Went to Eastercon over the weekend
http://www.olympus2012.org/Good times were had, meeting up with old friends, drinking beer and eating bad hotel food.
Eastercon is an old-fashioned sci-fi convention in that it's run by fans for fans, i.e no expensive appearances by actors and various media stars demanding £20 just for looking at them. Instead it's stuffed full of science-fictions writers who come pretty cheap, they can usually be bought for a pint, after which they'll talk all evening. Writers tend to come to fan-run conventions to network and meet-up and to be on panels...there are plenty of publishers and people from the book world too there. Many of them were/are fans themselves. So as well as the guests themselves (George RR Martin being the biggie of course) we had Charles Stross, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Joe Abercrombie, Freda Warrington, Geoffrey A. Landis and Justina Robson, just to name a few.
Great stuff!
I went to some excellent panels too. There was a fascinating one on the search for exoplanets given by an astronomer from the Royal Greenwich Observatory, largely focussing on the latest findings from the Kepler mission
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/main/index.htmlIt was good because it was very much live science...this summer there will be a transit of Venus which will allow scientists to accurately calibrate their instruments to facilitate the interpretation of data from these various newly discovered exoplanets so with luck we'll all be finding out new stuff. Here you could tell the speaker was used to giving tallking to children, he told us rather more often than necessary not to look at the sun directly.
Then there was a panel on the Biology of the zombie apocalypse with a group of world experts in necrological studies, a panel on the monarchy in fantasy (why do so many fantasies assume the problem is the monarch, not the monarchy) and on on Unsolvable problems in mathematics. Oh yeah and a fun panel (though they were all fun!) called The Metagame where the panel divided into two teams. Each was given a video game at random and then a random point to champion their game on. The team with the most audience applause won the point. So we had
Diabolo vs The Sims: which game is the greatest threat to civilisation (The Sims won)
Tetris vs Dance Dance Revolution: which is the best foundation for a religion (DDR)
Gran Turismo vs Bejewelled: which gives the most relevant commentary on modern life (Bejewelled)
and others I can't remember though I know Pong, Sonic, Tekken and Red Dead Redemption were all involved and we discussed the best games to get you laid (Pong was in there), teach history and illustrate gender relations (Sonic was one in that one).
So yeah
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