Wow, has it really been thirteen days since a whirlwind of a weekend began? An event six months in the planning that felt like it passed in the blink of an eye.

Let me try and reconstruct those days from what little was recorded in my long-term memory during a period of sleep deprivation, mixed with caffeine and adrenalin.

Looking back at my tweets from that time doesn’t help, they were mostly cries of exhaustion and one that recalls a particularly painful panel.

Yes, panels. Look – photographic evidence!

There we are talking about Dollhouse.  That was a fun one.  In fact, I discovered that my many years of watching, talking about and ok, mostly ranting to people about the strengths and many weaknesses of tv shows have made me more than capable to doing exactly that in front of an audience.

The  ‘time travel in genre tv’ panel was a lot of fun too.  Discussion was hard though, since we were all in complete agreement on how great Moffat’s eps of Doctor Who are, and that Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles kicks major ass.  Then, much to my surprise, when I mention Lost everyone went quiet.  Apparently the whole nerdcore tuned out at the same time, after the Polar Bear ep.  There was only one guy in the audience who was actually still watching the show!  Which left me the choice of giving a four season re-cap, or just moving on.  I did get to work in a reference to the Another Cold Morning one-shot from Tranmetropolitan and compare that to Ripley’s cryo-sleep in between Alien and Aliens.

Now, the first panel.. on the Apocalypse, well.. let’s just call that one a learning experience.  I could blame nerves, or the vodka’n’redbulls..  but, hey, it was my first panel ever, I survived.   Valuable ffeedback from lizbt included such tips as ‘look at the audience’ and ‘speak into the microphone’; which, you can clearly see from the photo above I did in subsequent panels.

The Climate Change panel, that was another kind of learning experience; and I’ll just redact the rest of that.

Suffice to say, I am ready for future gigs now.  From panel virgin to pro in three days.  OK, not quite pro.. but I am confident.  Yes.  Look out!

Now, there were obviously other duties I had, like Guest Liaising..  to my credit I only mislaid them a few times.   Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and Narrelle M. Harris were fantastic.  Sadly, committee duties meant that apart from escorting them to their panels and events, I didn’t really get to see that much of them in action.  Or any other panels really.

It’s just like being the host of a party, you’re so busy making sure everyone’s having a good time, you barely get a chance to breath yourself.

The one panel I did manage to catch in full was Steampunk Fashion 101, with Cass from Wildilocks, and our DJ from the Ball, Omega.  Good show, that was!

Oh yes, the Ball.. gosh, long and blurry weekend was long..  here, have a cheesy photo of myself and the lovely wife:

Word to the wise, bribes work – ok cheesy smiles, or something.. because we came second in the costume parade.  Huzzah!  Then we proceeded to dance the night away to great mix of tunes and themes songs.  Yes, damn right dunk m1k3y was fist-pumping the air when the Farscape theme came on!

Little did I know the next day, slightly extra under the weather, but with a whole seven hours sleep, I had to fill in for a genuinely ill panellist – thankfully, like all cheap bonus eps, this was a clip show, and I just nodded, smiled and ran off my own list of ‘greatest shows that never were’ – Babylon Fields and Global Frequency FTW!

So, in summary, much XP was gained, a great time had and new allies made in the bid for total global domination.

Now we go almost straight into planning Continuum 6: Future Tense, starring futurist and self-described ‘minor tv celebrity’ Mark Pesce (from the ABC’s New Inventors.)

Why so soon?  Well, there’s this little thing called WorldCon happening in Melbourne next year, so we’re holding C6 in Feb, to avoid conflicting with that.