I spent all day Friday at BayCon, the Bay Area’s largest sci-fi & fantasy convention. It’s been about fifteen years since my last con (and the last one was a small college-sized affair) so this was all pretty new to me. I mostly went so that I could meet the artist Guest of Honor Ursula Vernon and her husband Kevin Sonney (
It was a lot of fun. I drove, parked, wandered the wrong way around the parking structure/hotel/convention center, registered, and ended up in the throngs of people. I checked out the dealer’s room (where I picked up an anthology of sci-fi mysteries (a hard genre to pull off), and a couple of mid-sixties Peanuts and Charles Addams collections) and the art show (excellent leather masks by this one lady whose card I lost and some impressive work from the Bay Area Lego Club.) I attended a few panels throughout the day (one on costuming, one on how Doctor Who has endured all these years, and one about clockpunk, steampunk, & cyberpunk. I also poked my head around the entire con to see what else was going on. I found a nice Indian place a couple blocks away from the hotel for dinner and I got back in time to watch the presentation of the Guests of Honor. The author GOH, David Weber, is a great storyteller. After that I stuck around for charaoke (charity karaoke), but I was feeling some heartburn from the biryani for dinner so I never did turn in my slip to perform “Mahna Mahna.”
The big highlight of the day was meeting Kevin & Ursula at their table in the dealer’s room. As their unofficial segueographer I felt it my duty to bring them a nice snack so I brought some honey sticks from Buzzbee’s Honey, and I apologized for the box of food that I sent a couple months back. I browsed through Ursula’s selection of prints and chatted with her and Kevin while I picked out a few.
And the best part? I got a wombat sketch in my new notebook!
Other memorable moments:
* David Weber’s amalgamation of the worst con he’d ever been to – no schedule, no con staff, had to pay own expenses, con committee ended up in jail on fraud charges.
* “Sherp is a verb, isn’t it? It should be.”
* “Lots of planets have a Vancouver.”
* “Located next to the memorial Gorn.”
I spent most of yesterday napping off an on. I’m kind of glad I went on Friday when it was a little more sedate.