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WisCon 30I made my almost-annual pilgrimage to Madison, WI to attend WisCon 30 and visit friends. I had meant to spend some time writing journal entries on my adventures, but as often seems to happen during vacations, I never did. So now I'll play catch-up with a few backdated entries.
 My friends Charlie and Dan put me up for the week again. We've been friends seemingly forever - and Charlie and I worked together at Epic Systems in the 90s - but in reality we met in grad school in 1991. They have a nice condo not far from the con, which makes staying there both convenient and cheap (and I'm nothing if not cheap!). Plus we have a good time after the con when I visit, going out for meals, hanging out, and playing video games. Unfortunately getting to Madison was a trek and a half. I flew out on Thursday the 25th, but there had been thunderstorms in Chicago the day before, and although I got to Chicago on time, the concourses were packed with people, and I infer that they were still catching up on getting people out from the day before. On top of that, my own flight was cancelled due to the ever-popular "mechanical problems", and the next flight to Madison (and last of the day) was already full. So I went down and collected my checked luggage (1 hour), then caught the bus to Madison (a 3-hour trip), all-in-all getting in to Madison 4 hours late what with all the walking around and such. People ask me why I even bother flying through O'Hare. The reason is that from O'Hare I can take a bus to Madison and get there the same day I left, whereas it would an even longer ride from Minneapolis, and effectively impossible from any other connecting airport I'd fly through. So there are risks, but there are also backup plans. So that's why I fly through O'Hare when going to Madison. On top of this, the weekend features 90+ degree weather and substantial humidity, which made getting around outside the con hotel arduous at times.
The con was pretty good, although to my mind not as good as last year's. I think I'm in the minority on this, and it might just be that last year was my first WisCon in several years, so I was especially enthusiastic about attending last year. Also, this was the biggest WisCon ever, at 1000 people (hitting the concom's membership cap); although I don't mind big cons, that's a lot of people to cram into the Concourse Hotel, and I find I need to take breaks to be by myself from time to time and recover from people overload. I guess on reflection it felt like there were just a number of little things that didn't quite live up to my hopes. For instance, Friday features a lengthy block in one of the large rooms called "The Gathering", which as I recall last year was basically just a space to hang out, get oriented, go through the program book, and talk to people. This year most of the space - although under the same name - was taken up with various "activity stations". This went over well with some people (so it seemed), but there were so few tables to just hang out at that it seemed to defeat the purpose. My biggest regret was with programming. I admit that despite WisCon being a feminist SF convention, I don't attend for the feminist content. There's usually substantial mainstream SF programming and/or science programming and/or writing programming, but all of those seemed to be in shorter supply this year. But there were some good panels. Unfortunately I missed the panel on the new Doctor Who series. The most memorable panel I attended was "Future Earth: Realistic World Building Across Age and Family", which was concerned with science fiction stories focusing on mainstream culture rather than fringe characters (loners, explorers, and the dispossessed of various sorts). There was a panel on comic books which was generically titled, but seemed to be aimed at considering titles which would appeal to a general or feminist audience, rather than the mainstream superhero stuff. Unfortunately it mostly turned out to be a list of titles to check out. More unfortunately, it mostly was lists of titles which I don't care for. Stuff like Alan Moore's Promethea (Moore's metaphysical stuff tends to bore me to tears, and this is probably the worst offender) or Colleen Doran's A Distant Soil (lovely artwork, but the story was so circuitous that I gave up waiting for it to go somewhere). To be fair, I did offer up a list of my own:
(If you're curious, these are books which I've either hooked Debbi on, or - in the case of the last two - which I'm trying to.) I enjoyed the art show, but didn't buy anything this year. I enjoyed browsing the dealer's room, but only bought a little stone turtle carving (I'm becoming a fan of sea turtle iconography, and may use this one as a card protector in poker games). Though I'm so backlogged on reading material that my to-buy list is fairly short these days, so it seems like I rarely buy anything whenever I go into any bookstore. I did enjoy the SignOut again, even though I only got one book signed, by John Scalzi. I told him if he writes a book a year he should keep me entertained on all of my flights to WisCon, as I read The Ghost Brigades on the trip to the con. He replied that he might have two books out by next WisCon, which oughta teach me... something. Anyway, I socialized with a few people and had a good time. Like - I think - many people, attending WisCon is becoming more centered on seeing old friends (especially friends I rarely see anymore) and less around the panels and science fiction content. The parties I wanted to attend were mostly backloaded to Sunday night, but I had a lot of fun at the LiveJournal party, meeting a few new people and seeing a number of people I knew, like Cliff and Agent Xpndble. I reflected that some parties closed down while I was still up, which is unusual. I'm not the night owl I once was! I also got to go to lunch-or-dinner with friends such as Tracy and Bill, with Jeanne and John, and Chris and Penny, all of which I enjoyed thoroughly.
Since I was spending an extra week in Madison (as I usually do), Monday and Tuesday were spent mostly watching people head out, which is something of a melancholy time for me. On the other hand, there were as many delays getting out of Madison for many people as getting in. John Scalzi took a photo of the thundercloud which mucked up O'Hare again, and other folks had completely different problems involving entirely different cities. So I can count myself lucky that I wasn't involved in all that. I was sorry the con was over, though.
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