Orycon, Day One

[sinanju]

The beauteous and charming snippy and I attended the first day of Orycon today.  Orycon is the annual local science fiction convention here in Portland.  Specifically, beautiful downtown Burbank Portland. It has traditionally been held at a hotel on Jantzen Island, but that hotel closed for renovation and the concom was forced to scramble for a new venue for this year's convention.  They wound up selecting the Marriott downtown, which is a much more vertical hotel than the Doubletree, which sprawled across a huge area.  Going from one's room to the convention spaces, or from (for instance) the hospitality suite to the ballroom could involve a long, long walk.  In the Marriott it involves instead taking an escalator, or an elevator, or the stairs.

The Marriott is a nice hotel, though the elevators are very slow to arrive.  Some of the function space for the con wasn't ready on time today, as Intel--which was ending a convention of their own today--hung onto some of the rooms past the scheduled time.  But otherwise it seems to be going well.  Better, in fact, than I suspected it might.  The con managed to fill the block of rooms set aside for them, which is good.  The hospitality suite won't have beer on tap this year as in years past (not that I care--I never drink the stuff); depending on whom you ask, this was a prohibition by this hotel specifically or the result an industry-wide change in what they're willing to allow.  No soda dispensers (the fountain type) for similar reasons--sodas are available in cans instead.  Hospitality is in a smaller space, and there's less access to space for cooking, so it's a more snack-oriented hospitality than in previous years.

A lot of familiar faces aren't present (or weren't today), probably because a lot of them are attending a larger fantasy convention elsewhere--Orycon traditionally happens a week later than it is this year (more hotel shuffle issues) and doesn't run into this problem.  Nonetheless the first day was entertaining enough.  I attended a couple of panels, drifted thru the art show a couple times, and even visited the dealer's room when it--finally--opened at six.  Everyone at the con had the same idea, though, so snippy  and I made a quick circuit of the room then left.  I'll go back to look around more thoroughly some other time when it isn't wall to wall people.

Most of my enjoyment of the con came from running into friends we don't see nearly often enough.  We arrived a little before noon and almost immediately I spotted Rory and Kami sitting around a table in the lobby with another friend of theirs.  We hung out with them for a while.  Eventually the five of us crossed the street (in the nasty, cold wind and rain) to have lunch at a chinese restaurant.  Then it was back to the hotel, where snippy and I split up.  I attended a panel, then another panel that Rory participated in.  Then the two of us wandered for a bit before running into Rory's friend again; she introduced us to still another friend of hers that she'd been wanting to introduce to Rory.  We wound up sitting around a table in the lobby again, talking.  Eventually my lovely and talented wife joined us for a while.

Rory will be doing a couple of demonstrations and panels tomorrow on the issues of violence, real vs fictional/imaginary, a subject on which he is very qualified to speak.  It'll be interesting to see.  About seven p.m., snippy and I decided to head home for dinner and an early bedtime (for her), since we ddn't get a room for this convention.  I considered going back but ultimately decided to stay home; the only thing going on in the evening would be room parties and I'm just not a mingle-with-strangers kind of guy.

Tomorrow she'll be off early to classes for much of the day and I'll head down to the hotel for more fun and games before we rendezvous in the late afternoon.