Apologies up front for the almost-certain crap quality of this post; I woke up this morning feeling, shall we say, pretty awful, and that will probably color just about everything I produce throughout the day, at least.

So, sorry.

Still, stuff and adventures and things happened this weekend, so I feel I ought to chronicle them here while they’re still freshish in my mind, because that’s what I do here.

Overall, Marscon was fun, more due to the presence of friends and such rather than the quality of the programming. I knew going in, given my advance read of the panel schedule, that I’d be spending most of my time haunting the game room. And, that’s pretty much what I ended up doing. They can’t all be programming winners, or, more likely, they can’t all be programmed in line with my needs, wants and preferences – I’m sure a lot of attendees got a lot of enjoyment out of the panels presented.

One exception to the programming end was the music/filk stuff. It’s amusing to me, though not particularly surprising given my background, that I’m drawn to this sort of thing, given that it’s a fusion of at least two different life-long interests. When I see the astounding right-hand guitar gymnastics of Jonah Knight, for example, I’m both inspired to go out and write my own songs, damn the steam-driven torpedoes and my limited singing ability, as well as a little intimidated by the fact that I simply don’t have the manual dexterity to do that, not that my theoretical output would resemble his, in any case.

Leaving that bit of self-doubt aside, I enjoyed seeing Jonah perform again, and engaging in a bit of con acquantance chit-chat over the table while handing over my cold hard cash for a copy of his latest disc, The Age of Steam: Strange Machines, which is impressive and haunting and virtuosic and more than a little bit hauntingly beautiful, and includes the fun and creepy track “King of Nebraska” at the end.

Sitting at that very same table, and performing on some of the same stages was “comedy rock star” Mikey Mason, whose stuff I hadn’t encountered before (although given the internet circles I run in, I must have simply been looking the other way when this made the rounds last spring), but I soon found myself humming along with the entire weekend. Mikey’s funny and gracious and gregarious, performs a note-perfect acoustic rendition of the “Muppet Babies” theme song with all the voices intact like nobody’s business, and wrote what’s probably my favorite song (not favorite “geek song”, favorite song) of the year so far (or heck, last year even), “Me and Alan Moore’s Beard”.

Otherwise, like I said, I spent most of my time in the game room, rolling dice and flipping cards with our friends from Steve Jackson Games (who also constitute most of our semi-regular Sunday afternoon gaming group). We played ’em all, particularly GURPS (I almost died dramatically in a post-apocalyptic Richmond, though I only heard the legends about The Pope of France defeating an Elder God by removing his pants), Munchkin, Give Me The Brain, and the non-SJ product, Kittens In A Blender, which, nonetheless became the viral hit of the game room, causing a near-immediate sell-out of copies from the dealer’s room Saturday afternoon.

So yeah, that’s how I spent my weekend, more or less. I wouldn’t call it wasted.