Con and Run...
If I've learned anything this weekend, it's that only spending a couple of hours at a gaming convention is not conducive to a god con experience. The con in question in Trinoc-con in Durham. It's probably the closest "general purpose" convention (which I define as fantasy/sci-fi/gaming without any particular focus) to where I live--it's about 30 minutes away from the door of my apartment. However, as "luck" would have it, I only had the time to go during the early afternoon on Saturday, and as timing would have it, that early afternoon ended up only being about a couple of hours. I spent about half of that wandering the con, stopping only by a ballroom where they were showing one of the Samurai X films and by a table that T Campbell and Greg Eatroff had appropriated to sell Fans comics, along with the one-shot "How to Break Into Comics." (On the latter, I'd say there's a lot of good information in there, but an ability to separate the info from the tongue-in-cheek humor is absolutely required). The other half I spent eating lunch while flipping through the comics I had picked up.
I got the feeling that I had picked the worst possible time to show up; none of the panels I would have wanted to see were on at that time, the gaming session was in full tilt so I couldn't get into any of that, and I got the feeling that a lot of people were at lunch. So, there weren't that many people there (true, it's a small convention, but this seemed light even for them), and a fair amount of the people that were there had that cranky-in-need-of-food look. Campbell and Eatroff were the exceptions, which was why I ended up gravitating over to their table.
It might sound as though I'm giving Trinoc a "bad" grade. I'm not--I simply didn't see enough of it to get a good feel for what was going on. Next year, I intend to set aside the time to go for a longer period of time (One whole Saturday? The entire weekend?) and find a way to drag my friends down as well. Hmm...