I am forgetting SO MUCH STUFF it isn’t even funny.
Like moments where I saw a friend Thursday evening, gave her, in fact, a Word Warriors ribbon, and then saw her again at the Friday morning Word Warriors meetup, then saw her AGAIN on Saturday and was like “OMG I haven’t even seen you AT ALL this weekend! …oh, except the meetup…” and she was like “…and Thursday night…when you gave me THIS…?”
It reminds me of when Dublin actually got the Worldcon bid, and I saw Ian McDonald (whom I’ve met several times, if am not close personal friends with), and he heard my American accent and roared, “COME TO DUBLIN!” cheerily, and all of our mutual friends stared at him in bemusement and said, “She *lives* in Dublin,” and he paused, and paused a bit more, and then, merrily, roared, “COME TO DUBLIN!” again. *laughs* My week was a little like that, and the longer it went on the more likely I was to make a mistake like that. :) There were people–vendors–from Octocon whom I’ve spoken with annually for years whom I was just like “Uh, we’ve met, right?” and was mortified to be told, “Several times,” in very dry tones. :) Usually I’m better about that kind of thing, but…well…#worldcon. :)
Saturday morning’s panel was the only one of the convention where the moderator & I seemed to have a Quite Different Idea of what the panel was about–it was “Comic Art: A Buyer’s Market”, and the description for it was about being a writer trying to find artists to work with, since…we always need artists… :) …and the moderator was really into *collecting* original comic art, so that was…very different. But it actually turned out fine, and we talked about both things, and it was a nice panel. And I met Tara Ferguson, who does comics marketing and stuff, so that was really great. Also she has amaaaaaaaazing eyebrows, like wow.
Then I *went* to my only two panels of the con: one about artists and writers collaborating on comics, and that was a lot of fun, and then I managed to get to Diane’s GOH interview, which was very, very funny and managed to embarrass her unembarrassable husband, which was quite an accomplishment. I was *so* pleased to be able to get to at least one of those interviews.
I went up to the food court after that, announced I had fudge, and let people come to me. This was followed by the Great Pokemon Debacle of Worldcon 77, wherein I was chatting and everybody behind me started a raid and then suddenly they were like “Catie! CATIE! We need help! Help!” but you can’t come into a raid late so they all died and then I went into the gym for the next round but they were all like NOOOOOOOOO WE NEED TO HEAAAAAAAAAAAALLL so I went out again and then they were like NOW NOW NOW and then I GOT BOOTED OUT BECAUSE THE RAID FILLED UP so they all got their Suicune and I DID NOT so I posted on Twitter like WAH I NEED RAIDERS and people actually just came FLOODING IN but we still didn’t have enough and one of the people who’d come in bellowed WE NEED POKEMON PLAYERS FOR A RAID and suddenly a bunch of people leapt up and I finally got my Suicune but also I had apparently the world’s most epic sulk while the original crew were raiding and it was evidently very very funny. :)
But I met SO MANY people I knew from Twitter because of that, and I was really overjoyed to get to really put faces to names, and it was utterly lovely.
Oh, also, in Stories I’ve Forgotten, so: ribbons are a thing at Worldcon. You collect them and put them on your badge, and people can end up with hundreds if they work at it, and basically nobody ever says no you can’t have a ribbon. But we had Word Warrior ribbons (as referenced above) and they were actually for an exclusive group. But a friend’s (18 year old) son saw me handing one out on Thursday evening and stepped up eagerly to get one and I said, “No, you can’t have one!”
Complete bafflement. He lifted his badge again, all puppy dog eyes, and I was like, “No, you can’t *have* one.”
Total bewilderment. More puppy dog eyes. More eager lifting of the badge. Me: “No, you *can’t* have one, seriously! There are like 20 people at this con who get one, and you’re not one of them!”
“Ooooooh,” said he, understanding finally dawning, “you mean I can’t have one!”
(I’m full of teasing for that, but he’s a brilliant young man and also I owe him bigtime for his pleasant pushiness later in the weekend, so yeah, that was kinda great. :))
Saturday night I had dinner scheduled with Faith and David, whose spouses I also got to meet and who were all completely splendid people. I’d say we needed another 3 hours to chat, but honestly, I don’t think there’s a single person I couldn’t have talked with for hours longer all weekend. And there were so very many people I barely got to talk to at all, and some I didn’t even know were there until they’d gone home again. When I went to Loncon I’d scheduled almost every waking moment to meet up with people, and while it made for a quite rigid weekend in some ways…it might have been the smarter thing to do for this week, too, because it’s so easy to miss people at these things…