Wizard World Chicago 2008

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From Wizard World …

I haven’t written much here about my visits to Wizard World Chicago conventions, but I have nevertheless gone annually for going on ten years now.  I haven’t been motivated to write about it at all over the last few years because about 5 years it started to go down hill, while things like Comicon in San Diego (which I have had the pleasure of attending twice, in 2004 and 2005) only seem to get better every year.  Wizard World Chicago was very early this year landing in the last weekend of June, when it is normally in the middle of August.

How one defines the success of such an event can certainly vary from person to person.  For me, the availability of exhibitors, the quality of the panels, and the management of crowds and lines are probably the top three aspects of any convention which features media and mainstream aspects.  These were, of course, the things that only seemed to become lower in quality as the years passed for Wizard World and only seem to rise in quality for Comicon.  Comicon crowds are rather ridiculous in size, but they still somehow managed to provide places for everyone to go and had very aggressive crowd handlers to make sure human nature didn’t get the best of anyone.  Wizard World crowds are nothing to sneeze at but year after year lately, the crowd handlers have become meeker and meeker, if they were even present.

It looks like the bottom was hit last year, because this is the first year in a while at Wizard World where I have noticed a slight upswing in two out of the three categories.  The panels finally included some interesting Q&A sessions, this year specifically Lou Ferigno discussing reaction to the new HULK movie, two half-way decent movie trailer sessions, and a very well handled Q&A with Missy Peregrym from REAPER, HEROES, and STICK IT to name a few.

As a vegan, finding food at these type of events is always a bit of an issue.  Bringing my own food is usually the solution, which is certainly a way to save some money while I’m at it.  Regardless, this year also featured a fairly decent food court of sorts which was another nice way to deal with crowds and give them a place to eat.  Kudos to the Wizard World staff for this area and here’s to hoping it is still around next year along with continuing improvements, especially in the one area that continues to spiral downwards: the exhibitor area.

I don’t blame Wizard World 100% for the downward path of exhibitor number and quality.  The economy is certainly down and getting people to come to Chicago with the price of gas and the quality of airline travel is probably not as easy as it once was.  I can see how Comicon San Diego will continue to shine in this area with such easy access to Los Angeles and an ideal place to visit.  The success that Comicon continues to have is actually a downside in my book with too much to choose from, it becomes painful sometimes to pick among all the goodness.  Not that I won’t be greedily consuming all information that comes out of Comicon, but in some ways I can find some small consolation in the tiny upswing being witnessed in our own local con.

Living in the Future

Norwescon 27 has come and gone and wonderful it was. The website seemed to have disappeared for a moment (now it is back), but they already have something up for next year: “The Language of Fantasy.”

I am most intrigued by the science guest of honor for next year.

And as always the rest of the guests ain’t half bad themselves.

Science, Science and more Science

Norwescon 27 is here.

VegFest 2004

My second year at Vegfest. Much like last year. Good food tastings, most of which I would eat. Didn’t really find anything surprising that I just must add to my regular diet.

Only went to a couple of presentations/cooking demonstrations this time around. The presentation I attended had to do with general vegetarion nutrion and the audio was WAY too high. Gave me headache, which is probably why I only attended the one presentation and spent a bit more time with the cooking demonstration side of things.

I went to two cooking demos. The first one was all about tofu. Essentially a couple of recipes which substituted tofu strips and slabs for chicken in a couple of recipes. Nice thing about these demos is that they pass out samples afterward and the seasoning and sauces were tasty.

The second demo I went to was one on how to make seitan (made from the glutenous part of wheat and when cooked has a nice chewy texture). I love seitan, but never knew how easy it was to make the final product. In summary, add gluten flour to water, knead into a sticky dough like consistency, break of pieces and boil. Mmmmm, good. Especially after being grilled and mixed with nice veggies.

Orycon 25 - Report

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.

Orycon 25 Arrives

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

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

Northwest Bookfest 2003 Sunday

My plan for the second day was to be much more relaxed in going to presentations and attend three panels at most and maybe have another overly-expensive veggie dog.

I was a bit late to the first panel I wanted to attend: “Graphic Novels Where Literature and Art Intersect”, but I didn’t seem to miss much more than a few introductions. The panelists were Peter Bagge, Gary Groth, Ted Jouflas, and Jim Woodring, with Eric Reynolds moderating. The discussion was not new to me (being a fan of comic books), with a comparison of comics to movies, which I have heard before as a way to grasp why they might be successful. Woodring made an excellent point during this stage, which went something like comparing comic book artists and sequential art professionals saying it is “sorta like jazz… broken down practicioners trying to get the nuances down.” A nice way of thinking about it. Gary Groth of Fantagraphics fame announced that they would be publishing the complete run of Peanuts, which is no small task, and reminds us what a class act his company is.

The next panel I attended was a crowded one called “If This is the Doorway to the Future, Why are We Stuck in the Past?” The participants were Steven Barnes, Octavia Butler, Susan Matthews, Spider Robinson, and moderator Syne Mitchell. As the moderator, Syne started things off quickly in attempting to interpret the topic as trying to figure out how to look to the future when one is inevitably tied to the past, wheras at least one panelist (Spider) saw it more as why more people aren’t willing to look at the future along with them. The discussion quickly moved to examine the idea of viewpoint, not only from a perspective of history, but rather gender and race as many of the panelists have written across those lines in the sand. A very engrossing panel that was kept on track considering the number of participants. There was a consensus to not be afraid of research in all the forms it can take from intensive study to eavesdropping on the conversations of your fellow bus riders. Lively to the end, this group did not disappoint.

Somewhere in there I had another over-priced veggie dog and keeping to the plan, only one presentation remained: An interview with scifi author Greg Bear and mystery author J. A. Jance done by Judith Chandler (a long time associate of both authors from here work at the UW Boookstore). Unfortunately J. A. Jance was running late from the airport and never made it! The panel was meant to be a discussion of genre literature and its value in the grand scheme of things. Greg Bear was perfect for such a discussion and I’m sure Ms. Jance would have only made it richer. Greg’s best comment was something about eclectic readers: “I you walk into the bathroom reading Jane Austen and come out reading Stephen King, something must have happened in there!” The discussion moved on to ideas centering around mainstream fiction being character-driven and genre fiction being plot-driven. Greg did not agree with this 100%, saying that this idea is more in reference to works like Jane Austen where class is the basis, which inevitably leads to character exploration versus any kind of dramatic plotting. Some variation of these ideas came up all the way to the end, the main thrust being if the reader feels like his world is out of his control, that they are at the mercy of the universe, then they will gravitate towards mainstream fiction where the characters strive for control. To balance this, if the readers feels that wit can gain control over any situation the universe manages to throw at them, then they are more likely to find themselves gravitating towards the genre works.

I kept my panel attendance down to three for this day. Overall a very satisfying experience from the focus on ideas of the first day to the draw of the personalities on the second.

Northwest Bookfest 2003 Saturday

I’ve attended the Northwest Bookfest for going on 5 years now. The venues chosen usually manage to give a nice outdoorsy and open feel to the fest and this being the second year in an decommissioned naval airplane hangar at Sand Point Magnuson Park did not disappoint on that front. This year was the first with a mandatory admission fee (a modest $10/day) which unfortunately seems to have kept some people away this year. It did not feel quite as crowded as usual (which is personally a plus for me, but not if the event goes away). Also, I could tell by the way the presentations were organized (no author seemed to be scheduled for more than one panel) that frugality would rule the day. I’ve since read in the paper that attendance was way down from previous years, so my eyes did not deceive, but I have yet to read whether they at least managed to break even monetarily.

Whereas the unplanned theme of (and as yet unreported upon) Westercon 56 for me was “music,” for Bookfest this year, it seemed to be “cultures clashing.” This is a two-day event and I planned to attend as many panels as I could without overloading on information. None of the Saturday panels had an author whose work I had read, but the concepts seemed compelling enough. Sunday was chock full of the authors who I had seen at this event before or who just packed that extra star power for me.

After taking a quick run around the expansive dealer floor, the first panel I went to was entitled “A Clash of Cultures in Fiction.” The two authors on the panel clashed nicely in personality as well: Kate Gadbow, an unassuming Montanan teacher with a loving family contrasted nicely with the world weary thriller writing marine biologist, Michael Gruber. If you get a kick out of fish out of water stories, then neither of their books will disappoint, if their performance here is any indication of their writing talent.

After an underwhelming $5.00 veggie dog, the next panel that graced my view was centered around the non-question “Ruling the Roost: Has Fantasy Finally Eclipsed SF in Today’s Market?” A couple of scheduled authors did not make it to this, but the trio that did, L. E. Modesitt, Jr., Chris Bunch, and Kage Baker were immensely entertaining as they attempted to answer this question which wasn’t really much of a question at all. Appropriately, each of them has written both fantasy and science fiction, and all seemed to agree that the success or failure of each genre in the movie theatre sheds some light on where the public consciousness might lie in this regard. I’ve haven’t read any of their stuff, but their performance on this panel made me want to explore some of it. They took a horrible topic and made it interesting and took a couple of incoherent questions from the audience in stride, not to mention how well they handled the good queries. Modesitt seemed to get on several people’s nerves, but I found him refreshingly honest.

Stuck around the same stage area for the next presentation entitled “Disaffected? Affected? Hip or Just Plain Strange? Where do Literary Fiction and Contemporary Culture Interact?” There was that culture thing again. I won’t go into too much detail here. This was a good panel, but turned out to be more a reading from two local writers, which was great, but as the moderator Steven Shaviro pointed out, the panel was more of a chance for two authors to talk about why place was so specific in their works more than anything else. The authors were Matthew McIntosh who read from WELL, and Matt Ruff who read from SET THIS HOUSE IN ORDER. The former populated with the various points of view of downtrodden working class stiffs from the not well to do suburbs of Seattle and the latter written from the many points of view of a multiple personality disorder protagonist. Both had memorable readings and the multiple story was very intriguing.

Next for me was a panel on which the moderator also had the panelists read from their work, but on this one they also made the time to discuss the topic in some depth. Called “Dark Humor and Good Literature: So Funny It Breaks Your Heart.” These authors had works ranging from high school boys coming to terms with their homosexuality to a set of short stories and a novella which follow the adventures of a funeral junkie. Each piece was quite good and the success of shows like SIX FEET UNDER was mentioned as one indicator that we like a bit of pith with our pathos, possibly because life always manages to be a heart rending mixture of utter hilarity and great pain.

The final panel of Saturday for me was one with the straightforward name of “No Closed Doors: Privacy As a Privilege in the Electronic Age.” I was late for this one, but managed to arrive in time to hear some very pointed theories on African American slaves as being the first group to practice anti-surveillance techniques (by Christian Parenti), and a step by step technique for analyzing the effectiveness of any type of security situation (by Bruce Schneier). An energetic discussion moderated by a Seattle Times journalist, Jerry Large that spared no criticism for George W. Bush, which made for an excellent conclusion to Day 1.

Always Later

Working on my Westercon 56 (which was in July) report, so I can make room in the old reportage engine for my inevitable procrastination in writing my Northwest Bookfest 2003 (which happens to be this weekend) report and then my Orycon 25 (which is next month, Silvery goodness) report.

When complete, the Westercon report will show up on August 3rd, 2003 (which is when I first truly began writing the thing thinking that a month would be long enough for the report to simmer). This should commemorate adequately how freakin’ long it took me to get it done.

Wizard World 2003

In many ways, this year’s Wizard World (the current incarnation of the old Chicago Comicon) was a major major disappointment.

In summary, this was mainly due to the fact that there were no open mic panels by any of the major personalities present and that the number of panels and presentations in general were cut way down and staggered in such a way to disguise that fact.

In my mind it was pared down to a comics trade show, which can be interesting, but is not what Wizard World has been in the past, even at its worst.