Belatedly, and in the interests of providing feedback to the FT Powers That Be, my recap of UnCon2004:
Location: Living in West London, the Commonwealth Institute was always easy to get to. The Quaker building however is just as easy to get to and much more convenient for those coming from afar. So thumbs up there.
Facilities: the cheap tea and coffee was much appreciated as were the sturdy but cheap meals from downstairs. Although I wish the breakfast or lunch hours were longer, there's plenty of other places nearby. The sales tables were not as interesting as previous years, with the corridors were not amenable to lingering in. A dedicated sales room next time?
Theatre: Not bad, but prone to heating up as the day went on. Combined with the darkness, this made it easy to fall asleep. The sound was a bit variable around the auditorium, with it being easier to hear in some places than others. More volume next time, please? The AV problems were obvious to all. Also, when the OHP was used, the projection was often to small for those of us at the back of the room. It was a pity when there was no time for questions, because that's often the most interesting part.
Schedule: I always liked the old two-stream Uncon setup - lets you skip out of duff talks to see something else. This time instead, I just went to lunch. While I enjoyed UnCon as ever, there was a feeling of the same set of speakers showing up. More variety in the future?
Speakers:
Perhaps I becoming curmudgeonly from too many years in academia, but I'm growing intolerant of poorly presented talks. Guys, we appreciate what you're doing - but we're also paying for it. Decide what you're going to say become you get up there. Practice it. Make some decent visual aids. Powerpoint and Keynote are dead easy to use. Learn how to use Photoshop to bring some contrast to those dark, grimy pictures and resize them so we can see what's going on.
In no particular order:
Gail-Nina Anderson (bird-footed women): A good fun talk. The trick was that she wasn't actually talking about her supposed subject (the Byrnie plaque) but using that as an excuse to talk about other interesting things, which threw me off for a while.
Marina Warner (ectoplasm): it took me some time to warm to this talk, presented in such an academic manner. But by the end I thought she'd made some really good points (if the air is full of invisible but detectable forces, why not assume there are a few more?), and she was a different speaker and different type of speaker so that was good.
Ken Campbell: I've seen him ever time he's appeared at UnCon, giving almost exactly the same (albeit funny) talk. Didn't need to see him again, so I didn't bother.
Ian Simmons (skinwalkers): Soldiering bravely through a nasty cold, Ian gave what for me was the most interesting talk, a classical fortean piece. If this was in FT, I must have missed it.
Paul Deveraux (rant): A tedious haranguing of the audience that obscured a few interesting stories. Despite his repeated claim that he had facts not anecdotes, what he presented was pure anecdote. My sympathies are with the supposedly scientific establishment that is trying to crush him. I would have liked to have heard more about the telepathy machine, the Octopus.
Jan Bondeson (dauphin, kasper hauser): Jan is always intriguing and erudite. This time was no exception. I had missed the DNA testing of Kasper Hausers blood, so that was especially interesting. It's a pity the booktable ran out of copies of that book.
Andy Roberts (50s ufos): I missed the start of this talk which I regret because the last half was great fun. But maybe lose the blurry overheads and do some slides next time, please?
Lloyd Pye (starchild fundraising): A talk of two parts. The starchild material was far more interesting MONEY than I would have expected, although their DONATE research is clearly being thwarted by their approach. As said elsewhere, if they went to forensic anthropologists CASH in the right way, they'd love to examine and analyse this thing. GIVE ME YOUR DOLLARS. As it is, there were a myriad of interesting features they'd discovered but had neither the time or money to pursue.
(And if the skeletons are 900 years old, and were found in a mine, does that mean that they were in a pre-Columbian mine? Or were they supposed to have been moved there?)
His introductory piece on the "hobbits" was regretable. Stating that everyone else is wrong and you know absolutely that your theory is right but don't have the time or inclination to present your evidence ... does not constitute a persuasive argument.
Peter Lamont (Indian rope trick): What's not to like? Great stuff.
CFZ: It looks like I'm in a minority of one, but just for once, I'd like to see a CFZ talk that didn't look like someone's shambolic commentary on their holiday snaps. If I was a donor, and and this was really their annual report, I'd be angry because it doesn't display any systematic or professional approach to their work. (Go somewhere, complain about food, fail to find cryptid, complain about weather, wander off to look for second cryptid, fail to find it, complain about terrain. "But just as we were about to leave we met a guy in a bar who said he'd seen it!")
Alan Alford (singing pyramids): Another talk that was more interesting than I expected. His thesis is highly speculative, but there were lots of interesting facts in there.
Lionel Fanthorpe (templar thingies): Lionel gives a good fun talk - but this time he seemed to start in the middle of things. Although I though I knew a lot about the Templars, I had trouble following it. This was a sin of several speakers - assuming the audience had just finished cramming up on the FT back-catalogue and so knew all the background to their talks. A bit more introduction next time.
Gary Lachman (italian mystics): An interesting talk presented in a somewhat unsympathetic manner. If the slides had been synced to the talk, it would have been much better, although I hope that this wasn't the start of a future trend - simply presenting your FT articles as a talk.
Peter Brookesmith: went for lunch and a breather because his program blurb said nothing about his talk, instead ranting on about guns. Oh yeah, that's going to draw me in ...
Is that all? It seemed like there were so many talks. Looking forward to next year ...