So, I went to Penguicon, right?

Did I go to any panels? No.
Did I go to the masquerade/dance? No.
Did I see/listen to/interact with any of the special guests? Uh, no.

I -did- reconnect with a crap ton of old friends. , , , to name a few. I also ran into and Tom quite often, and got a ribbon to attach to my convention badge after holding their brand-new baby, Ivy. I also got one for Dan and Moonbeam’s wedding.

I don’t think I’ve met either Dan, nor Moonbeam. I certainly didn’t attend their wedding. ;)

There was an observation made at the convention, about the age of convention-goers. There were the expected graybeards, with their t-shirts and suspenders. There were a lot of geek/nerd parents chasing after kids that had obviously inherited some store of caffeine from their aforementioned parental units. Most of these parents were a bit older than and I, but not by much. And then, of course, there were the people that were my age, give or take on either side.

But there were teenagers. People that were either under 18, or just on the plus side. Young blood, so to speak. Their presence was remarked upon (I don’t remember by whom), and then someone said, “thank god for that.” It wasn’t the response that I was expecting.

Conventions were getting older. This, I think, is related to a scene of convention-goers. You know, like the rave scene, the gamer scene, the goth scene… there’s the metro Detroit area convention scene. The same people go to every con.

What’s with that?

It’s like a repeating, roving hotel party with Guests of Honor and topics (Linux, Science Fiction, Anime, etc.) as excuses to get together and party with other geeks. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not speaking out against geeks getting social in hotel settings. Freakin’ go for it.

I may be naive, but I thought Linux cons were for Linux people, because they were interested in things of and relating to Linux. The same with Anime cons and SciFi cons. Thinking back, I’m not sure if this was ever the case.

MooCon, Origins, and GenCon, which were my first experience with conventions, were gaming cons. Sure, drunken debauchery happened, but it was pretty obvious everywhere that RPGs and their related offshoots were the primary focus of those present. I avoided ConVocation because I heard that it was nothing but a big orgy with a filmy pagan excuse. I’ve never looked in to going back. Then there was ConFusion. No one ever made any bones about what this con was about… hanging out with old friends from across the state and country, be nerdy, and possibly get some action. The fact that it’s run by Ann Arbor’s SciFi community has never seemed to matter.

Two years ago, at the last PenguiCon that I attended, open source was exciting. Install fests cropped up wherever anyone booted up a machine with Windows. Knoppix was passed around like candy. The Chaos Machine… okay, the Chaos Machine actually brings me to my point (finally).

This year there were no install fests that I could find. I installed OpenOffice.org on my iBook in my hotel room. Sure, people were around with their laptops, checking their gmail and their friends’ blogs, and probably their *shudder* MySpace accounts, but where were those to spread the Open Source message to ready and willing installees?

They were busy competing for the coolest room party. But on Saturday night, after word went out that the Chaos Machine would be dismantled at 9 AM, much of the younger crowd moved in on it. Where others of us had simply tweaked and re-built the machine that had already been built (I kept getting hit with marbles, damnit, I had to DO something), these people constructed whole new scaffolding, interconnected two disparate systems with a suspension bridge (supported by duct tape, mind you), fixed some broken toy motors and cobbled together a new raiser ladder out of two older, broken ones. They got it. They got it way more than I had.

So, as I delve back into the world of conventions, I have hope in a place that my grumpy old man personality is trying desperately to deny. The next generation of nerd kicks some serious ass.