Lunacon 2013 mini-report

I am pretty sure the last time I was at Lunacon was in 2008. So it's changed a lot:

(1) The hotel has been substantially renovated. I actually quite liked the changes aesthetically (fireplace!), but by the end of the weekend I was a bit nostalgic for the old look (and the old coffee shop!)
(2) Apparently the con's gotten smaller since I was last there, and apparently also there was some extra-special organizational chaos going on -- but from where I was sitting, I felt approximately zero impact (programming? what's that??), so whatever. Everyone I saw seemed to be having a pretty good time, or at least holding it together while enabling other people to have a good time (so thanks to all those people for that).
(3) In particular, I very much felt the absence of ablock, as well as xdaemon and aurelis and several other specific folks I associate strongly with Lunacons past. (No bagel run! Sniff!)
(3a) Relatedly, this may be the first time I have ever been at Lunacon without at least nominally working tech.
(4) It is also for sure the first time I have ever traveled to Lunacon on the MetroNorth commuter rail rather than roadtripping from Boston. (No Rein's Deli!! Double sniff!)

In any case, however, it was excellent to get to see kalessin and mercury_sparkle (even if it was mostly in the ops office, at least we still got to have dinner together)... and lots of other dear friends, and some cool new ones. And I did make it to the hot tub for about 20 minutes (went down by myself, but chatted with the nice folks who were in there, and it was all good) before heading up to a certain single-malt-themed party.

And bringing MuffinButtons to Lunacon for the first time was definitely fun and worth doing. FAQ #1: How'd you do? I broke even on my con expenses (including transportation and Saturday dinner) with literally about $4 to spare. Oh, um, except that's on gross receipts and I still have to pay sales tax out of that, so came out a bit under, after all. But that's still pretty good.

And, signal boost: my next-door booth neighbor was this adorable young math teacher who draws an adorable, smart webcomic called Monster Haiku. And every single time new people came up and he would pitch them the book, my brain kept serving up to me the idea of how much Tiger Boy would have liked it. Which was both exasperating and endearing in about equal, if small, measures. Yes, every strip actually is a haiku (in the basic American 5-7-5 sense, not the Japanese content-structure sense). With monsters. Since I use LJ as my RSS aggregator, I have syndicated it as monsterhaiku.

... And now I'm headed out shortly for my performance at the New York Gilbert & Sullivan Society. This is a scaled-down reprise of the January show I did at Temple Israel Center in White Plains ( LJ | DW ), consisting largely of Anna Russell's delightful parody piece "How to Write Your Own Gilbert & Sullivan Operetta", plus a bunch of solo/duet/trio selections, and finishing up with Trial By Jury because hey. 7:30pm at the Community Church of New York, 40 E 35th St (corner of Park). Robbie, our Fearless Leader, called me this afternoon to warn me that some of our folks might have trouble getting to the show if the snow got bad, and so, basically, "be prepared to wing it, the show must go on, all that". So if we end up doing a spontaneous from-memory 4-person rendition of the entire Act I finale of Iolanthe... well, I just hope they have a camera running. :-}