session, but if I was up for playing something different there was a table of Witch Hunter I could join. It sounded like fun to me, so that's what I did for the next four hours. Witch Hunter is set in an alternate history 17th Century, with a gothic horror flavor. The game system was easy enough to learn. I had a good time.

Afterwards I visited the dealer room. It was in the Hilton. It seemed large, but because it was laid out in a kind of horse shoe shape with the stairwell taking up the space in the center I couldn't really say how it compared to other dealer rooms. I was amazed at the variety of product, though. It ranged from tables for comics artists to jewelry. I bought a very pretty jade pendant for Elysa, a CD of Midnight Syndicate's DnD gaming music, a copy of Haibane Renmei, and then I spotted Goro Miyazaki's Tales from Earth Sea.

The movie hasn't been released in the States, yet. (If you go to imdb.com you'll find that it's been released in a lot of places besides the US. According to the woman at that table there are legal disputes. Aren't there always.) It's been dubbed in English, but apparently there are no subtitles on this copy. No matter. I bought it, too. (I've watched it since then. As often happens I'm not happy with the dubbing voice actors, who phoned in their performances, but without subtitles I had to put up with that. Yes, the actors are well known. Their performances still didn't impress me.)

I wandered around the dealer room for a while. Eventually the dealer room closed and I made my way back to the hotel. Elysa had decided to sleep in, so she was rested and we went to my son's one more time to spend the evening there at a front porch barbecue.

The trip home was remarkable only to the extent that I only got lost once on the way to return the car to the rental agency, and our plane was held in Denver for about two hours while they first worked on a mechanical problem, and then waited for the storm in Salt Lake City to calm down enough to allow planes to land again.

DragonCon had a record 56,000 attendees this year. Part of the planned convention space wasn't available because the Marriott was under construction, and the resulting crowding tended to be awesome when it wasn't awful. Next year I would expect similar crowds, but different problems, since the Marriott's construction is supposed to be done, but the Hyatt will be making renovations, instead. However, if you can make it, go. It's loads of fun!

I did sign off last night saying I had to be at the con by 8:30 so I could get lost.

I did get lost. Well, not quite. I went ahead without Elysa because she wasn't feeling well, and while on the train I was reading. I noticed Civic Center station going by. I didn't remember that Peachtree Center is right after Civic Center, so at the next stop I asked which stop it was. I wasn't wearing my hearing aids, so by the time I figured out that was Peachtree Center the train's doors were already closed. I had to get off at Five Points and backtrack to Peachtree. Luckily the wait wasn't long, and I did make it to my planned gaming session.

I haven't been gaming in a long while. It was fun to do it again. I also learned that Wizards of the Coast is planning on forcing all of the RPGA Living Campaigns to Edition 4. 2008 is the last year for Living Greyhawk. In 2009 they will start Living Forgotten Realms with edition 4 rules. So play like there's no tomorrow!

I honestly don't know how I'll handle that. I've not really bought all that many 3.5th edition books. I've got the three basic ones, and a few others, but hardly the dozens that I could own. Switching to 4th edition wouldn't be such a great deal of "look at all these books I won't be using anymore" for me. But I do know some people who have a small fortune invested in 3.5th edition, and switching will be painful for them.

In a way it's testimony to the amazing quality of the product since 3rd edition. When TSR owned the franchise there were very few well produced books. The main books were in fact amazingly inferior productions. And there weren't that many of them, mostly because of TSR's counterproductive attitudes to issues of copyright, which kept a lot of people from writing or making art for them. Switching from one edition to the next under TSR was never an issue. Wizards changed all that, and that is really the only reason why people now even have a reason to complain about all that money they've already spent.

Anyway, I suspect my own gaming group will stick with 3.5, but I'll also play 4th edition because of the RPGA. Sure, RPGA is a marketing tool for Wizards. But RPGA is also fun, which is the whole point of this hobby.

(Above I used the word "invest" intentionally. If you're "investing" in your hobby by buying stuff, then you've got the wrong attitude entirely. Invest in stocks or bonds or gold or whatever you think you can count on creating an income for you. Buying DnD books will never do that. They are not an investment. Collecting them compulsively will never get you anything but a hole in your bank account. Thus endeth Helge's Wallstreet Minute.)

The modules they play here in Georgia (Grand Marche in Living Greyhawk) are very militaristic in tone. This time was no different. The first module was along the lines of "explore this hole in the ground and report back" - APL 2 (for low level characters), with a finish that involved a confrontation with uniformed bad guys. The second was a double sized interactive combat scenario, complete with some LARPing. It started with a regatta and ended up with taking back a town from some bandits. I had a great time.

DragonCon apparently has some kind of arrangement with the hotels, because no one got yelled at for bringing in outside food. Knowing that I brought a bagel for lunch to eat at the table. They did have a 1 hour break for dinner, and I met up with Elysa in the food court.

At the end of the second half I collected Elysa and we returned to the hotel without mishap.

Tomorrow Elysa plans on spending with Devan's stepsons. I'm going back to the convention. I was originally planning on going to robot wars, but I'm thinking of changing my mind and playing some more RPGA. I'll have to see if I can get tickets.

Today went a lot more according to plan. We woke up around 7:30, ate a quick breakfast (apples and bagles), and were off. About an hour later we were waiting for the parade to start on Peachtree Road outside of Peachtree Center. I posted over 80 pictures to flickr, which you can look at here.

I have comments in my pictures, but I'll mention this one point here, as well. If you're going to shop for a digital camera, buy one that has the fastest possible processing rate. My dinky 2 Mpixel HP takes forever, because it's old, and because it insists on converting every image to JPG format. As a result I missed a lot of great shots.

Anyway, after the parade I went to Podcasting in the Classroom, where I talked to Michael Stackpole. I still need to email him. He seems very nice. The podcasting panel kind of walked a narrow line between unbridled enthusiasm and cautious pessimism. Most everyone agreed that it's a cool technology, but also everyone agreed that technology is expensive (podcasting not so much), difficult to learn (not everyone is a computer junky), takes time (oh, you had something else planned for your weekend?), and sometimes even interferes with the real business of learning (replacing the old film strip with a podcast kind of misses the point).

Tomorrow is my gaming day. I haven't played Living Greyhawk for about a year or more, and none of my characters have really been upgraded to 3.5. So I spent the next little while grabbing a bite to eat and creating a new character. Glossol Inter Alia, a fast talking halforc barbarian who shouts things like "Do not suffer the descenderation of swinebeasts to erodify you!" I figure he has Asperger's Syndrome.

I was going to the panel "The Hydrogen Myth," but that was standing room only when I got there. After that I wanted to go to "Contour Drawing," another art workshop. I decided to just go there and sit and wait. I did some reading and watched a couple of kids drive their parents to distraction. The panel itself was OK. The artist teaching the workshop kind of didn't plan her time well, and didn't realize that she could only use 60 minutes of the 90 minute slot. When you have to slog from the Hyatt to the Hilton, 30 minutes are barely enough.

Anyway, that's what I had to do next. Luckily getting to the drawing workshop meant that I discovered that the adjoining room where the next panel I wanted to attend was scheduled was no longer the correct room. That had been moved to the Hilton. (No one had noted that on the board, so I wrote it there myself.) At the Hilton I found that the panel had been moved to yet another room. All the same, I got there in plenty of time to get a front row seat for what turned out to be one hell of a great panel: "Smackdown! Skeptics vs True Believers."

On the panel were Patrick Burns (an investigator of paranormal claims and founder of the Ghosthounds Paranormal Investigators Network), some guy from the Rhine Institute who was not actually in the program or I'd be able to tell you more about him, Dr Michael Shermer (founder of The Skeptics Society), and Alison Smith (a private investigator who works for the James Randi challenge thing). Both of the "true believers" described themselves as skeptics...

The whole business started out kind of tame, and I decided to mix things up. I asked them to define exactly what it was they were doing: looking for naturalistic explanations of phenomena, or looking for supernatural explanations. I pointed out that science doesn't accept the proposition that there are supernatural explanations: that's a fundamental postulate of science. If a scientist cannot explain something in terms of natural causes, she just keeps looking.

That worked only for a very short while before the true believers tried to twist out of the discussion by saying they weren't investigating the paranormal or supernatural, but "unusual phenomena."

A little later a young man got up and tried holding their feet to the fire again. If the true believers were in dualists (believers in something other than naturalistic explanations), why cloak their work in the paradigm of science (which does not allow a non-naturalistic explanation)? If they were materialists then what was their paradigm of investigation? What were they looking for?

Yes, the crowd was definitely hostile to the true believers. There was a fellow wearing a kippah who wanted to know what the religion of the skeptics was. Alison Smith said she was not an atheist, but she also said she did not hold her personal religion to the same standard of evidence that she expected of science. She acknowledged that was hypocritical of her. Michael Shermer pointed out that the copy of Skeptical Inquirer he had before him had a picture of Richard Dawkins on the cover. It wasn't a direct answer, I guess, but he went on to point out that faith, belief, or religion were what made people feel good. Science is not about making people feel good.

Someone else asked why the skeptics didn't admit the use of statistics when considering the evidence for the paranormal. Both Smith and Shermer pointed out that statistics were at the very heart of science, and very much the reason why skeptics do not agree that there is anything to claims for the paranormal.

But that's pretty much all the challenges they got. The crowd was cheering and hooting through the entire thing, and the two true believers eventually got so frustrated that one resorted to calling James Randi a fraud and the moderator had to calm things down a bit.

I had a great time! If professional wrestling were this exciting I'd be a fan.

Well, after that I had to get back to the Hyatt to join Elysa for the awards banquet. I rushed out into the street, trotted up to Peachtree Center, stormed up the stairs to the food court, ran through the connecting tunnel, through the lobby, down the escalator, and realized I'd run into the wrong hotel. Back up the escalator, through the lobby, connecting tunnel, food court, and now for the correct connecting tunnel (to the Hyatt, not the Marriott) and down to the Ballroom level. I'd got the map turned around so at first I looked for the Regency ballroom at the wrong side. I swear, I can get lost in my own house.

Finally I was trotting down the line of people waiting to get in to the banquet. No Elysa. I get out my cell phone. Good, a signal. Call Elysa, and she's waving at me from the head of the line.

The banquet was OK. A small jazz band (horn, electric fiddle, electric bass, and drum set) entertained us. Peter David was the MC. He's funny. Nichel Nichols presented a little music video from a movie they're screening here. The food was forgettable. The main course was ziti pasta and cheese ravioli and mixed vegetables. The veggies were OK, but heavy on the onions. Two pasta dishes? What's with that? It was served family style, with the food brought out on large platters which we had to pass around to help ourselves. Dessert was a very nice chocolate cake. The entire thing cost $50 $35 per person. Not something I'd do again if it was just for the food.

OK, enough blathering. I have to be at the con tomorrow by 8:30 so I can get lost before finding the gaming area.

What's your process for picking your con schedule?

Whatever your method, DragonCon's pocket program is 92 pages of 6pt single spaced type. OK, the pages are half size, and there are the occasional graphics and paragraph breaks. But it is a substantial amount of programming.

There are 32 separate tracks of programming, ranging from American Sci-Fi Classics to Young Adult Literature. The Main track includes the opening and closing ceremonies, awards, robot wars, film premiers, various stargazing panels (not the astronomy type stars), and anything else of which there wasn't enough to make a track of its own.

Elysa is going to spend a lot of time at the film festival. I hope they will sell a DVD of what they have here. It's amazing. About 27 hours of material will be presented, ranging from animation to fan produced movies.

I'm going to be doing some gaming, and I plan to go to the science, space, and EFF tracks. Perhaps some others. Elysa and I will watch the parade together, and we've got tickets to the banquet. Besides that we may well end up experiencing two entirely different cons. It's been that way in the past. Later we can compare notes. It's like getting two conventions for the price of one.

Michael Stackpole has panels on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. I hope to corner him on one of those occasions.

Those are the plans. Here's the execution.

Went to bed too late. Got up later than we intended to. Discovered that some ants have made their home in our rental car, so we made a detour to Publix to buy some ant spray. Off to Dunwoody, park, and catch the train. Elysa took along a pillow because last year the seating was uncomfortable. As we walked to the train I realized I didn't know where our badges were. We were already back to our car when I think to look in my lunch sack, and there they are.

Eventually we got to Peachtree Center. I somehow felt a sense of solidarity with all those other geeks who got off the train with us. The Peachtree Center Foodcourt was already crowded with con goers. Elysa went off to buy a lanyard for her badge, and I went to find gaming registration.

The trouble with a large convention is that you have to departmentalize, and departmentalization leads to compartmentalization. That means that I never actually met any con staff who knew what I was looking for until I found it. Ditto places to put the HorrorCon flyers and bookmarks. I eventually dropped small stacks of them here and there, and if I find tomorrow that some spots were not so good I'll move them around a bit when I have a moment.

I signed up for three gaming sessions on Sunday. There's too much else going on I don't want to miss.

I went to an art panel (digital coloring line drawings) and then to the art show where I ran into Jessica Douglass. We first looked at each other like "that person looks familiar but are they who I think they are?" and then gave a hug and Jessica introduced me to her dad.

Anyway, the art show consisted really of two parts. There were panels, of course, about twice as many as we manage to put up for CONduit (which should tell you all we have a very respectable art show in Salt Lake City), and sales tables where artists were selling their wares directly. One woman had about 10 panels of her art, and it was clear that she used herself as the model for all of the big eyed elfin creatures she painted, some in the altogether. She was sitting at her sales table wearing a very small bikini top, and for some reason a lot of people wanted to talk to her.

And I bought another teeshirt.

The crowds were insane. I took some video walking around the fan area where various music groups where selling CDs and people were showing off their costumes. (I had a link, but took it back out when I realized the video was mostly of the ceiling.) I took some pictures of the most remarkable ones. Not all of them are of nearly naked girls.

I went to see some anime (Death Note, a fairly good adaptation of the manga) and then I was going to see our Dr Stephen Howe talk on antimatter. Except no sooner am I on my way across the street to the Hilton (programming is spread over three adjacent hotels) than my phone gets a signal and I get a message from Elysa. I try to find her, but somehow managed to overlook her where she was watching the Asian independent films. After a while I gave up and went back to anime, since Dr Howe's panel was half over by then.

When I finally hear from Elysa again she is waiting for me at the Dairy Queen, pretty upset because the crowds at the Hyatt had literally pushed her into the street and she couldn't force her way back in. When I tried to make my way back up to the foodcourt I found the fire marshal had closed the Hyatt's lobby (too many people), so I went across the street to the Marriott, and from there to Peachtree Center.

Elysa and I decided we'd had enough for one day and went to catch the train. It turned out the Northsprings line was still running, but packed with people because both the Braves and the Jaguars or whatever they call the football team had finished their games. We jammed in there, found out the Braves had lost, and tried not to fall over in the crowd.

Tomorrow Elysa will leave the pillow behind, because the seating is comfortable enough without it.

As some of you may know, Labor Day weekend they hold DragonCon here in the City of the Braves. Attendance is somewhere in the vicinity of 50,000, or the equivalent of almost 100 CONduit conventions all at once. I plan to give you all a day-to-day account of events here. For now just imagine me trying to cope with several dozen streets all named Peachtree, and running every direction like a crazed spider's web. Our hotel is surrounded by three streets all named Northside Drive, and a couple named Powers Ferry Road. (In Salt Lake City you know most streets run east and west or north and south. The folks here in Atlanta must have decided that if the Yankees ever want to invade again, they'll first get hopelessly lost.)

So far we've visited the Coca Cola Museum which is apparently based on Dante. And we ate lunch at CNN Center, which Turner Broadcasting has turned into a sort of theme park for news. (Before that it used to be where H.R. Pufnstuf was produced.) It didn't make my Killian's Red go down any better. Later we took the tour. Lots of security. Senator Craig doing a tap dance on all of the monitors.

The Georgia Aquarium was probably the best thing we've seen here. We could have spent hours there. Just watching the whales swim around and look at us was worth the price of admission.

These three spots are all separated by the Olympic Park, where Richard Jewel spotted that bomb. Only 11 years later he's dead. The slander he suffered from because of his quick action has never been settled. Lesson learned: take care of your health if you're suing deep pockets.

We've been to the High Art Museum, which was OK. Annie Leibowitz had an exhibition of photos. I'm not sure what the noise is about. Call me a philistine. I was particularly impressed by the exhibition of Cecilia Beaux's work.

We've been to the Carter Center (which seemed dated) and to the Atlanta History Center (which had a large but superficial exhibit on Ben Franklin, and lots of Civil War stuff).

Our oldest son lives here, so we visited him and met his two stepsons. We took them to the Atlanta Botanical Garden where they behaved themselves very well. I was impressed by both of them.

Besides that we've found that Georgia drivers may rival Italians for aggressiveness and Jerseyites for cluelessness. We've eaten way too much, and we've taken a video of an honest to gosh UFO.

Today we went to the Peachtree Center to pick up our badges. After about an hour of standing in line we were let in and snaked through about a mile of queueing barrier. I kid you not when I tell you that one fellow who was waddling about as fast as he could (which was not fast) had to give up about halfway to the registration booths.  He was pale and we asked him if he was OK. He said he'd recover and told us to go on, but after standing for a couple of minutes to catch his breath he collapsed in a heap. People hurried to get him help. Congoing is not for the physically unfit.

Elysa and I collected our bag of free swag, bought a couple of teeshirts, and got back on Marta to return to Dunwoody where our car was parked. This will be our routine for the next few days. Get up early, drive to Perimeter Mall, park, and take the train to Peachtree Center. Late in the evening things get complicated. They run two lines north and south. The one runs from airport station to Northsprings station, which is the line we have to take. The other runs to Doraville station. After 9 pm the Northsprings line only runs south to Lindbergh station, so we'll have to change trains there on our way home.

I've got 200 copies of the World HorrorCon flyer, and 200 bookmarks printed on bright yellow cardstock. I'll bring them along tomorrow morning.

Right now I have to decide what I'm definitely not going to miss, and just how much gaming I'll do. Then it's time for bed.

I just received this from Carl Stark, the chair of Mountain-Con. Please help out the food bank by participating in this.

Greetings everyone

Please feel free to pass this onto any other mailing lists or message boards.

One of the best things about organized fandom is giving back to the community.  It could be the Browncoats organizing a screening for a charity, Toys-for-Tots collections from the Star Wars fans, the Star Trek clubs participating in the Adopt-a-Highway or more.  Here at Mountain-Con, we want to continue the charity events at the annual convention.  Starting with this year we've adopted a new charity to continue on an annual basis.

In today's (Sunday 8-19-07) Morning Deseret News, there was an article talking about how food supplies at the Utah Food Bank are running low. http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695202203,00.html

We are issuing a challenge to each club and fan.  Bring in a canned food item and get a discount at the convention.  Each club can set up a collection box and the club that brings in the most donations will win a trophy.  The trophy will then be brought back the next year for another food drive competition. 

As a fan, you can submit your donation to the club that impresses you the most.  Different clubs will have booths and room parties at the convention.

Let me know if you have any questions.  Looking forward to the convention.

Carl Stark, Convention Chair
Mountain-Con III, September 21-23, 2007
http://www.MountainCon.org