While I realize that it serves as a valuable decoder ring for post-con
inside jokes, I'm a much bigger fan of writeups that have some part of
them that's not name dropping or chronology. So I'll try to save any of
that for the end.

First off, this was the first con that I had spoken at. Second, the whole
art/tech duality threw me for a loop, a bit. I had no idea what attendance
was going to be like and very little idea how the art/music stuff was
going to go over with the general crowd. I also wasn't sure what aspects
of the projects they'd actually be interested in hearing about.

The groups that actually showed up for my particular crazy bullshit were
just great. Far, far more people showed up to listen to noise and my
rambling at 1pm on a con Friday than I expected and actually had comments
and questions and such to boot. For a 7pm Saturday talk with "Pornography"
in the title, the attendance was much less than I anticipated, but the
combination of being opposite of Myself's telco stuff and my newly
acquired reputation for making people sit through horrible screeching
noise, it wasn't too surprising. It worked out alright for me, since I
thought I could get away with showing little 8x10 prints from the front of
a conference room and have everyone see them, but over crowding near the
front wasn't much of a problem. The people who showed up for both talks
were great and I thank them for generally being positive and receptive, as
well as for indulging me in my lengthy verbal digressions and general
alcoholism.

Froggy did a bang up job organizing and holding the con. It was an
interesting idea, and he managed to pull together a great staff, people,
speakers and hotel. And in the end, he was still sane and lucid (at least
as near as I could tell), which is probably the most amazing thing. Well,
no, the amazing thing is that there's competitive jump rope tournaments.
But that was still a thing to behold.

Right, time to digress into name dropping and chronology stuff. Labcoat
and I got to the hotel about 10 minutes before my first talk after a full
day of being awake and a 9 hour drive. Shardy seemed relieved, since I had
made him promise to give the talk if I was late, even if he just had to
stand there and bitch about how much G8 sucks and how glad the audience
should be I hadn't made it on time. Some of the stuff from the weekend
that sticks out in my mind was the Winking Lizard, the traditional
Saturday Indian dinner and Sunday morning Denny's (couldn't find a Big
Boy, apparently) with the Room 515/NYC/#crypto "drunken hedonists" and
mall sushi wih NFF, Myself and others. I'm so terrible with names that by
the end of the weekend, there was a certain tendency to just call people
by their city of origin. Irish was Irish, but bungfish, his hetero life
partner, is still just "Omaha" in my mind.  "Minneapolis" seemed relieved
after I switched to calling him "Minneapolis"  instead of some sort of
cruel reference to the hair dye on his forehead.  There was also a pair of
Windy Cities, but in all fairness I don't think either of them ever gave
me a name to call them. Where I'm going with this is that if I pissed you
off over the course of the weekend, you probably aren't alone, and I
probably didn't mean to. Except for just now with the hetero life partner
joke, but I just couldn't leave it out. Other random fun things: constant
Cleveland steamer jokes, Jason Scott seemingly borrowing PHiZ's
omnipresent "Bitches!"  exclaimation, Alexander Aitken kicking it old
school with daguerreotypes, the Cleveland sports fans making us look like
tame little teenage Bouncing Bulldogs, the hotel manager deciding not to
charge us several hundred dollars for a bottle of bad tequila, not having
seen or dealt with hotel staff or cops in the conference area all weekend
and maids moving furniture after poker games. Random things that could
have gone better: the hotel driver who convinced us that China Town sucked
and the Winking Lizard was the only way to go just because he had to pick
up a load of jump ropers there after dropping us off (in retrospect, China
Town was probably really horrible, but still), the "only hotel liquor in
the conference rooms" rule and freaky blue laws. Hell, if that's all
that goes wrong in a weekend, who can complain?

Finally, for all of the people who I told that the G8 stuff was linked
from the Notacon speakers page, I fucked up. Only the Pornography for
Engineers stuff was. G8 is right over here:
http://www.acm.uiowa.edu/~tbeck/

Koz