hazelchaz | There's a destination a little up the road from the habitations and the towns we know (Reply)

Pictures from the Greek dinner Richard Foss organized in September are up. Click on the Greek dancer to see them.

Highlights of Coppercon... I've stayed at Embassy Suites in Tulsa and Chicago, and I've seen the one in Santa Ana, so I had assumed they were all built along the same lines: a big building with an atrium where you can step out of your room and look down into the breakfast area. Not so at the Phoenix North. Here, they have a large ring of three-story buildings with the rooms, and you walk back to the main building to get to the function area and the breakfast restaurant. Breakfast and the lobby are actually at the middle level, compared to the guest room buildings; the ballrooms are on the lower level. So if you can request a room close to the lobby, you'll be a lot happier than if you're traipsing all the way across the grounds from the far corners... On the other hand it means that there's a lot of room for hanging out on the lawn. (Yes, lawn. Middle of the desert and they've got the place all landscaped up green as a golf course. I hear that all of the water that's being pumped out to keep the Phoenix metro area looking lush evaporates into the air every day and is creating a micro-climate zone -- if this keeps up, they'll lose their reputation for a "dry heat" and be as humid as Tulsa...)

I renewed my acquaintance with Tasha Cady and

tamtrible, who was quite taken aback when she came by the party room and saw our box of "Tribble Repellent", which we promptly banished to the back room. I met Edouard Mesert, who has a lovely custom Kristi Smart coat, very different from my velvet coat. Hugh Gregory, who's a talker, spread rumors about Noreascon, Dragon*Con, and Anne McCaffrey.

I saw a poster for a ConRunners conference in the Phoenix area the second weekend of October; can anyone from Arizona tell us how that went? Did the AniZona people, the Coppercon people, Tuscon, Darkcon, and Leprecon all get together and compare notes? Arizona's had some one-off floating conventions lately, such as the Westercon and World Horror, but I'm more interested to learn that the annual conventions are talking to each other. They certainly had some issues with knowledge getting lost and old mistakes made at this Coppercon. I learned when I got to the convention that they'd decided to use a photo from my website in their program book; I generally give permission when asked, but it's nice to be asked. As it happens, for the particular photo that they use, the photographer has expressed a policy of releasing his photos into the public domain, so technically asking wasn't required for the photo they used, but nevertheless it would have been nice of them to credit him when they decided to use it.

Speaking of photos, this was another convention when I was "on duty" most of the time, so I didn't take very many photos - only about 70 over the two days I was around. When I don't have much to do, and I spend my time snapping pictures like crazy, my average is closer to 100/day...

Let's see. Darth Vader played piano for a stormtrooper; there was at least one anime costume in the Masquerade (Susan Wilkerson as Rei Ayanami from Evangelion), and Dawn Grigsby in the "Dustbunny" costume was absolutely adorable. After the masdquerade, we opened up the party room. They hadn't blocked all of the parties near each other, which was a shame, but people found us anyway; I think we would have been better off on the ground floor, in the same building as, or the building next to, the Loscon party.

nolly wore her Space Cadet sash, with the skill badges sewn three-across. (If you do it that way, they'll all fit on one side.) She helped run the party; we didn't sell any memberships in the party, but we did have a number of people buy their memberships at the table. Coppercon weekend was the last chance to buy an

laconiv membership at the initial "cold" rate, or to sign up for the installment plan and lock in that rate; the rate went up the day after the convention. So we had a lot of last-minute sign-ups because of that. (We also had a number of people join via the web page that weekend.)

I saw Michael Mason that weekend, he stopped by the party and I snapped a picture of him. So if you're tracking how many pictures I have of him on the website, the number just went up...

One interesting thing I saw was at another fan table. They'd bought a bunch of PVC pipe and various connectors to make a structure that they could wrap around the back/underside of their fan table to hang their signs from. The design may be worth studying and adapting for our purposes... Pipe connectors are not designed to be tinkertoys, they don't have all the different permutations of connections that would be helpful in a toy building set, but you can get the job done if you use enough of them. Cf. the Minicon panels they used for the Fan Gallery in 2002 where the panels are offset up and down from each other -- that's because the L-joints and T-joints that are available require it.

nolly wore her "I am an adult" t-shirt, which is based on a card design by Blackfyr Arts. I'm thinking I might get some of the cards...

After Coppercon, we headed for home -- oh joy, driving west at sunset, my favorite thing. Almost as exciting as driving east at sunrise. It wasn't too bad -- we pulled over and stopped for the worst of it. And then Monday morning, back to work!

Then the next day,

colleency told me that her lovely husband couldn't make it to a dinner she'd pre-paid, and would I like to try a greek banquet? I said sure. It turns out that Richard Foss is organizing a supper club of sorts -- he arranges for an interesting fixed-price meal at a restaurant, and everyone who wants to sign up goes and enjoys it. For this one, the interesting thing for me to learn was that Baklava isn't a Greek dessert, and that they had something else for us to enjoy at the end of it all. A lot of the "usual suspects" were out -- Mike and Sharon Sheffield, Elizabeth and Jerome, Janis and Glen Olson, Tracy Butler, and so forth.

(In other news:

animelosangeles has over 250 pre-registered members. Gulp.)