Here comes the story of the HurriCon Aug 29, 2011

I went to 6Pi-Con!  It was fun.  Con report over.

OK, yeah, I'm a bit too long-winded for that.  So, rough summary, in bullet-point format:

  • Attendance for 6Pi-Con was way down, which is understandable considering that Hurricane Irene was projected to pass right over the hotel.  So the con felt a bit lonely at times, but overall the con staff and the hotel did a heroic job of adapting to the situation.  They even organized a track of programming for after the con officially ended on Sunday, in case people ended up trapped in Enfield.
  • Probably the highlights of my weekend were attending the two workshops run by the music guests of honor, Heather Dale and Ben Deschamps, as well as their concert on Saturday.  Ben did a workshop on guitar technique on Saturday morning, and Heather did a performance workshop on Sunday morning.  Heather and Ben are both lovely people and awesome musicians, and it was great to meet and hear them.  Also, Ben absolutely saved our asses on Sunday.  More on that later.
  • Sandry and I ran Time Travel Review Board on Friday night.  While the turnout was small, the game went pretty well, I thought.  I hadn't previously imagined it was possible to run this game with 6 players, and while much of the content of the game doesn't come out that way, the game still works reasonably well and is a pretty similar game to the way it runs with a full cast.
  • I attempted to play in Kat, Josh & Allan's new vampire LARP on Friday night, but they didn't meet their minimum.  It looks like a fun game, though, and I hope they end up running at Intercon or Festival.
  • I sat on four panels!  LARP 101 was extremely well-attended, and was, IMO, the best LARP 101 panel I've seen at Pi-Con (and the third one I've been on at Pi-Con).  Filk 101 was a lot of fun, and while I felt like a bit of an amateur on the panel (especially considering that Heather Dale was in the audience!), the discussion was lively and we even played a few songs.  SMOF 101: Intro to Conrunning was a good panel, but I felt a bit superfluous sitting next to Michael and Jeff, who really could have done the panel on their own.  My last panel was Borderline Sci-Fi, which I moderated.  I honestly did not think I did a great job with this one; the panelists were two professional authors and I think I asked some good questions and some stupid questions.
  • On Saturday night, Conor and I hosted the Intercon L party!  This was pretty much the typical Intercon party we've always tried to run at Pi-Con, which is to say, a chill hangout zone with snacks, Intercones and without a lot of pressure to come to Intercon.  If anyone's curious, this year's flavors were Blue Raspberry, Orange-Pineapple, and Mudslide.
  • I was theoretically one of the leaders of the Bawdy Song Circle, but truthfully that thing doesn't need a lot of leading.  I was sad to have to leave it halfway through to go back to hosting the Intercon party.
  • Finally, we had the Stranger Ways 2.0 concert on Sunday.  We were a man down on this one, since due to a confluence of the weather and his wife being very pregnant, our bassist Jon couldn't make it.  Fortunately, music guest of honor and god amongst men Ben Deschamps saved our asses, filling in on guitar during La Llorona (which in its SW2.0 arrangement is a bass-driven song).  The concert was a lot of fun to play, and while it would have been nice to have had the bass, I think we sounded pretty good nonetheless.  Harold Stein recorded audio of it, so I'm hoping to get that posted for y'all to hear soon.
Oh yeah, and I wrote a song about the con.  It's a somewhat appropriate song parody, and it's called "Irene".  You can find the lyrics here.
As always, I'm very grateful to the Pi-Con staff for making this awesome con happen.  It's become one of the highlights of my year.