CascadiaCon Update Deux
Sep. 5th, 2005 12:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sinanjuWe're home again. We left the hotel about 5 p.m. or thereabouts and got home a few minutes before 9 p.m., including a couple of half hour stops. Travel was amazingly light for I-5 between Seattle and Portland. But then, that was why we chose to leave the con today instead of tomorrow, though the con runs thru 6 p.m. Monday. We had no desire to be caught up in the heavy Labor Day traffic tomorrow as everyone heads home after the weekend.
I came home expecting to have Stargate and Battlestar Galactica on Tivo. I forgot that they aren't on (or new eps aren't on, anyhow) until next week. Drat. Still, I had a "new" Wonderfalls to watch, as well as a new Numb3rs (well, new to me).
The con was fun, but certainly no bigger than a typical Orycon (about 2000 people altogether). Spread out over two hotels and a convention center, it made the con feel even smaller. The halls were never crowded, which was good; but you were a lot less likely to encounter people you knew, which was not so good.
Some interesting panels, but aside from a very few familiar names/faces (Larry Niven on a few, Jerry Pournelle on a couple, and a few other less well known but familar-to-me writers), I didn't know who any of the panelists were. One panel discussed the possibilities in a world where drugs that allow you to go without sleep for long periods (or indefinitely) safely were around. Another discussed the economic and social fallout of practical immortality*. I also saw a couple of panels on the nuts and bolts of writing (nothing especially new to me there), but it was interesting.
*Immortality of the "you don't age and don't get sick" form; misadventure will still kill you. Someone referenced a study I remembered hearing about years ago in which someone analyzed insurance actuarial tables to see what the result was if you take out deaths from old age and disease. Apparently the "average lifespan" would be about 300 years in that case. After that, as they put it, you're a fugitive from the law of averages, and there's a bus out there somewhere with your name on it.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
snippy and I enjoyed the con, but we're both glad to be home with another day off to enjoy before we get back to work.
I came home expecting to have Stargate and Battlestar Galactica on Tivo. I forgot that they aren't on (or new eps aren't on, anyhow) until next week. Drat. Still, I had a "new" Wonderfalls to watch, as well as a new Numb3rs (well, new to me).
The con was fun, but certainly no bigger than a typical Orycon (about 2000 people altogether). Spread out over two hotels and a convention center, it made the con feel even smaller. The halls were never crowded, which was good; but you were a lot less likely to encounter people you knew, which was not so good.
Some interesting panels, but aside from a very few familiar names/faces (Larry Niven on a few, Jerry Pournelle on a couple, and a few other less well known but familar-to-me writers), I didn't know who any of the panelists were. One panel discussed the possibilities in a world where drugs that allow you to go without sleep for long periods (or indefinitely) safely were around. Another discussed the economic and social fallout of practical immortality*. I also saw a couple of panels on the nuts and bolts of writing (nothing especially new to me there), but it was interesting.
*Immortality of the "you don't age and don't get sick" form; misadventure will still kill you. Someone referenced a study I remembered hearing about years ago in which someone analyzed insurance actuarial tables to see what the result was if you take out deaths from old age and disease. Apparently the "average lifespan" would be about 300 years in that case. After that, as they put it, you're a fugitive from the law of averages, and there's a bus out there somewhere with your name on it.
snippy and I enjoyed the con, but we're both glad to be home with another day off to enjoy before we get back to work.