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dime_novel_heroI heard about the proposal for a steampunk convention in Gettysburg last year and pretty much immediately committed to going. Gettysburg is only a 4 hour drive and it would be nice to go to a comparatively “local” con. (Up in the Aether in Detroit is also a 4 hour drive but the World’s Fair and Symposium are 5 hour drives and TeslaCon jumps to 10 hours on the road.) Additionally, Gettysburg has plenty of history to offer to the steampunk mileau.
One of the major tracks was going to be movies and since I run the video program for the science fiction convention in Pittsburgh I offered to help. A bit. Being in Pittsburgh, I wasn’t going to be able to be a major part of the planning at a distance and I wasn’t going to be prepared to haul my sound equipment and 8 foot screen across the state but I did offer up my somewhat extensive video collection.
Not much came from it.
Later, I sent some emails offering up my series of lectures. They were welcomed and I was offered “pick of the litter”, essentially allowed to do whatever programs I wanted whenever I wanted to do them. Well, I’m not used to that open a schedule so I deferred to the programming staff.
But as the con approached and the schedule started to fill out, I noticed that I wasn’t on the program. Another email and, in short order, I was on the program.
Friday
Pack. Drive. Check in. You know the drill.
When I was checking in at Registration, I saw that the day’s schedule was hand written on a presentation tablet. My Mystery Airship program wasn’t listed. Nor was it on the program handouts. It would seem that the updates on the website came about after the program handouts had been printed. I was penciled back in.
In the dealer’s room, I found one dealer with Dr. Grordbort’s Saboteur 66 Ultra Wave Equaliser Gun, which has been on my wish list. However, I knew I could find it for $30 less online (and that is even accounting for shipping). It was good that I got the chance to hold it. I like the size and, unlike the Righteous Bison Indivisible Particle Smasher I already have, it is of a size that I could make a holster for. A shoulder rig like the M-7 that I already have would work.
I also talked to Brett of T Star Leather. He had some very nice leatherwork and also had a Doc Holiday crossdraw holster. Because of the way it holds the gun, the design would not be acceptable for Cowboy Action Shooting but I saw how it was done and, not so different from the M-7, I could do the same thing the would hold the gun more vertically. I also talked to him about making the rifle case I want to do.
Brett is experienced in the Cowboy Festival circuit and can do gun spinning well beyond what I can do. Forward. Back. Hand to hand. Over the shoulder. The whole drill.
I’ll never be that good.
I went to Mark Donnelly’s introductory bartitsu demonstration. Again. I’ve been to several but this one was slightly different. In this he focused on lines of strength and how one of foundations of bartitsu, coming from ju-jitsu, is acting perpendicular to that line of strength along a line of weakness.
During a demonstration or two, I stood opposite Mark while he presented techniques and he complimented me on my standing still. I didn’t move to block him (because he told me not to) and I didn’t flinch when he swung a stick at my head (because I know he has excellent control and wouldn’t hit me). It also helped that I had my goggles on and thus had no peripheral vision.
My Mystery Airships presentation was late. 9pm. Better than 9 in the morning, I suppose. Attendance wasn’t too bad.
Afterwards, Mr. Steampun K. Macintyre mentioned to me the comet theory of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. He said that a comet broke up and formed a perfect line of fires across the American Midwest. This struck me as pseudoscientific, conspiracy theory crap because I knew that meteors will burn up high in the atmosphere, decelerating from something like 25,000 miles per hour to something like a couple of hundred miles an hour. Then, as they fall through 50 miles of cold airs, they cool off. They don’t reach the ground with any heat capable of starting a fire.
“But it was a comet made of ice and methane.”
Sorry, but that just tells me that it is even LESS likely to reach the ground with any sort of heat. The ice would melt. The methane would evaporate. And, if it was big enough to explode with enough power to affect the ground, say the Tunguska Event, then it would have been visible for hundreds of miles and would have devastated Chicago instead of just starting a fire the likes of which could be mistaken for a lamp being kicked over by Mrs. O’Leary’s cow.
Later, I looked it up. His story was based on what was called the Great Preshtigo Fire which occurred at the same time as the Chicago fire and 200 miles away. The speculation was that both were caused by a meteor. In that speculation there was not a perfect line of fires but just the two. Whet the story didn’t cover was that the region had been extremely dry that season and there had been plenty of brush and forest fires, of which the Preshtigo Fire was the worst. And, of course, meteors (and comets) don’t cause fires like that.
Sorry, Mr. Macintire, you’re theory is unsupported.
Saturday
I got up early on Saturday morning because I thought the guys from the IAAC were doing a program and I had offered my projector. Turned out that they didn’t but while I was down at the front desk and registration was opening I noticed that my Saturday programs was not on the schedule. The copies of the schedule that had my programming hand written in had run out leaving the older copies that had me left out. Had to have that fixed again.
I also learned of a theft overnight. Now, the previous day I had noticed a lot of dealers set up in the hallways and no sign of con security. There were apparently some instances of non-convention hotel guests browsing the dealers in the con area and, subsequently, a sign was put up saying that the hallway and points beyond were for con attendees. There was some people standing there as security for a while after that but they seemed to disappear later. I wondered how all those tables full of stuff were going to be protected overnight.
The answer was apparently not so much. Overnight, a Blu-ray player was stolen. There were reports that the associated flatscreen TV was also stolen but that turned out not to be the case. I don’t know if anything else happened to go missing from dealer tables but I didn’t hear any hue and cry beyond the Blue-ray so perhaps it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.
Coming back after running to Sheetz to get some breakfast (a quart of chocolate milk and a bananna) I ran into Mark Donnelly outside and spoke with him for a while. He said that he keeps intending to come to one of my presentations one of these days because we are doing must the same thing; historical education. He does more practical, hands-on presentations with bartitsu but he is always doing the same introductory course and would like to do more educational stuff. He apparently has four book deals pending so I don’t see him wanting for material to present.
We talked a little about my Mystery Airships presentation. He had been looking into that to perhaps build a presentation but other things came to the front and I beat him to it. Part of me thinks I should try to write a book about it but there are already half a dozen books out there. Granted, most of them are from the 70’s and 80’s and only one has been more recent (and it is a short book with almost zero research backing it up) but I still think that, with those books already out there, the likelihood of my book being picked up is slim. I would have nothing new or original to add to the topic.
Mark’s large repertoire of presentations does prompt me to expand my horizons as well. I have four presentations available now. Five if I want to rework my H.G.Wells/War of the Worlds presentation and reoffer it. I want to add a presentation on the luminiferous aether and another on Victorian pseudoscience. If I can get Lord Bobbins to publish the TeslaCon Civil war narrative I wrote for him I can leverage that into a presentation on writing alternative history fiction, much like the IAAC guys have stemming from their collection of stories “Steam Powered Tales of Awesomeness.”
A presentation that I saw at the Steampunk World’s Fair and that they had again at Gettysburg. During their presentation they talked about how the early introduction os a technology like airships would change the course of history. They said that they weren’t going to go into the technology because they didn’t really care about the “magic” that made it go but I had an opportunity at that point to invite people to my presentation later in the day where I WOULD go into the “how it works” part.
My History and Technology of Airships presentation really needs reworked.
When I premiered it at TeslaCon, I recognized that it went over time and spent too much time on the history and not enough on the technology. I vowed to edit it but spent too much time finalizing the TeslaCon Civil War narrative to really put good work into the fix so, ultimately, it came out much like it did before.
So, what I need to do is scrap it and start from scratch. Instead of going through the history chronologically starting with the Montgolfier Brothers and progressing up to the Hindenburg, noting technological advances along the way, what I need to do is start with a design element and then talk about the history that leads up to that.
For example: the first thing to talk about with airships is buoyancy. How does it float? Talk about the Montgolfier Brothers hot air balloon and that they thought is was the smoke that was lifting it rather than the hot air, the principal of which was know to Archimedes two millennia earlier. Then talk about how buoyancy works (the difference in densities between what you are trying to float and what you are trying to float it in) and the different gases you can use.
There. Done. Next principal. Perhaps about how to build the airship. Non-rigid, semi-rigid. Rigid. How they couldn’t get large than about 150 feet long because they lacked a material that was stong and light enough until the Hall-Héroult electrolytic process brought down the cost of aluminum to the point where Zeppelin could afford to build his dirigible.
Done. Next. And on from there. With that format I can give people the information necessary to build believable airships in their stories. Or, if they are going to build fantastical airships, at least they have a foundation of how it works so they can make it internally consistent. In many ways it parallels the IAAC’s presentation in giving people the tools and calling on them to “do their homework” and “leave a trail of breadcrumbs.”
For years now, I have been commissioning Leanne Peacey of Chi Studios to do artwork for me. She lives nearby to Gettysburg in York and she set up shop. I don’t know what sort of business she was able to pull in but we talked and she really likes the steampunk community. Her experience had been with the anime cons and she was growing too old to deal with the screaming young fangirls and boys. Steampunk is more mature. Even when the people behave in a childlike fashion, they are not being childish. Plus, from a con dealer point of view, steampunks tend to be older, better employed, homeowning and with more disposable income.
In her last piece of artwork, I had her do an illustration of Vitruvius Pike and Aimi Somerton. As she did the draft copies, I noticed that she had added glasses, apparently based on the model images I had given her. I hadn't originally thought that Aimi would wear glasses (since Pike wears goggles) but, on reflection, I thought it would be perfect. Aimi represents the foundation of a number of subsequent Japanese anime/manga trends; Victorian maids. Androids. Maid androids. Adding glasses would throw in the meganekko fetish as well. But something got lost in the communication and she neglected to have the glasses in the final version. It was easy enough to bring the art along and have her add them back.
Leanne asked me about my favorite cons. I, of course, talked up TeslaCon but then described some of the others. Jeff Mach just happened to be stopped near the booth talking to someone and I mentioned the Steampunk worlds Fair and grabbed him to introduce him to Leanne. I had other places to go and so left them to talk business.
I considered it my good deed for the day, introducing an artist/dealer to a con chair.
I got changed into my Union Aeroship Cavalry bathing suit and went out to the car to pick up my rocket powered Hale Sky Board in preparation for the bathing suit contest. In the parking lot I encountered General Robert E. Lee and his wife.
The Lee reenactor had the general down almost perfectly. The uniform. The hair. The beard. He even affected Martin Sheen’s Virginian accent from the movie “Gettysburg” when I asked if I could take his photograph.
“Of course,” he said. “But you’re wearing the wrong color hat.”
“You, sir, have come too far north, then.”
As he went into the hotel and I wished him a good day, he replied, “I’m sure you’ll have a better time than I did the last time I was here.”
Back to the bathing suit contest.
I had built a rocket surf board and had made for me a Union Army style bathing suit over a year ago but this was the first time I had actually been able to get it into a contest as previous occasions had fizzled out or I had missed them due to other commitments. The board had been built without plans, had inherent weaknesses and had not survived well as one of the tail fins was completely broken and the other was just barely hanging on. Even so, I was able to eek it out to take second place.
Afterwards, I looked in on Mark Donnelly doing bayonet and saber drills. Three years in a national championship high school marching band 30 years ago and I can say with absolute authority that those guys couldn’t hold a line for shit. I wanted to jump the railing and teach them how to march. It’s not that hard. Even easier because they aren’t required to stare straight ahead as one would in a competition marching band. Just look to the right and stay next to that guy. The guy on the far right is the anchor and, so long as he walks at a steady, even pace and everyone else is lining up off of the person to the right then the line should keep straight enough.
I don’t usually go to the evening dancing/entertainment/party things but I sat in on the Eli August concert. The sound guy wasn’t doing a very good job of managing the sound system. I’m no audiophile but even I recognize that the sound boards shouldn’t be right next to the stage.
Later in the evening I sat down and had an opportunity to talk with Major Girth of the IAAC about writing. During the course I mentioned that I was reading “Frontier Earth” by Bruce Boxlightner. Actually, it wasn’t written by Boxlightner but was ghostwritten by a friend of mine William H. Keith. Major Girth recognized the name from “Battletech” and I was able to lead that into Keith being Guest of Honor at Confluence in Pittsburgh. This had Major Girth being interested in expanding the IAAC footprint westward. He apparently has family in the area, which would make attendance an easier thing.
Unfortunately, he has a business model that, as an author now (or rather, in a few weeks when “Steam Powered Tales of Awesomeness” comes out) he’s not going to go to cons without being comped (compensated). And I know the people doing programming for Confluence and don’t expect the IAAC style of programming to be to their liking (in spite of how much anyone else might think we need to broaden our base).
That’s really too bad. I’m growing tired of Pittsburgh being on the hinterlands of fandom. Here we are, smack dab in between Chicago and New York, and we are this sort of “black hole” because of the conservatism of the people running our con. Tekkoshocon in Pittsburgh has grown tremendously with the anime community, drawing close to 4,000. Anthrocon in Pittsburgh is the largest furry cons in the world, drawing over 5,000. Why, after a quearter century, should Confluence stagnate at 300 attendees?
I also herd A Count Names Slick-Brass talking a bit about the con and he was very pleased. Pre-registration was about 90 and he didn’t know the full attendance but I would guess at a few hundred. Not bad for a first convention. Better manage scheduling, work out better security and I see no reason for next year to be better.
Sunday
The IAAC had an Edison vs. Tesla presentation on Sunday. They presented a very balanced approach designed to avoid the typical steampunk vilification of Edison and deification of Tesla. I will admit that I was tendent to do a little of that myself, (“Edison’s a hack!”) but a few weeks back I watched “The Men Who Built America” on The History Channel (yes, they do occasionally show history documentaries between the aliens and swamp people), and when you look at J.P.Morgan and the pressure he brought to bear, Edison doesn’t look quite so bad.
They were both jerks in an age when most men were jerks.
There was a traveling photographer doing tintypes. I seem to recall him being at TeslaCon as well. I decided to sit for a photograph and it came out very well.
I was yelling in the hallway trying to get people to attend my Century of the Beard presentation. I had one person come in and sit down. I waited and finally Thee Bluebeard came in so, with two people, I thought I could start. After a while, more people wandered in, another half dozen in all. I think some other programming may have been running behind
Bluebeard, a typically flamboyant character, seemed uncharacteristically humbled by what he didn’t know about beards.
After TeslaCon, I tightened up my program, deleting a number of less impressive beards from the photo list. I still think I need to tighten things up a bit but my going over time during this presentation was mostly due to starting late.
There was a panel on con horror stories that I wanted to see but I was distracted by having to pack up the projector and screen, collect up my finished tintype and my artwork from Chi Studios and start heading home and so completely forgot
I had Leanne make a new chibi for me. I didn’t like this one as much as all the rest. Not because of the artist in any way but because what I was wearing just didn’t translate well. Not enough contrast between the pants and the vest, I think.
Next time, Gadget. Next time.
One of the major tracks was going to be movies and since I run the video program for the science fiction convention in Pittsburgh I offered to help. A bit. Being in Pittsburgh, I wasn’t going to be able to be a major part of the planning at a distance and I wasn’t going to be prepared to haul my sound equipment and 8 foot screen across the state but I did offer up my somewhat extensive video collection.
Not much came from it.
Later, I sent some emails offering up my series of lectures. They were welcomed and I was offered “pick of the litter”, essentially allowed to do whatever programs I wanted whenever I wanted to do them. Well, I’m not used to that open a schedule so I deferred to the programming staff.
But as the con approached and the schedule started to fill out, I noticed that I wasn’t on the program. Another email and, in short order, I was on the program.
Friday
Pack. Drive. Check in. You know the drill.
When I was checking in at Registration, I saw that the day’s schedule was hand written on a presentation tablet. My Mystery Airship program wasn’t listed. Nor was it on the program handouts. It would seem that the updates on the website came about after the program handouts had been printed. I was penciled back in.
In the dealer’s room, I found one dealer with Dr. Grordbort’s Saboteur 66 Ultra Wave Equaliser Gun, which has been on my wish list. However, I knew I could find it for $30 less online (and that is even accounting for shipping). It was good that I got the chance to hold it. I like the size and, unlike the Righteous Bison Indivisible Particle Smasher I already have, it is of a size that I could make a holster for. A shoulder rig like the M-7 that I already have would work.
I also talked to Brett of T Star Leather. He had some very nice leatherwork and also had a Doc Holiday crossdraw holster. Because of the way it holds the gun, the design would not be acceptable for Cowboy Action Shooting but I saw how it was done and, not so different from the M-7, I could do the same thing the would hold the gun more vertically. I also talked to him about making the rifle case I want to do.
Brett is experienced in the Cowboy Festival circuit and can do gun spinning well beyond what I can do. Forward. Back. Hand to hand. Over the shoulder. The whole drill.
I’ll never be that good.
I went to Mark Donnelly’s introductory bartitsu demonstration. Again. I’ve been to several but this one was slightly different. In this he focused on lines of strength and how one of foundations of bartitsu, coming from ju-jitsu, is acting perpendicular to that line of strength along a line of weakness.
During a demonstration or two, I stood opposite Mark while he presented techniques and he complimented me on my standing still. I didn’t move to block him (because he told me not to) and I didn’t flinch when he swung a stick at my head (because I know he has excellent control and wouldn’t hit me). It also helped that I had my goggles on and thus had no peripheral vision.
My Mystery Airships presentation was late. 9pm. Better than 9 in the morning, I suppose. Attendance wasn’t too bad.
Afterwards, Mr. Steampun K. Macintyre mentioned to me the comet theory of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. He said that a comet broke up and formed a perfect line of fires across the American Midwest. This struck me as pseudoscientific, conspiracy theory crap because I knew that meteors will burn up high in the atmosphere, decelerating from something like 25,000 miles per hour to something like a couple of hundred miles an hour. Then, as they fall through 50 miles of cold airs, they cool off. They don’t reach the ground with any heat capable of starting a fire.
“But it was a comet made of ice and methane.”
Sorry, but that just tells me that it is even LESS likely to reach the ground with any sort of heat. The ice would melt. The methane would evaporate. And, if it was big enough to explode with enough power to affect the ground, say the Tunguska Event, then it would have been visible for hundreds of miles and would have devastated Chicago instead of just starting a fire the likes of which could be mistaken for a lamp being kicked over by Mrs. O’Leary’s cow.
Later, I looked it up. His story was based on what was called the Great Preshtigo Fire which occurred at the same time as the Chicago fire and 200 miles away. The speculation was that both were caused by a meteor. In that speculation there was not a perfect line of fires but just the two. Whet the story didn’t cover was that the region had been extremely dry that season and there had been plenty of brush and forest fires, of which the Preshtigo Fire was the worst. And, of course, meteors (and comets) don’t cause fires like that.
Sorry, Mr. Macintire, you’re theory is unsupported.
Saturday
I got up early on Saturday morning because I thought the guys from the IAAC were doing a program and I had offered my projector. Turned out that they didn’t but while I was down at the front desk and registration was opening I noticed that my Saturday programs was not on the schedule. The copies of the schedule that had my programming hand written in had run out leaving the older copies that had me left out. Had to have that fixed again.
I also learned of a theft overnight. Now, the previous day I had noticed a lot of dealers set up in the hallways and no sign of con security. There were apparently some instances of non-convention hotel guests browsing the dealers in the con area and, subsequently, a sign was put up saying that the hallway and points beyond were for con attendees. There was some people standing there as security for a while after that but they seemed to disappear later. I wondered how all those tables full of stuff were going to be protected overnight.
The answer was apparently not so much. Overnight, a Blu-ray player was stolen. There were reports that the associated flatscreen TV was also stolen but that turned out not to be the case. I don’t know if anything else happened to go missing from dealer tables but I didn’t hear any hue and cry beyond the Blue-ray so perhaps it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.
Coming back after running to Sheetz to get some breakfast (a quart of chocolate milk and a bananna) I ran into Mark Donnelly outside and spoke with him for a while. He said that he keeps intending to come to one of my presentations one of these days because we are doing must the same thing; historical education. He does more practical, hands-on presentations with bartitsu but he is always doing the same introductory course and would like to do more educational stuff. He apparently has four book deals pending so I don’t see him wanting for material to present.
We talked a little about my Mystery Airships presentation. He had been looking into that to perhaps build a presentation but other things came to the front and I beat him to it. Part of me thinks I should try to write a book about it but there are already half a dozen books out there. Granted, most of them are from the 70’s and 80’s and only one has been more recent (and it is a short book with almost zero research backing it up) but I still think that, with those books already out there, the likelihood of my book being picked up is slim. I would have nothing new or original to add to the topic.
Mark’s large repertoire of presentations does prompt me to expand my horizons as well. I have four presentations available now. Five if I want to rework my H.G.Wells/War of the Worlds presentation and reoffer it. I want to add a presentation on the luminiferous aether and another on Victorian pseudoscience. If I can get Lord Bobbins to publish the TeslaCon Civil war narrative I wrote for him I can leverage that into a presentation on writing alternative history fiction, much like the IAAC guys have stemming from their collection of stories “Steam Powered Tales of Awesomeness.”
A presentation that I saw at the Steampunk World’s Fair and that they had again at Gettysburg. During their presentation they talked about how the early introduction os a technology like airships would change the course of history. They said that they weren’t going to go into the technology because they didn’t really care about the “magic” that made it go but I had an opportunity at that point to invite people to my presentation later in the day where I WOULD go into the “how it works” part.
My History and Technology of Airships presentation really needs reworked.
When I premiered it at TeslaCon, I recognized that it went over time and spent too much time on the history and not enough on the technology. I vowed to edit it but spent too much time finalizing the TeslaCon Civil War narrative to really put good work into the fix so, ultimately, it came out much like it did before.
So, what I need to do is scrap it and start from scratch. Instead of going through the history chronologically starting with the Montgolfier Brothers and progressing up to the Hindenburg, noting technological advances along the way, what I need to do is start with a design element and then talk about the history that leads up to that.
For example: the first thing to talk about with airships is buoyancy. How does it float? Talk about the Montgolfier Brothers hot air balloon and that they thought is was the smoke that was lifting it rather than the hot air, the principal of which was know to Archimedes two millennia earlier. Then talk about how buoyancy works (the difference in densities between what you are trying to float and what you are trying to float it in) and the different gases you can use.
There. Done. Next principal. Perhaps about how to build the airship. Non-rigid, semi-rigid. Rigid. How they couldn’t get large than about 150 feet long because they lacked a material that was stong and light enough until the Hall-Héroult electrolytic process brought down the cost of aluminum to the point where Zeppelin could afford to build his dirigible.
Done. Next. And on from there. With that format I can give people the information necessary to build believable airships in their stories. Or, if they are going to build fantastical airships, at least they have a foundation of how it works so they can make it internally consistent. In many ways it parallels the IAAC’s presentation in giving people the tools and calling on them to “do their homework” and “leave a trail of breadcrumbs.”
For years now, I have been commissioning Leanne Peacey of Chi Studios to do artwork for me. She lives nearby to Gettysburg in York and she set up shop. I don’t know what sort of business she was able to pull in but we talked and she really likes the steampunk community. Her experience had been with the anime cons and she was growing too old to deal with the screaming young fangirls and boys. Steampunk is more mature. Even when the people behave in a childlike fashion, they are not being childish. Plus, from a con dealer point of view, steampunks tend to be older, better employed, homeowning and with more disposable income.
In her last piece of artwork, I had her do an illustration of Vitruvius Pike and Aimi Somerton. As she did the draft copies, I noticed that she had added glasses, apparently based on the model images I had given her. I hadn't originally thought that Aimi would wear glasses (since Pike wears goggles) but, on reflection, I thought it would be perfect. Aimi represents the foundation of a number of subsequent Japanese anime/manga trends; Victorian maids. Androids. Maid androids. Adding glasses would throw in the meganekko fetish as well. But something got lost in the communication and she neglected to have the glasses in the final version. It was easy enough to bring the art along and have her add them back.
Leanne asked me about my favorite cons. I, of course, talked up TeslaCon but then described some of the others. Jeff Mach just happened to be stopped near the booth talking to someone and I mentioned the Steampunk worlds Fair and grabbed him to introduce him to Leanne. I had other places to go and so left them to talk business.
I considered it my good deed for the day, introducing an artist/dealer to a con chair.
I got changed into my Union Aeroship Cavalry bathing suit and went out to the car to pick up my rocket powered Hale Sky Board in preparation for the bathing suit contest. In the parking lot I encountered General Robert E. Lee and his wife.The Lee reenactor had the general down almost perfectly. The uniform. The hair. The beard. He even affected Martin Sheen’s Virginian accent from the movie “Gettysburg” when I asked if I could take his photograph.
“Of course,” he said. “But you’re wearing the wrong color hat.”
“You, sir, have come too far north, then.”
As he went into the hotel and I wished him a good day, he replied, “I’m sure you’ll have a better time than I did the last time I was here.”
Back to the bathing suit contest.
I had built a rocket surf board and had made for me a Union Army style bathing suit over a year ago but this was the first time I had actually been able to get it into a contest as previous occasions had fizzled out or I had missed them due to other commitments. The board had been built without plans, had inherent weaknesses and had not survived well as one of the tail fins was completely broken and the other was just barely hanging on. Even so, I was able to eek it out to take second place.Afterwards, I looked in on Mark Donnelly doing bayonet and saber drills. Three years in a national championship high school marching band 30 years ago and I can say with absolute authority that those guys couldn’t hold a line for shit. I wanted to jump the railing and teach them how to march. It’s not that hard. Even easier because they aren’t required to stare straight ahead as one would in a competition marching band. Just look to the right and stay next to that guy. The guy on the far right is the anchor and, so long as he walks at a steady, even pace and everyone else is lining up off of the person to the right then the line should keep straight enough.
I don’t usually go to the evening dancing/entertainment/party things but I sat in on the Eli August concert. The sound guy wasn’t doing a very good job of managing the sound system. I’m no audiophile but even I recognize that the sound boards shouldn’t be right next to the stage.
Later in the evening I sat down and had an opportunity to talk with Major Girth of the IAAC about writing. During the course I mentioned that I was reading “Frontier Earth” by Bruce Boxlightner. Actually, it wasn’t written by Boxlightner but was ghostwritten by a friend of mine William H. Keith. Major Girth recognized the name from “Battletech” and I was able to lead that into Keith being Guest of Honor at Confluence in Pittsburgh. This had Major Girth being interested in expanding the IAAC footprint westward. He apparently has family in the area, which would make attendance an easier thing.
Unfortunately, he has a business model that, as an author now (or rather, in a few weeks when “Steam Powered Tales of Awesomeness” comes out) he’s not going to go to cons without being comped (compensated). And I know the people doing programming for Confluence and don’t expect the IAAC style of programming to be to their liking (in spite of how much anyone else might think we need to broaden our base).
That’s really too bad. I’m growing tired of Pittsburgh being on the hinterlands of fandom. Here we are, smack dab in between Chicago and New York, and we are this sort of “black hole” because of the conservatism of the people running our con. Tekkoshocon in Pittsburgh has grown tremendously with the anime community, drawing close to 4,000. Anthrocon in Pittsburgh is the largest furry cons in the world, drawing over 5,000. Why, after a quearter century, should Confluence stagnate at 300 attendees?
I also herd A Count Names Slick-Brass talking a bit about the con and he was very pleased. Pre-registration was about 90 and he didn’t know the full attendance but I would guess at a few hundred. Not bad for a first convention. Better manage scheduling, work out better security and I see no reason for next year to be better.
Sunday
The IAAC had an Edison vs. Tesla presentation on Sunday. They presented a very balanced approach designed to avoid the typical steampunk vilification of Edison and deification of Tesla. I will admit that I was tendent to do a little of that myself, (“Edison’s a hack!”) but a few weeks back I watched “The Men Who Built America” on The History Channel (yes, they do occasionally show history documentaries between the aliens and swamp people), and when you look at J.P.Morgan and the pressure he brought to bear, Edison doesn’t look quite so bad.
They were both jerks in an age when most men were jerks.
There was a traveling photographer doing tintypes. I seem to recall him being at TeslaCon as well. I decided to sit for a photograph and it came out very well.
I was yelling in the hallway trying to get people to attend my Century of the Beard presentation. I had one person come in and sit down. I waited and finally Thee Bluebeard came in so, with two people, I thought I could start. After a while, more people wandered in, another half dozen in all. I think some other programming may have been running behind
Bluebeard, a typically flamboyant character, seemed uncharacteristically humbled by what he didn’t know about beards.
After TeslaCon, I tightened up my program, deleting a number of less impressive beards from the photo list. I still think I need to tighten things up a bit but my going over time during this presentation was mostly due to starting late.
There was a panel on con horror stories that I wanted to see but I was distracted by having to pack up the projector and screen, collect up my finished tintype and my artwork from Chi Studios and start heading home and so completely forgot
I had Leanne make a new chibi for me. I didn’t like this one as much as all the rest. Not because of the artist in any way but because what I was wearing just didn’t translate well. Not enough contrast between the pants and the vest, I think.
Next time, Gadget. Next time.
