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This weekend was Balticon, the Baltimore Science Fiction Society's annual convention, which is held (where else?) in downtown Baltimore. I tried to do a post from our hotel room at the con, but LiveJournal's software ate it, and I didn't get around to trying again, so I'm left with doing a post-mortem.

Balticon has been light on programming since it took over the three-day Memorial Day weekend slot (the convention ran for years on Easter weekend, and didn't grab Memorial Day until Disclave, the Washington DC area convention, died a few years ago). Eric made it to two of his three panels (because of heavy traffic, we got to the con too late on Friday for his first one). One of the panels was about whether multiple-partner marriages have a future in the U.S. Though the subject was interesting, it didn't break new ground. The other panel was more fun--it was about SF authors who have been forgotten. (Though I was surprised to learn how many of the authors I had never even heard of.)

The Masquerade and Art Show were both quite large *and* quite good. I was pleasantly surprised by that. I was also pleasantly surprised to see a significant population of teenagers, college students, adolescents, and even babies in arms. It gave me warm fuzzy feelings about the future of Fandom out here on the East Coast. One of the college students I talked to, who turned out to be the boyfriend of a girl I know, is a regular at the area anime conventions but had never been to a science fiction convention before. I remarked that he must have been finding the con dull by comparison, but he said that he was not, for a very interesting reason. "At the anime cons I go to, the same people show up all the time, and they always have the same panels. The panels here are different." The moral of this story: people can fall into ruts at any age. There may be another moral, namely that Fandom would be better served by continuing to include, and maybe even increasing, activities relating to as many different subfandoms as possible, but that's a rant for another day. :-)

As usual, I missed most of the program items I was interested in, and I never found the anime room until after the con when they were setting up the Dead Dog Party in it. However, I did get to catch up with a lot of friends I haven't seen for awhile. That was really good, even though some of my friends, sadly, have financial or other problems.

The other thing I did was play some new games, which is always fun. The Looney Labs people weren't there with their Pop Tart Cafe party this year, but I got to play several new games, including two games designed by friends of mine. One was called "X-Machina", and it was designed by a friend I met through live-action roleplaying, Joan Wendland. X-Machina is, in effect, "Junkyard Wars in a Box." There are two decks of cards. One lists impossible inventions that customers might demand. Possible inventions include a Dog Walker, a Bladder Snooze Button, X-Ray Glasses (to name a few that came up) and so on. The other, larger deck consists of 240 cards, each of which bears the name of an item that might be used as a component of an invention. These items include an oscilloscope, a Van de Graff Generator, gears, nails, a bag of broken glass, lenses, feathers, pulleys, construction paper, particle accelerator, etc. Players take turns being the "customer" and challenging the others to select a subset of their "junk" cards and come up with a suitable explanation as to why their particular subset would make the best possible version of the demanded invention. (You get as much time as the "customer" will give you to search your cards and come up with a line of patter--2 or 3 minutes if you're lucky, less if you're not). The game ends when one person has come up with three successful inventions. Half the fun, of course, is listening to your fellow players give the explanations they've concocted or, better still, make stuff up on the fly. (Joan bluntly characterizes the games as being specially designed for liars.)

The other game was "Betrayal at the House on the Hill", which was designed by another LARP friend of mine, Bruce Glassco. This one is a cross between an RPG and a board game. The premise is that a number of characters are exploring a haunted house. The house is represented by tiles that you draw and place, one by one each turn. You draw cards from three separate decks, items, events, and "omens". With each omen you draw, you roll dice to determine when the "haunt" starts. At that point, one of 50 scenarios is selected, and one of the players is chosen as the "traitor". All the other players are the "heroes." As you might expect, the "traitor" usually wins by murdering all the heroes, while the heroes have to meet different conditions to stay alive in every scenario. The result plays satisfyingly like a horror movie. Eric, of course, won the single game we played, as the "professor" character who turned traitor. (Big surprise).

We also got to play the European map edition of "Ticket to Ride," which has a few quirks that make it trickier and deeper in strategy than the American version. I definitely want to play it with shakati andpmat sometime soon.

Now, I'm back from the con, without Eric. Eric stayed behind with DC-area friends of ours because he is supposed to fly to Brazil for an open-source conference on Tuesday evening. However, the organizers, after soft-pedaling the issue for weeks, have finally come out and said that they cannot get him a visa (which he needs to enter Brazil) unless he visits a Brazilian embassy, and the nearest one to where his flight leaves is in DC. So that's where he's going tomorrow. If he gets the visa, he'll be flying to Brazil; if not, he'll probably get home tomorrow night sometime.

After all the bustle of the con, it's awfully quiet here, alone with our cat. I miss him already, and it's only been four hours since I left Baltimore. Sigh.