Here’s my summary of everything I did in the con, excluding meals and saying “Hi” to people.
Day 1– Opening ceremony (crowded, technical suckage, and boy, Tal Guttman was born to be a rabbi. Also, Tryscer lost weight), a Tim Powers lecture (wondered around missing half of it before I realized it was going on; it seemed to consist of all the funny anecdotes and clever remarks I found in interviews online, but the live delivery is excellent), a Tim and Serena Powers dinner (actually, sort of dinner with Joe Brown. There were annoying problems with the tickets/coupons/whatever. Powerses are charming, funny, and entertaining, and have more anecdotes up their sleeves), missed Serenity (again) because they were out of tickets (Bo called me to see if I could get him in, but in the end got in thanks to K and her connections with the usher). Spent all night writing characters for the Transhuman Space game.
Day 2 – Gave a lecture/workshop about roleplaying; actually had attentive people in the audience, although there was disappointment there was no demo section. Looked for a place to continue writing my character sheets, and ended up sitting in the corner of the Cinematheque. Then went to the Tim Powers press conference, where Kitaro asked too many questions. Stayed in the room to finish writing those character sheets and missed the Tim Powers / Carmel Bergman duel in the colloseum.
Ran my Transhuman Space game (should prep the game more – it ended up being a simple mission type thing, but timewas short anyway), dragged Bo and friend to Primer (I nodded off during crucial exposition, I suspect, although I think it was confusing as it is. Anyway, a good film that makes you think). Went home and slept instead of writing charcter sheets.
Day 3 – Tim Powers writing workshop: I realized two days before (Vered mentioned it during the dinner) that you need to bring something to read, but was too busy writing characters; brought my laptop with my unfinished five-year-old stories, and although I had the chance, passed on reading the first page of any. Powers was again clever and very good. I wish I’d asked him about how he outlines, but I skipped the relevant talk (day 2, a Powers lecture on writing) because I was running games. Ran my Brooklyn Jewish gangsters Unknown Armies game, with 4 registered players + a refugee from Dicky’s cancelled intro game. Not enough time, and again I should have prepped harder, but got some good moments – the refugee actually gave me the most fun, with both some nice touches of threatening gangster behaviour and a freaked-out by the supernatural performance latter on (the player was expecting a straight game. Those newbies, with their innocent unawareness of lasersharking…). Did have one terrific horror scene where the assassin creeps into the dark bedroom of his victim, lighting his way with a match, pulls the blanket off the bed and sees that what looked like a person is in fact a measuring dummy. He pulls back, and then the dummy suddenly bolts upright – and the match burns out…
Went to the Israeli SF&F society meeting, then to see the “Who is the Hero?” play, which is basically “Choose Your Own Adventure: The Musical”, except without songs (they did have dancing, and a lovely choreographed battle scene at the end). Worth seeing because of the charismatic and excellent Gorodin, Greif and Genkin, a lovely and graceful dancer whose surname also starts with G, and the guy playing “Tree Number 2”. Then found Bo, waiting outside the Cinematheque to see the Rocky pre-show, and dragged him to the closing ceremonies (more Tal Guttman and Tryscer; the nerd-baiting humor is begining to grate with me). Got dragged in return by Bo back to Rocky once that was over, dragged Bo out of Rocky after 7 minutes, and we went to eat.
I planned to go see Free Enterprise on Friday, but chose to sleep instead. Wanted to drag Bo to Gamerz later, but the Corky MySQL Upgrade Encoding Crisis sucked away the rest of my day (Sweden should be collated from orbit).
