So, I attended Lunacon this weekend. Pretty good con, though I think attendence suffered greatly from the terrible weather. (Road conditions were horrible on Friday.)

Did two editing panels: “Ask the Editors” and “Escaping the Slush Pile.” I think “Escaping” might have been a better panel overall, but I actually recorded the “Ask the Editors” panel, just for you guys. If you’d like to listen to it, you’ll find it at this location. (It’s about an hour long.) On the panel with me are Wendy Delmater (Abyss & Apex), Marvin Kaye (HP Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror, anthologies, Hildy Silverman (Space and Time), and Doug Cohen (Realms of Fantasy). The sound seems pretty good considering the recorder was just sitting there on the table; admittedly, it would have been better if I’d placed it in the middle–it was actually right on the end by me, so Wendy down at the other end isn’t quite as loud as the other participants, but I think you can hear everything. I believe I started the recorder after I introduced myself on the panel, so it begins with Doug introducing himself.

Spent most of the con hanging out with Dave Kirtley, who was in town on spring break, Doug Cohen, Chris Cevasco, Andrea Kail, Amy Tibbetts, and Carol Pinchefsky and her husband Peter. Also ran into podcaster Jack Mangan, who you may remember interviewed me a while back for his podcast, Deadpan.

One night, Chris, Doug, Andrea, Dave, Amy and I gathered together for a game of Cranium, which is a cool board game that kind of combines Trivial Pursuit, Pictionary, Charades, Word Puzzles, and other sorts of things like that. The game is played in teams, which consisted of Chris/Dave, Andrea/Amy, and Doug/me. After getting out to an early lead, Chris/Dave fell to an epic comeback by Doug and I, which all began when I guessed a “Berlin Wall” charade. It was madness. Perhaps the funniest thing though was when we had a “humdinger” question, in which you have to hum or whistle a tune and your partner has to guess it, and Doug got “Wild Thing” from me humming two notes before I cracked up (because everyone else cracked up at the way I did it).

This year was the first that I’ve been to Lunacon when it was located at the Rye Town Hilton, which is also known as the Escher because of its crazy, Escher-like design. What does that mean, do you ask? Well, the fourth floor and the seventh floor appear to be the same floor, and you can’t seem to walk down the steps from the fifth floor to the fourth floor (the end of the fifth floor steps appears to go outside). There are other weird things about the architecture, but are really hard to explain. Needless to say, it’s the perfect hotel for a SF convention. Except for the restaurant — it’s way too freaking expensive. $4 for a cup of coffee and/or glass of soda? Not to mention the $22 buffet.

While there, we saw some old Lunacon “friends”: there was “Napoleon Rugburn,” “Dolphin-boy,” and “Rape-Man.” Let’s just say they’re…colorful characters.

To me, the con was characterized by a few choice phrases: “You can honestly say that you exchanged bodily fluids with [name redacted] after he came out of the closet.”; and “So do you think Chewbacca has one of those hooked cat-penises?”

The last of those came from the legendary Lunacon “Sex in SF” panel, which is always good for a laugh. Dave Kirtley is apparently the resident Lunacon sexspert because he’s on the panel every year. I wish I’d recorded this panel too–it was quite hilarious, though I can’t remember really anything specific to quote because the panel started at 1am, and I had been ready to pass out more than an hour before that, so my brain was not functioning entirely properly.

The other legendary Lunacon panel involving sex is the “How to Get Laid at a Con” panel, which aims to provide advice to the socially inept. It’s usually good for a laugh, though there’s always a few people in the audience who ask questions and do truly seem to be there for advice.

Oh, and since I’m linking to all kinds of audio above, allow me to link to two bits of audio I recorded at World Fantasy last year, but neglected to post until now. There’s great context behind them, but I find it more amusing to post them without any context at all. Not really work-safe, but you shouldn’t be reading blogs at work anyway, right?

Here they are: finger.mp3 and bald.mp3. Enjoy!

Read More

Samurai armor

Originally uploaded by slushgod.

As I was waiting for the Conan show to begin admitting the audience, I was loitering around outside and noticed across the street that there appeared to be samurai armor sitting in the windows at Christie’s. So since we had some time to kill before the show, I ran over to check it out. I did figure out the phone’s camera at that point, so I got pics of the three pieces of armor. Here’s one of them. See the others over on Flickr.

Read More