(no subject)

[seekingferret]

Philcon was this weekend. I attended with my brother, and Jon showed up on Saturday.

I had a great time, but I always feel like I might enjoy these cons more if I weren't so omnivorously geeky. I feel obligated to see everything, when the reality is I would have more fun if I spent more time talking to people and less time running from thing to thing. If I were just an anime fan, I could just stick to the single-room anime track for the whole weekend and not feel like I was missing anything. But this con made me choose between sitting through Marvel/DC wank and D&D Edition wank, and... seriously, how could I reasonably choose and not feel that I was missing something? :P

I was probably happiest at the con on Saturday afternoon/evening, when I gave up on going to panels and just started hanging out in the gaming suite. I learned two new games that were fun, Tsuro and Smashup. Tsuro is a really elegant, casual puzzle game. Smashup is a card game where pirates, ninjas, fairies, wizards, robots, and aliens compete. It's gloriously ridiculous. And then after that we played a Dread scenario. Dread is a horror rpg that uses a Jenga tower as its action resolution mechanism. If the tower falls while you're pulling a tile, you die. The game went long, because all rpgs ever run long, and it was ridiculous and scary and funny in good measures, and I had a blast.

My other frustration with SF cons is starting to be the kinds of geekishness you can't talk about. It is almost spooky the way any reference to fanfiction is missing from the conversation, when you just know that a third of the con has some involvement in some way with fanfiction. But because of MZB-inspired paranoia, it is a mostly unspoken etiquette faux pas to mention fanfiction around published authors, since it might cause them to be eaten by brainworms. I had to swallow my tongue a few times in panels since I kept forgetting about this rule. There was a Space Westerns panel, which was actually really good, since it talked about Firefly a lot less than I'd expected and had a good, broad perspective on the idea of space westerns and what western tropes translate well to SF, but we made it through without discussing fanfic Space Western AUs, which bothered me a little. I guess I should just start going to fanfic-oriented cons, except those mostly seem to be slash fandom cons, and I am not exactly a slasher even though I have written slash. And I don't want to go to slash cons, I want to go to general geeky cons where I can bounce from the filk room to the lit SF room to the astronomy room to the anime room to the game room, and be able to talk about fanfiction without feeling like a criminal. Eh...

Comments

[ambyr]

I have similar problems with the invisible fanfic elephant in the middle of the room at general SF cons. It doesn't bother me on panels, but it can make casual conversation awkward, because--everyone is talking about How They Are Involved in Fandom, the cons they're organizing and the 'zines they read and the message boards and Usenet groups they discuss on, and...my involvement in fandom is almost exclusively on the fanfic side. So I end up mumbling a lot.

I had a lot of fun at the one slash con I went to, even though I'm pretty much a gen person. You might try checking one out? But it would be nice if there were more general fanfic conventions where I didn't have to qualify my enjoyment with an "even though" statement.

[seekingferret]

Yes, it forces you to self-edit yourself in weird ways to make sure you haven't even hinted that you write fanfic.

Maybe I will try a slash con someday. Which was the one you went to?

I think the other reason I'd hesitate to go to a slash con is fear that I'd be the only guy. I suppose this is the experience of women at many geeky events, so the irony is palpable, but... I wouldn't want to feel like I was intruding.

[ambyr]

I went to Con.txt, the every-other-year one that's local to me. You would not have been the only guy there, but I'd be lying to say you wouldn't be outnumbered by at least 20:1. And of the guys, I got the impression about half were there because their female partner was. (Oh, the irony in that statement, as you note!) Probably the highest concentration of guys I saw in one place at the con was in the boardgame room that was running opposite the dance party opening night, and by "highest concentration" I mean like three. I did not feel like they were intruding (hey, I like having people to play games with), but I can understand why you might feel that way.

[bookherd]

Tsuro! Tsuro became one of my favorite party games when I played it at a game night a couple years ago. It's both adult-friendly and kid-friendly, which makes it a go-to when I visit my family. And so pretty!

Oddly, the most frequently kid-requested board game at my parents' house last time I visited was Careers, an old (and more interesting) variant on Life. It's a great game, but my parents' edition is from the 1950s and is horribly sexist. Like there's a square that tells you to roll to find out what percentage of your paycheck your wife just spent on a shopping spree. Apparently there are more recent editions. I hope they fixed that.

[seekingferret]

Yeah, Tsuro was a very good con game, but I can imagine it's a great party game. And yes, kid and adult friendly- our age range was about 10-40 and it went great. Also, effectively variable from 2-8 players is rare and awesome.

[teal_deer]

I feel like Arisia has a much stronger fanfiction contingent, and it's not so much the cons themselves as that the younger crowd tends to be more open about fanfic. Hell, I think Arisia had a whole fanfic panel going on :\a