Boskone 42: Friday
Despite wanting to leave work a bit early, I wound up getting out around 1700 anyway. I headed for the T, where I wound up waiting on the platform at Kendall for a while for a train. The train arrived, we all got on, the doors closed, it left, went into the tunnel a bit, and stopped.
At this point the guy standing next to me, who was very reminiscent of some of the more intoxicated customers you see on Airline, started talking to me. It was a multi-sensory experience, since I also got the full olfactory effect.
Thankfully, the train began to move again, and we rode across the river to Charles/MGH, where the platform was fairly full, and I figured that we’d wind up even more packed-in than we already were.
I was wrong; the train went out of service instead.
At that point I decided that it would possibly be faster, and certainly less frustrating, to walk to Gov’t Center and catch the Green Line directly, rather than trying to deal with the Red Line just to get to Park St.
I did so, and quickly boarded an E line train, which brought me to the Prudential stop and let me walk to the Sheraton in climate-controlled comfort.
Registration had been open for some time by then, so there was no line. I picked up my badge and had time to chat with several folks I knew who all happened to be in the area, including Scott Dennis (working the T-shirt sales table), Adina Adler (pre-registration), and Leslie Turek (drums). (No, not really drums; program books and give-aways. But “drums” was funnier.)
I then went to get a quick dinner at Urban Pain, which meant that I missed the 1800 panel I’d wanted to go to (”At Play in the Fields of Someone Else’s Universe”) but also meant I didn’t fall over from lack of food before the night was over.
At 1900, I went to “Science Versus Fiction?” which, by its description, was about whether negative portrayals of science led to good fiction, and positive ones to bad fiction. (I hear a chorus of “What about Jurassic Park?” coming.) I’d debated between this and James Macdonald’s “What’s In Your Go-bag?”, but the latter had been a Making Light thread and therefore seemed less likely to be “new and interesting” to me.
I didn’t take too many notes, but the general consensus seemed to be “No correlation. Counter-examples: Timescape is good, Crichton’s stuff isn’t”. There was some discussion about the difference between science and engineering (research vs. action); the latter is more likely to get a negative portrayal, because there’s something Being Done. Another comment: “propaganda makes bad writing in either direction”. I didn’t note who said this, though; may have been a comment from the audience.
After that, for 2000 it was off to The Blog Panel (”Weblogs — Addiction or Force for Social Change?”). It seemed to have a lighter turnout than last year’s, but some of that may have been an illusion caused by being in a much larger room. This was fun, with lots of good discussion, though (for obvious reasons, given the latter part of the title) political blogging got a fair amount of discussion, and the more personal “why blog” type discussion was less evident. Chad Orzel gave Fafblog a well-deserved shout-out.
With nothing I was particularly interested in on the schedule for 2100, I headed to the gaming room, leaving at about 0111 and walking home (the bus passed me after I’d already crossed the bridge and was about to go inside to make the cross-MIT trek the warm way). Not my day for transit, I guess. Arrive home without incident, and it’s off to bed so that I can have some energy for Saturday.
