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Oct. 14th, 2013 11:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretNYCC didn't suck this year like the last time.
This is for a few reasons but mostly because I spent all of thirty seconds on the main floor.
After NYCC I met up with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
allandaros, who's briefly in town, and I was struggling to articulate my problem with the main floor. It's that it's loud, crowded, and obnoxious, but it's more than that. It's that I experience a sense of disorientation from the lack of curation... all around me, in every direction, were objects that were being implicitly or often explicitly labelled as belonging to 'nerd culture', but without any guiding principle other than commerce, I found the disorganized leaps from subculture to subculture to be communicating a diminishing sense of coherence, so that the more time I spent on the floor, the less welcome I felt as a nerd, even though I was surrounded by things that I do legitimately appreciate as part of my experience of nerd culture.
Instead, I spent a few hours in Artist Alley, whose incredible, exuberant diversity I found manageable because it had some sorts of unifying principle. And then whenghost_lingering showed up with her friends, we ended up at the main stage for panels on Chozen (with Bobby Moynihan and Method Man), Doctor Who audio dramas (with the Sixth Doctor and the voice of the Daleks) and the X-Files (with David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson). It's not the convention as I would have experienced it on my own, I think, but we've already covered how badly that's gone in the past, so I am grateful to ghost_lingering for steering me in a different path where I had a lot more fun.
Method Man freestyling alone justified the cost of the con ticket for me, and the Duchovny/Anderson panel was unbelievably hilarious as Duchovny kept finding new ways to troll the audience and Anderson. They did a bit as Scully and Mulder attempting badly to have phone sex. Duchovny tried to make everything he said a 'shipper innuendo to rile up the fans. It was absolutely a unique experience.
I'm thinking that every other year seems a manageable level of NYCC exposure, but given this experience I'm probably not going to give up on the con altogether, as I would have if it had been as unpleasant as last time. Still, I am way more excited for Philcon.
This is for a few reasons but mostly because I spent all of thirty seconds on the main floor.
After NYCC I met up with
allandaros, who's briefly in town, and I was struggling to articulate my problem with the main floor. It's that it's loud, crowded, and obnoxious, but it's more than that. It's that I experience a sense of disorientation from the lack of curation... all around me, in every direction, were objects that were being implicitly or often explicitly labelled as belonging to 'nerd culture', but without any guiding principle other than commerce, I found the disorganized leaps from subculture to subculture to be communicating a diminishing sense of coherence, so that the more time I spent on the floor, the less welcome I felt as a nerd, even though I was surrounded by things that I do legitimately appreciate as part of my experience of nerd culture.Instead, I spent a few hours in Artist Alley, whose incredible, exuberant diversity I found manageable because it had some sorts of unifying principle. And then when
ghost_lingering showed up with her friends, we ended up at the main stage for panels on Chozen (with Bobby Moynihan and Method Man), Doctor Who audio dramas (with the Sixth Doctor and the voice of the Daleks) and the X-Files (with David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson). It's not the convention as I would have experienced it on my own, I think, but we've already covered how badly that's gone in the past, so I am grateful to ghost_lingering for steering me in a different path where I had a lot more fun.Method Man freestyling alone justified the cost of the con ticket for me, and the Duchovny/Anderson panel was unbelievably hilarious as Duchovny kept finding new ways to troll the audience and Anderson. They did a bit as Scully and Mulder attempting badly to have phone sex. Duchovny tried to make everything he said a 'shipper innuendo to rile up the fans. It was absolutely a unique experience.
I'm thinking that every other year seems a manageable level of NYCC exposure, but given this experience I'm probably not going to give up on the con altogether, as I would have if it had been as unpleasant as last time. Still, I am way more excited for Philcon.
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Date: 2013-10-14 08:29 pm (UTC)