Worldcon day 2

I spent the morning posting here, hanging out on various con-related Discord servers, and getting myself signed up for the boardgaming platforms I would need to use for Gen Con. I also checked out the CoNZealand art show and exhibit hall.

Pie of the day: beef and mushroom stout. I also remembered that the SO had just gotten a 12-pack of assorted sodas from a vendor we first came across at last year's Portland Retro Gaming Expo. Their black cherry soda is decent, but I think Boylan's has them beat.

I had the beginning of the CoNZealand day blocked out since someone had asked in the staff lounge for volunteers to play the part of Hugo finalists in a rehearsal, but heard nothing more about on the day, so I had a low-key afternoon/evening of Discord and panels. We also squeezed in the weekly shopping trip right after lunch.

Also there was the Retro Hugo and Sir Julius Vogel Awards webcast, the latter part being a recording of a genuine in-person get-together. All the Vogel finalists were able to attend a small ceremony where the trophies were handed out, with the results being kept quiet until the the ceremony was streamed. I had not known that my co-panelist from the day before, Andi C. Buchanan, was a finalist (but maybe they mentioned it in their introduction at the panel and I was too nervous to pay enough attention).

"Money and Currency for Fantasy Authors" was another of those topics where there are practically no good examples to point to. A couple that were mentioned: the Wheel of Time series for the author noting that the different polities in it make significantly different coins, and the Pern books, where such commerce that exists uses wooden tokens (the precious metals being far too precious to use as coinage).

"Stunts in SF Films and TV Shows" was a one-man presentation by NZ stuntman Peter Hassall, and easily the best program item I've been to so far, definitely worth checking out on the "Watch it Again" feature if it shows up there. Lots of information ranging from the latest in safety gear to a terrifying story about how some of the EVA scenes in 2001 were filmed.

Worldcon day 3, Gen Con day 1

Gen Con kicked off with the launch of the Pathfinder 2nd edition Advanced Player's Guide, bringing a whole new bunch of ancestries and heritages to 2e. I really wanted to try out the witch class and something from the new ancestries and heritages, so I rolled a few dice in public view on the main PFS Discord server, and now I have a half-angel goblin ready to bring in when Yara graduates from the 1-4 tier.

First game of the day was Cosmic Colonies on Tabletopia. The game itself uses cards and polyominos as you attempt to make asteroids suitable for habitation. One neat feature for evening things out is that you get a random hand to start the game with, but any cards you play are then passed to the player on your left at the end of the round. Pretty good, would play again.

Being the first session of the con, a lot of time was spent at the beginning ironing out technical difficulties. Tabletopia turns out not to play well with Chrome, for instance. I was using Firefox, but ran into a problem where I couldn't dismiss a popup which was too big for my screen insisting that I sign up for a free trial.

One thing that struck me about both boardgaming platforms from yesterday was that where Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds are constructed with an eye to being an aid to players by implementing some of the rules in code, Tabletopia and such are conceived more as a simulation. You get a 3D representation of your gaming table and the ability to move your point of view around. You also get some work to mimic real-world physics, which can work both for and against you. For instance, when you're trying to return a resource counter to its stack, it would be neat if it just snapped back into the stack, whereas it was possible to not put it back precisely on top and have it fall to the table.

"Dice Questions Answered" presented the results of some experiments on dice rolling and fairness. The main question it answered was "Are your dice cursed?". The answer was, your d20s probably are cursed. The majority of d20s tested were biased, and more were biased toward low numbers than high numbers.

What biases them seems to be imprecise tolerances, a problem that gets worse as you move to dice with smaller and smaller faces. While the float test is useless, a good pair of calipers turns out to be the quickest and easiest way to tell if your die is going to be fair or not. Also, sharp corners work better than round ones.

The second game of the day was Planet Unknown on Sovranti, another space-themed game which turned out to also involve polyominos, but with wholly different mechanisms for allocation and scoring. I liked this one a lot, probably because I'm attracted to crunchier gaming systems and this one was significantly crunchier than Cosmic Colonies. It was the sort of game where none of us really fully grasped everything that was going on until a few turns in, yet managed to have fun anyway.

Sovranti, which turns out be pronounced like "sovereignty", is a downloadable app rather than a browser-based platform, and currently in beta. It adds avatars to stand around the virtual table (not customizable, though with a long list of varying ethnicities to choose from), but it falls closer to the "aid" end of the spectrum than Tabletopia. Rules were implemented in code, with a robust undo mechanism. One feature missing in comparison was the ability to select a board and zoom in on it, but our GM, who was one of the developers, assured us that that was on their shortlist of features still to be implemented.

Pacific Pie of the day: classic chicken. Very classic. I'd forgotten how good their chicken pie was. Wild Bill's soda of the day: vanilla cream. Possibly the best vanilla cream soda I've ever had, in that it tastes like actual vanilla and cream rather than just sugar.

Worldcon's Masquerade happened, all by pre-recorded video. A fairly small number of entries, which would be normal for a Worldcon outside North America, but all good. My favorite would probably be "The Pirates of New Zealand", all adorned with native NZ birds rather than pirates.

This was also the day that the site selection result was announced. To the surprise of practically no one, Chicago romped home with over 90% of the vote. The Jeddah committee will be trying again for 2026. In the traditional SMOFfish manner, they are now being recruited to help out with the next couple Worldcons.

Props to the nine people whose first-choice vote was a write-in for "Free Hong Kong", both for the sentiment and for setting up the additional write-in of "Moderately Expensive Hong Kong".

A lot of people stopped by the bid channel afterward to offer their condolences to the Jeddah chair and wish him Eid Mubarak. While it is well understood that the bid was a nonstarter (and that the odds for 2026 are not great right now either), few people want to crush the spirits of such an enthusiastic and committed bunch of young fans.

"Great Worlds in SF" was mostly about the mechanics of worldbuilding and how it is communicated to the reader-- the map in the front of the book and so forth. Fewer recommendations for specific great worlds than I was hoping for.

"My Favourite Anime" was the last thing I made it to for the day. Always good to see a bunch of people getting to enthuse about anime at an sf con, and many recommendations were made. It suffered from one problem that tends to occur on any open-ended anime-related panel, though, which is that very little of what was talked about was less than about 15 years old.

This panel also set a record for the number of feline interruptions. One panelist was plagued early with recurring appearances of a tail in frame with her, while another had a cat hanging out in his background grooming itself for a while, which eventually decided to come up and demand lap time and scritches.