Con*cept.

Yawn. Awake again. I crashed as soon as I got home from Con*cept. I was going to stop and post a quick message to LJ, but I found myself nodding off in front of the computer and decided to go to bed before I woke up with keyboard face.

So, the convention was no better than 'okay'. Those of our friends who missed going didn't miss much this year. They had 2 media guests (the lady who plays the base doctor on SG1, and someone who's played lots of bit roles in SF movies and TV, including an Empire Admiral in Empire Strikes Back.) I'm always impressed at how little media guests resemble the characters they play. The lady turns out to be horribly afraid of blood and needles, so she finds some of her scenes to be very difficult. The other guy was a devil-may-care prankster and actually started a food fight at one point in the con...

They also had two well-known writers as guests: Dave Duncan (a favorite of mine, but I never got a chance to chat with him) and Robert Sawyer who recently won a Hugo. I'm not really a fan of Sawyer, so of course he was the one I had real opportunities to talk to. They also had an SF writer who'd just published his first book. Both his name and the book escape me, but it seemed worth reading. And, of course, Donald Kingsbury was there, but he lives in Montreal so it wasn't much of a surprise.

So, they had me, Dr. Stephenson (who does satellite based geophysics), and two hard SF writers, and a total of ONE science panel. So, of course we were all put on it, and it played opposite the masquerade, the most popular event at the con.

Given that both of the media guests were very entertaining speakers, and there were a number of good authors present, it should have been an amazingly good convention. Instead, this talent was very poorly utilized and not much was going on. I actually felt bored for a large portion of the con, something which hasn't happened to me before. I don't know why they didn't have an extra three tracks of panels, or for that matter, why they didn't have many panels in the 4 tracks they had. The video presentations sucked; there wasn't a SINGLE movie I wanted to see other than Beavra. There wasnt ANY anime at all!

So, although I enjoyed the bits that I attended, I spent at least three hours of the con just sitting around waiting for something to happen. The fact that I didn't bumb into a single friend other than T, didn't help. And of course, T was volunteering. My three encounters with T were:

1) Me: Hey T! Hi!
T: (to unknown friend as she walks by, never noticing me) I've got this huge list of things to do and no time and...

2) Me: T! Hi there!
T: Oh hello! How are you enjoying the...
X: T! We need you! There's this problem...

3) T: Stirling! Sorry I had to leave abruptly like that but there was a crisis and... Oh GOD! I forgot to DO that thing I said I would do! I gotta RUN!

OOPS

So, it turns out that I don't know that I don't like Robert Sawyers writing. I just did an check on Amazon to see if I had remembered his name correctly, and it turns out he didn't write the "Galactic Center" novels that I read and didn't like. That was Gregory Benford. The only book by Sawyer that I've actually read was Starplex and I rather enjoyed that one. (Although I didn't buy his gestalt aliens. He needs to read my xenobiology book, if I can ever get it written.)

Anyway, I suppose this means I should pick up one of his other books sometime and form a conclusion with more than one data point.

Gasp!

Here's something that deserves an LJ CUT: X-Rated Fruit! I found this in an images directory when looking for something else. Many of my friends have seen them before, but they'll be new to others. And no, I'm not the photograher. I have no idea who is.

( Don't Look! )