Arisia notes

[chhotii]

* Yay for Fast Track. I am starting to re-claim my ability to actually be at the con. Leaving Sophia in the Fast Track room, without my attendance, for up to a couple of hours at a time, is starting to actually work. I was worried about this, given that the school regards Sophia as too prone to freak-outs and melt-downs to deal with; but Fast Track was fine. Sophia did have a couple of weepy episodes, but they took it in stride.
* So I went to some programming!!! And it was mostly excellent!!!! ctan moderated a panel on the work habits of writers, which was very interesting. Beyond excellent. Double-plus excellent. The editor of Sky and Telescope magazine gave a lecture on recent exo-planet discoveries, which was absolutely edge-of-my-seat fascinating. brian1789 gave a talk about his work, which was pretty interesting. (Ran into cyan-blue there, of course.) I also went to one panel that sucked, but guess what? If you aren't enjoying a panel, you can leave and hang out with your friends in the hallway! Who knew?
* Not much party attendance, because I had to stay with Sophia in the hotel room at night. Note to self: remind Rich of the alternating party shifts idea next year. I would be content with partying from just 7 to 9 pm, he can have the rest of the night. :)
* The masquerade half-time show (televised) put me to sleep. And tell tech that they need to learn how to stop down the iris on their cameras.
* Food, and illness: Food, brought from home, in hotel room, worked out fine. I made the mistake of supplementing that with some grazing at the con suite, especially on Sunday. What a biohazard the con suite is. On Sunday evening my stomach started to hurt, and Monday I was mostly in bed. Bleh. No more con suite grazing (although coffee should be fine.)
* Sophia and I discovered the gaming room!!! We got up insanely early on Sunday morning, and there was little else to do. The game room was open, but empty. Yay for 24-hour gaming rooms. We learned about some new-to-us games, and played some Zombie Dice. The gaming room is the place to be to fill in odd blocks of time, rather than grazing in the con suite.
* Four days is kind of long for Arisia, don't you think? I chose to reserve a hotel room for only two nights, and pack out and leave on Sunday. The idea was to still have a weekend day left over after leaving Arisia to do laundry, grocery shopping, housework, and to start looking at work-work (although it turned out that I needed the day to recover from con crud instead). On the one hand, by the end of Sunday I did feel that we had had enough. On the other hand, there may be too much programming to stuff into a shorter time. I was actually a bit tempted to drive back in on Monday for one last panel that might have been interesting, but really, I needed that nap that I opted for instead.

Comments

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

I think it's unlikely that the Con Suite was where you picked up the sick. If it was the majot vector, then I think *way* more people would have come down with it, and plenty of people who avoided the con suite entirely still got sick.

I like the four-day format because I find it much less frantic. Remember that if it ended Sunday, a lot of what currently happens on Sunday would be scrapped.