TeslaCon Convention Report
9 November 2010 10:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dime_novel_heroI started thinking about attending TeslaCon when I first heard of it at the room party at WindyCon a year ago. It stayed little more than a consideration because of the 11 hour drive until June when Lord Bobbins contacted me about my H.G.Wells/War of the Worlds presentation that had not gone through at the World Steam Expo. Simultaneously, Matt, who had previously not shown much of an interest in steampunk conventions in spite of several years of playing Deadlands and putting together a western costume, asked if I was going to go to TeslaCon. splitting a room with someone was enough to allow me to overcome my hesitation at the long drive and sign up.
Having the con chair contact me about doing a presentation didn't hurt either.
As the date approached, another Pittsburgh steampunk, Alexa, won tickets to the con and I offered up a ride and a room. There were machinations trying to add a fourth to the party (dividing costs even further) but work restrictions ended that.
Thursday
With an 11 hour drive, I didn't want to miss all the programming on Friday because I was in transit and also I didn't want to incur an additional day at the hotel so the plan was to leave at about midnight on Thursday and arrive around 11 or noon with plenty of time to get checked in and perhaps take a nap before the opening ceremony and the start of programming. I took Thursday off of work (because I still have plenty of PTO) and tried to get a nap in the afternoon so that I wouldn't be too tired. What with the workmen using the nail gun to rebuild our collapsed porch and Euphorbia calling me just as I was starting to doze, all told I may have gotten an hour of sleep.
Having been awake for essentially an entire day, the drive was long and tiring. I could have, and maybe even should have, let someone else do some of the driving but I will admit to not being a good passenger. Additionally, I am almost never able to sleep while in the car so it would not have done me much good.
Friday
We arrived, checked in and I was actually able to get a few hours of sleep in the afternoon before things got started.
TeslaCon was intended to be a somewhat immersive experience. Instead of merely a table at which to pick up ones pre-reg badges, there were ticket booths and one might expect at the terminal before embarking up the gangplank to the airship. We were provided with passport booklets which were stamped. I signed up for the tea room wherein, all weekend long, one could stop by for a cup of tea and a cookie or two. This was a somewhat pared down but still quite civilized version of the more common con suite.
First up on my personal schedule was a Steampunk Empire meetup. Other than the three of us, there was only one other person.
Next, I wanted to attend a steampunk movie panel. I had conversed online with the person who was to run the panel because I am doing steampunk as a theme for the Confluence video room next year and wanted to see if he had any ideas for content that I may have overlooked.
Unfortunately, he never showed up. I never found out why. Perhaps he was delayed in transit. It was amusing to see the staff rush in and set up a projector and screen only to be told that this was to be a panel about movies, not the showing of a movie itself, whereupon they tore it all down.
Was this all too early? There were actually plenty of people it's just that I had the misfortune of having two failures in a row.
Dinner was at the Chinese buffet across the street. I though it was overpriced for what they had. The buffet just a few minutes away from home towards Monroeville is markedly better for significantly less. Something that TeslaCon had that I had not seen at any other convention, steampunk or otherwise, was an empty block in the schedule specifically for dinner. Even though I didn't find enough in the schedule to keep me busy every moment of the con, it was nice to have a block so that, if one wanted to coordinate a break with others, there would not be conflict over panel attendance.
Even though programming had been going on for hours, the opening ceremony was after dinner. This is where the imersive program really got underway. Lord Bobbins announced that the airship and it revolutionary Tesla engines would be leaving so. He introduced the ship's captain, engineer, financier and, as diplomatic guests, Kapitan von Grelle and the Imperial Anti-Piracy Squadron. The word was given, the conventional engines were throttled back and Tesla engines were brought on line. With remarkable swiftness, the ganlavic engines took the ship to the very edge of the atmosphere before being throttled back once more to cruising speed.
There were cheers and congratulations all around. Champagne was passed out, with toasts to the ship and the queen. Huzzah!
It was then that tragedy struck. The ships executive officer fell, apparently poisoned by some assassin who had laid a diabolical trap within the officer's glass. It was immediately supposed that this was some nefarious plot by the dreaded Doctor Proctocus, no doubt part of his latest campaign to take over the whole of Europe.
So, yea. A bit immersive. It was even written into the program so that guests could be on hand to see the next murder or other plot point in the weekend-long murder mystery. Ingenious. Much credit to Lord Bobbins and his convention staff for having and executing such an idea.
The dealer's room opened again after the opening ceremony and before the concerts got underway. I purchased British Airships 1905-30 and The Victorian Home from Crimson Books. Later, I brought my Martini-Henry back to show the proprietor my refurbished rifle.
Matt, with his WWI German uniform, easily fell in with the crew of the Imperial Anti-Piracy Squadron. I hung around as well and thus we were able to avoid their demands to see people's papers as they enforced security and sought out the executive officer's murderer.
There was another death overnight, the acting chief engineer fell to poisonous fumes while defusing a bomb set on the ship's levitation engines.
Eventually things wound down and it was time to call it a day. At that point, I had been up almost continuously for about 41 hours and driven 600 miles.
With Alexa in the other bed, we gentlemen had to share a bed. Matt apparently had dreams about picking his daughter up and putting her in the car. This caused him to roll over with significant force. The first time I merely pushed him back off of me. The second time he physically shoved me onto the floor, my head striking the nightstand on the way down. The third time he awoke in time to keep me from tumbling onto the floor.
Next time I'm sleeping on the floor to save myself the trouble.
Saturday
The Raddison hotel had a complimentary breakfast.
After that, the first panels on the schedule started at 9am and I dropped in on G. D. Falksen and Graf Georg von Ziger's panel on airships. I've been reading a lot about the Airship Flap of 1896-97 and am intending to develop my own presentation on the subject. I think that will be fun to present at cons.
Cherie Priest was one of the guests and if I had paid more attention to that knowledge I would have brought my copies of Boneshaker and Dreadnought to be autographed.
I should have gone to von Grelle's presentation on Victorian flirting. In fact, at the next con I should probably just go to every panel presented by the I.A.P.S. as they are always entertaining.
There was supposed to be a weapons panel with Outland Armor but it seems that they didn't show up, either.
And there was yet another murder. A wealthy American Industrialist, poisoned by a fresh deck of cards.
Going back to the room at one point, our key cards failed so we had to up to the front desk to have them re-coded. While there, we noticed a dinner special of lasagna and decided to give that a try. I thought it was pretty good even though the sauce was a bit more pizza that one might expect, the so-called garlic bread was just a roll with garlic butter on it and the lasagna also had cheddar cheese on it. It's Wisconsin so I'm not surprised by the cheddar.
My mom makes much better lasagna.
The cheese curds (fried mozzarella cheese bites) were good.
And, still another murder. Lord Buckingham, who had voiced his opinion that the ship should be surrendered to Doctor Proctocus to avoid further loss of life, was murdered, again by poison, at the grand ball. The Reverend Captain Samuel Flint and his associate Lord Baron Vorteque of the Royal Ladies' and Gentlemens' Experimental Madness Society (occultists) were arrested and it was felt that the matter was finally settled. I had met both Flint and Vorteque on previous occasions and doubted that they were the culprits. I even went so far as to suspect that they were involved in a ploy to draw the actual murderer out by having him believe that the investigation was over.
Besides, the program indicated there was another episode of the murder mystery scheduled for the next day.
Sunday
After breakfast on Sunday, Matt harangued me mercilessly concerning my putting of sugar on my cottage cheese, both for the rest of the day and into the next day. What's so wrong with putting sugar on cottage cheese? Manufacturers add sugar to cottage cheese and add more to low fat and non-fat versions because they lack the fatty flavor so what is so weird about me adding additional sugar?
My presentation on H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds and its legacy was scheduled at 9am Sunday morning. 9am! I wondered if anyone was even going to be alive that early. On the plus side, the changeover from Daylight Savings Time had set the clocks back giving people an additional hour. Whether people would spend that extra hour coming to my presentation was in some question.
I will admit to not feeling good about my preparations. I thought I had an ok script, I had collected up some pictures, audio and video into a multimedia presentation to support it. I did sort of know what I was talking about and I had done any number of presentations in front of audiences before but for some reason I didn't feel good about this one.
Once things got under way, I calmed down and thought I did a good job. The audience started out at 4 but eventually grew to 4 times that size. It may have helped that the doors to the hallway were wide open and people could listen in on my clips from Orson Welle's Halloween 1938 broadcast and that caught their attention.
In the end, I think it went well and, even though I haven't even started it yet, I think my presentation on the Airship Flap will be even better.
I had not been actually present for most of the murder mystery episodes but the last one was billed as a Gun Show presented by Lord Bobbins. Even if the story climax wasn't scheduled, I would want to see the guns.
Turns out that I was correct, the real murderer revealed himself and tried to take the ship by direct action, holding Lord Bobbins as hostage. Flint and Vorteque appeared with with the I.A.P.S. and a Mexican standoff ensued until the assassin was goaded into attempting to kill Lord Bobbins in a show of resolve, only to discover that the weapon had been previously disabled by Flint. There was only a brief struggle as Von Grelle and he crew took the assassin away to be thrown overboard.
Tim Mickelburg gave a presentation on the development of early photography, specifically the daguerreotype. Neat.
I didn't have any nice pictures of myself in my Union Airship Cavalry uniform so I went to the photo shop where the official con photographers had set up a green screen. Matt also had his picture taken. When we came back a bit later to get the files copied to a USB drive, the conversation somehow turned to the idea of Matt in his WWI German uniform and gas mask presenting himself posed on a bearskin rug. There was no rug but with green screen technology there may yet be. While we were getting dinner he got changed again and came back to have the picture taken.
Von Preußen mit Liebe.
Very disturbing.
I was hoping there would be a dead dog dinner so we could hang out with people who had been running the con but, for the most part, things seemed to scatter fairly quickly. There were a few people still about and, if we were smart we would have spent more time loitering in the lobby or with the room door open so we could attract attention and conversation. Instead, we kept to our room and made future plans.
Monday
We stayed an extra night, got up Monday morning and began the journey home. We listed to an audiobook version of War of the Worlds, which took up about half of the trip. It was much easier making the 11 hour drive after having gotten a good night's sleep rather than trying to do it tired. We all arrived at our respective homes in good time.
I would definitely go next year if it weren't an 11 hour drive. Next year's theme will be a submarine cruise and there will be a mummy unwrapping so one can easily see the "mummy's curse" mystery theater unfolding. No doubt, with the experience gained from this con, next years will be even better. But, again, there's that 11 hour drive each way and the extra day or even two necessary to do such a trip and not be completely exhausted for the trip.
I'm going to register for both the Steampunk World's Fair and the World Steam Expo as pre-reg opens but will be putting off TeslaCon, much like I did this year, unless something special opens up to balance out that 11 hour drive.
Having the con chair contact me about doing a presentation didn't hurt either.
As the date approached, another Pittsburgh steampunk, Alexa, won tickets to the con and I offered up a ride and a room. There were machinations trying to add a fourth to the party (dividing costs even further) but work restrictions ended that.
Thursday
With an 11 hour drive, I didn't want to miss all the programming on Friday because I was in transit and also I didn't want to incur an additional day at the hotel so the plan was to leave at about midnight on Thursday and arrive around 11 or noon with plenty of time to get checked in and perhaps take a nap before the opening ceremony and the start of programming. I took Thursday off of work (because I still have plenty of PTO) and tried to get a nap in the afternoon so that I wouldn't be too tired. What with the workmen using the nail gun to rebuild our collapsed porch and Euphorbia calling me just as I was starting to doze, all told I may have gotten an hour of sleep.
Having been awake for essentially an entire day, the drive was long and tiring. I could have, and maybe even should have, let someone else do some of the driving but I will admit to not being a good passenger. Additionally, I am almost never able to sleep while in the car so it would not have done me much good.
Friday
We arrived, checked in and I was actually able to get a few hours of sleep in the afternoon before things got started.
TeslaCon was intended to be a somewhat immersive experience. Instead of merely a table at which to pick up ones pre-reg badges, there were ticket booths and one might expect at the terminal before embarking up the gangplank to the airship. We were provided with passport booklets which were stamped. I signed up for the tea room wherein, all weekend long, one could stop by for a cup of tea and a cookie or two. This was a somewhat pared down but still quite civilized version of the more common con suite.
First up on my personal schedule was a Steampunk Empire meetup. Other than the three of us, there was only one other person.
Next, I wanted to attend a steampunk movie panel. I had conversed online with the person who was to run the panel because I am doing steampunk as a theme for the Confluence video room next year and wanted to see if he had any ideas for content that I may have overlooked.
Unfortunately, he never showed up. I never found out why. Perhaps he was delayed in transit. It was amusing to see the staff rush in and set up a projector and screen only to be told that this was to be a panel about movies, not the showing of a movie itself, whereupon they tore it all down.
Was this all too early? There were actually plenty of people it's just that I had the misfortune of having two failures in a row.
Dinner was at the Chinese buffet across the street. I though it was overpriced for what they had. The buffet just a few minutes away from home towards Monroeville is markedly better for significantly less. Something that TeslaCon had that I had not seen at any other convention, steampunk or otherwise, was an empty block in the schedule specifically for dinner. Even though I didn't find enough in the schedule to keep me busy every moment of the con, it was nice to have a block so that, if one wanted to coordinate a break with others, there would not be conflict over panel attendance.
Even though programming had been going on for hours, the opening ceremony was after dinner. This is where the imersive program really got underway. Lord Bobbins announced that the airship and it revolutionary Tesla engines would be leaving so. He introduced the ship's captain, engineer, financier and, as diplomatic guests, Kapitan von Grelle and the Imperial Anti-Piracy Squadron. The word was given, the conventional engines were throttled back and Tesla engines were brought on line. With remarkable swiftness, the ganlavic engines took the ship to the very edge of the atmosphere before being throttled back once more to cruising speed.
There were cheers and congratulations all around. Champagne was passed out, with toasts to the ship and the queen. Huzzah!
It was then that tragedy struck. The ships executive officer fell, apparently poisoned by some assassin who had laid a diabolical trap within the officer's glass. It was immediately supposed that this was some nefarious plot by the dreaded Doctor Proctocus, no doubt part of his latest campaign to take over the whole of Europe.
So, yea. A bit immersive. It was even written into the program so that guests could be on hand to see the next murder or other plot point in the weekend-long murder mystery. Ingenious. Much credit to Lord Bobbins and his convention staff for having and executing such an idea.
The dealer's room opened again after the opening ceremony and before the concerts got underway. I purchased British Airships 1905-30 and The Victorian Home from Crimson Books. Later, I brought my Martini-Henry back to show the proprietor my refurbished rifle.
Matt, with his WWI German uniform, easily fell in with the crew of the Imperial Anti-Piracy Squadron. I hung around as well and thus we were able to avoid their demands to see people's papers as they enforced security and sought out the executive officer's murderer.
There was another death overnight, the acting chief engineer fell to poisonous fumes while defusing a bomb set on the ship's levitation engines.
Eventually things wound down and it was time to call it a day. At that point, I had been up almost continuously for about 41 hours and driven 600 miles.
With Alexa in the other bed, we gentlemen had to share a bed. Matt apparently had dreams about picking his daughter up and putting her in the car. This caused him to roll over with significant force. The first time I merely pushed him back off of me. The second time he physically shoved me onto the floor, my head striking the nightstand on the way down. The third time he awoke in time to keep me from tumbling onto the floor.
Next time I'm sleeping on the floor to save myself the trouble.
Saturday
The Raddison hotel had a complimentary breakfast.
After that, the first panels on the schedule started at 9am and I dropped in on G. D. Falksen and Graf Georg von Ziger's panel on airships. I've been reading a lot about the Airship Flap of 1896-97 and am intending to develop my own presentation on the subject. I think that will be fun to present at cons.
Cherie Priest was one of the guests and if I had paid more attention to that knowledge I would have brought my copies of Boneshaker and Dreadnought to be autographed.
I should have gone to von Grelle's presentation on Victorian flirting. In fact, at the next con I should probably just go to every panel presented by the I.A.P.S. as they are always entertaining.
There was supposed to be a weapons panel with Outland Armor but it seems that they didn't show up, either.
And there was yet another murder. A wealthy American Industrialist, poisoned by a fresh deck of cards.
Going back to the room at one point, our key cards failed so we had to up to the front desk to have them re-coded. While there, we noticed a dinner special of lasagna and decided to give that a try. I thought it was pretty good even though the sauce was a bit more pizza that one might expect, the so-called garlic bread was just a roll with garlic butter on it and the lasagna also had cheddar cheese on it. It's Wisconsin so I'm not surprised by the cheddar.
My mom makes much better lasagna.
The cheese curds (fried mozzarella cheese bites) were good.
And, still another murder. Lord Buckingham, who had voiced his opinion that the ship should be surrendered to Doctor Proctocus to avoid further loss of life, was murdered, again by poison, at the grand ball. The Reverend Captain Samuel Flint and his associate Lord Baron Vorteque of the Royal Ladies' and Gentlemens' Experimental Madness Society (occultists) were arrested and it was felt that the matter was finally settled. I had met both Flint and Vorteque on previous occasions and doubted that they were the culprits. I even went so far as to suspect that they were involved in a ploy to draw the actual murderer out by having him believe that the investigation was over.
Besides, the program indicated there was another episode of the murder mystery scheduled for the next day.
Sunday
After breakfast on Sunday, Matt harangued me mercilessly concerning my putting of sugar on my cottage cheese, both for the rest of the day and into the next day. What's so wrong with putting sugar on cottage cheese? Manufacturers add sugar to cottage cheese and add more to low fat and non-fat versions because they lack the fatty flavor so what is so weird about me adding additional sugar?
My presentation on H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds and its legacy was scheduled at 9am Sunday morning. 9am! I wondered if anyone was even going to be alive that early. On the plus side, the changeover from Daylight Savings Time had set the clocks back giving people an additional hour. Whether people would spend that extra hour coming to my presentation was in some question.
I will admit to not feeling good about my preparations. I thought I had an ok script, I had collected up some pictures, audio and video into a multimedia presentation to support it. I did sort of know what I was talking about and I had done any number of presentations in front of audiences before but for some reason I didn't feel good about this one.
Once things got under way, I calmed down and thought I did a good job. The audience started out at 4 but eventually grew to 4 times that size. It may have helped that the doors to the hallway were wide open and people could listen in on my clips from Orson Welle's Halloween 1938 broadcast and that caught their attention.
In the end, I think it went well and, even though I haven't even started it yet, I think my presentation on the Airship Flap will be even better.
I had not been actually present for most of the murder mystery episodes but the last one was billed as a Gun Show presented by Lord Bobbins. Even if the story climax wasn't scheduled, I would want to see the guns.
Turns out that I was correct, the real murderer revealed himself and tried to take the ship by direct action, holding Lord Bobbins as hostage. Flint and Vorteque appeared with with the I.A.P.S. and a Mexican standoff ensued until the assassin was goaded into attempting to kill Lord Bobbins in a show of resolve, only to discover that the weapon had been previously disabled by Flint. There was only a brief struggle as Von Grelle and he crew took the assassin away to be thrown overboard.
Tim Mickelburg gave a presentation on the development of early photography, specifically the daguerreotype. Neat.
I didn't have any nice pictures of myself in my Union Airship Cavalry uniform so I went to the photo shop where the official con photographers had set up a green screen. Matt also had his picture taken. When we came back a bit later to get the files copied to a USB drive, the conversation somehow turned to the idea of Matt in his WWI German uniform and gas mask presenting himself posed on a bearskin rug. There was no rug but with green screen technology there may yet be. While we were getting dinner he got changed again and came back to have the picture taken.
Von Preußen mit Liebe.
Very disturbing.
I was hoping there would be a dead dog dinner so we could hang out with people who had been running the con but, for the most part, things seemed to scatter fairly quickly. There were a few people still about and, if we were smart we would have spent more time loitering in the lobby or with the room door open so we could attract attention and conversation. Instead, we kept to our room and made future plans.
Monday
We stayed an extra night, got up Monday morning and began the journey home. We listed to an audiobook version of War of the Worlds, which took up about half of the trip. It was much easier making the 11 hour drive after having gotten a good night's sleep rather than trying to do it tired. We all arrived at our respective homes in good time.
I would definitely go next year if it weren't an 11 hour drive. Next year's theme will be a submarine cruise and there will be a mummy unwrapping so one can easily see the "mummy's curse" mystery theater unfolding. No doubt, with the experience gained from this con, next years will be even better. But, again, there's that 11 hour drive each way and the extra day or even two necessary to do such a trip and not be completely exhausted for the trip.
I'm going to register for both the Steampunk World's Fair and the World Steam Expo as pre-reg opens but will be putting off TeslaCon, much like I did this year, unless something special opens up to balance out that 11 hour drive.
