Image courtesy of Pat Loika. Licensed under CCY BY 2.0.

Labor Day weekend is, as I have mentioned before, a Busy Weekend in Atlanta. Since, as a city, we don’t know how to schedule things in a reasonable fashion, Labor Day weekend is host to: Dragon Con (largest independent sci fi/fantasy convention in the country), the Decatur Book Festival (largest independent book festival in the country),  and Black Gay Pride (largest Black Gay Pride celebration in the country). Plus there’s a massive college football thing.

This happens every year. It is a delightful logistical nightmare. Several hundred thousand people with really intense, really disparate interests descend on a city that is an infrastructure nightmare at the best of times.

Labor Day weekend is, of course, the Best.

Normally, I confine myself to the quiet nerds at the Decatur Book Festival. They drink beer, (politely), and care about books (politely), and listen to readings (politely). They go home at 5. There are no after parties. But this year, I decided that I had to spend at least a day amongst the rowdier nerds: I was going to try to go to Dragon Con.

A bit of Dragon Con backstory: prior to this year, I had been to Dragon Con twice. I was 12 the first time and 13 the second, and at neither point was a chaperoned. It was terrifying. At the time (and this was 10 years ago, now), the con had somewhere around 17,000 attendees. It was crowded, and it was full of people in bondage gear, and it did not have anti-harassment policies on display. I got to see Anne McCaffrey speak, but made no effort to go back during high school or college.  Continue reading →