Very cool, if true

I spent the last four days in deepest Yorkshire, with 13 family members (including 3 under 6 years old) and 4 dogs.  You can thus imagine that I might spend a few hours sitting in my room with a PDA and a keyboard, writing up a Worldcon report.  I didn't mean to write 3,500 words, but such are the perils of young children.

Herein you will find mention of various people, including surliminal, nhw, coalescent, greengolux, the entirety of the Plokta Cabal, zarabee, swisstone, repeated Mike Abbott's and many more  - I know that I saw many more people than this, and can only humbly apologise for missing you out, but a 10,000 word write-up would seem extreme.  I've included mainly those people I was actually seeing at a panel, out to dinner with or otherwise thrown into extended contact around.  flickgc will undoubtedly complain that she's not mentioned at all.  I was writing this some distance from an internet connection (about half a mile, to the village shop), and thus have used real names, as my only reference was a copy of the Con Guidebook.  If you know the people you can undoubtedly match them up to their LJ tags - which is more than I can generally manage.

Looking back at my Eastercon write-up (handily at my side, thanks to its inclusion in Lilian's final (ha!) fanzine), I note that it finishes with me looking forward the Worldcon, thankful that it's significantly closer to Edinburgh than Hinkley is.  In hindsight I can now appreciate that this proximity is both a blessing and a curse. 

This was my third convention (not counting Corflu, which I didn't actually attend any of, the delights of Las Vegas far outweighing the pull of aged fanzine creators - with a few exceptions), and I was looking forward to chatting to The Plokta cabal, Third Row fandom, miscellaneous Cambridge people and the others who had repeatedly surfaced at previous events.

My brother Mike, on reading my Eastercon write-up, pointed out the obvious - which is that write-ups of events tend to end up as lists of "things wot I went to", so rather than attempt to find a way of subverting that format, I'll play straight into it, with a list of panels attended, meals eaten, etc,and then attempt to stick in some context and opinion at the end.
( Read on - if you dare )

Back briefly from the Worldcon to see The Prodigy, who are playing The Corn Exchange tonight - I'm meeting up with Guy later on to get a lift down and dance my socks off with him.

Worldcon so far is good fun, and I've met up with loads of people for cool conversation, appeared on 1 and a half panels (the half being an argumentative panel that I volunteered for at the last minute and was basically a conversation we'd have had anyway, only with about 20 people in the audience (which we basically sat _in_ so that they could join in as necessary).

I also made it to a fab panel on Hard-SF/Soft SF, where I got to watch Geoff Ryman and Ian MacDonald talk about Mundane SF, which was entertaining (and about 20 minutes too short), and an interesting one on become the establishment, where various older fans talked about the fact that they now felt like they'd become part of the establishment despite still not feeling they _were_ part of it.  I was able to help out a little bit by pointing out there's a difference between being established and being part of the establishment.  Oh, and listened to 60s fan Pete Weston talking about how much better the 21st century was than the 1960s, when everyone at cons wore shirts and ties, ate terrible food and stood up when the national anthem played at TV-close-down.

Back off again tomorrow so that I can help Geek-up another con-goer at "Geek Eye for the Mundane Guy", which should be fun.  In the meantime, I'm finishing up reading Flick's "Shiny" and 3rd Row Fandom's "Meta", both of which are fun.