PicoCon 36

 

The first SF convention I've been to in a year, and the first of two I shall be going to this year.

There were four talks. The first was on game design theory by Alexis Kennedy (the guy on the far right of the picture) and Lottie Bevan (sitting on his right). I found his talk interesting, but he had a tendency to mumble his words, which made following what he said difficult. I would have liked to have seen them both presenting the first talk as it was clear from the last panel that Lottie had a lot to say.

The second talk by Gavin Smith (second from left) was about V for Vendetta, which unfortunately was a talk that was undermined by the power point slides; as in he repeated what was on the slides, which lessened his presentation. A good example of what is meant when one says, death by power point.

The third talk of the morning was by Andrew Bannister (on the left) on the history of life etc and SF. I enjoyed this because it contained personal anecdotes about the subject and how Andrew became an author.

After lunch, we listened to Simon Morden (centre–insert Babylon 5 joke here) who gave a presentation on space law and the commons. A well illustrated talk on the problems of exploiting space and the pros and cons of laws and the idea behind "the commons."

Finally, there was the panel discussion that was a question-and-answer session, which was a lot of fun. So that was it for another PicoCon. After reviewing the history of the convention, I feel very old when I realized that PicoCon 16 was twenty years ago, and that wasn't my first, either. Which means I've been going to them for more years than I care to remember.