Seeking Ferret

My weekend was pretty good! I went to the Heliosphere con hotel straight from work, but I was so wiped out that after kiddush and dinner in my room I just crashed and didn't actually go any con stuff.

Saturday morning I sleepily attended a lightly attended panel that was mostly Chuck Gannon monologuing, then went to the game room where I met up with someone I've been gaming with at Philcon and other cons for years and beat him at Splendor for I think the first time ever. Then I solved a cryptic crossword with Scrabble tiles and went to lunch.

After lunch I went to a super-neat panel involving a doctor, a biologist, and some spec-fic writers brainstorming what a modern doctor could do if they traveled back in time, to treat people using modern scientific knowledge and whatever was available back then. After that, back to the game room for Ticket to Ride and more Splendor, then back to my hotel room for a bit of a nap and some reading.

In the evening there was an Everything Everywhere All at Once Appreciation Circle and then, in lieu of the traditional Eye of Argon reading, some writers read their stories from a new anthology of Eye of Argon sequels. The editor's instruction to the writers was that in the spirit of the literary game, they should not fix any of their typos while writing. The result was hilarious.

Sunday morning I unfortunately had to work a few hours, but then I picked up ghost_lingering at the train station and we spent the whole afternoon shaping our ten seconds of Frankenvid timeline into a masterpiece. It was so much fun vidding with ghost_lingering and I honestly learned a lot.


The only damper on the whole thing was work. Last week was incredibly stressful and this week is going to be about as stressful. Way too much stuff is trying to happen in way too little time. I wish I could say that there's an end in sight but there probably isn't. I mean, at least we're doing some really cool projects?

In the last two and a half years, I've left the state about a half dozen times- two trips into NYC for the opera, two trips into NYC for puzzled pint, a wedding in the Hudson valley in New York, and Discon in DC. That's literally it. Oh, wait, no, I also had a day trip to Boston for Hunt logistics last fall. In the next two months I'll have three out of state trips. I'm presently planning to go to Fanworks Con and Worldcon, both in Chicago in August. And I'm planning to go up to Boston for the in-person Boswords crossword puzzle tournament in late July.


I'm not sure which I'm most excited about!

I'm finishing up my Fanworks con vid premieres- It will be at least one MCU vid and at least one Star Wars vid, but I might have a third premiere. I'm really pleased with how all three are coming together. And I've submitted my Natasha "Handlebars" to the recap show highlighting vids from the online Fanworks cons- I'm really looking forward to seeing it on a big screen.

I just got notified that I will be on program at the Worldcon, though I'm not sure what the contours of that will be. I offered, roughly speaking, in two major areas: programming about fanworks, and programming about engineering and science. I also offered to run a Sunday morning crosswording hangout. I'm not sure which area they are interested in having me participate. I'm supposed to find out in a few weeks.

And Boswords! I'm going to do terribly but it'll be the first in-person crossword tournament I'll be able to go to so that's just exciting anyway.

Heliosphere was, um, by some definition, a convention. Guest of Honor Peter David referred to it euphemistically as 'underattended'. If there were a hundred people at the con I'd be surprised. The biggest panels had about thirty attendees, and a number of panels barely had more audience than panelists. It was held at a hotel that was undergoing serious renovation, with entire wings gutted and blocked off for additional navigational challenge. My hotel room was fine, but others told me that theirs were not quite finished, with pipes sticking out and so on. And there was no printed program, just an online listing and some postings by the actual rooms, so when I showed up in the lobby another observant Jewish fan spotted me and said, "Ah, I had the front desk print out a few copies of the panel list, here's one you can use on Shabbos."

By and large, I had a good time, but it will not go high on my list of favorite conventions. I attended a couple of interesting panels. I had a good time playing Splendor and Bananagrams and solving crosswords in the game room. It was nice to see a few con friends for the first time in three years. And it was nice to be back at a regional convention, to feel like these pleasures could be in my life again. But also I spent more time in my hotel room reading than I normally do at a convention- sometimes there just wasn't anything interesting happening at the con I wanted to do. That's not the worst thing in the world, but it was a bit of a letdown.

On the other hand, the con was two miles from work and six miles from home. It was an extremely low effort investment and I got enjoyment from it, so... yay!

I signed up for Escapade at the last minute, because I could. I missed a bunch of it because of Shabbos and work, but it was still a really good time. I went to about two panels, particularly enjoying the panel on transcultural vidding modded by bonibaru and lola, and I spent a bunch of time chatting with people in discord voice/video rooms.

I saw faces I hadn't seen since the last Vividcon! It was really nice to reconnect with people, and to meet new people with shared interests, and to just be able to babble geekishly about my obsessions and let other people babble geekishly. It's unlikely I'll ever go to an in person Escapade, so it was cool to get a window into some fraction of what the con is like.

Since nothing was stopping me, I got a virtual membership to Wiscon. Last night I watched the opening concert with the Doubleclicks while chatting with people in the Discord, and it was a really joyful experience.

Sadly, though, I find myself running into the limitations of being Shomer Shabbos at virtual cons. Three of the things I would be most excited about on the program- the Vid Party (which will be replaying my 2015 Wiscon Vid Party premiere "Cassavetes") is Friday night, Benjamin Rosenbaum's presentation on Doctor Who as a wandering Jew will be tomorrow afternoon, and brainwane's Otherwise Auction will fall as sundown is happening, so I may catch the second half.

It's not like in-person cons are always such a congruous experience to observe Shabbos at, but I've developed strategies over the years that have helped a great deal in making it possible for me to both live Shabbos and live the convention experience simultaneously when I'm physically present, but I don't have any useful strategies here. The good thing is I believe at least the Doctor Who presentation will be available to stream later, but as the Doubleclicks concert last night demonstrated, there's a big difference in virtual experiences between watching a video as opposed to being part of a group watching a video, experiencing it together and interacting with it together. Then again, if Wiscon weren't virtual at all I'd never have the chance to see it at all. The other good news is that I don't need to deal with preparing kosher food ahead of time, shlepping it to my hotel room, and all the tsuris that comes with that.


I think in some surprising places, my virtual membership to Vidukon will work out better because the Friday night programming, timeshifted across the Atlantic, will fall largely before sundown.

Philcon was a pretty excellent time.

Logistics worked out this year much better than in past years. Room booked well in advance, low floor requested on account of stairs on Shabbat, and for the first time, request actually accommodated! That was a huge difference in being able to head back to the room on breaks to eat or just chill out. Also, requested a fridge, and acquired food that requires a fridge and that also made a difference in logistical success. Ate much better this year than at past cons. Oh man, the fiasco at Worldcon where they didn't have enough refrigerators and I used the tiny icebox to hold a turkey sandwich that ended up waterlogged despite being sealed in various plastic bags. :( I shared a room with my brother, plus freeradical42, teal_dear, and Jon who doesn't have an LJ/DW. It was great to hang out with all of them.


In general, the panels were not too great. One of the best panels I will not talk about because Yuletide spoilers, but the best panel of all was the First Annual Philcon Imaginary Word Spelling Bee, which was amazing. Contestants were quizzed on words from Nyarlathotep to Mxyzptlk, and I just barely missed out on winning the bee. I was a little annoyed that I had to miss the SF trivia contest for it, but it was so ridiculous and fun and I'm hoping it will continue to be a part of the con.

There was also a well done panel on Dangerous Visions, which took a broad and skeptical look at the place of the collection in SF history and ultimately I think did a very fair job of apportioning credit to Harlan where it was due without buying into the hype machine surrounding the anthology. Dangerous Visions is an amazing collection of stories, everyone agreed, and it did some things to give legitimacy to the genre as a source of thoughtful literary ideas, but it was also of a time and place where that was happening elsewhere. One panelist emphasized the role it had in bringing new female voices to peoples' attention, and another highlighted the way it helped bring sex and liberal politics into SF. But some people in the audience wondered if by partially legitimizing SF, Dangerous Visions had in some sense prolonged the ghetto and kept it from folding into the literary mainstream earlier, and this led to a nicely broad conversation about how these 'revolutionary anthologies' - not just Dangerous Visions, but also Mirrorshades and Dark Matter and others- changed the conversation around genre fic in significant ways without really fundamentally changing the nature of 'genre fiction'.

Hmm... what else was cool? Went to two performances involving the musical guest of honor, Heather Dale, which were both great. The former was the opening ceremony concert, a nice high energy filk set that highlighted Dale's beautiful vocals- the latter was the first solo show of her guitarist Ben Deschamps, which was a really fun set of filky instrumental folk, highlighted by instrumentals about zombies and dinosaurs and a poem setting of an SJ Tucker poem, recited by Tucker. I also went to a few other filk concerts that I enjoyed- the Denebian Slime Devils, Marc Grossman, and Sarah Pinsker. And there was a Sunday morning filk panel on ridiculous filk that saw a filk of Meercat Manor to the tune of Mozart's "La Ci Darem" and the most aggressive, hardcore filk I've ever heard about a dishwasher.

Saturday evening I signed up for a Ravaged Earth game- a high energy 1930s pulp rpg setting for Savage Worlds. teal_dear played a sentient robot butler, I played Captain Lightning, a superhero, and the other two players played a martial arts master and a mad scientist as we scampered around the naked city on a series of wild adventures. The setting was great fun and well matched to the system, and we all had a blast. The high water mark for me was flying down onto the hood of the cultists' automobile, punching through the windshield, and grabbing the driver by the throat. And then striking a heroic pose, to demonstrate to the American Public of This Fine Land that standing up for What Is Right is always worth it. In the game room I also played SET with an eight year old and tried out the new Guilds expansion for Dominion. I lost at Dominion, of course. I always lose at Dominion. I absolutely do not have the head for that game.

And then I suppose I should share what happened at the fanfic panel. If you were told that it wouldn't be a panel of profic writers trashing fanfic, it was exactly what you would expect the Philcon fanfic panel to be. It was a bunch of writers who had mostly gotten their start in 1970s K/S and had mostly transitioned to being profic writers. When they were sharing fandom stories from back in the day, the panel was great. When they were talking about their approach to fanfic and its relationship to canon, TPTB, profic, and tie-ins, they were so far on the other side of a cultural and to some degree generational divide from me that it wasn't even worth the time and effort to argue with them.

They believed that the reason they could write Trekfic was because Paramount let them/turned a blind eye, and they believed that when Paramount started recruiting fic writers to write tie-in novels, that amounted to Paramount finally paying attention to the fandom. I don't think they could have possibly understood the relationship I have with TPTB in my fandoms, that I don't care whether or not they want me to be writing the fic, that I often write fic that would be read as deliberately confrontational toward TPTB, except that I don't give a shit whether they read it because I'm writing in conversation with other fans, not in conversation with the creators. They can't comprehend how I approach contemporary copyright law as a thing to ignore when one is not politically inspired and to campaign against when one is.

So on the one hand I was profoundly relieved that it wasn't a wankfest about how fanfiction sucks compared to profic, but the cultural gap was significant enough that there was not much room for my fanfictional experience in the room.

The most fascinating bit of the conversation for me was when they all discussed the moment when they had moved from writing fanfiction that adhered as closely to canon as possible- deleted scenes, episode tags, casefic- to writing something that deviated. These were interesting stories- how one of them had created a fanzine represented as if it were an in-universe magazine, how one of them had introduced an OFC whose dialogue and approach to the world didn't match classic Trek dialogue- but what struck me was that that's how I was writing fanfic from my very first story. I never had that moment because I never had a phase of only writing episode tags and casefic and deleted scenes. Later in the con I was talking to teal_dear about how the transformative/affirmative fandom breakdown is interesting and somewhat descriptively powerful, but not always clean- the panelists seemed to me to be talking about making a transition between a sort of affirmational fanfiction and transformational fanfiction, as the hypothetical stepping stone toward origfic.

In any case, there were lots of other neat things, and I had a great time. Yay Philcon.

NYCC 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 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.