I had a nice time at Philcon this weekend.

I met up with Nita around 7 on Friday evening and we headed down to the Sheraton in Center City to check into our hotel rooms and sign in with registration. Unfortunately they somehow never received my registration – which means my check is lost. I had to sign up there and pay for registration again (will need to put a stop payment on that check too, sigh). I was slightly flustered after the whole thing with my failed registration, and there were a lot of people around, so I was happy when we headed back up to the hotel room to chill out for a few minutes.

Eventually we met up with and went into the first panel.

Friday, 9PM – What is Time – Is time the fourth dimension of space? Is time just another word for entropy? Does time really exist, or is it just an illusion created by our brains? What does physics say about time?

We got into this panel late, missed some important bits and they were in deep discussion when we finally arrived. I didn’t get much out of this panel, can’t say how good it was either!

After the panel mct and Nita wanted to say hello to one of the panelists they knew, and while we were standing around the doorway a guy came up to me, looked at my name badge, and said:

“I know you!”
“Really?”
“I’m Jim!”
“Hmm…”
“NegaWeapon!”
“Oh… OH! Hi!”

It was ! Who I know from #Deep13. It was strange, of all the #deep13 people to bump into there I didn’t expect to see him, there are a bunch of local deep13ers and he’s from over 500 miles away. He came with his fiance, , and a van full of other people they knew.

We spent the rest of the evening down at the bar hanging out and talking. I’m really glad we bumped into each other, it was really cool getting to talk for real and meet his fiance. Besides, Nita had run off to go to the PhilProm, which I was not at all interested in attending (there is a reason I didn’t go to my real prom!)

Around 1AM I decided I needed to go to bed.

The next morning I got up around 9AM, showered, and then Nita and I met up with near the registration stand. We all went out for breakfast and were back at the Con in time for some 11AM panels.

Saturday 11AM – Has Science Fiction swung to the right? – Or is this merely some liberal paranoid delusion?

My favorite thing about this panel was that the hotel had scheduled some Christian revival thing in the next ballroom – their Jesus music was making the walls shake during this talk. The talk itself often drifted off the topic a bit to the panelists political views, but I guess this was to be expected. I don’t seem to recall the question being answered very well.

Saturday 12PM – Revenge of the best films you’ve never heard of – Our annual look at some of the treasure of genre film and TV that American audiences may be overlooking. Bring your note pad

This was enjoyable, I was slightly worried that all the films would be crazy artsy-independent films that would annoy me, but there were some really interesting ones. I should have taken the suggestion to bring a note pad seriously! I don’t remember the titles of anything!

Saturday 1PM – What does the future hold for you know WHO? – Come join the dicussion of the evolution of our favorite Time Lord through the media.

This was really enjoyable. I have spent so much time over the past couple years convincing non-Doctor fans to check out the new series and no time with other fans of the old series. It was really cool to be in a room full of people who knew all about The Doctor – many of them knowing much more than I! The discussion was fairly free-form, but it was interesting and stayed pretty much on topic.

Saturday 2PM – All that glitters… Economies of virtual worlds – From MUDs to MMOs, money makes the world go round. Today we are seeing virtual gold sold on eBay and millions of dollars paid for forms of currency that are little more than 1s and 0s on a protected server. Panelists will discuss what effects online games have had on the world economy, from innovative to exploitative.

We went to this one for two reasons 1) There wasn’t anything else terribly interesting at this timeslot 2) I had met one of the panelists in the bar the night before and said I’d try to drop by one of the VR panels. The panel was my first exposure to Second Life. The panel was recorded and broadcast over Second Life and there was a big screen up showing the auditorium of strange-looking Second Life people. I think because of the whole Second Life broadcast the talk was centered around specifically Second Life economics – which would have been unfortunate had it not been such an interesting and well-documented economic system!

Saturday 3PM – Why do people believe in “weird” things? – Although there are more scientists alive than ever before in human history and the benefits of science are evident everywhere, large numbers of people believe in non-scientific theories such as channeling, the Bermuda Triangle, etc. Why is this and what is to be done about it?

They really ended up focusing on organized relgion as the “weird” thing – so a panel full of agnostic “porn”! It was unfortunate that they didn’t define “belief” because there were several versions put forward throughout the discussion that made it impossible to comment on. I didn’t really enjoy this panel.

Saturday 4PM – Principal Speech – Charles Stross

Honestly? I’d never heard of Charles Stross. But it was interesting to listen to this interview with him where he discussed his personal history, how his writing has grown and progressed, and where some of his ideas came from.

After this “speech” had to head out and I met up with Nita, who had met up with one of the authors at the con, David Louis Edelman. He wrote Infoquake. I also got to meet a couple people from the SciFi book club that Nita is in, Lee and Denise. After some discussion all six of us (Nita, mct, “The Author” David, Lee, Denise, me) decided to head out for some pizza. We hit Rex Pizza, which was just a block from the hotel. The pizza was pretty good, Lee was nice enough to treat Denise and I to a pie the three of us shared. During dinner the subject of beer came up (the subject of beer always comes up when I’m around!) and it turns out that Lee is really into beer! He then suggested heading to Monks Cafe (nationally famous beer bar) after we finished dinner.

Lee told us that Monks was only about a block away, but it turned out to being more like 5 or 6 (for which he was mercilessly teased). Monks was crazy busy, and we snagged 4 seats at the bar when they became available. I bought a round of drinks and we all enjoyed some delicious Belgian ales they had on tap. I am now in love with Philadelphia’s giant ban on smoking – Monk’s was crowded but the bar wasn’t thick with smoke! How wonderful!

We left Monk’s after we finished our drinks and headed back to the hotel. David needed to drop his stuff off somewhere and Nita offered to let him drop his stuff in our room (hahaha Nita is kidnapping the author!), but he ended up dropping stuff off in his car and going off to chill out away from us for a while (we suspected at first that we had scared him off, but he was quite friendly the next day, apparently he was just exhausted).

Then Nita brought me to a couple late night panels that some people she knew were involved with.

Saturday 11PM – Scarlet G 2 – Now with more singing! How well do you know your movie quotes? Well, we’re gonna find out. Come pit your skills versus your fellow fan. May the best person..ah hell, everyone for themselves!

I’m sure this would have been fun if I was more awake (mct told me I looked like a zombie) and if I had seen more movies, my repertoire of movies is pretty sad compared to the other SciFi people who were there.

Saturday 12AM – Versus II : The Revenge – The late night horror continues. So what TV/Film characters would you like to see together? What would it look like? Present them to the panel and find out.

I probably should have gone to bed after Scarlet G, but I decided to tag along with mct and Nita for this panel too. It was a pretty geeky thing, but it was funny. I ran off to the room to crash after this was over though.

Sunday morning Nita woke up at 8:30 to have breakfast with a friend. I laid around for a while until I decided I should get up and get dressed. Nita was off doing her own stuff in the morning so I decided to head to a couple panels.

Sunday 10AM – Holocaust and After in Science Fiction – How has the holocaust influenced genre writers?

I went into this one about 20 minutes into it, by accident. I had actually intended to go to the panel in the next room, but once I sat down and realized my mistake I didn’t feel like leaving… but I should have. It wasn’t a very good panel, rather than talking about Science Fiction, they focused on talking about the Holocaust – a subject that I’m sure anyone going to such a panel would be well-versed in! It really would have been interesting to hear more thoughts about what the real panel topic. Plus, I wasn’t impressed with their lead speaker at the con, Charles Stross, being on his PDA for more than 10 minutes during the discussion – while he was on the panel! He should have given that his full attention!

Sunday 11AM – Sam Will Kill Him If He Tries Anything: Blogging and SF – Some of today’s hottest SF&F writers actually publish several short essays per week, and even per day… online. Whether on MySpace, LiveJournal, Blogger, or their own websites, authors, artists, and other creators, and their fans, are using web-logs to reach out to other fans. Find out more about this phenomenon, and hear from some of the most popular bloggers out there.

This panel was a disappointment. I wish they’d stay more on topic – talking about blogging and SciFi. Unfortunately it degenerated mostly into a few “popular” bloggers talking about themselves and their personal blogs (I might argue the “popularity” factor of some of the panelists, hundreds of readers is nothing to sneeze at, but it’s relatively small in blogsphere terms). Yeah yeah, you have hundreds of readers, yeah yeah people have copied your posts to other places on the internet, now all of you tell us about why you got into blogging, blah blah blah. I think many people who would attend such a panel are reasonably popular bloggers themselves and stories like this are familiar and are not at all interesting. It was mostly a public bragging-about-my-blog session.

After the panel I called so we could arrange meeting up for lunch, which we scheduled for 1. I then met up with Nita and we went up to the hotel room to crash on the beds for a half hour and then lug our stuff out to the car and check out of the room.

We had lunch at Rex Pizza again (I said it was good!), talked about Doctor Who and the future of projects related to Deep13.org and the wiki. After lunch we headed back for some more panels.

Sunday 2PM – How Would a Galactic Empire Really Work? – Faster than light travel is only the beginning. How would you process the information from a billion worlds?

I enjoyed this panel. The moderator really kept the panel on topic and some ideas came up in the conversation that I hadn’t necessarily thought of. I wish it had been longer!

After that panel we met up with the rest of ‘s party and headed into the last panel of the day.

Sunday 3PM – Mansquito vs. Boa in the Alien Apocalypse: What Happened to the Sci-Fi Channel? – Are we losing the sci-fi on the Sci-Fi Channel to wrestling and police shows? Discuss with panelists the future trend of the Sci-Fi Channel. Will Friday night programming, shows like Eureka and Sci-Fi Pulse be the answers to save the Channel even after cancelling Stargate SG-1?

This was a cool panel. I haven’t had cable in three years now, so I hadn’t seen SciFi’s move to wrestling and other horrible programming, but I’d heard it was bad. A lot of interesting points were brought up. The panelists were pretty well informed about the status if the SciFi channel and their internal history (with the exception of one panelists belief that MST was cancelled because it was too expensive). So it was nice to hear their thoughts, and they actually reached a nice conclusion – the SciFi channel is dying because SciFi has entered the mainstream and lots of money is being pumped into primetime network television SciFi shows.

After that panel I said goodbye to , and the rest of the gang (who invited me up to their hotel room to hang out for a while but I had to decline so I could go home at a reasonable time). I found Nita, and after attending the “Grip session” about problems the con had, we left to go back to Nita’s place around 5:30. Nita got me an invite for a late night dinner with her, some of the big convention organizers and the guest speaker guy, but I had to decline – the invite was for a 9:30PM dinner and I was really wanting to go home – I missed Michael and Caligula!

I didn’t buy anything at the con, but Nita got me an early Christmas present of a signed copy of Edelman’s Infoquake – which is very cool, since I was planning on buying it.

I arrived home around 7PM and Michael had some dinner ready and a roaring fire in the fireplace. I spent the rest of the evening just talking with Michael and playing with Caligula, and went to bed around 9:30.