Awesome con is awesome. 

Nah, not going to leave you with just that. 

My family and I went to a concert to start off our weekend at the convention, and the second singer was Tim Griffin, a singer-songwriter and teacher who is a favorite of ours. He writes educational music, mostly, but it's actually a lot of fun to listen to or sing. Go check him out, he has a website that should be first on the list of results if you search 'tim griffin filk' and runs a nonprofit organisation where he goes to schools and does workshops with the students. You can listen to his music on the website, or download it for free. 

Anyways, the way a filk concert generally works is that the singer(s) is(are) up on stage singing, but the audience is often encouraged to join in or add stuff in between songs. So after one particular song, I stood up, turned so that I was facing most of the audience, and stated "I got really frustrated in science class last year because we did a unit on the periodic table and stuff, and it barely covered more than what this song had already taught me." Then I turned back towards the stage and added, "So, good job fitting in a lot of information." These aren't exact quotes of what I said, really not at all, but the meaning is the same, and it is coming from me, so it counts. 

After that segment of the concert, they called up all of the special guests this year for a sing-along segment, and the concert became more of a directed filk circle, with the special guests starting a song and the rest of the audience joining in for whatever parts they knew. For me, that was generally just the chorus, but then they brought out a classic kids filk song, Never Set The Cat On Fire, which is a set of instructions for a space child, written by Frank Hayes. I have that one practically memorized, and was able to join in for the entire song. I absolutely love how, in the final verse, everyone will continue singing as normal while the song tells the child to not start an interstellar war or cause trillions of people to get hurt, and then slow slightly and sing in a very grim manner the threat of no dessert.  

The point of filk music is not to have clearly defined, precise harmonies. If you want that, you're probably looking for barbershop music, which I've heard described as 'intended to be precise so that the four part harmony causes you to imagine a fifth part.' Filk music generally has only one or two parts created by the writer, and then when multiple people sing together each will make up their own harmonies. The beauty of it is that dissonances rarely happen. When I first hear a new song, half the time I can predict what the next note will sound like or what the next word will be, and utilizing this almost instinctive knowledge of the patterns behind music allows filkers to keep their parts from clashing even as they create them. 

A weird fact about me: I absolutely cannot get to sleep on a hotel bed. So what I'll do is gather all the chairs and benches and stuff in the room, and arrange them right next to the window, and sleep on that. If there isn't enough furniture to make something I can sleep on, I'll sleep on the floor, and if there is a closet big enough for me to lay down in comfortably, I'll claim it as mine. A couple years ago, I went on a trip to Disneyland with most of my school's music department, and I wound up having to ask my friends to move their bags off of the floor of the closet.