So, that’s another Marscon down.

As always, I had a good time, catching up with friends, making music, and generally engaging in the nerd love-in for a couple of days. the energy this year was, according to pretty much all concerned, weird, though no unified theory as to why really emerged. For the second year in the hotel, they made a couple of changes to the way things go (games got moved upstairs, secondary music room got moved out of the sweet small auditorium, con suite adjustments, etc), but everybody generally felt it was more than that.

Lots of compelling theories abound, from the snow earlier in the week throwing everyone off, to the political situation in the world bringing us all down, to the fact that many of us are going to be right back in exactly the same place in a couple of months for Ravencon, and it might all be too much. I dunno.

That said, despite the weirdness (and some serious social circle drama coming to a head which I won’t discuss because it’s really not my place to do so), there’s still a lot to love about this con. The attendees are great people, I love the way music has become the focus/highlight of the event for so many of us, and I love the cool, creative, and accepting atmosphere that gets maintained. I hope the strange energy works itself out; in a lot of ways, this event is the highlight of my year (and not just because I get to be a little bit of a celebrity for 48 hours or so), and I have a vested interest in keeping it awesome.

Our shows went really well, particularly Saturday night’s Naughty show, where we played all the slightly risque dirty joke songs together, which we don’t get to do very often. Also, thanks to some social lubrication, a lot of the subtext became text, and people had fun, laughing in the right places and singing along. We had fun.

Pictured above, you can see a shot my friend Chris took of the Sunday afternoon round-robin performance, where we all play stuff together and enjoy each other’s company. This year was interesting, as we had three(!) bassists on stage for the round-robin, and sadly, we couldn’t come up with a quickie arrangement of Spinal Tap’s “Big Bottom” – next year, Braxton and Michael, we need to make that happen.

Beyond the music, I got some quality gaming time in with one of my favorite game masters ever, who I don’t get so see so much anymore since our regular gaming group fell apart a bit, which was wonderful. Also, had some pleasant conversations with folks I haven’t seen in a while. I really do miss so many of you.