Funk Babblings

Upon checking into Marcon on Friday evening, I received a sheet of schedule updates and other information. I laughed when I saw that the schedule updates ended with these two items:

Sunday Changes:
1:00pm "Time: is it real?" - CANCELLED
2:30pm "A Scientist's Personal Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality" - MOVED TO 1:00pm

It was a day later before I learned that these were real, not fake. At Marcon it's sometimes hard to tell about these things.

Now I remember how difficult it is to find a place to get breakfast in downtown (Columbus in this case, but this probably applies to any city) at 7:30am on a national holiday..... But after heading toward a more residential neighborhood I found a coffee shop that had opened an hour earlier than they were supposed to on the holiday, and as a bonus they have free wireless internet service. (An hour or so later they were doing a brisk business.)

But I'm getting ahead of myself....

It's the Monday morning after Marcon, and I'm sitting in Columbus's Short North district. My calves are still doubtful about forgiving me for going up and down the stairs to our 17th-floor room at least twice Friday night. (It's been a long time since I lived on the 12th floor at OSU.) Not to mention the dancing Saturday night -- after I was fully intending to give my legs a break, the DJ played the Ramones, and those intentions were lost.

But I'm getting ahead of myself again....

( Ah, nevermind, forget chronology )
I'm very much looking forward to next year's Marcon. Why? It's Marcon 42. You can guess the theme they have planned. ;-)

This weekend we'll be heading to Columbus for Marcon. Every year at Marcon I end up buying a pile of books, usually stuff that's hard to find locally, and often rare or out of print stuff. Last year's take included my first real effort to get into graphic novels beyond Sandman.

( And also Elric... )

( My fictional influences )

I've thought it might be fun sometime to go to Notacon in Cleveland ever since I learned about it at the first Ohio LinuxFest a few years ago. But I never seriously considered going until this year. I even got on the mailing list and was alerted as $50 pre-registration was closing a week or two ago. I figured I wasn't sure about going, I'd probably only go for one day if I did go, and I was too busy to bother pre-registering.

Of course I discovered that this was a mistake.

Today I looked at the schedule and some some things that would be really interesting to attend. I'm also thinking that going there next Saturday could be the sort of fun I could really use right now. Then I saw that to register at the door is $100, with no lower-cost day-passes. I think it would be fun and interesting, but I'm not sure I'd get $100 worth of fun and interesting out of one day.

Ah well. Two months until Marcon in Columbus. And nontacitare already took care of the pre-registration and hotel there, so I can't mess that up. I think this year I'll check out more of the music than I have in the past.


In other geeky news, I think I finally got my 5-year-old laptop all set up with Kubuntu running on its new hard disk. (Maybe I should update my web page about it.) So far it seems to be working better than ever; for example I might not even need to use a PCMCIA card to get public wireless access anymore, just hit a key to activate the wireless adapter on the back cover. It's kind of odd seeing its old hard drive sitting bare on top of my other machine, hooked up through an IDE-to-USB adapter -- especially when it whirs to life as I read data from it.

Looks like I might have some interesting schedule-balancing to do tomorrow night. While I'm in Columbus attending Marcon, Room Nineteen is playing at Club 202 a few blocks away. Even nontacitare likes Room Nineteen, though I doubt she'll leave Marcon to see them.

But going to see the band might mean missing braider's performance in the "Once More With Feeling" Buffy musical at midnight.....

Thursday night in Columbus, Social Distortion and The Eyeliners are playing at Promowest Pavilion. I'd love to see both bands; unfortunately I won't be in Columbus until Friday night, for Marcon.

OK, it's almost another weekend, so I'd better write about last weekend before I forget....

I ended up spending most of my Marcon time in panel discussions, probably half of which were fan discussions about TV shows (lots of Firefly and Buffy fans) and movies, and the rest were about either old Sci Fi books or some issues raised in some Sci Fi. Actually the best part there was starting to get to know some of the people that went to so many of the same panels as I did.

But the highlights of my weekend were walking up High street for some music.

( Friday - NSA and some trauma )

( Saturday - Scrawl Rocks! )

Just today I realized that Ladyfest Ohio is this weekend in Columbus, and I might be able to go to some of it since I'll already be downtown for Marcon. Looks like there's a lot of interesting stuff going on, but of course I'm most interested in the music. Looks like a wide variety of styles.

The main highlight for me is the return of Scrawl, 11:30 Saturday night at Little Brother's. However, another one I hope to see the same night is Camora, 11:00 Saturday night at Club 202. Doing both should be interesting, but they're both great bands.

There are others I'm not familiar with but look interesting just from the descriptions... my initial list includes:

• Friday Night
  • Little Brother's
    • 7:00 - St. Sebastian
      
    • 10:00 - Di Di Mao
      
    • 11:45 - Frostiva
      
    • 1:00am - Tracy + the Plastics
  • Club 202
    • 11:40 - The Voodoo Dollies
• Saturday Night
  • Little Brother's
    • 5:30 - Deco Halo
      
    • 8:30 - The Fairmount Girls
      
    • 10:00 - Slumber Party
      
    • 11:30 - Scrawl
  • Club 202
    • 11:00 - Camora
      
    • 11:45 - Scarlett
      
    • 12:30 - Burning Sage
      

Of course, Friday night I'm already planning to see The Secret Sound Of The NSA at Bernie's.

Next trick is to compare this with the Marcon schedule and figure out my priorities and where to go when.

I realized a couple days ago that I'll miss Comfest in Columbus this year because we'll be at Pagan Spirit Gathering. It's not surprising that they conflict; Comfest is always on the last weekend of June (well, unless wedding planners book the park first), and PSG is always the week surrounding the summer solstice. There are enough non-overlapping years that I haven't had to get used to that conflict the way I've had to get used to PSG always conflicting with Father's Day. The trouble is that both events are important to me, but Comfest is more comfortable for me, especially with all the great music going constantly.

It also looks like Karen will finally get to drag me to Pennsic in August -- unless I'm working by then and can't get away. Or sneezing my head off. Should be quite an experience.

With two week-long camping events coming up, I'm starting to think that renting an SUV (gasp!) might be worthwhile. I wonder if there's some pay-for-miles-not-time deal I can make that will take advantage of not actually driving that whole week. What I really need is an expandable car (forget the flying car, I want to keep my foot) so that normally I can happily drive my beautiful and maneuverable little coupe, then when friends come along it becomes a four-door with plenty of legroom in the back, and when I need to haul stuff it expands into a truck.

Anyway, coming up next weekend is Marcon in Columbus. Only a bunch of geeks would spend Memorial Day Weekend cooped up in a hotel for three days, but it still can be fun. Maybe I'll wander over to Goodale Park at some point to try to make up for missing Comfest. And I'll definitely have to head up to Bernie's on Friday night to catch The Secret Sound Of The NSA celebrating their new release.