Farpoint 2010

Thank goodness for the epic snow removal that's been going on here in the DC/Baltimore corridor. Things were cleared out enough to allow the 2010 Farpoint Convention to go on as scheduled! It's a small sci-fi convention in Timonium, named after the Farpoint outpost in the series premiere of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Happily, the Timonium Crowne Plaza hotel was not built on top of a giant captive space jellyfish.

The convention was able to book several recognizable guests with a lot of sci-fi credits: Lee Arenberg (Pirates of the Caribbean), Sam Witwer (BSG, Smallville), Mira Furlan (Babylon 5, Lost), and Felicia Day (The Guild, Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog). Laurel and I got to see 3 of the 4 Q&A sessions; we missed Lee Arenberg's because it was happening at the same time as Mira Furlan and Felicia Day's autograph session:


Yay! We talked WoW with Felicia Day for a couple of minutes, and she was just as sweet as could be... which is probably part of why the charity auction for lunch with her ended up going for $5000. Seriously.

I also met Mira Furlan and got her autograph, but didn't get a picture with her. After the autograph session, we wandered through the vendor area and then went to the game room for a little while before heading back to the main room to watch the costume competition and charity auction. This was one of the more astounding costume entries:


It's a reproduction of Kaylee's pink frilly dress from the "Shindig" episode of Firefly, and it was absolutely stunning. She did this without a pattern,and had to piece together the bodice by hand, along with custom-dyeing some of the fabric and hand-tying the tassels on the sleeves (she has the details available here). Just incredible.

And the evening was capped nicely by a screening of the new Star Trek movie (it is FARPOINT, after all, so they have to get some Trek in there).

All in all, a very enjoyable day!