My con schedule is stored on my phone, thanks to a handy little app, so doing a summary will involve a bit of back-and-forth. Let’s see how it goes, shall we?

• Climate Catastrophes
  This was done by Jonathan Cowie, who was at Au Contrairé in 2010, and was basically an introduction to Earth Systems Science, specifically the role of life in changing the planet. Kind of interesting, though his answer to the question of “What Can We Do About Climate Change/Global Warming?” was a sobering ‘Go enjoy yourselves; We’ve been warning people for 40 years, and it’s only getting worse’
• Goliath
  An anime-esque War Of The Worlds sequel, where human fighting machines & heat rays are used to do battle with a second Martian invasion.
  Teddy Roosevelt as the Action Secretary of Defense was a nice touch, and the backdrop of WW1 starting & Irish Independence was interesting.
• Experimenting With Comics
  Mostly an artist talking about her own work, with reference to historical art & some of the more unusual approaches to comics.
• Raumpatrouille Orion Fangroup
  ~sigh~
  I’ve seen the movie version of this German SF TV show, where the episodes were cut together & edited into a single narrative, so I was looking forward to finding out more about it.
  Unfortunately, this was the bad sort of fan presentation, where they just want to tell you everything, with little thought given to structure or a coherent narrative in their talk. Clearly, people were fans, but that kind of worked against them.
  I snuck out early, as did another chap who wanted to avoid spoilers.
  this did give me the opportunity to go to …
• Getting London Wrong
  Thor would have needed to change trains to get back to Greenwich. Ben Aaronovich gets multicultural London right. Stop trying to do Cockney if you’ve never heard one.
  Basically, this was a lot of fun.
• No Adolf Inside: The Truth About German Fandom
  This was great. Very funny, covers a lot of German culture in a very short time.
  Wherever seven Germans gather, they’ll form a club. When there are more than ten people in the club, they split into two clubs & bicker.
  It covered Raumpatrouille Orion & the Perry Rhodan series, plus some oddities of German Publishing & the fact that there is no Germany-wide convention, but lots of regional ones instead.

I spent a short period of time at the NZ2020 Bid table, mostly because I helped Maree, who seems to be organising it, carry bags filled with cans of whipped cream. It turns out that these were for the Bid Party that night (I didn’t go: Too crowded, noisy, & annoying), and not as a supply of nitrous to while away the hours on the bid table.

Something I wasn’t expecting was the sudden appearance of blisters, which is making the trip to & from the hotel a little more annoying than I’d like.
On the plus side, there are gems like this in the ExCeL centre.

Badge Pickup, day one; I am so very glad that I wasn’t in this line.

Looking down into the Fan Village.

Looking into the Dealer Hall

Not quite an interior shot of the Dealer Hall, but it’s less dark.

Looking up from the Fan Village, which was effectively a hangout zone, plus bid tables and a cafe/bar.
I have no idea what the Pirate Moose flag is about, and, to be honest, I’m OK with that mystery.

This, I thought, was just kind of neat.