Strontium Bitchings

 I was at Bristolcon last weekend, which was more fun than I expected. The programme was largely fantasy items and publishing items, so I initially didn't think I'd go to much, given that I'm largely a science fiction geek. And I also knew that several people I usually chat to wouldn't be there.

However, I was down to volunteer and also to moderate a panel on War Never Changes and had been emailing the participants beforehand. Thus on the morning I got the opportunity to meet JP Corwyn, who was one of the panellists and is blind. I offered to be the volunteer to guide JP to the Opening Ceremony and to the first panel of the day. We hit it off and I stayed as his volunteer all morning. JP was a gent and insisted that we go things that I was interested in too.

I went to:
Opening Ceremony
Reading by Anna Smith Spark
There Were No Elves at Helm's Deep
Worldbuilding Tips and Tricks - this was great. 
The Economics of Fantasy - had a lot of actual history discussed, so was much more interesting than I was expecting.
Book launch/signing
GoH interview - Liz Williams. Hugely entertaining. 
Reading by Cavan Scott
And of course the War Never Changes panel. Which went brilliantly. Dom Murray was incredibly nervous because it was his first ever panel, and refused to believe he was doing fine. 

The only downside of Bristolcon is the bar gets INCREDIBLY NOISY so for people with damaged hearing (me) and age-related hearing loss (me) it is almost impossible to hold a conversation. I should have nabbed a committee member and asked if there was an option to use the Dealers Room or Art show for chatting after those had been dismantled. 

The latest PR for Reclamation had a link to their Covid policy. Good job I went to re-read it, as I had missed the first time round that they want an INTERNATIONAL Covid Pass, not a domestic one.

I've no idea how easy/difficult getting an International one is, and the Gov website (understandably) says tons about international travel related stuff and nowt about how you'd go about using an International one for domestic stuff. (This is the England regulations I'm talking about - Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland may have their own screeds of legalese to plough through).

I did find out that the digital version of the International pass lasts:
- 30 days if you confirm your phone number
- 72 hours if you don't confirm your phone number
(It doesn't say how)

If you want a paper copy, you need to leave 7 days for it to arrive. (Assuming the post in your area is reliable).

Do I need to say what country I'm travelling to? (The People's Republic of Heathrow???)

I'll try later in the week to apply for it, after I've done my next lateral flow test. Hope it doesn't require a PCR test like my Mum's Scottish version of the International Pass did when she went on holiday a few months ago.

 I had a gaming thing scheduled with my brother for 3pm, so I only did a half day at Confusion on Day 4.

The Exoplanets panel had no tech issues. They wandered off topic a lot but it was entertaining nevertheless. 

Annoyingly, as usual the previous panel crashed into the next panel, and so the buffering thing meant I didn't get into it until it had started. It was the In Memory of Storm Constantine panel and it had no audio. I really, really wanted to hear this, so set off to log onto Slide to tell the moderator that.

And discovered that I had no idea which of the 7 channels was the Storm Constantine one!  (I hadn't written it down like I had with some other panels). No problem, I thought - I'll go look at the list of what's on today and that will say.  But it didn't say on the "now happening" page, and the 12.00 panels had all vanished from the Monday programme page - it only had future panels showing, not current ones. I went round and round in circles trying to find the "whole of the programme" page which I knew had the info on it.  FFS stop making vital info difficult to find. 

So I jumped in and out of all the Slide channels until Kari posted a moderator message in one, indicating it was the Storm one. 

Kari and Tech sorted the audio after a few minutes, so I got to hear most of the panellists stories about Storm. It was sweet and funny and made me cry in places.

The final panel I watched was New Keystones in SF. Again I missed the start, due to (1) the previous one not finishing until bang on 1pm; (2) the buffering thing lasting a minute or two; and (3) I am a human being who sometimes needs to pee! 

I think the tech issues for this con would have been a lot less frustrating if the communications had been better. Stuff like:

• Don't assume everyone and their dog is constantly glued to Facebook and Twitter. Put everything important on your website. Especially "how to" summaries and links to platforms/channels.
• Don't send out emails at the last minute. (If there is some sort of last minute emergency, fair enough). 
• Repeated information is better than lack of information. 
• Too much information is better than lack of information.
• If the platform to ask questions is different to the platform to watch the panel, it needs flagged up in LARGE FRIENDLY LETTERS in multiple places, so people don't have to go hunting thru emails to find it.
• If there are multiple channels/rooms for questions with generic names like "Room 1", then you need to include the channel name in the title of the panel EVERYWHERE that title is mentioned. e.g. Exoplanets in SF - Room 5. 
• If the panels all start bang on the hour, then the panels need to end at 5 to the hour. Those 5 minutes are vital for meat space activities like comfort breaks, making cups of tea, feeding the cat, etc. As well as providing 5 minutes to get over the buffering issues. (Having 5 minutes for buffering from 12.55 to 13.00 is no use if the last panel I went to ends at exactly 13.00). 

Things have improved on the tech front, but still not 100%.

I couldn't get into the 10am panel I wanted to see - just a black screen, not even any buffering. Same for the others running in the same slot. So I wandered off to do other things.

At 1pm I tried again for Dan Abmett's GoH interview - and everything worked! Yippee!  As did the lecture on Medieval Forensics. And both were excellent events.

However there was no audio on the 8pm panel I wanted to see - 80s pop music & space marine dialogue. I tried my second choice of Working Class Heroes and that had audio... and some very fine discussion. I have a few book recommendations jotted down.

The Male Power Fantasy panel also worked fine.

 The lovely people who entertained the Dublin Worldcon queues have, er, scientifically analysed their data. I love that they are still being entertaining!

dublin2019.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Dublin2019QueueSurveyResults.pdf

 Stabcon this year just hit the spot for me. I always enjoy it, but this year it de-stressed me nicely. 

Friday: I played the worker placement game Evil High Priest. Liked it a lot and may buy it. There was enough variety of stuff to do that I never felt I got stuck, or had to waste workers on pointless actions.

I then scooted off to run Vampire the Masquerade 5th ed. Only 2 players*, but that made little difference to the scenario. They steamed efficiently through the investigation, recruited some supernatural assistance and headed off for the big showdown. Lots of comments from one player about how he liked the new VTM5e system - hunger dice, 3 round combats and so on.

Saturday: In the morning, I ran Summerland 2nd ed, using the published Fire scenario. I was worried that the scenario was a bit rail-roady in places, so I'd added a few extra elements to diverge from the main thread, and I rolled with the flow and let the players invent a derelict Little Chef to pillage for supplies. While the 2nd ed system (Open d6) is far better than 1st ed, I'm not convinced it fits Summerland's mood. Twice Roger's character killed someone with one punch, which feels more martial arts/superhero genre than 'eerie post apocalypse with mystical elements'. 

In the afternoon I chatted with folk, but lack of sleep on the Friday night (too much caffeine, too much heat) meant I wilted mid afternoon and retreated to my room to grab an hour's sleep.

Saturday evening was the fantastic Valkyrie 9 adventure for The Cthulhu Hack, run by Simon Burley. We were all maintenance robots on a moonbase, wondering where all the humans had gone. This is hands down the most fun I've ever had in a Cthulhu adventure. 

Sunday: The morning session I ran United Earth Defence: You are the Resistance, with one no-show out of 5 players.**  I was worried that a resource based game mechanic (if you roll a dice it is spent) might be troublesome if the players didn't grok it and ran out of dice. However, they pounced on the opportunities to do tactical stuff and rack up bonuses before they rolled, so they made every spent dice count. Plus they scavenged for more supplies etc, to refresh some of their dice pools.

A lunchtime chat with one of my best friends, then I scooted off to play the military science fiction Operation Felix run by John Parr. I was the only player to turn up, so it ended up being a one on one game. I had a whole platoon to myself, so it played out as part RPG, part skirmish wargame, and was great fun.

I was staying the Sunday evening after the con was over, so I met up with Peter and we went to a local pub - the Puss in Boots - for an evening meal. Good food, nice staff and a nice chat about roleplaying, Ancient Greek mythology and a novel Peter is writing. 

I love Stabcon. The organisation is a well oiled machine. Michelle and Hammy who run it are lovely folks. A good pool of RPG players and a metric ton of boardgames to play if none of the RPGs take my fancy. The hotel delivers pub food with very generous portions to your gaming table and the staff are all great. 


*Lack of players seemed to be a feature of this year's Summer Stabcon - several RPG games with few or no players. Perhaps fewer RPGers are coming? I think it clashed with Volcon, so that might be a reason.

** No-one had signed up in the reserve slot, which again makes me think there were fewer RPGers than normal at Stabcon. 

Follycon was last weekend but I've only just gathered enough wits and free time to do this report.

Travel there was trouble free, though the first train (of 2) was packed. Fortunately I had booked a seat. As she was checking tickets the conductor remarked that Maundy Thursday is the busiest day of the year on the rail network. I chatted to Rosie Oliver and other fans on the 2nd train.

I was in the Majestic, which is old enough NOT to have air conditioning (yippee!), to have windows which open (yippee!), and a radiator which remains off when you turn it off (yippee!). So finally an Eastercon without me coming down with con crud! Thew downside of the room was:
(1) The only decently bright light was in the bathroom. I had to read my con programme by standing at the window using daylight, and thank Grud the kindle has an illuminated screen.
(2) My room was above main programming, which meant my Cunning Plan to get an early night on Friday was scuppered by the dum-dum-dum of bass from the band. Ah well, they quit about 23.00 and neither the Ceilidh nor the Disco was as loud as the band.

Went out to eat at a very nice Chinese on the Thurs evening. I stuck to hotel food the rest of the time, mainly because there weren't big enough gaps between panels I wanted to see to do a restaurant meal. The method by which you obtained and paid for con food seemed to vary every time I was in the dining area (pay first, pay afterwards, table service, self service). Quality varied from terrible to really very nice. All the staff were lovely. I was a bit bemused by the warning signs which said things like "Pork - contains meat" or "Eggs - contains eggs".

Lots of fun chats with folk I hadn't seen for ages and with some people I'd never met before.

Stuff I went to:
- The Future of Cities
- Games: Story vs Mechanics
- Transgressive Sexuality
- Generations: Bioscience
- Generations: Ecology
- Putting Science in Your Story
- Nnedi Okorafor GOH interview
- Christina Lake GOH talk - Utopianism & Eugenics in Fiction
- BSFA Awards (I failed to vote because I didn't find the BSFA desk in the dealers' room. I realised later it had been hidden behind a gaggle of people every time I'd been there).
- Economics of Terraforming
- Eastercon bid session
- How to Finish Your Novel (where David Wake finished his live on stage by typing 'The End' and hitting Save).
- Christina Lake GOH talk on her early years in fandom
- Negotiating the Otherworldly
- Reproductive Technologies. It was great that they had an anthropologist as well as scientists on the panel.

I was busy fretting about snow, floods and train cancellations on Monday (Andy Bigwood of Bristolcon was texting me with tales of reversing trains and replacement buses) so I didn't go to any panels prior to giving my talk: Aliens Ate My Baby.

The speaker giving the talk prior to mine didn't stop at 11.50 like she was supposed to. And she didn't stop at 11.55 ish when the gopher waved the Stop sign or at 12.00 when the gopher came back and waved it more vigorously. As a result, the laptop which tech had loaned me wasn't set up on time... and the only tech guy who knew the password to it had dashed off to do tech in another room. I started without pictures, whilst the room tech sped off in search of John-Who-Knew-The-Password. Note to previous speaker REHEARSE YOUR TALK and TIME IT. It isn't rocket science.

Fortunately I HAD rehearsed my talk and knew it was 36 minutes long in a 50 minute slot, so Ms I'm Too Pretty & Special To Stick To My Allocated Slot wasn't the complete disaster it could have been. I did, however, only have time for 3 questions, and that was only by finishing at 12.53 instead of 12.50. The audience laughed and cringed in all the right places, so it went well.

Grabbed a quick lunch, toured round saying bye to people and then left a couple of hours earlier than I had originally planned, in case there was more weather chaos on the railways. Met Ian Millsted on train 1 of 2 and had a nice chat there and while we waited for connections at Leeds.