WisCONline: Day One

My con day began with a preplanned video meetup with some friends, followed by the opening ceremonies speech and then the Gathering. When the con happens at the hotel, the Gathering is held primarily in the largest ballroom, with a number of small stations set up for different activities: crafting, eating coffee and snacks, browsing the events that will be on auction Saturday, the annual nail polish and clothing swaps. (This is also typically when the Otherwise Bake Sale would happen, which was the thing I was supposed to be co-leading this year, but I didn't get my act together to come up with a virtual replacement.) Instead, there were various discussion threads set up to represent the different areas, and also to create some new, online-friendly activities. There was too much going on to keep up with every thread, so I mostly hung out in the main Gathering thread and a new thread called Photo Swap, which ended up primarily being people sharing pictures of their bookshelves, as well as getting into a couple of direct message conversations. I managed that for a couple of hours, then decided to take a break until the Vid Party.

Vid Party was great -- a selection of premieres, classics, and new favorites around a couple of themes. For the most part, folks watched the stream while text chatting in the dedicated thread, but for the last song ("Starships"), the mods opened up audio chat on the stream so people could sing along. It became immediately obvious why people don't usually perform music together over an audio stream, but the anarchy of sound just added to the festive atmosphere. Normally I end up dropping in and out of the Vid Party, because it's so long and there's usually at least one panel I want to attend programmed against it. One upside of having only one panel track: I have to make a lot fewer decisions this year. :)

Update: here's the vid playlist, with warnings and links, in case you missed it or want to go back and rewatch something (I know I do).