Natterings From Nepantla

Lost and Found Day: Have you ever lost something important to you and thought you would never get it back, but then you found it or someone returned it to you?

Nothing memorable enough to answer this, no.

A kinda important thing I lost once was my badge at the 2021 Kumoricon, but by the time I realized it was missing it had been returned to Ops.

(I've been on the other side of that story, too. One evening during the 2005 Worldcon, the SO and I were taking the train back to our hotel when I spotted a badge that had fallen on the platform at an intermediate stop. [ETA: Actually, now that I think about it, I think it had fallen in the train and that's why I picked it up, the person who dropped it wasn't going to be able to come back to the platform and retrieve it.] I grabbed it and then the SO turned it in to Ops the next morning. There was a nice thank-you note in a later issue of the newsletter.)

It is frequently said these days that freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences. Case in point: the consequences of my post about Westercon and gaming are that people encouraged me to at least try volunteering to run the gaming track, so I did, and I am in fact going to be running gaming at Westercon.

I made it to Kumoricon last weekend, and enjoyed seeing a few people I haven't seen in a couple years, giving a talk about history of conventions, going to a talk about 150 years of trains in Japan, doing a bit of smoffing, learning mahjong, and so forth. The attempt to run a game did not go so well, though.

( A tale of drama and intrigue out of all proportion to what is being attempted )

The one thing I can do directly is take care to ensure that nothing like this happens in my gaming room.

Media conventions have not made the transition to the online very well, and most have just given up without trying. Kumoricon, our local anime con, was one such. It postponed the next con to the same dates to 2021 and made no mention of having a virtual event.

But apparently at some point the committee changed their minds, so the weekend after OR-eCon, we got DigiKumo.




There were two pieces: a Discord server which will remain up permanently, and a widget incorporating a Zoom broadcast and a feed from the matching Discord channel. I thought this was an elegant solution to the problem of two chats and the Zoom learning curve. The Zoom host only had the panelists to deal with, and there was still plenty of interactivity between chat and panelists when needed.

The one flaw in DigiKumo's design was that the embedded widget was on the same page as the con schedule. If you wanted to browse to see what was coming up next, you had to scroll down and lose the video. If you opened a second tab, you'd get a second video stream.

Anyway, pretty fun, covered the essentials of what I always attend at an anime con, excited to get back to an in-person con next year.