(Be glad it’s this. I was originally going to teach you people about brain structures as a form of studying.)

Sunday, October 4, 2015

Wow, did I sleep well. Turns out that, at least this one time, alcohol and sleeping pills made a wonderful combination. I got eight solid hours of peaceful, blank, dreamless^[1] sleep and woke up feeling fine.

And normally, even with my CPAP and my sleeping pills, I am lucky to get six hours of mildly restless, dreamful sleep.

So while I would not recommend mixing your rum and grapefruit juice with quetiapine and trazodone, it worked for me. The only downside was that I slept so well that I completely missed the panel about Marvel movies at 1 pm.

Therefore, the first panel I made it to was at :

2 pm : Vcons Past. I went to this panel for a number of reasons, the foremost of which was, of course, genuine interest. I am an old person’s dreams in that I am always eager to listen to their stories. Formal history has never interested me deeply, but personal history fascinates me. So I was quite happy to listen to tales of yesteryear from Them What Was There. Another reason to go was to support my friend R. Graeme Cameron, who is a wonderful fellow and a spellbinding raconteur. And thirdly, I was already feeling guilty because I knew I would not be there for his always dryly hilarious Elron Awards because they were scheduled against the only force in the universe that could keep me away from them : The Turkey Readings.

I am sorry, Graeme, but the Turkeys are literally the most fun I have all year.

And speaking of which…

3 pm : The Turkey Readings. People read the worst books they can find. Volunteer weirdos (like me) act out the action. People pay to stop the reading. Others pay to keep it going. Money goes to the Canadian Unity Fan Fund, dedicated to sending West Coast fans to the East Coast and vice versa. When someone bids “stop” and nobody outbids them to “start”, you switch readers and the whole thing starts over.

Oh, and while the madness is busy ensuing, my dear friend and roomie Joe Devoy and the radiant and fabulous Felicity Walker are attempting to illustrate the stories being told, as told. At the end of the proceedings, the illustrations are auctioned, and this year, one of Felicity’s went for $25!

It’s the most fun thing ever.

Seriously. I laugh so much it counts as aerobic exercise. The whole room shakes with laughter. Bad fiction is a natural source of comedy, and getting people being all silly acting it out only amplifies the effects. The beauty of bad art as comedy is that bad art is so much more unpredictable than good art. Good art follows rules. And there are always a lot more ways to break a rule than there is to follow it.

In fact, bad art is a great way to learn the rules of effective storytelling because it will break rules you never even knew existed. Learning by counterexample is a powerful tool.

But mostly, it’s just funny as hell.

4:30 pm : The Elrons and FanEds. The Turkey Readings went till 4:30, so like I said, I missed the Elrons half of it. But I did get to see my dear friend and avatar of awesomeness Felicity Walker receive her FanEd award for activity in the world of fanzines (look it up), and I could not be more proud.

5 pm : As is the tradition at Vcon, the final panel was the Closing Ceremonies. As is my personal tradition, I didn’t go. My roomies did, though, so I just went back to the room and relaxed till it was over, then it was another trip out of the cozy confines of the con in search of food.

A lovely dinner was had with my usual cohorts and some local fans, then we wandered back to the convention for the quite horribly named but harmless Dead Dog Party, which is the party that marks the true end of the convention, where all us fen get together to drink, talk, and delay the onset of reality as long as we can.

This year, however, there was a planning SNAFU and the original base for this all-fen party was just someone’s room, right in the middle of a bunch of other rooms filled with people who had the wacky idea that they should be able to sleep at night. And parties have a minimum volume directly proportional to the number of attendants, so while we tried to be quiet in response to a noise complaint, it just wasn’t happening, even after the second complaint.

So we were booted out of that room, and had to find another. At this point, the majority of partygoers simply gave up and went to bed. But some kind and swift-thinking con staff were able to sneak us into a conference room that had one of my favorite things to see at a party, a big huge round table.

Thus began one epic and well populated game of Cards Against Humanity. At maximum, we had 14 people playing. The game is designed to manufacture hilarity, so despite the fact that it was materially the worst Dead Dog Party I have ever been to in my many years of Vcon-going, I had a wonderful time and didn’t end up going to bed till 4:30 am, all laughed out.

And thus ends another wonderful, magical, marvelous Vcon. I had a grand old time, as I always do, and I can’t wait till I get to do it all over again in 2016.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.