Yesterday, Today, This Weekend

I realized this morning that I had not only failed to have a post go live yesterday, but I also failed to warn anyone.

Yesterday was the victim of a confluence of events.

Wrestlemania was on Sunday.
Stephanie's Birthday was on Monday
NorWesCon is going on now.

It's not because I haven't managed to get anything written, however. I've managed to discard a couple of half-written (but not very good) posts about GenCon's response to the RFRA in Indiana - and I may try to re-write them sometime. Maybe.

Instead, though, I'll be writing about Norwescon (which is this weekend) and how that goes.  Much like my GenCon posts, I'll be mostly posting in the evenings after the bulk of the day has passed.

I've been attending Norwes off and on for about twenty years, now. In fact, it was the first convention I ever attended, and the first convention I dragged Steph to.

It's not usually a huge con, but it sells out its hotel and several of the neighboring hotels, too.

I don't work at Norwescon. I'm an attendee. I go to panels and listen to experts. Sometimes I know more than the experts on one thing or another, but very rarely have I walked out of a panel not having learned something.

At this point, I've already been through registration. This year, they e-mailed bar codes to folks who had pre-registered. It was supposed to speed things up. It didn't. Those of us who had prepared in advance stood in a long line to get to one of the two badge printers they had for us. Pre-registered folks who hadn't printed their barcodes went to a line that let them print their barcodes and then go to one of six stations that were printing badges.

Net result? It was faster to have been unprepared. It was a shorter faster-moving line.

Not a promising start, but I also haven't been to any panels, yet (they don't technically start until 2:00 today).

In terms of panels, I found a bunch more panels that interested me than I have for a while (lack of good panels is one reason Steph and I took a couple of years off). So we'll see how it goes.