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Jul. 29th, 2020 04:51 pmFirst day of Virtual Conzealand was fun!
I ate dinner while watching the Opening Ceremony, featuring nice pre-recorded videos from the various guests of honor.
The first panel I attended was on the possibilities of a Hugo for Best Video Game or Interactive Experience, about which I remain somewhat skeptical in spite of all my actual objections being well answered by the panelists. The award proposal is clearly well-thought out and well-designed and any obvious problems with an award like this have been thought out. And yet...
Then I hung out on discord in both chat and some casual video hangouts for a while. The discord has a virtual bar and virtual cafe with various 'tables' and a 'hallway' for popping into and video chatting. And I feel like much more than panels, that was the experience the people I talked to were searching for on the first day of Worldcon- how can I reproduce the most important part of Worldcon, seeing my friends from all over the world and meeting new people from all over the world and having conversations with them about fandom and life? I think we're still figuring it out, but I had some good conversation.
Then I went to a kaffeeklatsch with Gillian Polack, whose fiction I have not yet read. But I really liked her on a panel at Dublin Worldcon about Jewish fantasy, so I decided to join, and had a good time. She's a medievalist by training and talked a lot about wacky medieval history stuff, how to insult people in old French, and about her upcoming book pulling together medieval Jewish legend with portal fantasy and superhero mythos, which sounds awesome.
By this point it was mid-afternoon in New Zealand, but around midnight in my time zone. I popped into the DC 2021 zoom party for a few minutes and then went to sleep.
I ate dinner while watching the Opening Ceremony, featuring nice pre-recorded videos from the various guests of honor.
The first panel I attended was on the possibilities of a Hugo for Best Video Game or Interactive Experience, about which I remain somewhat skeptical in spite of all my actual objections being well answered by the panelists. The award proposal is clearly well-thought out and well-designed and any obvious problems with an award like this have been thought out. And yet...
Then I hung out on discord in both chat and some casual video hangouts for a while. The discord has a virtual bar and virtual cafe with various 'tables' and a 'hallway' for popping into and video chatting. And I feel like much more than panels, that was the experience the people I talked to were searching for on the first day of Worldcon- how can I reproduce the most important part of Worldcon, seeing my friends from all over the world and meeting new people from all over the world and having conversations with them about fandom and life? I think we're still figuring it out, but I had some good conversation.
Then I went to a kaffeeklatsch with Gillian Polack, whose fiction I have not yet read. But I really liked her on a panel at Dublin Worldcon about Jewish fantasy, so I decided to join, and had a good time. She's a medievalist by training and talked a lot about wacky medieval history stuff, how to insult people in old French, and about her upcoming book pulling together medieval Jewish legend with portal fantasy and superhero mythos, which sounds awesome.
By this point it was mid-afternoon in New Zealand, but around midnight in my time zone. I popped into the DC 2021 zoom party for a few minutes and then went to sleep.