The Con Game
May. 27th, 2003 09:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gridloreThe BayCon Report!
Well, the 21st BayCon has come and gone, and I'd have to say that I had a very good time. Saw many old friends (a few of whom I recognized, amazingly enough,) met a few new ones, and saw many interesting things.. So, in a somewhat chronological order…
Disclaimer: Due to my memory problems, I'm deliberately not using many names here. I simply can't remember who I was talking too at any given time.. I remember the conversation, but not with whom it was with! No insults here, just my addled brain making itself known. When I am sure, I'll name names, or handles, as appropriate.
Thursday
Since our situation was so bloody odd, we decided that it was in our best interests to go out for early registration to make sure that our badges were in fact there. We didn't want to try to do this on Friday, when Reg would be packed. There was a nice little group milling about, and when we explained our plight to the confused Reg Weasels, and showed them the email we had, it took only a few moments to secure our memberships.. which showed us as residents of Mountain View, Ca. Remember this fact, it shall come back to haunt us later..
We wandered a bit, but![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kshandra had to work Friday, so we headed home.
Friday
Anyone who knows me at all can picture me at 0800 on Friday morning. Ready to go, packed, high-lighted pocket program in pocket, printout of VTA schedules.. the works. The problem is, the Con didn't open until 1400, and the first panel I was interested in wasn't until 1600!
Fuss, fidget, twitch. Watch ER, take off at noon.
It's nice to know that The Almaden VTA station is a short walk away, this opens up all sorts of options. Get on train, change trains, and remember where to get off for the Double Red Tree Lion Hotel. Wander in.. and I'm at Con! Yay!
Since I got there at about 1300-ish, and immediately see a nice change from previous years.. the hotel had set up "BayCon food courts," open serving areas with con food.. nachos, hotdogs, pizza, sandwiches, soda, etc. These were very popular during the entire convention.. it was great to be able to stop and grab a quite bite to eat on the run. Pretty good food too.
With nothing to do for an hour, and the Dealers' Room was still not quite ready, I sat in a strategic location on the lobby and did the sea anemone thing. . . waited for people to find me and say hi! Worked pretty well, and I had a fun chat with Fr. John Blaker. *grin* Who'd ever thought it, Doug the Militant Agnostic being pretty good friends with a priest?
The first panel I attended was Real Time War Reports, about the effects of embedded reporters on both the viewers and the press corps themselves. What should have been an interesting discussion was sabotaged by "HD", who insisted on doing his "all order is wrong" crap. At least there was some useful info put out before it devolved.
After that, I headed up to the Pine room for Surprises in the Kuiper Belt. This was a stunningly amazing panel. Aside from the usual Pluto debate, which was quickly squashed as the topic for another panel, we learned some really cool ideas about what might be lurking out there in the Big Empty. Evidently, there is a lot of thought that many Kuiper/Oort objects might be interstellar hitchhikers, passing from star to star as the galaxy orbits.
At some point in here, I caught up with Kshandra. Balls if I remember when because I was focused on the last panel of the day.
Women Warriors: What does this say about our culture?
Read that title. Our culture. I can't speak for anyone else, but I live in early 21st century America.. Not in Boddeccia's Celtic lands, not in the grasslands of the Scythians, nor do I seem to be speaking Urdu, so why I had to endure the blatherings about these people is beyond me.
Then there were the panelists themselves! Five of them.
A tech writer for JPL, no military experience.
A retired USAF Aeronautical engineer.
A psychologist. no military experience
A writer of pseudo-Celtic fantasy. no military experience
And a Systems Engineer with some Army time, but not in a combat arm.
There, what better group[ to discuss the topic? Not *one* of them had ever even fired a M-60, must less tried to road march carrying one with 800 rounds of ammo!
The first fifteen minutes of that panel were a waste of time, with gushings about Celtic warrior women, etc. Then the moderator did pull it back on topic, and let me make the comment that set the room off:
"In my opinion, I have no problem with women holding any job in the military just so long as they can meet the standards of the job."
BOOM!
The psychologist called standards "arbitrary." I replied that hitting a certain of percentage of targets translates directly to killing people, which is the job. A few of the girls (women is the wrong term for these idiots) kept trying to bring up their beloved Celtic women.. absolute crap. Enough said about that mess.
After that, we wandered around, chatted with people and had dinner at the Coffee Garden. Great French Dip sandwich.
Saturday
We get a bit of a late start, and split up soon after arriving. I seriously hit the Dealers' Room, assuming that everyone had time to get there and set up. I was right. To my disappointment, the dealer who always had such great old RPG stuff was missing. But "The Other Change of Hobbit had their usual spot, and I grabbed a copy of Darwin's Radio. Other than that, there wasn't really all that much I was interested in.. no, not that much I was interested in that I could afford.
Up to the Fir/Oak for The History of Mars, a panel that suffered from a bad case of "Why am I on this panel?" syndrome. It was entertaining, though. After that, I wandered and ended up at the "Baghdad Bob" BoF (BoF: Birds of a Feather. Informal gatherings for people of similar interests.) Four of us fans showed up. No! forty! There were forty of us, and Saeed himself came to greet us!
I wasted the next few hours in the Kid Room, visiting with Fred and Robin and their munchkins. Ended up hanging out a long time, because they showed Shrek. Lying on the floor with a bunch of little kids watching Shrek was very fun, and I even got an M&M!
To be honest, most of Saturday is a blur, caused by the Center of the Galaxy panel.. an hour of really fun, dense musings on the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Among the interesting ideas that I hadn't heard before was that the BH had stopped gobbling stars, that there might not be tidal effects either at the event horizon or even inside the hole itself, and that the entire universe might be inside a black hole that lays in some other universe.. which has an amazing recursive feature.. if we are in somebody else's hole, then they are in someone else's, and the entire thing might be this hyperstructure of universes within each other, creating and evaporating in this infinite mass..
*POP* fizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Sorry. Let me just clean up my exploded brain bits here...
We called it an early night. We had planned on changing and heading back for the parties, but we were beat, and the Powerpuff Girls movie was on!
Sunday
Although I woke up at 0630, as usual, the extra sleep helped.
Once back at the Con, I headed for my first panel, The Draft, the Professional Army, and Reservists.
Now THIS was more like it! Three of the four panelists were military, two of the army, and all three were retires. The one non-service member agreed that his voice should be that of Devil's Advocate. The panel rocked, going from what makes a professional soldier better, who do you make a professional, when do you need a draft and ending up in a fun argument over Bush! Great panel.
Thus energized, I went next door to Life on Mars. A bit dry (no pun intended) but it was worth it. Some interesting facts about the upcoming series of probes. After that it was time for the amazing innovation of actually seeing friends face to face, rather than through blogging, the LiveJournal BoF!
johno tempted fate by trying to actually get us to listen to him, and actually succeeded in herding the cats once or twice. Mostly, it was a nice chance to put names to faces, and do a little plain gabbing. One interesting thing was being nicely mauled by freyjaw. That woman has a nice-tasting neck. Oh, and I'm now Michael Siladi. I stole his panelist sign. Remember the Mountain View thing? This is clue number 2.
But onward! To the Cedar room, for the Resurgence of Hard SF. Ah, crunchy goodness. Books with technical appendixes. No mysterious particles saving the day, unless they also exist in the Bestiary!
We had a bit of fun deciding what Hard SF was! The definition we agreed on was this:
"Hard science-fiction is fiction that extrapolates from what is currently known and accepted in the science and engineering fields, is internally consistent within those extrapolations, and makes use of no or minimal 'magic' technology."
The last bit was a sop to things like FTL.
I had planned on one more panel, but I was also determined to make an appearance on the party floor, so Kiri and I headed back to the apartment to change. I chose to be Ominous. Black trousers, pirate shirt, shoes, and my long black hooded cloak. If I have had the appropriate gloves, I would have worn them as well. I also wore this sort of shimmery-black scarf, with multi-colored threads running through it. Made just enough of an accent. Also, with the shirt, you could see the Tyr rune I wear all the time.
We started out at the Silicon Party, and I ended up in the Ladyhawke Party, with a lot of fun in-between. What can you say about several hours on the party floor? I ate free food, had several interesting conversations, and got into an argument with one of the Celtic Twit Girls from the Women Warriors panel. When things started winding down, I went over to the Atlantis Dance and located Kirsten. We wandered home, and fell asleep.
Monday
Day Four pf the con. We go up to the Reg desk to make sure they have our correct information updated in their files. We were a bit perturbed to find out why we had never received any of the progress reports. Reg weasel looks up our names.. and.. "you guys live at (address) in Mountain View?" Nooo... It took some doing, but we figured it out. They had a disk crash (never bothered to let anyone know) and lost large portions of the data base. When they had a name, but no address, the fools used Michael Siladi's home address and phone number! And evidently didn't let their own staff people know that this was a null address, and to question it when it came up!
The few functioning brain cells I had left (the ones not working over the things learned about black holes) decide that before anything else, I must eat. We grab the last possible cash, and hit the Coffee Garden's breakfast buffet. The eggs were good, the sausages far too tough, but the bacon was nice. It was the nice version of Army food - plentiful and designed to fill your stomach for the days' events.blackfyr and lysana joined us for a little bit.
With nothing really planned except the Veterans BoF and the Hiss and Purr, I wandered around. The Veteran's BoF was sparsely attended, with me as the only Army rep. Of course, it only takes one Doggie to face a pair of Squids and two Zoomies. We told stories, discussed benefits, and shot the shit for about an hour.
After that, with two hours to kill before the final panel, I did what I did at the beginning of the con.. found a strategic place to sit and people watch. Said many good-byes, but these with the promise of seeing each other much sooner than next year.
Like the railroad clock in High Noon, the time inexorably ticked down to the showdown at the Hiss and Purr. I showed up, got a neat with various friends and family member who could restrain me if necessary, and waited. I was the second called upon.
I did not whine about not being a guest, but instead focused on the lack of effective communications from the committee making it hard for me to understand my status. I kept it short, clear and effective. The Headcase of Programming started insinuating that there might have not been an email, then started going on about how I shouldn't expect to be a guest from year to year.. I resisted the urge to strangle her while screaming that I've been to more of these things than she has, know most of her staff, and have seen several of them naked.. when they were infants. Instead I pointed out that she had missed my point, and it was the communications issue that was at the heart of my complaint. She didn't get it. We left. End of Con.
Well, except for that last bit, I had a great time. See you next year!
Well, the 21st BayCon has come and gone, and I'd have to say that I had a very good time. Saw many old friends (a few of whom I recognized, amazingly enough,) met a few new ones, and saw many interesting things.. So, in a somewhat chronological order…
Disclaimer: Due to my memory problems, I'm deliberately not using many names here. I simply can't remember who I was talking too at any given time.. I remember the conversation, but not with whom it was with! No insults here, just my addled brain making itself known. When I am sure, I'll name names, or handles, as appropriate.
Thursday
Since our situation was so bloody odd, we decided that it was in our best interests to go out for early registration to make sure that our badges were in fact there. We didn't want to try to do this on Friday, when Reg would be packed. There was a nice little group milling about, and when we explained our plight to the confused Reg Weasels, and showed them the email we had, it took only a few moments to secure our memberships.. which showed us as residents of Mountain View, Ca. Remember this fact, it shall come back to haunt us later..
We wandered a bit, but
kshandra had to work Friday, so we headed home.Friday
Anyone who knows me at all can picture me at 0800 on Friday morning. Ready to go, packed, high-lighted pocket program in pocket, printout of VTA schedules.. the works. The problem is, the Con didn't open until 1400, and the first panel I was interested in wasn't until 1600!
Fuss, fidget, twitch. Watch ER, take off at noon.
It's nice to know that The Almaden VTA station is a short walk away, this opens up all sorts of options. Get on train, change trains, and remember where to get off for the Double Red Tree Lion Hotel. Wander in.. and I'm at Con! Yay!
Since I got there at about 1300-ish, and immediately see a nice change from previous years.. the hotel had set up "BayCon food courts," open serving areas with con food.. nachos, hotdogs, pizza, sandwiches, soda, etc. These were very popular during the entire convention.. it was great to be able to stop and grab a quite bite to eat on the run. Pretty good food too.
With nothing to do for an hour, and the Dealers' Room was still not quite ready, I sat in a strategic location on the lobby and did the sea anemone thing. . . waited for people to find me and say hi! Worked pretty well, and I had a fun chat with Fr. John Blaker. *grin* Who'd ever thought it, Doug the Militant Agnostic being pretty good friends with a priest?
The first panel I attended was Real Time War Reports, about the effects of embedded reporters on both the viewers and the press corps themselves. What should have been an interesting discussion was sabotaged by "HD", who insisted on doing his "all order is wrong" crap. At least there was some useful info put out before it devolved.
After that, I headed up to the Pine room for Surprises in the Kuiper Belt. This was a stunningly amazing panel. Aside from the usual Pluto debate, which was quickly squashed as the topic for another panel, we learned some really cool ideas about what might be lurking out there in the Big Empty. Evidently, there is a lot of thought that many Kuiper/Oort objects might be interstellar hitchhikers, passing from star to star as the galaxy orbits.
At some point in here, I caught up with Kshandra. Balls if I remember when because I was focused on the last panel of the day.
Women Warriors: What does this say about our culture?
Read that title. Our culture. I can't speak for anyone else, but I live in early 21st century America.. Not in Boddeccia's Celtic lands, not in the grasslands of the Scythians, nor do I seem to be speaking Urdu, so why I had to endure the blatherings about these people is beyond me.
Then there were the panelists themselves! Five of them.
A tech writer for JPL, no military experience.
A retired USAF Aeronautical engineer.
A psychologist. no military experience
A writer of pseudo-Celtic fantasy. no military experience
And a Systems Engineer with some Army time, but not in a combat arm.
There, what better group[ to discuss the topic? Not *one* of them had ever even fired a M-60, must less tried to road march carrying one with 800 rounds of ammo!
The first fifteen minutes of that panel were a waste of time, with gushings about Celtic warrior women, etc. Then the moderator did pull it back on topic, and let me make the comment that set the room off:
"In my opinion, I have no problem with women holding any job in the military just so long as they can meet the standards of the job."
BOOM!
The psychologist called standards "arbitrary." I replied that hitting a certain of percentage of targets translates directly to killing people, which is the job. A few of the girls (women is the wrong term for these idiots) kept trying to bring up their beloved Celtic women.. absolute crap. Enough said about that mess.
After that, we wandered around, chatted with people and had dinner at the Coffee Garden. Great French Dip sandwich.
Saturday
We get a bit of a late start, and split up soon after arriving. I seriously hit the Dealers' Room, assuming that everyone had time to get there and set up. I was right. To my disappointment, the dealer who always had such great old RPG stuff was missing. But "The Other Change of Hobbit had their usual spot, and I grabbed a copy of Darwin's Radio. Other than that, there wasn't really all that much I was interested in.. no, not that much I was interested in that I could afford.
Up to the Fir/Oak for The History of Mars, a panel that suffered from a bad case of "Why am I on this panel?" syndrome. It was entertaining, though. After that, I wandered and ended up at the "Baghdad Bob" BoF (BoF: Birds of a Feather. Informal gatherings for people of similar interests.) Four of us fans showed up. No! forty! There were forty of us, and Saeed himself came to greet us!
I wasted the next few hours in the Kid Room, visiting with Fred and Robin and their munchkins. Ended up hanging out a long time, because they showed Shrek. Lying on the floor with a bunch of little kids watching Shrek was very fun, and I even got an M&M!
To be honest, most of Saturday is a blur, caused by the Center of the Galaxy panel.. an hour of really fun, dense musings on the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Among the interesting ideas that I hadn't heard before was that the BH had stopped gobbling stars, that there might not be tidal effects either at the event horizon or even inside the hole itself, and that the entire universe might be inside a black hole that lays in some other universe.. which has an amazing recursive feature.. if we are in somebody else's hole, then they are in someone else's, and the entire thing might be this hyperstructure of universes within each other, creating and evaporating in this infinite mass..
*POP* fizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Sorry. Let me just clean up my exploded brain bits here...
We called it an early night. We had planned on changing and heading back for the parties, but we were beat, and the Powerpuff Girls movie was on!
Sunday
Although I woke up at 0630, as usual, the extra sleep helped.
Once back at the Con, I headed for my first panel, The Draft, the Professional Army, and Reservists.
Now THIS was more like it! Three of the four panelists were military, two of the army, and all three were retires. The one non-service member agreed that his voice should be that of Devil's Advocate. The panel rocked, going from what makes a professional soldier better, who do you make a professional, when do you need a draft and ending up in a fun argument over Bush! Great panel.
Thus energized, I went next door to Life on Mars. A bit dry (no pun intended) but it was worth it. Some interesting facts about the upcoming series of probes. After that it was time for the amazing innovation of actually seeing friends face to face, rather than through blogging, the LiveJournal BoF!
johno tempted fate by trying to actually get us to listen to him, and actually succeeded in herding the cats once or twice. Mostly, it was a nice chance to put names to faces, and do a little plain gabbing. One interesting thing was being nicely mauled by freyjaw. That woman has a nice-tasting neck. Oh, and I'm now Michael Siladi. I stole his panelist sign. Remember the Mountain View thing? This is clue number 2.But onward! To the Cedar room, for the Resurgence of Hard SF. Ah, crunchy goodness. Books with technical appendixes. No mysterious particles saving the day, unless they also exist in the Bestiary!
We had a bit of fun deciding what Hard SF was! The definition we agreed on was this:
"Hard science-fiction is fiction that extrapolates from what is currently known and accepted in the science and engineering fields, is internally consistent within those extrapolations, and makes use of no or minimal 'magic' technology."
The last bit was a sop to things like FTL.
I had planned on one more panel, but I was also determined to make an appearance on the party floor, so Kiri and I headed back to the apartment to change. I chose to be Ominous. Black trousers, pirate shirt, shoes, and my long black hooded cloak. If I have had the appropriate gloves, I would have worn them as well. I also wore this sort of shimmery-black scarf, with multi-colored threads running through it. Made just enough of an accent. Also, with the shirt, you could see the Tyr rune I wear all the time.
We started out at the Silicon Party, and I ended up in the Ladyhawke Party, with a lot of fun in-between. What can you say about several hours on the party floor? I ate free food, had several interesting conversations, and got into an argument with one of the Celtic Twit Girls from the Women Warriors panel. When things started winding down, I went over to the Atlantis Dance and located Kirsten. We wandered home, and fell asleep.
Monday
Day Four pf the con. We go up to the Reg desk to make sure they have our correct information updated in their files. We were a bit perturbed to find out why we had never received any of the progress reports. Reg weasel looks up our names.. and.. "you guys live at (address) in Mountain View?" Nooo... It took some doing, but we figured it out. They had a disk crash (never bothered to let anyone know) and lost large portions of the data base. When they had a name, but no address, the fools used Michael Siladi's home address and phone number! And evidently didn't let their own staff people know that this was a null address, and to question it when it came up!
The few functioning brain cells I had left (the ones not working over the things learned about black holes) decide that before anything else, I must eat. We grab the last possible cash, and hit the Coffee Garden's breakfast buffet. The eggs were good, the sausages far too tough, but the bacon was nice. It was the nice version of Army food - plentiful and designed to fill your stomach for the days' events.
blackfyr and lysana joined us for a little bit. With nothing really planned except the Veterans BoF and the Hiss and Purr, I wandered around. The Veteran's BoF was sparsely attended, with me as the only Army rep. Of course, it only takes one Doggie to face a pair of Squids and two Zoomies. We told stories, discussed benefits, and shot the shit for about an hour.
After that, with two hours to kill before the final panel, I did what I did at the beginning of the con.. found a strategic place to sit and people watch. Said many good-byes, but these with the promise of seeing each other much sooner than next year.
Like the railroad clock in High Noon, the time inexorably ticked down to the showdown at the Hiss and Purr. I showed up, got a neat with various friends and family member who could restrain me if necessary, and waited. I was the second called upon.
I did not whine about not being a guest, but instead focused on the lack of effective communications from the committee making it hard for me to understand my status. I kept it short, clear and effective. The Headcase of Programming started insinuating that there might have not been an email, then started going on about how I shouldn't expect to be a guest from year to year.. I resisted the urge to strangle her while screaming that I've been to more of these things than she has, know most of her staff, and have seen several of them naked.. when they were infants. Instead I pointed out that she had missed my point, and it was the communications issue that was at the heart of my complaint. She didn't get it. We left. End of Con.
Well, except for that last bit, I had a great time. See you next year!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 28 May 2003 01:23 (UTC)Idiots. This is why you have backups. Frequent ones. and you never *ever* stick anything that even *looks* like valid data into fileds for which you've lost the data.
When I was dealing awith a membership database, I had cases where (for good reasons) people's addreses weren't in there. I left the fileds blank when I could, and stuck in obviously bogus stuff where I couldn't.
But it sounds like you had fun in spite of the idiots.
no subject
Date: 28 May 2003 02:31 (UTC)We typically do have a back up. Being as I live out of the area now, I did not hear about the crash or why the back was not used. I will be happy to look into what my friends, the idiots, did.
no subject
Date: 28 May 2003 02:05 (UTC)-----------------
I've run into the HD effect as well. HD is the only "will not be a panelist with" on my applications. One year when I was talking with a program head, the response was "yeah, we get that a lot."
---------------
While the BoF was fun, I was concerned with bringing the newbies into the conversations, but was failing.
It was pointed out to me after the BoF ended, that by letting the conversations clump, it was just re-enforcing already existing friends groups.
Next year I'll try to setup the BoF as circle or maybe throw a party instead.
-------------
I knew her answer would make you simmer.
I'll say this about Michael Siladi, he knows how to communicate and say the right things to calm folks down.
He leaned over to the Head of Programming and gave her a little talking too after your question. Her future questions were much more to the point and didn't have as many weasel words.
He has trained the other division heads well though on handling the Hiss-n-Purr...
* If you know the answer, give it.
* If you fucked up, admit it, apologize, promise not to do it again.
* If you know nothing about it, say so, write it down, promise to look into it.
no subject
Date: 28 May 2003 02:27 (UTC)Michael never trained me when I had the thrilling job to sit up on that riser. I think a lot of that stuff is common sense. Though sometimes it is hard to pop off with what you should be saying; it is a little intimidating being up there.
I am assuming it was Kathryn D. up for programming. She too has been affiliated with the Con for a long time, but the way she handled things doesn't surprise me.
I won't be doing anything with programming for '04, but I do intend to try and be a little more involved pre-con this time around. Hopefully I can be a little more proative with the pre-con speed bumps.
no subject
Date: 29 May 2003 19:56 (UTC)And if you're a department head:
* Always show up, since someone might say something nice or nasty about your people and their performance.
* Get a spot near someone you know who will wake you up if they mention your AOR.
* Catch up on sleep before Dead Dog.
-M
no subject
Date: 28 May 2003 02:23 (UTC)no subject
Date: 31 May 2003 11:21 (UTC)It was fun, pleasant conversation, and for once I could eat donuts without worrying about screwing up my blood sugar!
no subject
Date: 28 May 2003 11:49 (UTC)I take it the term refers to a con AAR of some sort...?
no subject
Date: 28 May 2003 16:30 (UTC)no subject
Date: 29 May 2003 19:56 (UTC)Worthwhile if you have something specific to laud or deplore, especially if it involves the hotel staff/service/accommodations.
Otherwise, a big snooze.
-M
no subject
Date: 31 May 2003 11:27 (UTC)I was soooo glad you were there.
Re: the Hiss and Purr, I stopped bothering years ago. If I criticize the con, I get jumped on; if I praise, I'm only echoing the obvious. I don't need the stress.