Capricon Report Day 1

Upon arrival yesterday I immediately volunteered for a few hours, until they ran out of things for me to do. To be reimbursed, I have to fit in 12 hours around running the fan table and Cafe Penguicon. There seem to be more volunteers than available work, which is troubling, but oh well, such problems we should have. This is a well-organized convention.

copingwithcows, you need to see the instruction sheet they hand out to volunteers. It is quite nice and possibly instructive for us.

The two places of most interest to me personally are Consuite and Gaming Room. After volunteering work ran out, I checked them out. I hovered dangerously close to the Anime room, but did not feel sufficiently lonely to venture in.

I went toward Consuite envisioning nachos, soft drinks, and conversation. It was in a Ballroom, and this sucked the feeling out of it. The food looked sparse, but there was exactly what I wanted, so why complain? I got all three of the things I had envisioned! So I consider that success.

Then I went to the gaming room a couple of times. It too was in a Ballroom, and had the same problem, with a couple of games appearing to be huddled in the cavernous space of emptiness. The second time I visited, there was someone offering a startup game of Munchkin Quest. So I got to play a game! Again this was success. Shadowcat, an MIB from Steve Jackson Games, gave me a Munchkin Quest promotional coin.

Thursday is a slow day at Capricon. I think these function spaces will not seem so empty when they fill up to Friday and Saturday levels.

Notes From The Hall Table

Kids adore the capsule toy vending machine, but none of them have money. And yet I've got a lot of t-shirts in small size. A little girl was trying to turn the handle, so I gave her fifty cents. She won a t-shirt.

Several Chicagoans have won t-shirts. These people do not attend, but maybe they will. Fans, out of state, will be wearing Penguicon 3.0 and 4.0 t-shirts, out of state, and then other fans, out of state, will be reading the shirts and thinking, "hey, there exists such a thing as Penguicon!" Guess where they will do this reading and thinking.

Futurist and SF author Tom Trumpinksi stopped by to trade contact info. At one point he noted that a Singularity is already in progress. That brief comment turned into an hour-long conversation about the economic crash, a pending crash of the higher education system, Bruce Sterling's recent Seed article about pending panics, Kevin Kelly's eight generatives better than free and my mnemonic device for it, and how to mearn a living in a world where things change faster than you can get used to them.