2013 Schedule Thoughts

I've been exercising my Google-Fu looking for possible events to go to in 2013.

For SCA events I'm early, except for the bigger ones like Boar's Head, Maidens, and Val Day. But for conventions this isn't too early to be planning.

Probably won't do Tree-Girt-Sea's annual 12th Night event again. New site, but still in the City of Chicago, which can be a challenge with the trailer, especially parking. Plus its the week before Maidens. Two weeks after Maidens is Military History Fest, and then the weekend after that is Capricon, where Xap and Ron are running the cafe, I'm cafe staff, and MuseCon is sponsoring the cafe. Kind of a death march month.

At the end of February is the Ayreton Carnivale, just down the road in Des Plaines. Not sure when it became a dance event, IIRC we didn't go this year, though. In any case, its close enough that we'll likely go.

CodCon has only a skeleton website, but it appears it will be 19-21 April. CodCon is a gaming convention, and last year we did pretty well, thanks to a healthy anime/cosplay contingent. Definitely want to do it again, so today I e-mailed the College of DuPage SF club's advisor asking to get information when its available.

May 4th is the Midrealm spring coronation, somewhere in the Ayreton, and then on the 11th is the Northshield Crown Tourney, in Stoughton, WI. At the end of May is WisCon. I don't think we'd do well at WisCon, and then there's the whole question of taking the Things, Grinch, etc. up to the second floor on the elevators. But I suspect we'll go and throw a MuseCon party again.

Border Skirmish is June 7-9th, but we did poorly at it this year, I think mostly because of location location location. Hopefully it'll be laid out differently this year, which would probably get me to try again - it wasn't a bad event in the past. Then at the end of June (29th) is Ragnarok Rampage, now subtitled Baroness Wars. Looks like Ayreton will be co-sponsoring with Carraig Ban, which hopefully will increase Ayreton attendance (which seemed lacking this year).

MuseCon, 2-4 August, a convention celebrating CREATIVITY! (shameless plug!) eats July, of course. That's what happens when the family wears a bunch of hats in running it. And that's about Pennsic time, which means the local-ish SCA calendars go fairly blank, too.

Scattered around all the likely events are a bunch of anime and general SF-ish cons in Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, and I think even a couple in Iowa that I found. We probably won't do most of them, but I think we should look into some of them. The problem is that even if the vendor space rates are reasonable, they're all far enough away that they'd require hotel stays, which eat into the profits.