My Motley Meanderings

This weekend I was at ConRunner, the first in a series of biannual UK conventions for convention organisers. ( Read more... )

I am selling Zombiecon membership number 9 because I will be in Ireland at the time of the con. It is a full adult attending membership and I paid £41.50 for it. Any reasonable offer accepted. Feel free to pass this on to anyone you think might be interested.

At Orbital 2008 last weekend I directed another episode of Torchwood Wobblevision. For the uninitiated this involves randomly choosing an episode of Torchwood from a selection of pre-prepared scripts, casting the characters pretty much at random, staging each of the key scenes in places around a convention hotel using any props that happen to come to hand, taking photos of them, and posting them on the web as a captioned slide show. I stole the idea from Blake's 7 Wobblevision to do at Year of the Teledu and it was so much fun that I volunteered to do it again.

So, without further ado, I present Day One.

We ran into a few teething troubles related to casting but I have some ideas for ways to make the scripts easier to work with in the future. The crowded social space we were working in and the fact that we overlapped with one of the most popular items of the whole weekend caused some slight problems but I think the end result turned out pretty well, I had lots of fun doing it, and I'd like to thank the cast (especially Carys) for being such great sports.

In case you missed the one we did at YotT, it was Cyberwoman.

I have already volunteered to do another episode at Redemption 2009 and could easily be persuaded to do it at other cons I'm going to if you give me a bit of notice to sort out the scripts in advance.

Monday from about 9AM to 3:30PM was spent rushing around finishing things off in the workshop and getting prepared for the Great Crystal Cyberdrome Exhibition. SMS and Eira presented two guided tours while Cuil sabotaged the monorail, then suddenly it was 5PM and I had to rush off to the closing ceremony. watervole and the_magician thanked loads of people by name, then asked everyone who had helped in some way to run the con (including gophers and panellists) to stand up - that turned out to be roughly two thirds of us. Back down to Newbury where we spent the next couple of hours first shifting all the exhibits back to the workshop room, then sorting, packing, and clearing everything out of the room (the hotel wanted it back the next day).

When I came back to the dead dog party after dinner I staggered around for a few minutes in a bit of a daze thinking, "is it over already? what happened? I've only been to one panel item!" before twinfair nabbed me and sent me on a quest to remove the posters from the walls all over the hotel. After finishing that, Vince handed me a small fortune in spare groats! With only a few hours left to spend them, I bought a drink for myself and one for Bazooka, attempted to buy one for Mad Elf (the bar had run out of cider), then came to the conclusion that I was never going to get rid of them at that rate and it really wasn't worth stressing out about it, so I went and handed most of them to a poor student who no doubt was able to find a productive use for them.

I'm back home now and have unloaded Fenchurch. There was one incident of Lorry Rage[1] on the way home. I would like to know who the person in the Volvo estate was who waved at me as they passed, then did it again a couple of hundred miles later. I'm not sure if they were somebody from Eastercon or just a random Morris Minor enthusiast. ETA: That was feorag.

How to summarise Orbital? Having worked on it for over two years (since before I went to my first Eastercon!) I have so many different feelings that I don't think I can adequately articulate them. It seemed to go pretty well from the comments I've heard. We had possibly the biggest Eastercon programme ever, and the highest membership count for over twenty years. The highlights for me personally were the ceilidh, the Beer Hunt sketch in the cabaret, Mitch Benn's act, and directing the second episode of Torchwood Wobblevision. I really hope we can have ceilidhs again at future Eastercons - it's such a fun social thing to do, much more so than a disco in my opinion. I'm already planning to do more episodes of Torchwood Wobblevision and have some ideas for ways to make it run a bit smoother.

The post-con blues haven't hit yet (that will probably come tomorrow when I have to go back to work) but the post-con lurgy has already begun to attack my throat. I'll try to get Torchwood Wobblevision posted up within the next day or two. I have registered my interest in helping out with Odyssey 2010 - watch this space. Finally, I'd just like to say get well soon to multiclassgeek and tracey_jane!

[1] When I'm doing a long journey I tend to cruise along behind a lorry, keeping pace with it for long periods of time. It's less stressful and more economical than constantly overtaking. Often another lorry will creep up behind me at less than 1 MPH faster than the lorry in front, and the driver will decide to overtake. For some reason they expect me to slow down so as to open a gap for them instead of continuing to keep pace with the lorry in front. Sometimes they get quite pissed off when I don't, especially if the gap in front of me increases and I speed up to close it again. One of them today gave me a long blast on the horn and flashed his headlights several times when he realised his speed-limiter wouldn't allow him to go fast enough to overtake a Morris Minor.

The bid session took place first thing on Sunday morning so I headed there instead of the BC workshop. There was one bid - Odyssey 2010 - which consisted of gaspodia, watervole, Fiona Scarlett, and gaspodex. They explained they wanted to come back to the Radisson again in 2010, and that the hotel had offered them Orbital's contract as a starting point, including the same room and drinks rates. Starting membership rates would be £35. A vote was taken and it passed with an overwhelming majority. The main guests of honour so far are Alistair Reynolds, Liz Williams and Mike Carey, with frandowdsofa and johannes_d as the fan guests. Let's do it again in 2010!

I spent most of the day in the workshop again, escaping for a short while to look around the art show, then head down to the dealers' room to join Odyssey, Satellite 2, and Albacon 2010, which I don't know much amount about except cuddles_batcave appears to be involved. I also tried to buy a T shirt with SMS's Orbital artwork on it but they'd already sold out of my size so I had to place an order for them to post me one later.

In the evening I went to the play, then I stayed on for the Mitch Benn set, which was absolutely hilarious. He was still going strong when I had to duck out to go and run Torchwood Wobblevision. I was a bit nervous but not as badly as the first time I did it, at Year of the Teledu. We got enough main cast members despite most of the con still being at Mitch Benn, though a couple of the extras got used several times. I made one mistake in that I cast somebody as Rhys, then cut the one scene Rhys was in. Oops! That character should have been down as an extra in the script. Next time I do this I'm going to have to reformat the scripts to make them easier to use (eg. grouping the scenes by setting would reduce the amount of running back and forth). Everyone involved certainly seemed to have a lot of fun. I've had a quick look at the photos and they seem to have come out pretty well (for a Wobblevision). I'll get them edited and uploaded as soon as I have a chance.

Afterwards I hung around for a while then went to my first panel item of the con: "What is Sci-Fi?" I must admit I wasn't particularly interested in the topic of the panel, but it was interesting to see they had adopted the Redemption tradition of heavy panel/audience interaction (rather than the usual "questions at the end").

I spent most of Saturday looking after the BC workshop again, finally escaping for some food at about 6PM. After dinner I went to the combined masquerade and cabaret. Eira and SMS's "We're Going on a Beer Hunt" sketch made me laugh so hard I ran out of breath! The opera singer (at her first con I believe) was incredible. Unfortunately the cabaret overran and I didn't want to duck out before the end so I missed Blake's 7 Wobblevision. Afterwards I chilled out in the fan lounge for a while until it got pretty late and I was having trouble staying awake.

I've just opened the bedroom curtains on Sunday morning and it's snowing outside! OK, it's really feeble southern snow - the odd flake that melts as soon as it touches the ground - but I can't complain too much. At least it's not a heatwave.

After getting to bed well after 1AM on Friday morning I got up again before 7AM and headed off to breakfast. It seems that if you get there early (it's open before the official 8AM start time) you get seated in the brasserie instead of the overflow area, and they have actual fried eggs! After breakfast I tried to get a key for the cyberdrome workshop room from Ops but nobody was up yet, so I wandered around the hotel a bit and got chatting to asphodeline who had volunteered to be Neil Gaiman's assistant for the weekend was waiting in the foyer for him to arrive.

watervole got me a key so I went and unpacked the workshop and spent ages taping two layers of newspaper onto the wooden table, then assembling the basic structure of the City of the Future. The fact that it was a wooden table should have rung alarm bells - the reason we'd agreed to take that room was because on the site visit it had an unmovable glass table in it and the other one didn't, and Chaos Costume wanted to be able to move the table out of the way and work on the floor. The costumers arrived later on and immediately noticed that their room had a giant glass table in it: yes, the hotel had moved it since the site visit (I'm pretty sure they assured us they weren't going to put any more glass tables in before the con - they obviously thought it wasn't worth mentioning they were going to move an existing one). Anyway, we got everything swapped over and it doesn't seem to have caused too much confusion (though the newsletter somehow got an incorrect notice in it saying we'd moved into the other room on that corridor).

At 2PM I escaped from the workshop and went to the ceilidh training session. They started out slowly walking us through various steps and worked up to some faster dances. It was two hours long and energetic at times so I was pretty tired by the end - not good considering the real Ceilidh was later that evening. Most of the steps didn't sink in but the practise was useful and I picked up some useful tips. The people running the session were trying to teach us the steps to an English dance they didn't know from some instructions on a sheet of paper, and at one point they turned two pages over at once and got everyone on the floor into a complete muddle. As a nice bonus there were about twice as many women as men there so no trouble finding a partner!

In the evening after some dinner and the opening ceremony was the ceilidh itself. It was brilliant fun. I really should try to find a local dance I can go to. I danced for hours with many different partners and was completely knackered by the end. A special mention must go to helenex and munchkinstein who were spinning at double the speed of everyone else! After the ceilidh I wandered around for a bit wondering where everyone had gone (I hadn't realised it was after 1AM) and arborophile called me into the games room to play Werewolves. I didn't know the rules so I was trying to figure them out as the game progressed, while (successfully) hiding the fact that I'd been given one of the Werewolf cards!

As I write this on Saturday morning, it is hard to believe that the con only officially opened about twelve hours ago. It seems to be going pretty well so far as I can see.

After spending all day Wednesday sorting out the stuff for the Beyond Cyberdrome workshop and packing it into Fenchurch, I got up at 4AM on Thursday and headed off down to London. There were no major problems on the motorways (just a bit of congestion around Birmingham) and I arrived at about 10AM and spent a while helping to stuff registration packs before I had to leave and catch the tube into London to meet hermi_nomi at the Theatre Royal and see the Lord of the Rings musical. I was a bit nervous about getting lost on the underground or in the streets of London but actually it was fine and I had time to stop for a hot dog in Leicester Square.

The musical was worth seeing once. The live special effects (especially the giant robotic stage) were really spectacular. Unfortunately the songs were nothing special, and the plot really suffered from being condensed to less than three hours. I complained about all the stuff they had to leave out of the movies but the musical was much worse. Huge chunks were just skipped over. The part where Frodo was stabbed by a black rider occurred in the Prancing Pony. Later on Galadriel was singing about Lothlorien, then suddenly we were in the scene were Boromir tries to take the ring from Frodo. Among the more significant missing characters were Faramir and Eowyn. They never travelled the Paths of the Dead, never visited Minas Tirith, and we didn't get to see most of the important battles. I'm probably being too picky. As others have said, it may be more enjoyable for those who have never read the books or seen the movies (which also left things out but nowhere near as much as the musical). And there is the trouble - the people who enjoy this type of story have probably already experienced it in a better version. The songs and the acting could have made up for it, but unfortunately they didn't.

After the musical I walked back to Leicester Square and had a very nice pizza in an Italian restaurant, then got back on the tube and headed up to Camden for the Jonathan Coulton gig at Dingwalls. Shortly after leaving the tube station I was stopped by johncoxon, flickgc, and others who were waiting for somebody else. We walked up to the venue as a group and arrived nice and early, to find that there was already a huge queue in the yard outside. While we waited, aardvark179, ffutures, and several others arrived and joined our group - there were probably about 20 of us there who were also members of Orbital. The gig itself (once it finally got started) was absolutely brilliant. Jonathan Coulton is a really funny guy, not just in the songs he writes but in the banter between the songs, and the ad-libbed changes making fun out of the Americanisms in his lyrics. At one point he announced he was going to do a Christmas song, so we were all expecting Christmas is Interesting or Chiron Beta Prime, but instead he launched into an impromptu rendition of Feed the World, ad-libbing new lyrics as he went along. Hilarious. It was a very geeky crowd and everyone got really into it, singing along and cheering. Afterwards aardvark179 and I headed back on the tube and arrived at the hotel sometime after 1AM.

That's enough for now; I'll catch up with Friday's report while I'm supervising the BC workshop.

This was my second Novacon. It was probably more representative of the Novacon experience than last year because that was dominated by discussion about Convoy (the original 2007 Eastercon) having been cancelled, and the creation of Contemplation as a very short notice replacement. ( Read more... )

Congratulations to tlanti and steverogerson, who just appeared on The One Show on BBC1 in a piece about the Cult TV con.

Satellite 1 was a small one-day convention at the Campanile hotel in Glasgow, a stone's throw from the SECC, site of the 2005 Worldcon and the 2006 Eastercon. Its theme was the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik 1, the first man-made satellite. I vacillated for some time over whether to go or not - the distance (250 miles) made it impractical to travel there and back in one day. I eventually decided to drive up very early on the day of the con and stay one night, then drive back the next day after doing a bit of sightseeing.
( Read more... )

OK, I know I've been lax in updating my journal for the past few weeks. Work got pretty hectic for a while but I can't go into details in a public post. I guess it's time for another random update: ( Read more... )

This weekend I went to the Year of the Teledu convention in Leicester.

( Read more... )

tregenza asks what are you looking forward to at Year of the Teledu?

Well, apart from the items I'm running and generally having fun with friends old and new, I'm looking forward to both Inconsequential - When We Were Young, about one of the very first FunCons, and Something Wiki This Way Comes, about Teledu and its experimental idea of organising the con in an Open Source manner via a public Wiki (a Bazaar of fans vs the Cathedral model of traditional committee-run cons).

It's not too late to join, but you'd better be quick because the hotel is very close to running out of bedrooms.

Here are the photos I took at ConFounding Tales! Unfortunately for reasons that seemed to make more sense at the time than they do now, I took nearly all of them using my crappy phonecam instead of my good camera.

ConFounding Tales! was small but cunningly formed. It had two programme streams, the typical attendance at each item was between about twenty and forty people, and they were structured in such a way as to encourage everybody to join in, even somebody like me who usually goes to lots of serious panel type programme items and sits through them without saying a word. The items I went to at ConFounding Tales! were mostly silly games, but I heard vague rumours of some slightly more serious things going on elsewhere.

( What I did at ConFounding Tales! (had lots of fun) )

In related news, the Great God Telethulu persuaded me to join Year of the Teledu, which is being held at the Stage Hotel in Leicester on the 20th-22nd July.

I'll do a full con report later, but here's a quick Sunday morning update while I sit in the bar with the free WiFi in it, waiting for the day's activities to start. I'm having a great time up here in Glasgow, and I'm very glad I came. The programme is packed with fun SF-themed games with lots of audience participation. I particularly enjoyed satellite_1's game, which was loosely based on the Knightmare TV show, except with several "mission controls" simultaneously trying to guide their blindfolded "space probe" to the correct destination planet within a time limit.

The best thing to happen yesterday was that I went to the Space Baron's wedding Ceilidh and thoroughly enjoyed Scottish folk-dancing with lots of young ladies. Considering I've never been to a Ceilidh before and generally avoid dancing altogether because I'm so bad at it, I was surprised by how much fun it was. It certainly helped a lot that I went to the introductory workshop "for English and other foreigners" beforehand - it was too short to learn the steps to the dances off by heart, but the practise and the pep-talk gave me enough confidence to get up and have a go (thanks also to Ann who asked me up for the first dance while I was still trying to work up the courage to ask someone to be my dance partner). There were lots of other novice dancers there, plus as the night wore on people got increasingly inebriated, so if you botched a move and suddenly found yourself at the opposite side of the floor to your partner or trying to dance with the wrong person, that just made it funnier. The best one (I can't remember the name but I think the band said it was an Arcadian?) involved the men stood in one line and the women in another line facing them. The top couple joined hands and spun around a few times, then they set off down the middle of the line; the man spins the next woman in the line around his right while his partner spins around the next man on her right, then you meet in the middle and spin around to the left, catch the next pair and spin to the right, meet your partner in the middle and spin to the left again, and so on, till you reach the bottom. Then you join the end of the line and spin around each couple that comes down the line, gradually advancing back to the top, at which point it starts all over again. New couples keep starting off down the line at a regular pace, so there are several pairs going at a time. The music sped up once we'd got the hang of the steps, and suddenly the line was one massive spinning whirl of people going round and round at breakneck pace, all trying not to miss a catch or collide with another spinning couple. Incredible.

At Contemplation (Eastercon 2007), I made my acting debut as Dayna in Moloch, an episode of Blake's 7 Wobblevision. We thought we might have to call it off when only three cast members turned up, but steverogerson recruited some more fans from the bar, deleted a few minor roles from the script, and made it all work somehow. I had a lot of fun doing it and I'm already looking forward to the next one.


In this scene my character is being rescued by Doran, played by quasi_hayley's mum.

Here's the original script (in case you would like to see how badly we butchered it).

Look what I found on the CD of photos from Redemption that johnrw gave me:

It's the sketch asphodeline drew of me during the Redemption pub quiz. The vacant glassy-eyed look on my face is because my brain had switched into power-saving mode by that point as a result of travelling to a con the day after giving blood.

( What I did on Monday at Contemplation, and some discussion on the hotel. )

Here is the video from Beyond Cyberdrome's Intermission Games (I'm Sorry I Haven't a Robot) at Contemplation, this year's Eastercon.


As an added bonus, we also have the Magnotron Crescent map.

The rip-off Swisscom Eurospot WiFi was broken throughout the hotel on Monday, so I didn't get a full 24 hours out of the "1 in 24" I bought on Sunday, and I wasn't able to post this until I got home on Tuesday afternoon. Monday's report has yet to be written but I think it'll be a short one because I didn't do a whole lot on the last day.

( What I did on Sunday at Contemplation )

I've just bought "1 hour over a 24 hour period" worth of Internet access for £6.50, so if I'm quick I should be able to check my email more than once today.

( What I did on Saturday at Contemplation... )

( What I did on Friday at Contemplation... )

I've done the packing for the trip to Eastercon unusually early for me - I'm not leaving until tomorrow morning, and it's virtually finished already. I was surprised to find that everything fitted into my rucksack with only a bit of pushing and squeezing, and I was even able to get it fastened. Then I remembered that I haven't packed my pillow yet (a neck problem means that hotel pillows are nearly always unusably thick for me). I think some of the Beyond Cyberdrome stuff will have to come back out and go into a carrier bag instead, but I can sort that out in the morning. I'm not bringing that pile of Foundation books home again on the train.

ETA: I repacked the rucksack, filled up my coat pockets with everything I could stuff into them, said the magic word[1] a few times, and it magically all fit except for the box of stationary supplies, which I've strapped to the top of my rucksack using the mesh of bungee cords that I've never found a use for until now.

Like last year, reports may be posted intermittently from now on because the Crowne Plaza's wireless Internet access is ludicrously expensive.

[1] "goinyerbugger"

Here's a quick teaser for the Beyond Cyberdrome Intermission Games I'm helping to run at this weekend's Eastercon:
( Read more... )
There's an A4 PDF version available if you want to print it out and decorate it yourself (regardless of whether you'll be at the con). The ones I'm taking with me will be printed on dayglo green, yellow, pink, and orange paper.

The Redemption Spy Game I spent most of the weekend playing is now available online with the answers obscured so you can have a go at solving it yourself.

( Another con, another con report... )

Redemption is going very well so far. I'm playing a spy game as a member of of team Raiders, which involves solving lots of SF-themed puzzles throughout the con. I earned some Drazi points for one of the puzzles, though I see my team is currently losing by 110 points to 175. Some of us just took part in Nigel and Sabine Furlong's Crisis Management live-action role playing game, which was scary but in a good way. The scenario was that we were controlling a nuclear power station in the Battlestar Galactica universe when the second Cylon attack broke, and we had to try to deal with the crisis as best we could. It isn't possible to "win" the game as far as I can tell, it's a question of how badly things have gone wrong when you run out of time. The worst part for me was when I had to order the site security team to use lethal force if necessary to prevent panicked civilians breaking in through the main gates, and they refused.

Apparently Orbital has taken plenty of new members today. I suspect we're going to get some Redemption regulars coming to Orbital as their first Eastercon because it's being run by the same people. As for myself, I'll almost certainly be coming back to Redemption '09. I managed to limit myself to one small book in the dealers' room, which is probably a good thing considering how little space I have in my rucksack.

A bit of a break now, then the masquerade, cabaret, disco, and maybe I'll take a look in at Wobblevision later.

I've arrived at Redemption. Apparently I'm in the Purple Drazis team, the significance of which should become apparent later on.

Slight SNAFU at Preston - my train arrived late and the departure boards were broken, so I got to the relevant platform just in time to watch my connecting train leave. My new route went via Birmingham New Street instead, where I ran into exalted_mugwump. On arrival at Hinckley station we spotted a couple of other fans, and all four of us squeezed into one small minicab.

Currently sat around in the Rotunda waiting for the_magician, who wants me to look at the broken windscreen washers on his car...