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Why am I incapable of not taking notes or doodling? And why did I say I would scan them all? (I don't mind, really.) Anyway.


I totally uploaded all my notes onto my website and formatted this post nicely with thumbnails, and then I remembered I have a flickr account, where people can click 'next' and 'previous' and other useful things like that. Click on the link for each day to get the beginning of my notes form it in the flickr set.

Friday: I went to the Time Travel & Alternative History talk, which was pretty good — picked up lots of book recs.

The highlight of the day was a talk titled "Homer's Odyssey - The World's First Fantasy Novel". It was less about fantasy novels and more a quick run-through of the themes of the Odyssey (quite a few of which are shared by fantasy novels), and it made me want to read it so bad. I mean, it was on my list vaguely, anyway, but now it's moved a lot closer to the top.

Then a talk on allergies, the first of many interesting science talks (I haven't counted, but I think I might've gone to more science talks than actual SF and fantasy ones), one on Arthurian legends, and a Writing Video Games panel that didn't mention any games I didn't already know, but made me iritated at myself for not playing those games. Also panels on gender and alternative sexuality in SF, which were pretty good but not as cool as they could've been, I think.

Saturday: Highlights... Saturday was sort of all highlights. I really wanted to go to the talk on whether immortality is a good thing in the morning, but my hotel bed was really warm and comfortable, ok? Anyway, I started my day with "Quantum Computing for Beginners", which was super interesting, but so packed with people that I could only see the top three lines of every slide form where I was sitting. D: I wanted to copy the diagrams! (As a slightly related aside, I am getting increasingly fond of mathematics, even though I've forgotten everything I learned in IB Maths. I have some websites bookmarked that will hopefully remedy that.)

Then I went to Ben Goldacre's talk, which was super fun and full of swearing, and should probably have been twice as long. And now he is even more one of my favourite people. *fangirl*

I also made a Dalek cake with lullula and her mum. IS IT NOT A THING OF BEAUTY? The Victorian Self-Defense talk/demonstration was lots of fun, watching the Dr Who special as part of a massive audience was a pretty amazing experience, "Non-Euclidean Geometry" was excellent (again with the maths), basically, the whole day was excellent. Oh, except for the the previously mentioned slash panel, which was better than I expected it to be in some ways, but bad in different and exciting ways. BUT at least I met some cool people through that. :3 Ah, I really want to stay in the con hotel next time I go to one, so I can stay up as late as I want talking to people and then just collapse into bed.

Sunday: Sunday was a little empty, but the Big Biology talk was very cool, and I learned how to knit socks! Though I foresee myself not doing much knitting in my daily life, if I'm honest. I could do it while watching TV, but I draw when I watch TV! It's just not gonna work out. I also sort of forgot to eat lunch and dinner that day, which put me in a really bad mood towards the evening.

Monday: Things that were supercool on Monday: basically everything. Lots of interesting discussions, despite the fact that I was pretty exhausted by that time. "Novels: A Product Their Time?" (historiography! Except with novels. Er... literarography. Literary analysis? It was very good, anyway), Researching Fantasy (I love worldbuilding) and Alien Invasions (colonial analogues!), especially. Also The Eastercon version of Just A Minute was brilliant.

I really wanted to mention "An Almanac for the Alien Invaders" in the Alien Invasions talk, but I was just too slow and the conversation'd moved on. But I will recommend it to you now! It's one of my favourite Escape Pod stories, and not just because it has archaeologists in it. (Though I admit that is a part of it. Hey, it addresses issues that interest me, but with aliens - what else is science fiction for? Besides badass space explosions, I mean.)



I also came home with a lot of books, considering my strained finances. There's the usual freebies, which... I will probably... read eventually? Last years are still sitting in my shelf, too. ¬_¬

I also got Redclaw by Philip Palmer, which I was immediately attracted to because the beginning of the blurb made me thing of Archaeology (it's about some researchers who have to record and entire alien ecosystem before it's destroyed to make the planet fit for human habitation), and The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories, because alt history is well known to be for cool kids. I was agonising about which of them to buy, and lullula took them both off me and bought them for me as a belated birthday present, making her my favourite person for the day.

I bought Fun With Rainbows a collection of short, concepty stories by Gareth Owens, basically on the basis of it having a nice cover and interestingly-titled stories. It's pretty good. In one or two of the stories the timing seemed a bit off — in "Tempus Fugit" I figured out what was going on before the narrator did, for example — but most of them are pretty delightful, and the creepy ones are really creepy. Especially the one with the eyes, oh man.

I also got this incredibly beautiful thing, which was meant to be £30, but I went back for it half an hour before the Dealers' Room was set to close on the last day, and convinced the dealer to give it to me for £10. Pretty much my proudest achievement of the weekend. And at the same time I picked up a bunch of free/super-cheap volumes of SF short story magazines. The moral of the story: Go to the Dealers' Room as late as you can and you will get stuff fer cheap.

Oh, and lullula also lent me Mr Dacy, Vampire. Pride & Prejudice & Zombies was pretty disappointing, let's see if this one's better.
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