Natterings From Nepantla

Last weekend: OryCon 42 (in person)
Weekend before: Kumoricon 2021 (in person)
First weekend in December: Smofcon Europe (hybrid but I'll be attending virtually)
Weekend after that: Cayden's Ascension (virtual)
Weekend after that: Discon III, the 79th Worldcon (hybrid, attending virtually)

Then a gap of NEARLY A MONTH until I possibly go to Waypoint Norwescon (an online relaxacon).

When Orycon announced it was going virtual, people were encouraged to get on its mailing list for updates on the replacement, OR-eCon.

There were no updates. But, the day before it was supposed to start, a schedule popped up on the Web site with a promise that full panel descriptions would follow shortly, which they did not. There were also instructions for joining another mailing list for Zoom links, which did work.

There was no Discord or other freeform social space, just a couple tracks of panels and readings, and another Zoom room for filk.

The highlight for me was a Q&A with next year's GoHs, Phil and Kaja Foglio, live from Phil's studio. It was neat to get a look at that, plus the Foglios are a very entertaining couple of people. Although I've given up reading Girl Genius, I'll look forward to seeing them on the program in person at Orycon next year.

With no Pathfinder Society games lined up for this weekend, I thought I had nothing at all scheduled until I got an e-mail Friday morning reminding me that I'd signed up for reCONVene. This was a one-day convention put on by NESFA (the people behind Boksone), running 11am-5pm Eastern and thus starting at an entirely reasonable hour of the morning for me.

The first couple hours I spent in the gaming room, which was Board Game Arena. BGA is a highly developed gaming platform, with various modes and a bunch of games and some low bars for newbies to overcome before they are allowed into competitive play. Upselling is moderately aggressive, though not quite as bad as the undismissable pop-up which forced me to sign up for a free trial on Tabletopia (now cancelled).

There is some variation in how well the games are implemented. The first one was Tokaido, a game where players are Edo-era travellers sightseeing along the great road from Kyoto. It ran beautifully and we even got a second game in.

The second game was Takenoko, where you try to grow a garden of bamboo and a panda moves around eating it. It's only a smidge more complicated than Tokaido, but was immensely frustrating to play. One of the key aspects is playing a card once you've achieved the objective on it, but it's more than just matching the picture on the card, so you have to have some underlying conditions met. If you've missed one and you try to play the card, you get told you can't play it, but not exactly why. We abandoned the game at the end of the hour about 20% through.

After that I took a break for lunch, and the afternoon was taken up by general hanging out and a couple of panels: "Modernizing Fairy Tales and Myths" and "Worldblending in Speculative Fiction". Both sounded promising but both also got hung up on the cultural appropriation discussion and wound up spending most of their time on it. I don't deny that it's an important discussion, but having it take over two panels almost to the exclusion of their intended topics was a disappointment.

At 5pm Eastern there was a last-minute addition of a feedback session. Some of it was predictable: lots of people initially struggled with one thing or another but felt like they'd gotten a handle on it. Some things are still a work in progress, like figuring out how to present the information on how to find and log into all the pieces of the con so that people can find and use it easily.

There were several people who reported in the chat that they were taking notes for their own upcoming virtual conventions. One of them was for Orycon, the local convention out here. As recently as a couple weeks ago, it was planning to be a blend of in-person and online components. Now I know it's just gone to all-virtual.

So I'll try this weekly notes thing and see how it works.

It's late June and I had to turn on the heat this morning. Ah, summer in Portland.

Cat

This is Phosphor. He's 9 years old, more active than any other 9-year-old cat I've known, and huge. He would be the king of all he surveys, except he has no assertiveness at all with other cats. As a kitten, he was the first feral cat we captured from the backyard, and he's helped tame subsequent kittens.

( This got long, adding a cut... )