PandoraCon 2016

This weekend I've been attending PandoraCon, a local science fiction convention.  I gather they're having some trouble this year, as attendance seems sparse, there were a large number of panel/program cancellations, and panels wasn't very plentiful to begin with in some of the time slots. Musical guests were very good, though.  I understand PandoraCon was up against at least one major convention and one minor convention, and that one of the local fan groups was otherwise engaged in some sort of costuming activity this week.  My late convention, Millennicon, was doing no better than this when the decision was made to shut down.  I wish the folks at PandoraCon the best and hope they pull through this year and have better luck next year.  Greater Cincinnati seems like it should be large enough it should be able to support at least one science fiction convention with real programming (as distinct from Midwestcon, the long-lived local Relaxacon).

EDIT: As I was reflecting this morning, I realized I need to give kudos to the folks running PandoraCon for two additional areas where they did very well this year.  Their vendor room was chock full of costuming, art, jewelry, and miscellany, though books seems to be sold mostly by authors - there were no real booksellers present.  Also, the gaming seemed to be going quite well, be it video gaming, RPG's, or other tabletop games.  There were anywhere from two to five games going on at any time.  Still, as I said, traditional programming was on the weak side.

On the other hand, the lack of decent programming this year led me to spend some time reading on my tablet.  I ran across a couple papers by George Kelly from the 2007-2008 time frame.  I'd downloaded from his web site and read "An Interactive System for Procedural City Generation" and other articles, but ran across them on my tablet again.  The aforementioned work is a lengthy masters thesis that provides implementation details on some of the techniques I've been playing with, so may be of some use, and I'm glad I stumbled across them.