Thanks For Being Kind To Me
I had a very nice time at DetCon this weekend; I was worried I’d melt down from all the people, but the people were kind.
No, seriously. Folks kept squeezing my shoulder, asking, “How are you doing?”, giving me hugs. Checking in with me. And yes, I’d asked for that, but nobody had to do it and yet you all did.
So thank you.
DetCon was a very nice con, but very awkward for what it was – it was held in the vast, sprawling area of GM headquarters, so big it took me twenty-five minutes and five floors just to find the convention. It was so big that they were holding another convention in there, a Netroots con – which foiled my usual plan of “follow the pasty backpack-wearing guy to the action” – and the place still often felt empty.
So even though it was the largest fan convention that Detroit had held (and go Tammy for running a hell of a con), it was hard to find people, as there was no central place where everyone just washed up.
I remain fascinated by how a hotel affects a con’s feel – if you have a central bar everyone has to pass through on the way to the panels, then you see everyone gathering there, washed up like a culvert of happy people. If you have a large layout full of hallways, then people tend to choke the hallways, leading to little clots of informal gathering that get pushed on as crowds pile up behind them. And if you have a large area like DetCon had, you have a con that feels very nice but not coherent, because I ran into people at various places but had no strong sense of “Here is where I want to go if I want to watch my friends turn up.”
But regardless, my friends did turn up, and many of you were much nicer to me than you had any right to be. And since you often find out how I’m doing in this public space, I should thank you in this public space, and say it clearly: Thanks for helping a grieving man find a bit of normality. Thanks for being there.
Thanks for proving to me, for the ten thousandth time, that the world is generally full of extremely nice people. Of which you are one.
To be fair, the NetRoots people were only sleeping there – all their events were down at Cobo.
We had originally planned for a more compact con (using all the rooms on 5, which would have meant we didn’t use the rooms off the lobby, and would only have used the Ambassador ballroom for the big events) but the hotel’s renovation schedule had a different idea! And on the silver lining side, it did mean we got that awesome river view room for Scalzi’s dance.