(no subject)

Last week was probably the worst work week of my professional life. It started with a rush to finish and ship a system that was on a wholly unreasonable deadline, so that I've been working late nights and weekends for the past couple weeks. Then after we shipped it, capped by a day I worked 8am to midnight (and as I told one of my Googler friends, when we work sixteen hour days, it's not sitting at a computer, it's working with power tools and it is not just unfun, it is potentially dangerous). Then there was the anxiety of overseeing the transfer from us to the crating company and then to the freight forwarder... and then on Friday the news that the system had been damaged in shipping after all that. The stress last week was crushing.

Then there was Philcon. I'm not sure it's the Philcon I did the coolest things at, but because of the emotional contrast and because of my desperate need, I think it was the Philcon I enjoyed the most.

It began, for the second year in a row, with a minyan for Kabbalat Shabbat. And, for the second year in a row, with one of the more traditional men saying "We have only seven people here" when we had eleven people, only four were women. And then, for the second year in a row, everyone else objected and pointed out that regardless of your feelings about ritual egalitarianism, it was not acceptable to suggest that women weren't people. Sigh. But we did end up with ten men and about five women, and everything else about the service was lovely and as I think I said last year, it's really meaningful to me that we can merge the Shabbat communal experience with the Philcon fannish communal experience. This year we added a Shacharit service and Havdalah. It feels like we are building a stronger sense of Jewish achdut at Philcon and that makes me so happy.

After Friday prayers I made kiddush and ate dinner with my roommates. I then ran a D&D game in the gaming suite- teal_deer's new Mesoamerican zombie velociraptor adventure for 5E. I had seven players in total, despite my worry that nobody would show up, including a total D&D newbie (who told me later the game had been her favorite part of the con), and it was noisy and fun and there was heroism and epicness and velociraptor feathers galore.

Then I went briefly to the filk room, listened to silly pun songs and "Dawson's Christian", and then slept.

In the morning, after Shacharit there was the panel on Jewish characters in genre fiction. (Technically cross-scheduled against Shacharit. Sigh. Everyone at the prayer service went to the panel, and we all got there fifteen minutes late.) The panel went well: even though I've been to several similar panels before and there was some repetition, I did get a few book recommendations, and we got to talk about some of the new stuff just out this year, like Lavie Tidhar's Jews vs. Zombies and Jews vs. Aliens anthologies, and Matthew Kressel's King of Shards.

Then I went to one of Musical GoH Murder Ballads's concerts, highlighted by a funny song about Han Solo trying to pick up a girl in a bar called "Kessel Run" and a lovely downtempo cover of Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off"- Taylor Leisurely, someone quipped. Then uh... I don't remember what I did next. I guess it was: Lunch, a little reading, a little hanging out with friends, a little gaming, a panel on Frankenstein's lessons for biologists in the 21st century about taking responsiblity for the consequences of research, then dinner, more hanging out with friends, then the panel on fanwork recs and the panel on Yuletide.

These, I should say first, were a disappointment as panels. There were five or six people in the room for the fanwork recs panel and three in the room for the Yuletide panel. Scheduled at 10PM and 11PM on Saturday night of the con, it's hard to see how we could have expected any other outcome- everyone was at parties. For the first hour, we passed a laptop around and shared fanvid recs, fan art recs, and fanfic recs. Someone recced bironic's "Starships"- I made sure we also screened jetpack_monkey's amazing monochromatic remix. I also inserted counteragent's "Still Alive" into the conversation about how complicated and frustrating Supernatural fandom is.

For the second hour, I explained a little about how Yuletide works and then we went back to talking fanwork recs. So it was fun but it wasn't what I'd wanted it to be.

On the other hand, the existence of the panels marks progress, and the attendance of even a few people showed that there are people at Philcon who care about this stuff enough to attend when everyone else is at parties. And most importantly to me, because the programming director was at both panels, I got to spend two and a half hours lobbying her about why we need to do this and how we can do this while navigating the convoluted fannish politics of Philcon. And I was also introduced to the other person who's been campaigning the programming director to add more fic programming, about which I say, in the words of Cordelia Naismith, "Ah. Allies. Good."

Too, the following afternoon had a better-attended panel called "Fans, Fiction, and the Formative Years" where the panelists, mostly fic-writers, talked about their initial exposure to fandom both as consumers of media and later as fan-creators. So... it felt like progress, but slow progress, toward creating space at Philcon where fan creators don't feel like we have to hide that part of our fannishness. Exciting!

Sunday had a messy but satisfyingly preaching-to-the-choir panel on the Hugo mess, a messy and unsatisfyingly preaching-to-the-choir panel on ending snobbery in fandom that was mostly about ending the wrong kind of snobbery in fandom rather than about ending all snobbery in fandom, some more board gaming, a good lunch, and a lot of goodbyes. All told, a really enjoyable weekend when I needed it.