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RavenCon Report and Pics
(April 28, 2009)
What would you say about a convention that initiated its members by smearing peanut butter on their eyes and then letting loose a flock of ravens to go after the peanut butter and peck their eyes out? Might be fun to watch, but I doubt anyone would attend. Thankfully RavenCon was nothing like that.
I left earlier than I originally planned because I found out the night before that the con scheduled a FuMP concert Friday night at 9:00. The drive down was uneventful until almost the end when some truck drivers decided to see if the laws of physics had been repealed and tried to fit two tractor trailers in the same place at the same time. I arrived about 8:20, with just barely enough time to get in, get registered, and get set up for the show.
 The FuMP show featured me, Rob Balder, Danny Birt, and Filk Ferret. We did a round robin concert and it went great. The audience was pretty full, and was really into it. The picture of me was taken by @cmaaarrr who posted to Twitter while the show was going on. I love technology. After the show we packed up our stuff and hung out in one of the party rooms in the hotel.
Saturday at noon they put us all on a panel called Filking The Basics. One of the basics of Filk is that noon to a filker is about 4 AM for the rest of the world, so Rob was a tad late to the panel, and I'm not sure he was fully awake until well after it ended. He kept going on about spiders and dandelions and 3 color fruit cakes. We just propped him up in the corner for the rest of the panel tried to keep him from drooling too much.
 Saturday afternoon was the concert block. Rob started it off, and was fully awake by this time, so he did a good job. I think he actually got the best response of all of us. The room was packed and the audience really enjoyed what he did. Then Filk Ferret went on, then Danny Birt, and finally me. It was weird because they didn't have a stage, so I was just on the floor in front of the crowd. And because there were panels in the next room I couldn't go too loud. I kind of felt like a street performer in New York begging someone, anyone, to pay attention to him and toss him some money. Maybe I should have borrowed Danny's guitar case and left it open on the floor. I might have made some decent tip money then.
Saturday night I decided to attend the Filk Workshop where Danny Birt and Filk Ferret were on the panel and the goal was to write a song in the panel and have it done by the end. Had Tom Smith been on the panel we could have had a whole album done, but we did what we could. We ended up doing a parody of Sitting On The Dock In The Bay (or whatever the official title of that song is) about attending conventions. It came out pretty good. RavenCon's web site will probably be posting the lyrics at some point. If I get them I'll post them. If not, just use your imagination, then pretend we came up with something 10 times funnier. We didn't, but I want you to think that we did.
After that we all got together in Rob's hotel room to record Manic Mondays. For the first time ever I had an artist perform the song live on the show. Danny Birt sang his song On Top Of My Sofa. You can listen to this week's show here: http://www.manicmondays.net/mp3/manicmondays0207.mp3
Sunday morning I was on a great panel on marketing your work, along with Podcasting's Rich Sigfrit. Yes, that's his full legal name. I think. Anyway, it was great. Then a couple hours later I was on a panel that was basically there to nitpick at Battlestar Galactica until it was reduced to tiny, unrecognizable bits that look like they've been chewed up and spit out by your dog, only to ultimately say that we all enjoyed the show anyway and none of it really mattered. It should have been called BSG:WTF.
So that's the con in a clam shell. I can't put it in a nutshell because I'm allergic to nuts. Besides, I'm still using my "clam shell iBook" which is now 10 years old and still chugging along just fine.
I didn't take a ton of photos but the ones I took you can find on my Flickr page here.
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