We drove through pouring rain to reach Marcon, but the worst
was the fog. Halfway between the cities was a thick fog bank. On one side of
it, I saw a car that had apparently slid into the retaining wall on the side,
hard enough to severely damage the car but not hard enough to damage the
driver. On the other side of the fog a saw a car turned sideways, and another
in the field below.
Once we arrived in Columbus, we found the garage to be full.
I drove around a bit, and finally found my way to the Chestnut Street garage.
We hiked to the convention center through the walkways, a fair distance but out
of the rain. At the con we found that registration we found the room right
before everyone else.
Thus we were only mildly late to our first event, a
fan-based Dr. Who panel. Both panelists and audience members contributed with
their favorite memories of the show.
Our next event was watching the The Confused Greenies
perform a new, unrehearsed, mostly improve play: Dottore Who and the Convenient
Plot Device. Dottore Who lands on a planet where everyone lives his life as a
streetplay, and everyone’s life ends happily due to the Convenient Plot Device.
But horrors! The device has been stolen! By who? Why? And what part with
Skarino the Dalek play?
 |
| My Little Demon |
After that we ate lunch, palled around, and visited the art
show and the Dealer’s room. The art show was only half full, and while the dealer's room was full, I think that there were fewer dealers and more display space per dealer. Further, the con did not restrict entrance into the dealer's room to attendees only, so that they could get business from the attendees of other events.
Next we went to the Plot Doctor’s panel. Eric Flint was on
the panel, as well as Charles Gannon, Emilie Bush, and G. Wedlund. We were asked what plot problems we had for
them to fix, and no one volunteered one. So the panelists were left to talk
about plotting, and various tools that they used to help them plot. Excell,
Note cards, and Dragon Speech recognition were all discussed, including the
trick of using a voice recorder on a Smartphone and Dragon to turn the comments
into written notes. All attempts to derail the panel were rebuffed...
After that we got dinner, and found far more friends to talk
to in the food court than we had in the con suite. And then we went home.
Thoughts on the con: It was very quiet for a con, especially
a Marcon. A lot of my con friends were not there, and the energy was way, way
down. There were a lot of people in the building, but most were attending other
events: a volleyball tournament and a dance competition. It got a bit hard to
tell the cosplayers from the dance competition girls, but the dance girls came
in multiples and had sexier outfits. Other people have reported having a good time, however. I
think much more was going on in the gaming rooms and at night. But I missed the
science track programming, and I would have like to see more programming on
popular TV shows and movies. Especially with the success of the Marvel movies,
a few panels on comic book topics would have been very welcome.
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