Category: Conventions

For Punctuation 2 we are repeating our Show and Tell: SFnal Cookbook panel. If you recall, last time I picked what looked like an quick and easy cookie recipe from the Doctor Who cookbook and then spent three plus hours sweating over the piping. This time around I have a new cookbook in the form of The Bakery Men Don’t See, a Xmas gift from John, who knows what side his bread is buttered on. And if you like butter, ho boy, does this book have a recipe for you! Now as the title suggests, The Bakery Men Don’t See …

Maundy Thursday coincided with the First Thursday London Fandom Zoom meetup, so it was bustling. What should have been excited anticipation for Eastercon was mostly annoyed grumbling, which is what what happens when pre-con communications are sparse/terrible. Still, having made my decision to attend Norwescon instead I tried my best not to get too worked up. John and I had gotten Vibrant Forest delivered earlier in the day, so we were drinking a nice porter, and later we had Unikebab for dinner, a nice drunken start to the weekend. Norwescon had opted for a platform called Airmeet, reminiscent of Accelevents, …

Website updates done for the most part, still need to go through and tidy up content and links, but I’m happy with the new theme and functionality. Next projects are probably is finally scanning the family album I meant to do literal years ago, and then garden work. As we get more sunny days, and the current lockdown nears completion, I want to be ready to get a few new plants to fill in some gaps in the garden and to pretty up the front of the house a bit. But before I do that I want to document what …

This was my first Picocon, I figured a one day convention might suit going virtual pretty well plus several folks I know were excited for it. They kicked things off by opening up the Discord channels, and encouraging people to have fun. The fun in question taking the form of several activities; a Turing test game channel, which I mostly ignored, fish slapping, on which more later, and a scavenger hunt! There were three teams; Marvin, R2D2, and HAL9000. I joined that last one, as it only had three people at the time and it seemed best to balance things …

Capricon was this past weekend, obviously CST isn’t the ideal timezone for me, but paying just $10 for a convention allows a certain casual approach to it, so I figured why not. It started Thursday, but as this was also First Thursday, I decided to Tun instead, which was a good time. On Friday, I popped back to the Discord for intermittent chatting. Staff was clearly keeping an eye on channels, being social as well as helpful. The first panel item I decided to go to was a reading, but unfortunately the reader in question could not be found, whoops. …

I settled in on election eve with junk food and wine and braced myself for doom scrolling and stress eating. I had read all the stats and felt intellectually good but emotionally fragile, and even seeing the first day numbers do exactly what was predicted by fivethirtyeight, it still made for several very long days. But eventually the results were in and now it’s all over but the yelling (though boy is there a lot of that). Luckily, my return to work had lasted all of two hours before the furlough extension announcement came down and off I went again, …

Once again two conventions occupied the same weekend, but this time I did have to choose between them, alas. New con on the block FIYAHCon which by all accounts was awesome, and Ineffable 2, a Good Omens convention in its second year. Only Ineffable had an art show, so I signed up and got to work on some new fans! Or I say got to work… I did everything but work on fans until a three days before the convention when I finally had a good idea of what I wanted to do. I only got two new fans done, …