Renovation, Day One (8/17)
Aug. 23rd, 2011 11:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellowUnder the cut.
I am a relatively early riser, which always presents a problem with conventions (since, apparently, most con-goers are not early risers - not even close...). I spent the early morning hours reading, before heading down to breakfast at the same place I'd eaten the night before. Breakfast was a copious version of my standard-when-I-can-get-it: eggs, bacon, hash browns, toast, coffee and OJ. Pricey, but tasty and filling.
The Peppermill provided a shuttle to and from the convention center. Unfortunately, the logistical aspects - how often it ran, how many buses were employed, where the pickups/dropoffs were to take place - took a while to shake down, and there were plenty of frustrated shuttle-users the first day or so.
Registration opened at 9:30; they were a trifle disorganized to begin with. I received a pocket program, but the souvenir program didn't become available until sometime later. I immediately sat down with the program, scanning for interesting events, and mapped out what I was going to do virtually every hour of the waking day from then until Saturday night. (There were, as usual, several time-slots occupied by two or even three interesting events that I would have to choose between....) But the first event that interested me was the opening of the Dealers' Room at 10:00. I began by picking up a second tote - the one I had was surely not going to suffice for the looming book-buying spree. The tote was the official Renovation bag, decorated with a set of panels depicting scenes from the Old West. (Think of the opening of the old "Wild Wild West" TV show.) Closer inspection, though, revealed that the scenes were not quite standard. The sheriff leaning on a wall is female, and the gun at her hip is a blaster, not a six-shooter; the bandits pulling out of the store they just robbed are carrying sacks full of books (naturally, since it's a bookstore, advertising "new scientifiction here"); the hand sprawled on a table, with the just-dropped Dead Man's Hand (two pair, aces and eights) lying nearby, belongs to a robot; and so on.
Thus equipped with sufficient carrying capacity, I moved on to the dealers' tables. I only stopped at two, both of my totes being full by then. From Glen Cook's table, I picked up copies of Delany's Babel-17, William Morris' The Water of the Wondrous Isles, Robin Hobb's Renegade's Magic (completing the Soldier Son trilogy), McKillip's Harrowing the Dragon, A. Merritt's The Moon Pool (my first Merritt), Cabell's Figures of Earth, Ernest Bramah's Kai Lung's Golden Hours, and Robin McKinley's The Outlaws of Sherwood. My second stop was at a used-book seller, from whom I acquired a couple of oldies by Norton (Quest Crosstime and Daybreak 2250 AD), a stack of Fafhrd/Grey Mouser books, and Dickson's Tactics of Mistake. Total cost: $53.50.
The first presentation I went to was a slide show of John Scalzi's visit to the Creation Museum in Kentucky. His account of the circumstances that led to his trip was pretty funny, as was - for the most part - his snarky commentary on the slides. (A few of his comments were misplaced, I thought; at one point, for example, he made a crack about holy water - which, of course, is not a relevant concept for the kind of fundamentalist who frequents that museum. It's more likely to be anathema to them, in point of fact....) Leaving, I ran intommegaera and CatMtn, the first Bujold listies I encountered at the con. We chatted briefly, then went our separate ways. I went on to a panel on "Designing Believable Physics", including a discussion of the effects of varying some of the basic physical constants. (Among other things, one panelist claimed that it was possible to describe a universe in which the weak force did not exist, but in which chemistry closely resembled our own. This required tweaking pretty much every basic constant....) This was followed by an audience-participation panel on Tim Power's On Stranger Tides (Powers being one of the Guests of Honor), which expanded into a discussion of TP's entire body of work - even the two very early and very bad novels which almost everyone has forgotten. That was fun; I threw my two fifteen cents in on, among other things, The Stress of Her Regard.
After that came the opening ceremonies. (My notes suggest that there wasn't anything memorable about them....) Then I went back to the Peppermill to unload my haul of books.mmegaera was also on the shuttle, and we chatted a bit more. At the hotel, I had some dinner - a batch of Singapore garlic noodles, about 40% larger than I was capable of eating, but very good. I returned to the convention center for a couple of concerts - one by Tricky Pixie (a strings-and-drum trio, mostly doing traditional-sounding Celtic stuff) and another by Mary Crowell (keyboard and strings, kind of a lounge act, whom I'd seen at Archon some years back). As I was hanging around in between the concerts, a dapper fellow in a high-crowned purple hat paused to inform me that I looked like Einstein. (I do not; mmegaera confirms this opinion. Nonetheless, things like this keep happening....)
And so to bed.
I am a relatively early riser, which always presents a problem with conventions (since, apparently, most con-goers are not early risers - not even close...). I spent the early morning hours reading, before heading down to breakfast at the same place I'd eaten the night before. Breakfast was a copious version of my standard-when-I-can-get-it: eggs, bacon, hash browns, toast, coffee and OJ. Pricey, but tasty and filling.
The Peppermill provided a shuttle to and from the convention center. Unfortunately, the logistical aspects - how often it ran, how many buses were employed, where the pickups/dropoffs were to take place - took a while to shake down, and there were plenty of frustrated shuttle-users the first day or so.
Registration opened at 9:30; they were a trifle disorganized to begin with. I received a pocket program, but the souvenir program didn't become available until sometime later. I immediately sat down with the program, scanning for interesting events, and mapped out what I was going to do virtually every hour of the waking day from then until Saturday night. (There were, as usual, several time-slots occupied by two or even three interesting events that I would have to choose between....) But the first event that interested me was the opening of the Dealers' Room at 10:00. I began by picking up a second tote - the one I had was surely not going to suffice for the looming book-buying spree. The tote was the official Renovation bag, decorated with a set of panels depicting scenes from the Old West. (Think of the opening of the old "Wild Wild West" TV show.) Closer inspection, though, revealed that the scenes were not quite standard. The sheriff leaning on a wall is female, and the gun at her hip is a blaster, not a six-shooter; the bandits pulling out of the store they just robbed are carrying sacks full of books (naturally, since it's a bookstore, advertising "new scientifiction here"); the hand sprawled on a table, with the just-dropped Dead Man's Hand (two pair, aces and eights) lying nearby, belongs to a robot; and so on.
Thus equipped with sufficient carrying capacity, I moved on to the dealers' tables. I only stopped at two, both of my totes being full by then. From Glen Cook's table, I picked up copies of Delany's Babel-17, William Morris' The Water of the Wondrous Isles, Robin Hobb's Renegade's Magic (completing the Soldier Son trilogy), McKillip's Harrowing the Dragon, A. Merritt's The Moon Pool (my first Merritt), Cabell's Figures of Earth, Ernest Bramah's Kai Lung's Golden Hours, and Robin McKinley's The Outlaws of Sherwood. My second stop was at a used-book seller, from whom I acquired a couple of oldies by Norton (Quest Crosstime and Daybreak 2250 AD), a stack of Fafhrd/Grey Mouser books, and Dickson's Tactics of Mistake. Total cost: $53.50.
The first presentation I went to was a slide show of John Scalzi's visit to the Creation Museum in Kentucky. His account of the circumstances that led to his trip was pretty funny, as was - for the most part - his snarky commentary on the slides. (A few of his comments were misplaced, I thought; at one point, for example, he made a crack about holy water - which, of course, is not a relevant concept for the kind of fundamentalist who frequents that museum. It's more likely to be anathema to them, in point of fact....) Leaving, I ran into
mmegaera and CatMtn, the first Bujold listies I encountered at the con. We chatted briefly, then went our separate ways. I went on to a panel on "Designing Believable Physics", including a discussion of the effects of varying some of the basic physical constants. (Among other things, one panelist claimed that it was possible to describe a universe in which the weak force did not exist, but in which chemistry closely resembled our own. This required tweaking pretty much every basic constant....) This was followed by an audience-participation panel on Tim Power's On Stranger Tides (Powers being one of the Guests of Honor), which expanded into a discussion of TP's entire body of work - even the two very early and very bad novels which almost everyone has forgotten. That was fun; I threw my After that came the opening ceremonies. (My notes suggest that there wasn't anything memorable about them....) Then I went back to the Peppermill to unload my haul of books.
mmegaera was also on the shuttle, and we chatted a bit more. At the hotel, I had some dinner - a batch of Singapore garlic noodles, about 40% larger than I was capable of eating, but very good. I returned to the convention center for a couple of concerts - one by Tricky Pixie (a strings-and-drum trio, mostly doing traditional-sounding Celtic stuff) and another by Mary Crowell (keyboard and strings, kind of a lounge act, whom I'd seen at Archon some years back). As I was hanging around in between the concerts, a dapper fellow in a high-crowned purple hat paused to inform me that I looked like Einstein. (I do not; mmegaera confirms this opinion. Nonetheless, things like this keep happening....)And so to bed.
