Home and sort of alive.

Made it home, later than usual due to kshandra's cashiering duties.

I'll write about the final day and a half of the con later, but now I need to go to work.

Ugh.

I invoke the spirit of Charles Nelson Reilly!

Photos from the Match Game SF event at Baycon. This one is a good shot of me, my badge-fu (pinned to my jacket,) Mr. K the penguin, and my ever-present Coke. Sitting next to me is figmo.

Traveller in SF is Dead, long live Trav in SF!

The original intent of the Traveller in SF mailing list was to promote contact and gaming among the surprisingly high number of Traveller players in the SFBA.

However, after some initial success, the list has died. I'm not sure if the mail to the list will even go through (hence the posting to TML-Chat.)

One good thing to come out of the list is the annual BayCon party. Over the last couple of years it's come to be planned and financed by four people. John Groth, Kiri-Chan, Kirsten (my wife) and myself. Honestly, very few people from the Trav in SF group even attend BayCon.

But that's another rant.

We talked it over at this year's con. We love getting together and throwing the party; at this point we are one of the oldest continuously running parties at the con (after Mara's Bar - the local Klingon Assault Group effort.) And with next year being Traveller's 30th anniversary, we're making some changes.

1. We are no longer Traveller in SF. We're the Traveller's Aid Society.

2. We are actually going to put some real planning and effort into making the party an experience to remember.

3. To facilitate discussion, I've created a LiveJournal community. tas_baycon

http://community.livejournal.com/tas_baycon/profile

Anyone interested in helping, even if it's just advice or encouraging words (although buckets of cash would also help) is encouraged to join. To do this, you'll need a LiveJournal account. It's free, and nobody says you have to actually use it for anything but this.

https://www.livejournal.com/create.bml

Once you have an account, you need to go to the community page and click the "join now" tag. I'll try to approve requests within 24 hours.

4. So, what do we need? At this point, ideas. Also for those who are local, an idea if you might be willing to attend the con to help with the party itself. We're also going to need some f/x help down the line.

OK, I'm done.

More Bayconnage.

When last we left our hero, it was early evening on Sunday. I had planned on helping run the party, but as I left the Internet Lounge something in my gut went sproing, and i was suddenly in dire need of a restroom. Needless to say, I skipped the party. Instead I sat on our balcony for the Dive-In Movie.

See, overlooking the pool area is a large, blank, white wall. And there's a walkway that provides a great place for a projector. So at night we show movies. Sunday it was Serenity. With people all over the place shouting comments, cheering the good lines (I couldn't say which one got a bigger cheer.. Jayne's "Let's be bad guys" or Mal's "I aim to misbehave.")

After the movie ended, I went to bed. ataniell93 had kindly given me some herbal meds that really settled my stomach, so I got a good eight hours sleep.

To be honest, most of Monday is something of a blur. There was a major SNAFU with the hotel.. none of the function space had been reset. Or opened. Which meant my 1000 panel "When the Water Rises" was a bit late and ad-hoc. It was also uncomfortable for me. Look, I'm a high-school dropout. It's only because my mother refused to let me leave the valley without a diploma that I have one at all. I know I've done a lot of self-education on a number of topics, but the reality of my education remains. So imagine how I felt sitting on a hard science panel with three PhDs. I honestly felt like an audience member with a really good seat. Thankfully there were a couple of places where I could make a point, and one wonderfully lady quoted the panel description and asked "Well, where will the penguins go?" I gave her two answers. The serious one (the Emperors and Kings are in serious trouble since they are adapted to life on the ice sheets, the other species just require rocky beaches and a food source) and the funny one (They're marching north! Guard your homes!)

I ducked into the "Extra solar planets" panel, but left quickly. Just a bad vibe in the room. Kiri and I decided to get the room packed up and out of the way early. I had one more panel, and it turned out to be one of the best of the weekend. Just A Minute... based on the BBC4 radio show, was a hoot even if we had a tiny audience. I won (21 points to 17 for my closest competitor) but that was besides the point.

Time passed, as it often does, and eventually we got to the Hiss'n'Purr. The usual BS mixed with good suggestions and real problems. One thing that really ticked me off was the whinging about military time. Is it that difficult to subtract 12 from the first two digits? I use the 24-hour clock all the time in my journal, does it bother any of you?

I mentioned how out of place I felt on the "Water Rises" panel, and got a good explanation on why I was there (they know me, and figured I could contribute.) At that point I left for a trip to the men's room, and lady caught me and said that she had attended that panel, and thought I had done a wonderful job. I heard that from a few other people over the next hour. Like my head needs to swell any more.

Now I need to go to bed.