Sunday is a very relaxed day at Istrakon – one can tell by the fact that everything is running a bit late and items keep appearing and disappearing from the schedule.
I somehow missed this year’s Coffee with the Organizers although I have no idea what I was doing at the time. Babysitting probably. My most vivid memories of this year’s con are of myself running after my son. He brought a toy shuttle he got at one of the Loncon3 awesome children’s workshop to Istrakon and spent most of the con attempting to fly it. There is a gallery at the Istrakon venue, pretty high up where people used to sleep when the con was very young and where now video games tournaments are held. It has practically no fence on one side – it’s designed that way and you don’t really notice it until you grow a fearless five-year-old with a propensity for swinging. He kept sneaking away to fly the shuttle from the gallery and I kept stressing out about it.
I even took him to the Game Room in an attempt to make him stop going to the gallery. Together, we managed to last about five and a half turns at a game called Takenoko a wonderful volunteer was teaching us. He asked for the sun and I could not say no.
The LARP in Croatia panel was quite interesting or so I gather, as they ran quite late and enabled me to run around in the sun outside with my kid some more. Thank you!
The Nightmares in Literature and Film panel was awesome. Author Marko Fancovic taught us a lot about H. P. Lovecraft, we established two people present in the room were not as crazy about Neil Gaiman as the rest of the world seems to be and concluded that good examples of nightmares as motives were difficult to find in literature, genre or otherwise. As device, there are plenty. As the main focus of a story, virtually none.
A few examples of dreams in books that made one feel as if one has just woken up from a nightmare there were however. The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin, was such a one for me – I found it to be so very uncomfortable a read. But then again, that would be a nightmare that was solely in the eye of the reader.
The discussion predictably veered into comics, Sandman, of course. Writer, cosplayer and LARP-er Ivana Delac* remembered the Italian comic that is quite popular in Croatia, Dylan Dog, named after the eponymous investigator of nightmares that is its hero. And film, where in addition to Freddy Krueger, Candyman was brought up.
Just as our panel got going, people started coming into the room in large numbers, unaware of the schedule change. Since the Zombie lecture enthusiasts outnumbered the Nightmare lovers, we went out into to sun for more coffee and further babysitting. After a short but delicious lunch, the drive to Zagreb was drowsy. The daylight savings time switch always has a weird influence on Istrakon Sunday.
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*Ivana Delac Facebook edit: “YOU FORGOT HELLBLAZER!!!! *noooo* “
