My Blog! My Blog!

It's 1 a.m. on Monday, and Linucon has officially been over for hours, but I'm not ready yet to write up my final thoughts on the con. Here's a few snippets on the last day, though.

Sunday night Eric and I recruited 4 people who'd never played Roborally before to play Roborally Second Edition, which we found a copy of in the Gaming Room. Most of the changes they've made in Second Edition are either cosmetic (fancy plastic 3-D checkpoint flags, more distinctive counters for lives and damage points) or an aid to recordkeeping (a placemat for each bot with spaces for damage point tokens, life point tokens, and programming cards). There seem to be some new options--I got one called "Double-Barreled" or something like that--it gives you two shots instead of one every time your bot shoots someone.

None of that helped me win, though, so I left as soon as I lost all three of my lives and went to my room, only to discover that I could no longer get a reliable, let alone strong, Internet feed from there. After about a half-hour of trying, I went to bed.

Sunday I had three more panels to do. The first, at 1 P.M., was called "Authors We Gave Up On" and was based on an idea I got from Eric and from nancylebov. It was well attended and a lot of fun. The second, the obligatory GPL panel, was essentially a three-cornered debate about whether the GPL is a good thing and whether we should keep it. I moderated, and Eric, landley, and jmaynard debated. It too was well attended. Since things stayed reasonably amicable until the end, I consider it to have been a success, too. The final panel, "Guilty Pleasures," was supposed to be about books fen read and enjoy even though they know they're crap, was scheduled with me alone, but Eric agreed to sign on despite having done many more panels than I have. We drew a reasonable audience, and managed to keep a discussion going for the requisite hour even though things dragged a bit in spots.

After closing ceremonies/gripe session time, Eric and I organized a dinner expedition with jmaynard, landley, John Quarterman, and a woman I think is John's wife. We went to a diner just outside town called the 290 Cafe (because it's on Route 290). It's very archtypically Texan (it has a decor that's pure 1950's diner gone to seed, complete with battered chairs and cracked vinyl upholstery in the booths) and pure Austin (WiFi available!). The menu is part diner food, part Southern delicacies like chicken fried steak, and part Tex-Mex stuff. It was, however, very good food. I ordered fajitas and enjoyed them a lot.

After dinner Eric, jmaynard, landley and I went downtown to meet fadethecat and see "Mirrormask", a fantasy movie for which Neil Gaiman wrote the script. It was interesting and odd, the way a lot of Gaiman's writing is, and I'm glad I had the experience.

Now I'm back at the hotel, sitting in the lobby to write this because the lobby has decent WiFi reception even though my room does not. Tomorrow I probably will write up the rest of my thoughts about Linucon but, for now, I'm going to bed.

So it's Saturday afternoon at Linucon, and already I've done two panels and the "Self Defense for Geeks" workshop with Eric.

The con is very small, but the vibe is good, and the people here disposed to have fun, and try different things. And the Con Suite's ice cream is first rate. I just had some chocolate orange ice cream about an hour ago.

More later when I have more to write about.