Redemption 09 - Part 1

[girlofprey]

I went to Redemption 09 over the weekend. It was great. They didn’t even kick me out when I wandered off to watch Coronation Street (alternatively known as Corona Street during the con) or Dancing on Ice. Of which: OH. I LOVE DONAL AND ROXANNE. I LOVE THAT HIS REHEARSAL WAS BEAUTIFUL EVEN IF HIS PERFORMANCE WASN'T ENTIRLEY. I LOVE THAT SHE WAS A DARK-HAIRED MARILYN MONROE AND DID THE HEADBANGER. But I digress.

I got there on Thursday, having gone straight from work, and alicamel, nerdcakes and jekesta were already there and had bought mini doughnuts. We talked for a while. I embarrassed myself by handing out gifts. There was only mean to be one gift, but things sort of went on from there. But anyway. No-one seemed to find it too ridiculous. Then we went out into Coventry to try to find some dinner, but most places were sadly closed or had a "problem" with the kitchen. We ended up going to a nearly deserted Pizza Hut in a pretty much deserted precinct. The food was great. I eat really slowly, it turns out. We talked quite loudly about slash, I think, and Strictly Come Dancing. It became clear the people who ran it wanted us to leave so they could close the restaurant, so we came back to the hotel, being only slightly accosted on the street by men who wanted us to take clubbing flyers. We briefly explained how little use they would be to us. Then we returned to the hotel, for more talk, and some rest for the next day's conning event. We totally rested. How can you suggest we did anything else?

I'd like to point out that I didn't have much sleep, in truth, over the whole weekend, which might explain some of the stylistic choices in this con report.

On Friday we woke up and went down to the free breakfast. The free breakfast was rather great. It was free. And also breakfast. I had to ask specially for water, but apart from that it was grand. There were beans. That's all I ask from a breakfast. Afterwards we hung around waiting for calapine to arrive and for the con desk to open so we could register. alicamel, however, found out through pointed wandering that if you hung around the con desk they would let you register anyway, so we got registered early. Then we went up to the room to wait for calapine to arrive and for the dealer's rooms to open. And eventually they did. Both those things. calapine told us about the Doctor Who con in America she'd just been to, and the dealer's rooms, when we went down, had books about vampire queens and unicorns. We bought things. I realised I'd lost £20 from my pocket, unless I put it back in my purse and forgot I did so, which I don't think I did. That was quite annoying, but we managed to work it out, and I had a bit of money left anyway. So not as bad as it could have been.

At 2 the panels started. Which for us or the some of us with me were...nothing? I didn't go to any in the first two hour slots I can see. I'm sure of it. Maybe we were in the dealer's rooms. The first panel I attended was the Introduction to Near-Field Communications Technology, which was a scientific talk about things like Oyster Cards and swipe cards, by a man who sadly didn't speak very loudly. There seemed to have been at least one supervillain also at the panel, who asked "What's the most evil thing you could do with this technology?", and had some specific questions about a thirty foot church. Mostly we learned that you could use it to defraud people if you had the right gadgets, but it couldn't be used to trace people very easily because of how close they needed to be to a scanner for the chips to work, unless the tech was really sophisticated or really well-powered. Which was nice. I stayed on for the talk about Is Girl-Guiding Relevant in Today's World?, of which I was one of about ten people in the audience, and pretty much the only one not actually involved with the guides. Mostly it made me think about how much I loved my sash in the Brownies, and that I wished we’d done more interesting things in Brownies when I was there. It was good though.

I went back to the room after that, nipped out to Sainsbury’s to buy bakery things and coke, and then settled in to watch Emmerdale and the first Coronation Street of the night. jekesta came in briefly, brushed her hair, sighed at me, and left. We met up again at 8 for dinner from the buffet in the restaurant, but sadly we'd got there a bit later than the rest of the guests, and a lot of the food was gone or covered up, and the person serving wasn't at the counter. But it was nice when we eventually got it, and there was even cake left. We wandered back into the bar for a bit, then went to pinkdormouse and yonmei's room party! For Blakes 7 people, even though I wasn't a Blakes 7 person. It was lovely, and they had Percy Pig cups, and we looked at a series of interesting new children’s books and blew up balloons.

At 10 jekesta and I left to go to Are Mary Sues Useful?, at which it was pretty much decided that sometimes they were, built sometimes they were really quite annoying, mostly when the universe cheated to suit them, and it took away from the canon characters we liked. But people also pointed out that many original characters were sort of Sues, or very much Sues, and sometimes those Sues were a bit great, if done well. I don’t think anyone was particularly swayed one way or the other from where they started, but it was interesting to discuss, and I do personally think it's quite good to have a genre of basically kicking back at fiction or stories you don't agree with, and I don't see anything wrong with writing along your impulses or for wish-fulfilment sometimes. I just don't want to read all of them. Or have all stories be along that line.

I have no idea where I was after that, I didn't go to any of the panels. Mostly what I remember was finding nerdcakes again, jekesta and I leaving her in the room so she could sleep, going down to the bar and finding _alicamel, trying to play pool but not being able to because it didn't give you enough balls, a cue ball, or a triangle (though we did find two chess pieces), and the cues were behind the bar which was closed. We made up our own game. It was great. Then we went upstairs, found that the Eclectic programme room was still open and had all the lights on, and held our own panels for a while, finding that monsters were different from aliens once and for all (we proved it with a diagram), that living with a slash writer is great, and that Star Trek was Very Sci Fi, but Enterprise came very close to the bottom of the bar chart. We also did the Pub Quiz on the wall, filling in the answers we didn't know with our honestly best guesses, at 5 in the morning. Later on we won that quiz. It was a bit magic. Then we went to bed, at 5-ish. For a bit of sleep.

On Saturday, we got up at nine for breakfast. alicamel chose more sleep instead. Then we hung out in the bar again. We spent quite a bit of time in the bar. It had lovely armchairs. Oh no, we went to Who Wants To Be Master of the Universe quiz, which was like Who Wants To Be a Millionaire, but with fannish questions and better because of more lifelines/cheating. Many questions were thrown open to the audience. I knew one that no-one else did. It was great. jekesta and I sat and didn't participate for an hour, and then alicamel came in and we forced her to run. And she got to £500,000, or second-running for Master of the Universe, before getting a question wrong. It was great. Afterwards jekesta and I went to It's a Knockout, where the questions were much less easy and great. We didn't do sop well on those questions. But we did watch some Blake's 7, Doctor Who and Babylon 5 clips. Which was great. We didn't win. But we won that other quiz, so it's fine.

And my eyes are getting a bit tired, so I'm going to stop there and decide between pizza and pizza. I will do part 2 tonight, or as soon as I am able. Hurray!