Dirac Angestun Gesept

Sunday. It was too cold to wait outside for the bus, so I took the T and it was probably faster than waiting for the bus would have been anyway; Sunday schedules are not nearly as frequent. Arrived in plenty of time for the 10am panel on “How Extended Edition DVDs Are Changing the Nature of Movies”. Fun and interesting, though fairly LOTR-heavy for the obvious reason.

Then a decision between two panels (”Those Terrible Middle Ages” and “Historical Myths in SF&F”); I dithered a bit before opting for the latter, simply because it was less crowded, and I was going to be leaving partway through to meet Helen for lunch. The write-up didn’t seem to be very clear to the panel, and I wasn’t really there long enough to see how it was developing anyway.

Lunch, some shopping, then back to gaming for the 12:30 Kill Dr. Lucky. I almost got the old coot (known in this case as “Dr. Pucky” since his token was the puck from a table-top hockey game), but all I managed was to clear out the failure cards so that another player could get him.

This left me time to catch the end of “The Dreaded Mary Sue” before the final panel I’d planned on: “Twenty Panels in an Hour”.

No blog entry I can write will do this one justice. The four panelists (Michael A. Burstein, Keith R. A. DeCandido, Leigh Grossman, and the victim-of-the-year, er, moderator Bob Devney) were clearly having a great deal of fun, as were the audience members. I lost count, but I think we actually got through thirty panel topics, even with miscellaneous digressions, running gags (”What if author were John Norman?”) and Geek Transcendence. I had so much fun that I’ve been threatened with being on the panel next year.

With that, I headed out to get some other things done before dinner, since I had system maint work scheduled after that (yes, I had to go to work in the middle of a three day weekend, sigh).

So that was Boskone as I saw it.

Saturday. Caught the bus (which helpfully arrived just as I reached the stop) over to Boston in time for the “Not Just War Porn: The Best Military SF” panel. A similarly-named panel at Noreascon 3 was responsible for my discovery of Lois McMaster Bujold, so I had hope for this one. I wasn’t disappointed; I’ll have to check out both James MacDonald and Walter Hunt now.

A swing through the hucksters’ room and the art show, then into the gaming room for Chez Dork. This wasn’t nearly as much fun as Ninja Burger, however. Oh, the cards were cute, but it seemed like “draw good stuff, ‘buy’ it, get the Autographed card on your 3 point item that matches your obsession, win” was all there was to it. Nobody traded, nobody auctioned, nobody slipped on ketchup during combat.

The game lasted long enough that I’d already missed most of the noon panel I’d wanted to attend (”Why Not the War of 1812?” on alternate alternate-history turning points). I grabbed a quick lunch in the mall food court, then headed to Michael Flynn’s “Return of How to Lie With Statistics”. This was lots of fun, but he didn’t get through all of his examples, alas. Dropping something (the “write a bunch of Ts on a piece of paper” exercise could go) might have worked better. This was up against the Nielsen Hayden tag-team kaffeklatsch, too. That was an annoying pair of program items to have to choose between!

None of the 2pm panels sounded interesting, so I wandered back down to gaming. We managed to put together a game of Settlers of Catan (including introducing someone to it–how he’d managed to avoid encountering it by now is still a mystery to me), and then a game of Puerto Rico with the same four of us. After that ended, it was about 6pm and while I’d sated my “German game” fix, I was hungry and somewhat tired, so figured it was the better part of valor to head home rather than get caught up in the Steve Jackson Games tournament. The tourney turned out to run until about 4 am, so I definitely made the right choice!

I did miss the GOH speech/awards ceremony/charity auction, though, but missing the latter was probably safest for the wallet in any case.

More about Friday night, in hopes of catching up on the con before Tuesday morning.

The gadget panel was enjoyable, since Charlie Stross (who had also been at the blogging panel) has even better gadgets than I do. I don’t usually carry my tri-band GSM phone; his is also a PDA. My PDA is a Palm m515; he has a new Tungsten T3. And so on, and so on. He’s also sufficiently fearsome that my odds of successfully mugging him and taking his gear are negligible.

I was sorely tempted by the panel on “Space: The Next Twenty Years” but wound up going to the Nippon in 2007 bid party instead, then heading down to gaming for the Nuclear War tournament at 2200. Turnout was pretty low, so we wound up just playing one four-player game, which I won through sheer luck of the draw on population (I had three 25 million cards left when I eliminated the last remaining other player). Since there was some free time due to the short tourney, we played a game of Ninja Burger (the card game) which was lots of fun. It’s a typical SJG beer & pretzels design; simple play, hysterical card flavor text. I snuck out a win by playing “Franchise Honored!” before one of my opponents could play “Franchise Shamed!”, pushing the total honor high enough to end the game just after I’d managed to get ahead (which I hadn’t been for most of the game).

(During the game, I also told Lis Riba that I wouldn’t be posting anything she’d be likely to miss during the con, though this was weakened by the fact that, like most of the rest of the known universe, she doesn’t read my blog anyway.)

After the game, I was tired enough to want to head home; this was especially true since I wanted to catch a bus rather than having to either cadge a ride or hoof it all the way back. I headed out to the bus stop, didn’t see anyone waiting, and figured I’d at least start walking towards Cambridge. At the last stop on the Boston side of the river, there were some folks who appeared to be enjoying a fair amount alcohol-fueled jubilance. Given their presence, and still no sign of a bus, I started across the bridge on foot; I figured I’d managed to just miss a bus and there wouldn’t be one for another 10-15 minutes.

Naturally, at about the 115 Smoot mark, the bus went by, and I wound up regretting the walk somewhat. It wasn’t too cold or windy, though, so it could well have been worse.