Trees for the Forest

I made my way from Seattle down to Portland via Amtrak train for the 25th Orycon Convention during the weekend of November 14th through the 16th, 2003. Tempted to stay in the hotel this time around, but did not, since my brother lives within a relatively easy bus ride of the site.

I arrived in time for the Opening Ceremonies and a panel or two on Friday night. The ceremonies were intended to be sorta foolish and they were. An okay way to start off the con with many bad time travel jokes and the leftover from an award ceremony buffet which had completed just previously. The two panels which I attended that evening were entitled “Game Masters: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” and “The Rest of the World in Space: 2003 Review and Look Back.” Both were interesting, but I was tired from a three hour train ride, so I don’t think I enjoyed them as much as I would have, had I been fully rested.

Saturday morning at 10am brought me to another space themed panel called “NASA vs. Private Enterprise, Who Will Win the Space Race?” Interesting discussion of who might be able to afford space travel besides a world government. Stress was placed on the idea that all space travel need not be for profit, but that good profitable ideas would go a long way to providing logical incentive. Most tantalizing comments had to do with that on earth we can only create both so-called “right-handed” and “left-handed” chemicals. The left-handed chemicals are not useful, but in a gravity environment, we have no choice but to produce both kinds of chemicals. In space, zero-g, a side benefit is the ability to focus on one type of chemical, so double the production of right-handed chemicals could be easily achieved.

The next panel I attended, at Noon, was about computer games, entitled “CD Rom Survivors: Games that Stay on your Hard Drive.” Fun panel, with lots of old favorite games mentioned. To answer the question of what keeps a game on your hard drive, the panelists mentioned those tried and true concepts of replayability and depth of story. The panel turned into a rumor mill of up and coming games such as Doom 3, Half-Life 2, etc, which was fine and dandy but didn’t really fit into the topic of the session. Oh well.

At 3pm, After a nice quick lunch at Burger King (their new veggie burger aint half bad) and breeze through the art room, I moved from the violence of Doom 3 in a game to the violence of hand to hand combat and martial arts with Steve Perry and Hank Reinhardt for their panel “Martial Arts Hardware.” Hank does movie reviews for a magazine called “Blade” in which he dissects the anatomy of a fight scene and pulls no punches while doing so. Says the majority of movie and tv fight scenes are patently unrealistic and laughs at the idea that an unarmed man can take on anyone with any kind of weapon at all. One of his best lines: “If somebody pulls a knife on you, your best defense is to already have your gun out!” Another fun tidbit thrown out to back up this statment was the fact that if a knife-wielder is within 21 feet of you, then they will stab you before you can unholster your gun. They also dispelled some myths, the best one being that there is no bone in the nose to be driven into the brain like it seems to happen in countless movies. Cartilage is not bone.

Next, for me, at 4pm came “Strong SF Characters.” The science CSI guy guest of honor was on this one. The panel was OK, but the participants seemed to get off track a bit between the idea of how one builds a strong SF characters and what it means to be a strong SF character.

After a quick dinner, I attended a rumor session about Star Wars among other things. I hate spoilers, but since we were talking about Star Wars, I didn’t much spoilage was possible. I was mostly right. I won’t mention any details here for fear of actually spoiling something for someone out there in the world. The moderator, Gareth, also dropped some tidbits about strong possibilities for B5 and Farscape (to wrap up some major cliff hangers) movies and the fact that the Terminator series is going strong and there are plans for a T4 and a T5. He also stated that there are rumors that Prisoner of Azkaban would be a four hour movie with a 30 minute intermission… We’ll see.

The rest of Saturday evening was rather low key for me. Went to the Escape Key filk concert which I knew would be great. It was nice to experience the full group live and they played most of the songs off their CD’s plus a nice bonus song or two. Forgot to mention that I also caught Blake Hodgetts (and a song or two by his daughters) on Friday night. Looking forward to all of them at the next Norwescon. I did not see Uffington Horse (who were great at a local Seattle show they did after Westercon) and only caught the last few seconds of Heather Alexander on Sunday. I hope to catch more of them at future events.

My con was wrapped up panel-wise on Sunday with two more quick panels, one by the CSI guy and the other about survival skills being lost in the modern age. The CSI panel was interesting in that it could have been a presentation about forensic techniques and orginization at just about any gathering. Ken Goddard mentioned writing a few times, but my feeling was justified when the final powerpoint slide came up asking how all of this applies to mystery writing… Regardless, Mr. Goddard was an engaging speaker and one of the treats of the con for me. My final panel, “The World We’ve Lost”, was nice capstone to the proceedings. The first panel I went to was about the masters of the tabletop survival arena and the final panel was about how in the modern world, we may have lost the skills needed to survive without technology. The panelists, among them, Steven Barnes and John Dalmas, were more than ready to dive into the debate. Some nice pondering about whether any skills are truly ever really lost as long as we are willing to look for them and reinvent them. The most interesting question was probably what will happen to our eletronic forms of archiving data over the next 2 centuries, which put the center of the fear of loss in the future, when certain media would be inaccessible. To balance out the tech talk, some interesting discussion of logging and communal house building ensued and made this one of most information packed panels of this con or any other.

The next con I plan on attending is Norwescon in early April 2004. That will mark my second Nortwescon and will move me towards being even less objective in my reporting, so watch out.

Heading out to Orycon 25 in Portland, OR this weekend.

There WILL be a report to follow the fun, someday…