World Steam Expo

It was last year at WindyCon that I started hearing about dedicated steampunk conventions. Up until that point, I had been to a few cons with a large contingent of steampunks but one of the room parties was promoting Tesla Con the following November. Unfortunately it was in Madison, Wisconsin, an 11 hour drive. Fortunately, there were two other cons happening within about half that distance, the Steampunk World’s Fair in Piscataway, New Jersey and the World Steam Expo in Dearborn, Michigan.

In January I started fishing around for roommates. I would be traveling on my own and at $100 a night for three nights, I wanted to defray some costs. There were a few people who said they were interested so in February I reserved the room. Then one of them pulled out because he said his parent’s wouldn’t let him go and the other simply never got back to my repeated requests for confirmation and details.I started looking for roommates again.

Also in February, I approached the con with the offer of doing a presentation on H. G. Wells and “The War of the Worlds.” It took a month for them to get back to me and say, yes, they have a slot in the schedule if I was still interested. I replied that I was and waited for details.

A response was not forthcoming. I sent a number of messages asking for an update but never got a response. With less than a week before the con, they posted the con program. It lacked anything even remotely related to my presentation. On Tuesday I finally received and email asking if I had talked to the programming person. I replied that I had not because I was talking to him and thought he was my contact. And besides, it was too late. I wasn’t done preparing and, with the program being posted, I had stopped spending time on the presentation so I could do other things. The wasn’t time to start up again and finish.

All the work I had done up to that point; reading "War of the Worlds" over again, reading two critical analyses and relevant parts of a Wells biography, watching a documentary, reading numerous online articles, composing a script while cutting the grass or riding my bike and then jumping on the computer to try to transcribe it, collecting pictures and video clips, starting to build a presentation file, buying a remote that would run the machine should I not be able to stand next to my laptop to run it through the video projector and buying half a dozen copies of The War of the Worlds that I would give out to some of those who had never read it before. . . all for nothing.

Well, not entirely nothing, I suppose. All that stuff is still there. I could finalize the presentation for some later convention. Perhaps next year.

The other frustrating issue leading up to the con was the search for a roommate. If my wife were coming along, I wouldn’t be overly concerned about $100 a night for three nights but, traveling by myself, that seemed like a lot of money. So, months in advance, I made a number of postings on various forums. One person responded only to cancel a month later saying his paren’t wouldn’t let him go. Another responded and then never got back to me to confirm. Kapitan von Grelle of the S.M.S. Zepherus responded that she had someone who was looking for a room but then they decided they were going to travel with their family. Von Grelle had another possibility who also canceled at the very last minute. Actually, I found out about that one at the con itself, but I saw it coming.

I was ultimately successful in finding someone to occupy the extra bed and help defray costs, at least for two nights.

I was gaming on Thursday night and that went later than I would have wanted. With that I only got about 4 hours of sleep. I didn’t hear my alarm go off at 5:00 am because I had finally put a fan in the bedroom window to bring down the temperature and the noise of the fan was louder than the radio volume.

I woke up late at 5:20 and only took me 10 or 15 minutes to get dressed, pack a lunch, load up the car, check the contents of the trunk against my packing list and hit the road. I arrived at the hotel just over five hours later without any sort of drama en-route.

The Hyatt Regency in Dearborn, Michigan is a nice enough hotel. It's kind of neat the inside is open all the way to the top so that the hallway of each floor is a balcony. A bit noisy, though, as all the sound going on in the lobby carries throughout. And, like most higher end hotels I've been to they actually have fewer amenities than the smaller hotels. No free Internet. No fridge. Typical hotel furniture. No complimentary breakfast. Even the beds seemed smaller.

I stood in line at registration for 45 minutes mostly because I didn’t have anything else to do at the time. The at the door registration was delayed because they didn’t have a second computer to process it and the program books were apparently not delivered from the printer yet. Delayed by highway construction was the given reason.

There was an airship presentation on Friday. Surprisingly, there were a few errors in historical detail. I did learn a new knot for tethering my airship, though.

There was a video gaming room with over a dozen game platforms, X-boxes, I think. On and off over the weekend I played Red Dead Redemption, sort of a Grand Theft Auto set in the west. It';s a free-form game that you can wander around but unlike it's urban cousin, the distances between things to do is much greater, leading to a lot more of you riding your horse across the desert. And riding. And more riding.

The room also had a big plasma TV playing movies on Blu-ray that I watched on and off through the weekend. Serenity. The Incredible Hulk. Hellboy 2. Sherlock Holmes. The Dark Knight. All shown at 120Hz, which I didn't like. Everything was too crisp. Too detailed. The frame rate made it look like a soap opera rather than a movie. I want my motion blur.

The main presentation room showed Emma and Steamboy and, even though I've seen them both numerous times, I watched them again.

Mark Donnelly gave an introductory course on Bartitsu. a short-lived mixed martial art from the end of the 19th Century. Damn, that man can move fast and has precise control, swinging a stick at an assistant's head at enormous velocity to have it stop only a few inches away from his skull. I tried a few of the moves and felt completely awkward, partially because I was wearing a vest a boots and that is not typical of my daily wear or conducive for martial arts.

He made a few interesting points. The first that I recall is the making of a fist. Try this experiment: make a traditional fist with your fingers curled underneath. Press against your fingers with your other hand as you might if you didn't strike with the knuckles but more towards the second joint. Hurts doesn't it? If you didn't know what you were doing, it would be very easy to strike incorrectly and brake your own hand. Edward William Barton-Wright, the "inventor" of bartitsu, was intending his training to go to people who had no experience and thus would be more prone to make mistakes such as striking poorly. So, try this now: straighten your fingers out over the heel of your hand and again press down. Making a fist like this won't get your hand broken.

In the new Sherlock Holmes film, I noticed the fist that Robert Downey Jr. was making and wondered if it was really bartitsu. Mark indicated that they used about 80% bartitsu and the rest wing chung (because the fight choreographer and Robert Downey were already familiar with wing chung).

Another thing he talked about is the importance of setting your opponent off balance. Typically, this might be done my throwing your hand or a hat in the attacker's face and yelling "Stop!" but the better line that Mark used was: "Good god, man! Don't you know who I am?"

Priceless.

On Sunday I finally got the chance to see Phil and Kaja Foglio and a cast of volunteers perform the Girl Genius radio drama I missed at WindyCon. I had seen that they were calling for volunteers and I could have tried out for either the announcer of Othar Tryggvassen, Gentleman Adventurer, and done a passable job in either role. I do think that the people they had did better, though. But, of course, no one could do Othar better than Cheyenne Wright.

I picked up a copy of "Agatha Heterodyne and the Heirs of the Storm: Girl Genius Volume 9" before it hits stores. Got it signed by Phil and Kaja.

I was late to a presentation on the technology of steampunk by G.D. Falksen. It turned out, so was he. He had been asked to announce Abney Park's concert and was told it would take only a few minutes then he could come back and do the presentation. However, the band before that, Tartanic, just kept playing. Ultimately, G.D. didn't come back until 10 minutes before his time was up. Later though, he did a presentation on the history of steampunk (not the history of steampunk, per se, but the history of the Victorian era and how it feeds into steampunk), filled in with some of the technology things he had not been able to present earlier in the day. There wasn't a program in the room after his allotted hour so he was able to keep going and cover everything he might have missed from the previous presentation.

I went to Kapiten von Grelle's presentation on making bustles, not so much to learn about bustles or to see the Captain in her undergarments but because she is always entertaining.

The "Building a Steampunk World" presentation was an introduction to a simple and free 3D software package called Doga. Using already established elements, he was able to build a passable airship in only a few minutes. It was pretty neat. I've downloaded it but haven't really tried seeing if I can get it to run under Ubuntu yet.

There was a dealer there caller NetherCraft who was selling architectural panels. These are plastic vacuformed facing panels to make a wall look like stone or industrial. They had some 8 foot steampunk panels that were further subdivided into 3 smaller panels and there was one panel in particular that I was interested in. I am still kicking myself for not simply buying the panel earlier in the con when I had decided that I wanted it because on Monday when I went to drop my money for it, someone else had gotten it. They dealer tried to get me to buy a full panel but I wasn't interested. I didn't have the space for a full panel. He tried to get my to buy a different panel and even discounted the price but I wanted the panel that I wanted. And since they were based out of Chicago I wasn't going to just run by the shop later.

Fortunately, the artist is working on a full scale castle/cathedral project at Coopers Lake. That's about an hour drive for me so I'm going to send him an email, tell him exactly the panel I want, and meet him at Coopers Lake when he comes down sometime later this month (in apparent preparation for Pennsic).

At 1pm on Sunday there were two different things I wanted to attend. The one was a redux of the Bartitsu class focusing on stick work. I had only really spectated at Saturday's presentation and, now that I was in shorts and tennis shoes, I wanted to do some more hands-on work. The other panel was on mold making for casting in plastic. I have mold making materials and want to do casting in metal but thought talking to someone before jumping in would be good.

Decisions. Decisions.

I decided on the mold making presentation. Found out it was canceled. Then, couldn't find where the Bartitsu class was. Well, at least I still have the books.

One of the dealers, Frenzy Universe, indicated that at 3pm they were going to have a half-off sale on all their rack clothes. I came back and got a very nice vest for $24 and a dress shirt for $17. They also had a box full of vacuum tubes so I picked up a few of those.

And now that I had a brown vest, I went over to The Blonde Swan and considered buying a bowler because somehow I feel that those two things go together. I hemmed and hawed and eventually decided not to buy a hat yet. I'll need to see if I can find matching pants and a jacket.

I didn't get the chance to socialize quite the way I wanted. There were a number of people I recognized and who recognized me from Ohayocon and WindyCon but I never fell in with anyone and spent time bull shitting in the lobby or in a room. There were a few people from the Second Life city of New Babbage that recognized me from my avatar and they wanted to get together but they never took my advice and posted signs somewhere saying that people should get together at a certain time or a certain location.

I may have to take matters into my own hands next time.