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PhilCon 2004 is less than 2 weeks away; if you live on the East Coast of the U.S., this one would be worth a visit! A lot of like-minded SciFi Fans will be there, and some great Author/Artist Guests.

Chick Corea has built a great new album, with a world class group of musicians, based on a SciFi story by an old cult religion person. His music just keeps getting better and better.

Read Super 8, the new story from Terry Bisson, online at the SciFi channel web site. And for the Politically Impaired, you can be brought up to speed by reading this Interview/Inquisition.

As I mentioned in an earlier entry, I made it to GalaxyCon II today. This is a Fan-run Con (the best kind), and featured a lot of great guests, including someone from about every Universe Whedon has created. If you are anywhere near Washington,D.C., I urge you to get there Sunday, before it is over!
The Guests include Gigi Edgley of Farscape, Richard Hatch of Battlestar Galactica, Robia Lamorte of Buffy, Mark Lutz of Angel, and Jewel Staite of Firefly. And that was just the actors! Click the MORE button for my review of the Con.

The crowd is small, which makes this the most intimate Con I have ever been to. You can actually talk to the Guests as people, rather than see them from across a crowded room; and they can actually be themselves and have fun, rather than being in a business environment. A win-win, except for the chance of not having another Con of this level for financial reasons (because the Guests cannot afford the out-of-pocket, or the Con itself depleted their piggybank for the next decade to make it happen). So please join us, and support your local Con!

Every one of the actors who made this event are people who have found it in themselves to become characters near and dear to my heart. Sometimes it was because who they were meshed with the characters they played, and sometimes because they were just that good at becoming those characters. But in all cases, they took a role in a story and made it their own, to the point where we believed in them. I don’t have any higher praise I could offer them, except maybe to say they showed their personal side at this event, and it was even more worth knowing!

Still reading? OK, the specifics, from my point of view… The core of the gathering for me was the Whedon team, from all its incarnations. They had 3 folks representing for them, and they had obviously all spent time together doing it. Watching them interact, both on and off stage, was a hoot. Gigi may have been the lone Farscape rep, but she had enough energy and intelligence to more than make up for the missing members. Richard Hatch displayed both a knowledge and an understanding of SciFi and the business of Movie/TV production as a whole, and was teaching the details to anyone with the ears to hear. All of them added up to an amazing day, one which I am honored to be part of!

Just a few random links to Cons you might find worth a visit. I recently mentioned GalaxyCon, which I will be attending. The big ones are the WorldCons; the next 2 are Interaction in Glasgow, and LAConIV in the City of Lost Angels. One of the more fun ones is the DilloCon in Austin; and let’s not forget to read up on a Mundane’s visit to a con, recounted in Geeks Gone Wild, about another great con in St. Louis. And if you really want to get wild, you might check out the many Cons of FurNation, a group even less subtle than most. Enjoy!

I love hitting Cons (Science Fiction Conventions) for a lot of reasons; I will list a few of them here, and look forward to hearing from you about your reasons you either love or hate them. But since I live on the East Coast, the next Con I will be going to is the Galaxy Con II. Good guests, both actors and authors; the pricing on this one looks like a typical Corp buying into the Con moneywagon, unfortunately. With luck, the folks who actually attend will be real people!

Oh, yeah, the reasons I love going to Cons. Here are a few of them; what are yours?

1) Meeting lots of folks with similar interests (SciFi)
2) Catching up with friends I got to know online for the first time in real life
3) Getting to hear the Actors who played the parts tell their experiences
4) Chatting with the Authors about their ideas and stories
5) Checking out the Booths, to add a few jems to my collection (Books, Art, Video, Fill-In-The-Blank)
6) Networking about all of the above with the people I meet there

If you are beginning to see a pattern here, you have probably hit the nail on the head. I go for the people (Authors, Artists, Actors, and that’s only the “A” words!), not the corporate beancounters. If I spend the whole weekend, and only meet one “Real Person” at the event, I still come out ahead, in my book! LOL…