First up I have discovered to my embarrassment that I have been mis-pronouncing the name of the convention for ages. The final ‘s’ of Imaginales is silent. I have been spending too much time with Latino people, I think, and my mind processes foreign languages as if they are Spanish.

Today has been amazing. Around lunch time the kids arrived. I guess school was out for the week. Admission to the con is free, so there are huge numbers of young people here. As with Finncon it will be hard to estimate how many, but certainly many hundreds. I suspect it will be several thousand by the end of the weekend.

Hal Duncan has arrived. As you may have seen him tweet, he was only on his second beer of the day when a 10-foot tall blue-skinned woman marched into the convention. It is true, I have video.

On the downside there have been a few schedule mistakes, one of which led to poor Bruce missing a reading this afternoon and a bunch of us having a small panic about where he was. These issues are, of course, fixable with good program ops people and sufficient staff. But if you have so many young people attending then finding new staff should be easy.

I have a photo of the own-label wine here. They have both red and white, only 9 Euros a bottle.

Tomorrow evening I will be live-blogging the awards ceremony over at SF Awards Watch. Huge thanks are due to Lionel Davoust who not only helped to arrange this with the tech crew, but also volunteered to help host the event. His English is excellent and of course he’ll be able to able to respond to any French people who chance along.