Conifur 2004

Bleah. I'm always too tired after a con to write up everything that I did, but waiting means I won't remember things as clearly or won't do it at all. So hear goes.

Thursday: Jeri-Lynn picked me up and we stopped at Silver Platters so that I could buy a birthday present for Gene, and we picked up Jeff as he got off work, and we listened to the A Mighty Wind Soundtrack on the way down to Tacoma. Once there I helped assemble con badges for several hours, but I couldn't register because I hadn't pre-registered and at-con registration started Friday morning.

Friday: I got registered early and ate breakfast at the hotel grill/lounge/whatever. I had the breakfast bar so that I could have bacon, eggs, and potatos and also fresh fruit. Yum. Then I spent most of the day hanging out at the Tai-Pan dealer's table. As usual we had two tables -- one was the Tai-Pan table, the other was the Sky Rigdon/Jennifer Anderson table. Early on Julie had asked me to draw a picture for her con badge, which she asked me last year as well and I couldn't really complain that I can't draw because the one I did last year turned out pretty good. Guess I haven't mastered the art of diminished expectations just yet. She asked for a shipperke, which I didn't feel confident of drawing without some art reference, so in the meantime I drew Gir (of Space Invader Zim) in his silly dog suit, claiming that he was a "Shipper Key Thing. No, really!" Then I went to work on a second badge where he sang the shipper-key song. Which is a lot like the Doom song.

I bought some stuff. I watched Jeff and Jeri-Lynn play Kingdom of Loathing. I played Kingdom of Loathing myself. We ate dinner at the Chinese restaurant up the street. It was good. And we had a Tai-Pan party that night which also was cool.

Saturday: I didn't eat breakfast because I had a panel at 10 am. This was on "What Not To Write". Gene had told me that it was an idea suggested by Kristin, but for some reason I had the idea that Kristin wasn't actually on the panel, and I didn't know who WAS on the panel besides me. But when I got there, Kristin and Gene were already there. That was very cool. We did a pretty good job on that panel, I think.

Saturday was my day for panels, but I had a break in the afternoon so I went to lunch with David. My club sandwich was huge, with a ton of fries. I couldn't eat it all, so I took half of it to the dealer's room and found someone who was happy to eat it (Diana Vick in this case). At the same time I became Jeri-Lynn's grilled cheese sandwich runner, and spent the next hour shuttling grilled cheese sandwiches between con ops and various con staffers who were too busy to get something to eat.

Then I tried to do some research on the subject of my next panel, but eventually gave up. I'd met the other guy on the panel at con ops an hour or so earlier, and realized that he was a geek with a capital G. The subject of the panel was "Studio Ghibli" which is the studio of Japanese anime legend Hayao Miyazaki (Nausicaa, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away) and his friend Isao Takahata (Grave of the Fireflies, Only Yesterday, Pom Poko). I mentioned to this other panelist that I needed to do some research by checking out nausicaa.net. You see, I'm enough of a geek to know where to look for the information, but I hadn't checked the site out in months or possibly a year or more. And the guy sharing the panel with me said that there hadn't been anything new at the site "up to Friday afternoon".

This is where I realized that I was a Miyazaki fan, and he was a Miyazaki geek. He had props, movies, notes copied laborously from online research, and even a Totoro cat-bus plushie, which was very cool.

So like I said, I went up to the Tai-Pan dealer's table where Jeff had his laptop (with wireless internet connection), and I went to nausicaa.net and tried to do some quick research, but I realized that there was nothing I could learn in fifteen minutes that the other guy didn't already know. So I gave up, and checked out pictures of Shiperkes and did some sketches, and then I played Kingdom of Loathing.

At my panel I discovered that while my co-host was a Geek with a capital G and someone who did most of the talking, he'd only been a fan of Miyazaki for six years or so. This is where I had an advantage over most in the room, I guess. I've been a fan since the mid 1980's when the first Nausicaa manga were being published here in the U.S. Long before most of his stuff was available in English, long before DVDs or bittorrent even existed, I had copies of all his movies on VHS. In most cases I had a clean Japanese copy and a frequently less clean fan-subtitled copy. In fact, I still have a fan-subtitled copy of Porco Roso, which was a movie many in the room had still not seen.

So I was able to add a little to the conversation in that way, and more when we talked about general anime.

After that was the Tai-Pan reading, which I wasn't a part of but of course I attended. And later, after that, came a panel with Edd Vick, called the Writer's Challenge. Several others showed up and joined in, so we had about six writers in all. The idea was, people selected several words (the choices were "Gyrocopter" "Disheveled" and "Quantum Physics") and we had an hour to write a story using those words. And the cool thing was, all six of us wrote complete stories and all of them were well-written and entertaining, so that panel worked well too.

Sunday... well Sunday was like most Sundays at Conifur. I spent part of it in the Dealer's room, and afterwards there was a lot of waiting around as the con wore down and people got everything packed away, then we went to dinner at The Outback Steakhouse. There were about 25 of us there.

And then a long ride home. There's a lot more than that to tell, but that's my con report for now.