Belfast: The Eastercon
It is always tricky to decide which day to arrive and how long to stay for a convention, especially when its in a place you want to explore. Aside from the obvious considerations around money and time, you have to balance the fear of missing out with the human limits if endurance. Particularly if you are friends with the harder drinking fans!
,We arrived on the Friday, by which time our social media feeds were already knee-deep in excited posts and envy inducing photos. We flew direct from Newcastle, which was nice and easy but did require getting up at a very uncivilized hour. I had only looked the Bullit upon streetview, so rather expected a pokey little budget hotel, not the extremely trendy, Steve McQueen film themed, vynil DJ in the lobby joint we encountered. Bicycles for borrowing, three coffee brewing options not counting espresso, and amazing cocktail bar described in my earlier post,. It was a delightful base of operations, not the least becase a lot of our favourite people were also staying there.
We dropped our bags, got coffee to go, walked the eight or so minutes over to the convention centre, and picked up our badges. Then I left John to it and headed to the art show to hang my fans. Unexpectedly, they had switched to adhesive plastic picture hangers, which don’t work very well with fabric. I scrounged their last four bulldog clips and did what I could with the hangers, but the fans kept falling off. With no alternatives in sight I let them know I would try to find a Rymans and get clips but hopefully they might come up with a solution. I must say the solution I found when I can back later was, er imaginative but perhaps not the best! lol. – luckily the ICC cloakroom were absolute legends and scrounged me up half a dozen of the exact clips the art show used to use. I will treasure them forever (literally, from now on I am bringing them with me every time).
One nice thing about hanging art is getting to chat with other folks also setting up, in this case Andrew and Emily January and their gorgeous ceramics. I didn’t have a proper look at the rest of the show until later with John, it was a really good one this year and I came very close to buying a little domin-IKA piece but it was direct sale and went quick. Overall sales seemed decent if not spectacular, I only sold three fans but about half of my prints.
Programme looked pretty strong, I managed opening and closing ceremonies, the future Eastercons bid session, and a handfull of panels.
Opening ceremonies included Jeanette Ng and Lauren Beukes launching an online auction in support of trans rights, in response to the supreme court ruling. It ran two weeks and was so successful that there is now a second one!
The bid session was quite fun for me because the next two Eastercons now both have logos from me. Unconfined asked me to design something based on an existing skyline image, and I’m pretty happy with the results, Iridescence liked an existing piece of art I did for the Drink Tank, so I did some minor tidying to that.
The best of the panels was probably Through the Wardrobe: Celebrating the 75th Anniversary of Narnia, with Ali Baker, Ben Handcock, Edward James, Emily Tesh, and Virginia Preston moderating. It was wide ranging without veering off-topic, and the panel were all fans of the books but with enough of a variety of opinion to still be interesting.
John was on multiple panels, but the only one I attended was Octothorpe Live, which as usual was a slightly hungover, gently chaotic experience and one of the more enthusiastically hybrid events due to the now traditional Discord chat on the screen behind the panelists.
The evening events included a disco, a ceilidh, a masquerade, and karaoke which is a pretty good variety – but for one reason or another I skipped all of them. I did catch a few glimpses of the masquerade, and very much enjoyed the variety of costumes around on Saturday. I changed into my Night Sister costume in the evening, most of the Star Wars cosplayers seemed to have gone by then but I got some pretty good reactions (well, and a couple of maybe a little less chill ones on the walk from the Bullit) especially from friends who did not recognize me at first glance.
But as always the best part of the convention were the conversations. It was great to meet some new people, including Roseanna and Ed, to get to have one of those long rambling chats with Johan, Jerry, and Suzle, that ranged from Fritz Leiber to Looney Tunes, to share a beer in the Hilton with Tobes and Andy and then walk the party over to Rattlebag to join the rotating cast of the seemingly continuous party there, and even after the convention was over, to meet some fans on the Giants Causeway tour for one last bit of convention.