All Blog Posts Tagged 'convention' (56)

I know that previously I had said I would not be getting a weekend pass for Steel City Con but I lied. Well, I didn't exactly lie in that it was my initial intention not to give the con any more money than I had too and I had planned on only attending Sunday for the costume contest but the local steampunks had decided to go on Saturday and I decided to support that cause.

$40 is…

When this year's TeslaCon theme “Journey to the Center of the Earth” was announced last year, I immediately wrote a posting on the history of the various hollow Earth “hypotheses” in both…

As the steampunk weekend at the Old West Festival was to coincide with the Pandora Society's Steampunk Salon, even though I am running low on funds I decided to combine the two, splurge, and get a room for the night. There had been some talk about a local hotel having favorable rates for…

I have been costuming for too long and have won enough awards to not generally concern myself with costume contests. But I was so pleased with my high-concept Steampunk Django, and especially the coffin/carbonite/freezer unit that I decided I was going to give the contest at Pittsburgh Comicon a try.

I also typically go on Saturday but because I am becoming increasingly broke, I went for just the one day on Sunday for the…

I will be assisting with this con.  What ideas/activities should we organize to attract a Steampunk crowd?  This is billed as a geekfest, with all types of guests and activites.

Lady Puffington Smythe (aka Cricket)

I first heard about Vandalia-Con last year at the Pittsburgh Comicon in September. As a new con, it was an unknown quantity with two things going for it. First, it was relatively nearby in Parkersburg, WV, only a two and a half hour drive. Secondly, they were set up as a non-profit with all of the proceeds dedicated to breast cancer screening and services. What's not to…

Having lost my job, I really cut back on my convention schedule. I chopped Millennicon from my schedule. Marcon. Steampunk World's Fair. Contemporal. I might still do Origins as a day trip but that…

I went to the con Friday in just shorts and a t-shirt. A number of dealers had to do a doubletake to recognize me because I am usually costumed.



I had registered for a three-day pass earlier in the week but for whatever reason I was not on their list. I had to wait in the rain for a manager to finally show up, look at my receipt and give me a badge.



There were a number of things that caught my eye but I picked up only a single Godzilla DVD and a…

I hadn't been going to Tekkoshocon for a few years. They had moved from the Convention Center to a downtown hotel and there simply wasn't room for them. Far too many people packed into far too small a space so I stopped going. They returned to the Convention Center last year but I didn't go then either. I think I saved myself $30 and went to Steel City Con instead. This year I went with my…

I had never been to Darkover but since my wife was going and after my “Bobbins Initiative” commentary after TeslaCon, I thought I should put my money where my mouth was and support an established general literary science fiction convention’s steampunk…

My initial expectation was to drive up to Madison on Thursday but, with the situation as it is, it turned out that we could take an extra day and leave on Wednesday. That made the drive not so arduous by our staying with my brother-in-law outside of Chicago and then with only a 2+ hour drive the next day so that we missed absolutely nothing of the con.



As we stopped for gas at an Illinois turnpike rest stop, I noticed the guy getting out of the car to fill his tank behind me had a…

It’s been a very long time since I’ve been to a gaming convention and I’ve never been to one on the scale of Origins in Columbus. I’m used to Marcon filling up the Hotel-end of the con and Ohayocaon spilling over into some of the main Convention Center spaces but Origins fills all the spaces quite thoroughly.



It took…

On my own this time. Leave by about 6:30.



For several years now I have been driving to Detroit for these steampunk cons and when crossing into Michigan there has been an intriguing billboard: “Beef Jerky Unlimited. We are not a gas station.” This year I did not pass the exit by and ended up buying $50 of dried meat.



They also carried an assortment of hot sauces that I decided…

Jeff Mach’s event is huge. The largest of the steampunk conventions I’ve gone to with 4,000 attendees last year. In the lead up to this year they filled up the two main hotels quickly. Filled up an overflow hotel and then another overflow hotel.



The halls were going to be packed.



Friday



And, when we got there, a big chunk of parking lot was closed. And I am not just referring to the spaces that were closed off for the Midway tents and performance stage, this…

MobiCon XVI Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, 17 – 19 May 2013, in Mobile Alabama

It’s time once again for that annual southern treat of MobiCon, a Science Fiction, Fantasy,  and Horror convention held in Mobile Alabama!  I have attended a fair number of MobiCons over the past decade or so and always enjoyed the laid-back southern fen that operate and attend MobiCon.  The committee’s hard work always makes MobiCon a great…

If it was just myself, I would get up at 5am, like I normally do for work, and get going by 6. Euphorbia, on the other hand, is always much more leisurely and is satisfied with arriving just when the convention programming is getting under way mid afternoon so she would have preferred to leave at 10. I thought 8am was a reasonable compromise.



We got going at around 9.



Four…

I 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…

In the lead up to TeslaCon, I had a lot of things to do. I was working on an alternative history of the American Civil War for Lord Bobbins through the summer and doing that sucked up a lot of time, preventing me from working on other projects and presentations. I’ll go into more details about each of those things later but on Tuesday of the week of the convention I concluded that I simply didn’t have enough time to finish them and called off work for…

Even though the event was two weeks ago, I have been so busy preparing for TeslaCon that I am only now getting to writing up my impressions of the Airship Pirate Days event. The first thing to not was the surprisingly slight amount to promotion in the Pittsburgh steampunk community. They created an event on the Steampunk Empire and on Facebook but then didn’t seem to follow up. There weren’t regular updates, announcements or…

     Have you noticed how many of my convention reports start out with “I hadn’t been intending to go to Such-and-such-Con but. . . “ Well, here is another one. I had only remembered the steampunk weekend at Old West Fest after I had already made arrangements to go to the Cowboy Action Shooting event in Donegal the…