Boskone 43, a shark's-eye view (part 3 of 3): Sunday

Sunday. Ah, Sunday. Sunday was not much of a panel-going day for me; hanging out and kaffeeklatsching (which is, after all, just institutionalized hanging out) were the order of the day.

This started at 1000, with Cory Doctorow's kaffeeklatsch. Unsurprisingly, even for that early a timeslot, it was very well attended; Cory's always interesting, and as the Special Guest, was more likely to have people attending the con to see him. After a discussion of Google Print, Amazon's "search inside" feature, and the nature of cookbook buying, the topic moved to origami. (Another attendee mentioned an origami book that had one of the designs available online, so she bought the whole book.) After that, Cory spent the rest of the time making origami cranes out of his name card.

At 1100, I headed off to the mall food court to say hello to tigerbright at her mini-birthday-con. I proceeded to totally geek out with happyfunpaul about the old days of USENET, meet bikergeek, and enjoy the company. Even the massive influx of folks from the college student conference at the Hynes couldn't wreck it.

After that, I headed back to the con, hit the dealers room to buy the Whisperado CD and nothing else (ha! made my saving throw that time!). On the way out, I had a nice chat with Bob Devney and Lis Carey; I was pleased to hear that Bob recognized my name in a good way from comment threads on makinglight, and got a chance to thank Lis for being part of the team that put together such a good con.

I then headed back up to the con suite to hang out some more. I wound up catching the last part of nineweaving's kaffeeklatsch, which allowed me to meet enegim and kestrell as well.

This was followed by scalzi's kaffeeklatsch, which was originally just three of us, though autopope also showed up and joined in for a good chunk of it. John is as fun to talk to in person as he is to read on scalzifeed, even when he's getting ready to make a run for Logan so that he can get the runaround from the airlines. (Hey, John; come back to Boskone, but maybe book a different airline for the trip....)

At 1400, I headed for the Funny Sunday panel ("Urban Legends Smackdown"), which was loads of fun, even (or especially) due to the substitute for kradical being a small stuffed lion with a mane of floppy yarn hair. I remember something about Harlan Ellison's car being filled with concrete by a guy with a hook for a hand who owned a baby alligator, or something like that.

That ended at 1500, and I thought about going to not gripe at the Gripe Session, but got sidetracked and didn't make it down to the session. Instead, I meandered between gaming and the Con Suite hanging out in both locations.

In the gaming room, I watched lesliet_ma and other folks play St. Petersburg for a while as I kibitzed it, finished the game so that Leslie could get ready to go to dinner, then played a two-player game of St. P (my only game all con!). At that point, the game room was getting packed up, so I helped out with that for a while, finishing up by taking a power strip back to the con suite and hanging out some more with various people including cheshyre, xiphias, victorthecook, ocelotn, and persis. It was a very hang-outy kind of day.

Eventually I reached a point where I really had to go home and start a load of laundry! How exciting! Besides, I was too dead for the dead dog. So, home I went, and that was the con that was...if you were me.

Next up, Minicon.