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.)

This is the first time that what we call Chinese New Year has come around since I learned it is actually called the Spring Festival (春节, Chūn Jié) in China. "New Year" (新年, Xīn Nián) seems to be reserved for the Gregorian calendar.

I have not been keeping up my daily practice very well the last couple weeks, but that's okay because I have two more months than planned. The Chengdu Worldcon has just been rescheduled to October, becoming the third Worldcon out of four in a row to have to change its originally announced dates and either the second or third in that group to change its planned venue, depending on how you want to count venues.

Here I will slowly accumulate fan terms in Chinese.

( Behind cut because it'll eventually get long )

The funding campaign to get KeyForge restarted is live at Gamefound and already well past its minimum funding goal. Ghost Galaxy has promised that this is a one-off campaign; future sets will be published in a normal manner.

Just a week and a half ago, a podcast episode went live with an interview with an ex-Fantasy Flight Games marketer who confirmed the rumor about ransomware. According to him, FFG never even made an internal announcement about it. He just started noticing there were things he could no longer reach on a backup server and then asked people in the IT department until someone finally told him that it was a ransomware attack. FFG lost a lot of work, including the deck-building algorithm and then next two or three planned sets of KeyForge beyond the one being funded now.

At Worldcon, I taught KeyForge to a couple people and played it against one person who hadn't played in a while and another who's still active. I had a few unopened decks with me and planned to open one if I ran into another person who was current with the game, so I did that and discovered I'd had this sitting on my shelf for two and a half years:



That's an Anomaly card, the rarest of the rares. This is only the second one I've ever seen in person.

I've already gotten my draft schedule for Chicon 8. Getting them out over a month before the con is good even for a regular local con; for a travelling convention like a Worldcon, it's just short of a miracle.

Exact times, panelists, etc. are subject to change, so I won't post it yet.

After two consecutive years of being cancelled, GameStorm is back and I am absolutely going even if I have to wear a full environment suit.

Actually, late March looks like good timing for the next pandemic lull, which makes it baffling to me that they cut off registration at February 1 and aren't allowing at-con registration. A lot of people are going to be making late decisions that they do want to go, and then being frustrated because GameStorm really did not make the announcement very prominently.

Next up is hopefully Enfilade! in late May. Its official site is still talking about 2021, but there's a Tabletop.Events listing at an easily guessable URL, so my hope is that things are in motion behind the scenes.

PaizoCon is still irritatingly scheduled the same week as Enfilade!, but it's one day longer, and Paizo has promised that it will have an online component in perpetuity, so I can just sign up for some online gaming on that one day.

It did occur to me that I could just try to go from Olympia to SeaTac at the end of Enfilade! and try to have one day of in-person PFS, but the logistical overhead is probably not worth it.

Origins is back to its usual dates in June, and just sent me an e-mail that I have an outstanding balance with them. It took me a minute to remember that I'd registered in 2020 before Origins Online fell apart. With no apparent online gaming component this year, I guess I won't have any use for that.

In July it's Westercon, which I'd better be at what with running the gaming track and all.

Gen Con is back to its usual weekend as well, at the start of August, and is keeping both Gen Con Online and Pop-Up Gen Con. I think it's worth taking a couple vacation days for the first and I may try to go to the second again, if any gaming store on this side of town is participating.

And then Worldcon is back in its usual zone on Labor Day weekend, and I'm hoping to go in person this year.

I'm sure one or more of these plans will fall apart, but my attitude these days is that the more plans I make, the harder the universe must work to frustrate them all, and the less it hurts when I have to cross one off.

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).

Paizo has made the expected announcement that PaizoCon will be online again this year. Unlike last year, they'll stick to traditional weekend dates rather than trying to hold most of the con during the week. (I'm guessing someone thought it would be neat to let all their designers and such just do con stuff during working hours rather than giving up their weekend, nice thought but most of their prospective congoers still have jobs too.) So I'll have something to do on Memorial Day weekend this year.

Meanwhile, in Worldcon land:

We have been informed that the bankruptcy case between the Wardman Park hotel owners and Marriott will take place in Delaware. Therefore, we are now in the process of retaining legal counsel to represent us in that jurisdiction.

A consensus is emerging that it will probably not be safe to have large in-person gatherings before the summer. Balticon, which is held Memorial Day weekend (the last full weekend in May, for international readers), has recently announced that it will be virtual for a second year in a row.

Futhermore, the consensus says that it will probably be safe by fall. So, for instance, Rustycon, which is normally held in January in the Seattle area, is moving to September this year, with an announcement that it expects to be one of the first in-person events in the state of Washington. Origins, one of the big commercial gaming events, which first tried to go virtual and then cancelled last year, has moved itself to October on a similar assumption that it will be safe.

Caught in between are all the big summer cons. Worldcon, as I mentioned recently, has the extra wrinkle of its main hotel being unavailable for negotiation due to bankruptcy proceedings.

Gen Con, usually early August, has simply not opened up pre-registration yet. Gen Con had easily the smoothest transition to being online, due to so much of the infrastructure for online gaming having existed for years, so it should be able to wait a while before it has to jump one way or another.

Then there's Otakon, one of the biggest anime cons in the US. ANN reports that Otakon is looking for donations to stave off a possible collapse. Rumors have immediately sprung up about the state of its finances, but my guess is that it's looking at being trapped between the enormous fees for being held in a convention center and much lower attendance. Even if it was able to cancel for a second year in a row, it also has fixed costs, plus there's whatever it sank into last year's free online event.

The situation is better here in Portland. 2020 was the year the Portland Retro Gaming Expo was supposed to have moved from October to August. It was presumably going to try for similar dates this year, but there's been no update to the Web site in ages. It doesn't have to worry about being forced to honor a facility contract with the last stages of a pandemic going on, though, because the Oregon Convention Center is currently serving as an emergency homeless shelter and mass vaccination site.