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    Monday, June 4th, 2012
    jinian
         		12:00p
    survey meme
     ( from lots of people )

    This entry was originally posted at http://jinian.dreamwidth.org/504350.html. Respond wherever you like.
    jinian
         		10:36a
    I made socks
     For a variety of reasons, it's been a while since I've finished a knitting project. I'm glad to have started getting past my creative block.

    These are "Sunday Swing" from Knitty, modeled by [personal profile] hattifattener. Now that they are completely finished, he had some kind of fucking criticism about the size, but they look JUST FINE to me.

    [I bugged him while he was doing something more important, though, and he cooperated.]

    This entry was originally posted at http://jinian.dreamwidth.org/504181.html. Respond wherever you like.
    Sunday, June 3rd, 2012
    balzacq
         		9:36p
    bcholmes
         		11:04p
    Binders and binders as far as the eye can see!

    I think the first thing I need to do is get all of these pages scanned. There are thousands of pages, here, though.

    This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where the colours are brighter, the conversation wittier, and people will mail you a free puppy when they like what you've written.

    bcholmes
         		10:06a
    WisCon Day 2: Saturday, Part 2

    Immediately after the WisConDB panel, I headed up to the green room to catch up with my other panelists for:

    Who Owns the Spoons?
    How appropriate is it for able-bodied people to use the metaphor of "spoons"? Does anyone (trans people, people of color, etc.) own the concept of "passing"? What happens when terminology used by one minority gets adopted by a wider audience?

    M: BC Holmes, Andrea Chandler, Magenta Griffith, Criss Moody, Keith Willenson

    I confess that I was a bit nervous about the panel. We hadn't managed to get much conversation going in email beforehand, so I wasn't sure what it was that we were going to say. For my part, I was interested in the "meta" conversation -- the conversation about exploring when it's okay or not okay to cyberpunk terminology (can the street find its own use for metaphors and labels?) For my part, I certainly haven't run into conflict on the discussion of passing, so I wasn't sure what I could meaningfully say, there.

    In the end, we spent most of our time talking about the spoons metaphor, about invisible versus visible disabilities and a little bit about passing. I was okay with this, and I decided to just play the role of traffic cop in the discussion, keeping track of who wanted to talk and whatnot. There was a lively discussion and I think it turned out okay. [personal profile] jesse_the_k kicked off a good, initial question about why we need something like a spoons metaphor? What's wrong with "I'm too tired" or "I'm in too much pain"?

    Keith did an exercise where he brought out cold, very hard ice cream and gave it to the panelists. Some people got able-bodied spoons (nice, metal spoons) and the rest of us got plastic spoons. I thought it was cute (and delicious), but I think that the exercise's depth was eluding me.

    There was an interesting contrast about trans passing and passing as able-bodied. One panelist talked about trans passing as "being seen for who you really are" whereas passing as able-bodied often results in people expecting that you can do certain things that you can't. I tried to problematize this view of passing in trans communities. Passing is the closet at the other end of the rainbow, and all that.

    After that, it was off to:

    You Got Race On My Class! You Got Class On My Race!!
    Race and class are two identities that exist in tandem, one never really trumping the other. What are the ways they intersect, diverge, conflict? What happens when our internal race/class state differs from an external race/class assignment—and what factors go into forming internal/external states in the first place? This panel will look at the realities of how we exist within and negotiate race and class without privileging either concept.

    Saladin Ahmed, Eileen Gunn, Nisi Shawl, Chris Wrdnrd

    [info]lcohen made the comment that this panel lacked a moderator and that it showed. I think that she's right. The discussion bounced around a lot, and seemed to lack focus. I really liked Saladin's comments that his class background stays with him. That because he grew up as a kid in a working-class, Arab-American community with relatives involved in legally-sketchy stuff, everything he sees and reacts to is as that kid. The idea wasn't new, but he captured the essence of it so nicely.

    Someone (I don't remember who) made the comment that if you don't know what class you are, you're probably middle-class. Chris told a good anecdote about how her co-workers expect her to share a sense of humour about certain things that she doesn't think are funny. There was also a comment about how Facebook is way more class diverse than either Twitter or Google+.

    After that, some of the best contributions came from the audience. Isabel Schechter made some interesting comments which she elaborated on in the "Passing Privilege" panel later in the con.

    The last panel I caught before dinner was:

    Intersectionalism: It's Not the Oppression Olympics
    Many of us experience discrimination and oppression of many kinds, often concurrently. These create unique circumstances that can put individuals and allies in oppressed communities at odds with the goals and experiences of their comrades. Intersectionalism seeks to create awareness of how different oppressions inform each other and how we can seek broader understanding of them. Greater solidarity would be the ideal outcome, avoiding the pitfalls of factionalism and fragmentation. If time allows, discussion of SF that reflects intersectional awareness can provide useful investigations.

    M: Ian K. Hagemann, Keffy R.M. Kehrli, Beth Plutchak, Julia Rios, Vanessa Vega

    By this point, I'd been in panels pretty-much non-stop, and didn't take any notes. I remember a few items from the panel. First, this was the interesting panel in which Beth talked about daytime talk shows that hype books that discuss the "conflict" between working women and stay-at-home mothers. She suggested that these conflicts are largely manufactured. In truth, the books don't really have large sales. It's as if the media wants people to focus on rifts between communities of women, rather than, say, on rifts between rich white cis guys and anyone else.

    This is also the first panel where I heard Keffy and Julia, and I though both of them had interesting things to say. I particularly liked Julia's understated way of making her points.

    I do remember a lot of talk about "liberals" and feeling my now-usual annoyance about the way leftists use "liberal" as a synonym for "left wing" or "progressive". Gyan made the comment that "liberal" doesn't mean "open minded". There's something annoying about the whole binary view of the political spectrum. Grrr. Me, I like Phil Ochs' line: "Ten degrees to the left of centre at the best of times; ten degrees to the right of centre if it affects them personally."

    Luke McGuff has a longer review of this panel.

    After that is was off to the Trans and Genderqueer dinner.

    This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where the colours are brighter, the conversation wittier, and people will mail you a free puppy when they like what you've written.

    Saturday, June 2nd, 2012
    bcholmes
         		9:05p
    Nearworm

    "Am I a trans? Or am I a trumpet?"

    This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where the colours are brighter, the conversation wittier, and people will mail you a free puppy when they like what you've written.

    ralphmelton
         		2:58p
    Advice Requested: Arkham Horror
     My web-searching skills have not helped with this question, so I request the advice of my gamer friends: what is the most fun combination of expansions and rules for Arkham Horror?

    I picked up Arkham Horror last summer, because I'm attracted to cooperative games and I was in a mood to splurge. Since then, we've played three or four times. Each time, the game has been decent, but I've had the feeling that it could be better.

    Here are weaknesses I'd like to overcome:

    Slow play
    Our last game lasted from about 7:30pm until after 1am. That was long enough that I was getting bored by the end, though others were engaged enough to lose track of time. The best fix for this would be to get more experience, so that we can play without pondering the rules so much.

    Lack of drama
    We haven't yet had a game in which we felt much uncertainty about the outcome. Most of our games have been fairly straightforward wins, with one loss that was inevitable for a long time. This might mean that we're doing something wrong, or it might mean that we haven't played enough to get into close games. But we've gotten lots of very close games of Pandemic, and I'd like for Arkham Horror to have similar white-knuckle potential.
    One part of the issue is that once you seal a few gates in key locations and get some good equipment, the game ratchets down in difficulty. Compare this to Pandemic, where the infection rate increases as the game progresses, so even as you become more able to handle diseases, the diseases get harder to handle.

    Uneven distribution of drama
    When you do not have plenty of weaponry, it makes sense to specialize: you give most of your weaponry to one investigator to make him able to reliably kill monsters, and send him out to do the monster-killing to let others move freely. While this is good strategy, it's kind of boring for the other investigators. In our last game, Mike was just using his trust fund to buy things which he would then give to other players to use—an effective and useful tactic, but boring for him personally.
    In the same vein, it often seems that the game ends with one player setting off through the last gate to seal that gate, while the other players are mostly twiddling their thumbs and waiting to see if that expedition is successful.

    Little identification with characters
    I'm not sure whether this is really a bug or not, but I don't feel any connection to my character while I'm playing; I just think of the character as a collection of statistics, without any sense of story there.

    So, my Arkham Horror-playing friends: how have you overcome those issues? What play combinations do you find most satisfying?
    Friday, June 1st, 2012
    bcholmes
         		5:39p
    WisCon Day 2: Saturday, Part 1

    I got out of bed around 8, and I went to breakfast in the hotel restaurant. After breakfast, I arrived at one of the early morning panels, already in progress. I think the panel was about half-done by the time I got there, but I got some notes:

    The Feeding and Proper Care of Your Underclass: How a Society Maintains Poverty
    We all say that we want to abolish poverty. But we all know that our society works very hard to maintain its poverty class. Let's talk about some of the practices that are inherent to Western society that keep the poverty class poor and hopeless. And since this is WisCon, let's talk about the books/stories that examine this issue.

    M: Beth Plutchak, L J Geoffrion, Michael J. "Orange Mike" Lowrey, Karon Crow Rilling

    At the time I arrived, there was a conversation going on about moral hazard w.r.t. notions of debt relief. The argument that the panelists were parroting was the idea that providing relief to people in debt might lead to people not working. A number of months ago, I quoted a report the suggested that Canadians would rather spend twice as much money on services for the poor than it would cost to just give poor people enough money to raise them above the poverty line. I think this is related.

    Shortly after that, Beth talked about an interesting contrast between state universities and private universities. She said that when she was a first-year student, she was told by her professors to look left and then to look right and that one of the three people involved in that looking exercise wouldn't finish the program. By contrast, she said that her partner (I think?) went to a private, Ivy-league university and was told to look left and look right and that they were the people who would rule the nation.

    After that, the conversation bounced around a lot -- because I missed the beginning, I'm not sure how a lot of these points fit together, but they were all roughly tackling the nature of wealth and poverty. There were a number of book recommendations, including Gladwell's Outliers and a documentary called Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders. Someone referred to an Elizabeth Warren quotation that suggested that the average person who declares bankruptcy already owes 3 times the amount that was originally borrowed and they've already paid back the originally borrowed amount.

    One last point the I thought was interesting: Beth referenced the Women Don't Ask thing and talked about the way that the media fixated on the finding of the original study that women didn't negotiate higher salaries (which provided a neat explanation for why women earn less than men). What was almost-never reported, she said, was that the other finding was that, in the few instances when women did ask for higher salaries, they were invariably viewed as "trouble" and were slapped down for asking, in contrast to the men who were just negotiated with. As Beth pointed out, if you have no resources, you can't afford to be slapped down.

    Like I say, it was hard to get a coherent picture of the whole panel, given that I missed about half of it. After that it was on to:

    Imagining Radical Democracy
    The General Assembly has become a familiar practice since the growth of Occupy Wall Street. Anarchistic and radically democratic organizing processes have a much longer history, though, including the Zapatistas, the Spanish student movement, and movements in the history of feminism. For WisCon members, a familiar feeling might have bubbled up in watching, reading about, or participating in Occupy: wasn't this a bit like what they did on Le Guin's Anarres, or in DuChamp's Free Zones? This panel will discuss the possible growth of a kind of democracy other than our current party-based political systems, using the ways it has been prefigured and imagined in feminist science fiction to help make sense of radical histories and futures.

    M: Alexis Lothian, Timmi Duchamp, Andrea Hairston, Liz Henry

    Wow. This was my favourite panel from the entire WisCon, and I doubt that I can capture its full awesomeness. There is, however, a really good transcript of the panel. It was one of the first panels that broke from the WisCon-standard format of "first the panelists are going to talk for about forty minutes, and then we'll take questions." In the end, the panelists spoke for most of the allotted time, and I was okay with that because the panelists were awesome!

    Timmi introduced herself, referring to The Marq'ssan Cycle, and the key thing that she used the writing process to teach herself was that utopia was a process. She also talked about being disillusioned by working with NOW -- that all of the hierarchical organizing just seemed to feed a fundraising process. She also went on to say that bad experiences create low expectations and that results in political apathy. Her last point was a bit subtle: that the kind of political apathy she's describing isn't a passive thing. That there's an active form of opting out.

    Later in the panel, she recapped her experience being arrested and going to trial -- a bit of a circus of a trial in which she and 17 other people had to defend themselves (most of them declined public defenders) and how she responded to this as "an oceanic merging with the universe" and really understood through that process why people throw themselves into civil disobedience.

    Then Liz introduced herself and described talking to a variety of journalists regarding the occupy movement. The point she stressed was that these journalists were incapable of writing about a movement that wasn't hierarchical and had no leader. She argued that something like occupy can't really be reported on from the outside, and yet the media is kinda constrained in the way it can conduct journalism. She also related this to the Riot Grrl movement and their idea of killing all the rock stars: we don't need rock stars to have a revolution.

    Later, she talked about working in hackerspaces, and the sometimes difficult relationship between her hackerspace and occupy. She also referred to her article about using pattern language to talk to computer types about sexism in geek spaces. Some of this stuff went by really fast, but it's nonetheless full of awesome.

    Then Andrea provided her intro, talking about how her family was full of organizers -- union organizers, civil rights organizers, etc. -- and that she was a much more artsy person. But she said, "I could organize -- I was just slower" and that her style of organizing had always had art woven in. She also told a story about the Igbo people and how the women had this form of performance/protest called "women's war" in which they would object to something. They'd perform their anger, insult the men, demand change, threaten to leave with the babies (leaving the men to take care of other childcare), and strip down. This kind of performance/protest was well-understood in the community and it could powerfully effect change, but when the British colonized, their way of reading this behaviour was that the men didn't have their women under control. At times, this would end with the British firing upon the Igbo women. She also talked about how colonialism fundamentally stamps out these narratives, replacing them with Victorian standards of behaviour.

    She continued to talk about the narrative of anarchy as relying on metaphors and language such as chaos and disorder, but never as ecosystems or biological or diversity. Or even, for that matter, fun.

    At one point, Liz was talking about Internet Drama and Andrea (a theatre person) wanted to know what "drama" was describing. She ultimately offered "melodrama" as a replacement term. Much of her conversation was about the relationship between art/performance and activism. She said "the fascists get the trains running on time, but the trains don't go anywhere." They're just rules.

    In contrast, she says, theatre is about preparing you to be ready in the moment. She talked about the experience of things going wrong during a theatre performance and she said that audience loves it when you solve the problem. She didn't quite use these words but I think it was clear that she felt that these are great tools for anachistic activists. She finally ended with the idea that "social drama" is essential to humanity, and that that's fundamentally a slow process. And many activists seem to want fast processes. "Slow money. Slow food. I think we need to have slow anarchy -- enough change to develop new processes/ideas."

    A great, great panel, full of many, many, many nuggets of gold.

    After that, I was off to a panel about the database project, but I didn't have much to contribute:

    Open Source WisCon DB
    WisCon continues to develop and refine an open-source application to handle convention programming, registration, and administrative tasks. We're just finishing year 4 of the effort and getting ready to work on the list of tasks we have for year 5. Want to talk to the developers? Find out what's behind the code? Get involved in improving the User Interface? See if you can use it to plan your convention? Come talk to us! We need your feedback. Suggestions for new features, questions about existing ones, and offers to write documentation, test, q/a, manage(!) or join the coding team are all very welcome. You can look at our source code and see our issues (bugs & new features) list at http://code.google.com/p/wiscondb/ for a preview of under the hood. Pizza will be served.

    Piglet, Jim Hudson, Emily Jones, BC Holmes

    It was mostly a talk about code I didn't touch, so I didn't have much to say. There was some "compare and contrast" with other tools used by other cons. And we ate the weirdest flavours of pizza.

    This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where the colours are brighter, the conversation wittier, and people will mail you a free puppy when they like what you've written.

    bcholmes
         		12:48p
    I will now preen

    Remember this post?

    ( Well... )

    This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where the colours are brighter, the conversation wittier, and people will mail you a free puppy when they like what you've written.

    feorag
         		12:00p
    My tweets
    bcholmes
         		10:30a
    WisSched 2.0 -- The Planning Game

    App improvements to consider:

    • Search bar to find a particular program item
    • iPad version (make use of the iPad form factor)
    • Android version
    • Restaurant guide
    • Different colours for highlight function
    • More data in calendar API (e.g. location)
    • Integration with other data sources -- e.g.: Cloud integration so that panels I mark on the phone are similarly marked on my iPad. Alternatively, stronger integration with wisconDB, so that the things I marked as interests there are marked on the phone.
    • [personal profile] redbird reminded me:
      • Include lunch breaks, and let people add notes, like, "dining with Ursula" to keep track of meal plans
      • Add, for example, "I'm volunteering in the green room at this time"

    I'm also pondering:

    • More cosmetic improvements
    • Possibly download Momentary Taste of WisCon
    • Better automation of the "panel updates" feature
    • Downloads for other content? (imagine if we needed to publish WisCholera notices?)
    • Images/Avatars for bios

    This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where the colours are brighter, the conversation wittier, and people will mail you a free puppy when they like what you've written.

    Thursday, May 31st, 2012
    bcholmes
         		6:04p
    WisCon Day 1: Friday

    I really only caught one panel on Friday:

    "I pulled myself up by my bootstraps and all I got was this chip on my shoulder": Uplift, Downsizing, and Other Changes of Class
    In the US, everyone is expected to want to move up in class—but if we do, we are likely to find that we can't leave our former experiences behind and we might not want to. Similarly, many formerly well-off people have slipped down the class ladder in the economic downturn, but may not realize the kinds of privilege they maintain or the kinds of survival knowledge they lack. In this panel, we'll talk about the challenges we've experienced in changing class in any direction, and work to build narratives that fit our lives better than the standard ones.

    M: Alexis Lothien Lothian, Julie Hayes, Kiini Salaam, Fred Schepartz, Vanessa Vega

    Earlier in the day, I'd had lunch with Alexis and Jess and Chris, and we talked about our own class panel the next night. So my mind was full of thinky thoughts about class. This panel ended up being more of a "telling our stories" panel than a structural analysis panel. At some level I was disappointed in that, but Alexis quite rightly tsk-tsked me, reminding me that the panel description clearly situated it in people's experience.

    Nonetheless, there were some interesting ideas that came out of the panel: I think it was Julie who raised the idea of three types of capital:

    1. People/Social capital -- who you know, informal support networks, etc.
    2. Cultural capital -- specific knowledge or skills that can assist you: anything from reading to knowing which side of the plate the fork goes on
    3. Economic capital -- moolah.

    Julie also raised comments about hipster classism, talking about colleagues who'd say things like "My brother is in jail -- oh, of course I meant Yale." Julie commented that these people would act like it was obviously a bit of a joke, but she knew people who had relatives in jail, and it didn't seem funny to her.

    Kiini also raised a number of good comments, remarking that class is, in many cases a weapon (in the sense of "which drugs do people go to jail for", etc). Toward the end of the panel, she also talked about the Freedom Riders, and phenomenon of people coming from the north to help register voters of colour in the south. Her comment was about how people would take these actions to help the people who were "down" but not really work to stop the "down-ness". (I liked this comment because it reminded me of that Dom Hélder Câmara quotation I'm fond of: "When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.")

    Fred, sadly, tended to drift off-topic a bit, or would raise certain comments that didn't seem, to me, to be grounded in lived experience. Alexis was good at reining him in, though.

    I also enjoyed Alexis' comments about the cluelessness of white Marxists in the academy, and how she tends to avoid having certain types of class discussions with them. It was kinda clear to me that she didn't say that every person who is white and Marxist is clueless, but I'm not sure that that was clear to everyone in the audience :-)

    This was the first panel of the weekend where the quotation came up that "America's new favourite pasttime is judging." There was also an audience comment in which one woman mentioned how some of her class history stays with her -- that, for example, although she started out poor, and did manage to make her way into middle class, she's still incapable of throwing away leftovers. Julie made a similar comment about being obsessive about having a fully stocked pantry ([personal profile] the_siobhan has made similar statements in the past, relating it to her time as a street kid).

    There was also talk about different attitudes about social safety nets in different states. Julie talked about how, if she lost her job in Massachusetts, there were better support systems than if she lost her job in Wisconsin. [info]orangemike commented, wistfully, that Wisconsin used to have those, but that Republicans were systemically disassembling them. And this brought us around to the crucial (and yet, unsurprising) point that this stuff isn't an accident. That social safety nets, and the public education system, and all these other things are under attack because rich people have no interest in more equitable wealth distribution.

    Other comments: Diantha mentioned, from the audience, that you have to have boots to pull yourself up. Alexis also talked about the changing meaning of her accent when she moved from Scotland to the States. In the U.S., her accent marks her with "white privilege plus," giving her special cool points, whereas in Scotland... kinda not.

    A good panel; I probably undervalued it at the time, but re-reading my notes, I think a lot of interesting stuff came out of it.

    This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where the colours are brighter, the conversation wittier, and people will mail you a free puppy when they like what you've written.

    bcholmes
         		1:53p
    The Whole Famn Damily

    My god, this stuff is fascinating. I've never had such a clear account of my family history before.

    ( Clipping )

    This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where the colours are brighter, the conversation wittier, and people will mail you a free puppy when they like what you've written.

    Wednesday, May 30th, 2012
    jinian
         		11:50p
    Wiscon Monday, Madison Tuesday
     Monday:
    Slept until 10:45! Ate the little rhubarb pie with a spoon cleverly kept from the dessert salon.

    Visited art show (already cleaning up and taking away) and dealers' room, messed about generally. I was going to sit outside and read, but it started raining as soon as I got to the Capitol. The anti-Walker protesters had a difference of opinion about whether it was a good idea to go under the trees (due to rain) or a bad one (due to possible lightning) but settled under one anyway. Too wet to read even under there, so I went to Michelangelo's and knitted and finished Flora's Fury.

    Lunch at like 2:30, in a hole at Nick's. Eventually made it to the Dead Cow party, hung out with Lenore and Lise et al. talking about con organization and world travel. Felt kinda fannish for a change. Missed some people I was looking for, but scrammed when it started filling up too much and I wanted to check on some home things. Hid out in the room the rest of the night.

    Tuesday:
    Breakfast with roommates in the hotel restaurant. Crossed off my life experiences list "get drenched in soda spilled by waitstaff." Changed clothes, which were conveniently right upstairs, though inconveniently packed already.

    Surprisingly, I felt that I had seen the botanic garden enough during my last three visits. I went to the lake. I tried to read the Onion, but it was way too windy; Best Science Writing 2011 was more physically manageable.

    It was really windy.

    [Breakers are not normal lake behavior!]

    Also sunny, so eventually I was worred about burning and tired of so much wind. I walked along Gorham and found a little park.

    [Shady benches, sunny benches, birdbath, rose garden]

    Look at the caustics from the water on that three-tiered birdbath!



    Peacefully read about hormone therapy for menopause until lunchtime. (Summary: Timing and molecular composition are very important!) Then went to Casa de Lara for enchiladas and a margarita, then A Room of One's Own, which is moving down a block in July. Then gelato, then time for the airport shuttle.

    My flights went smoothly, and I wasn't randomly screened for once. The end.

    This entry was originally posted at http://jinian.dreamwidth.org/503717.html. Respond wherever you like.
    jinian
         		11:26p
    Wiscon Sunday
     Up early due to light sleeping, I went down to Heteronormativity in YA SF and ate my blueberry bread there. Good panel -- lots of YA dystopias mentioned and critiqued, the passivity of the titles right now (so many of which are past participles), Delirium mentioned as actually referring to homosexuality ("unnaturalism"), appearance policing even when there's no romantic choice possible, overt reproductive or sexual pressures.

    [I got Delirium at the library today and was surprised at how good it is. Sure, the whole reason Ordinary Girl questions her dystopia is presented as being An Outsider Boy With Golden Eyes, but there is a lot more going on than that -- some good slow reveals of just how fucked up things are, decent worldbuilding, and lots of relationships among women and girls.]

    Geek Girls and Self-Objectification panel: already complained about it. Check out http://doctorher.com/?p=1208 for an updated presentation by Courtney Stoker on the same subject as the panel's source material.

    Lunch: more delicious farmer's market bounty, hanging with roommate and her friends.

    Reproductive Justice: lots about the different things this can mean, not just the ability to decide when to be pregnant, but access for both parents, the ability not to fear your kids will be taken into foster care, and more interesting issues. Mostly not that SFnal, though we got into some works at the end. The Testament of Jessie Lamb won awards, but the premise is appalling (pregnancy kills you! your choices are to die before or after the baby is born; also you are comatose at the time!) and one of the awards is the Man Booker Prize, so enough about that forever. It did remind me of The Clockwork Rocket, which I recommended. And in When She Woke by Hilary Jordan the scarlet A is for abortion and covers your entire skin.

    Shoujo Fairy Tales: Obviously Princess Tutu was the queen of this panel, and I tweeted Håll Om Mig Nu as a panel summary. (yes, I rewatched it when I did that, taking betsy somewhat aback when she came in to very loud music partway through; and yes, I also rewatched it right now; and yes, I still got chills both times.) A few notes on Japanese fairy tales: Natsume Yuujinchou, Xxxholic, Kamichu; Susan Napier, Thomas Lamar.

    [Don't go looking for my Twitter account expecting content or anything; it's just for Twit-specific things.]

    I debated chilling in the room at that point, since I was tired, but found myself unable to chill while Eleanor Arnason was reading something. The thing that killed me dead at the Aqueduct reading, though, was Liz Henry's poem about the moon landing. Kiini Ibura Salaam's stories were very good, too. And this is where the Wiscon Chronicles explaining Moonfail were explained aloud. I bought all three books.

    Dinner with [personal profile] boxofdelights, who knows me too well, at Buraka. Wonderful as always. Quick stop at Ragstock for a shirt to go with my other silk clothing-swap skirt; I genderfloomped femme this year, which I had basically planned, if only through thinking men's clothes are too hot for dancing in.

    When we came in, the line for the dessert salon was still going in, and it was halfway through its timeslot. Why people do that I will never understand. I went away for a little while, came back and got leftovers (seedy strawberry-rhubarb crumble and perfect blackberry panna cotta), and watched the speeches just fine. Really liked Andrea Hairston's about SF and expectations, and bucking them to fulfill SF's promises in her own way.

    After that I danced all the things. Once again I fail at dancing with people, but I think I can sometimes tell when they want to now? If you grab my hands, even I will definitely clue in, though I am still crap at doing anything about it. (Sorry, S!) The "cops" -- probably hotel security -- came by to legitimize our rocking at about 2am, and we broke it up around 2:30.

    This entry was originally posted at http://jinian.dreamwidth.org/503450.html. Respond wherever you like.
    jinian
         		10:32p
    Wiscon Saturday afternoon
     Fantastical Girlhood panel! It was great! Victoria and I basically disagreed on everything -- she has seen only the gross pony episodes, while I remain appalled that Monster High has no outfits without high heels, including the orange jumpsuits in juvie -- but were able to talk fine about the traits of things we liked. Apparently there are a lot more Power Rangers shows than I was aware of and some of the Pink Rangers are stone cold awesome, which is good to know. What do I think of bronies: um, well, I have to split them into at least two groups; some are helpless before the power of the show, and I approve of them, while others are making skeevy-as-hell fanart of pony butts, and I wonder how much of that is them trying desperately to be macho somehow. Rebecca and I emitted ATLA/Korra-squee to the rafters and talked about why ensemble casts are great. Add transparent moderation and a good amount of audience stuff, and my first panel went wonderfully.

    Other panels attended:
    . Feminist Bottoms (generally good, varied, socially responsible; occasionally assumed that everyone in the room IDed the same way)
    . Meta Elements of ATLA (lots of happy awesomeness; some trouble negotiating what we mean by Asian-American vs. Asian-inspired American and whether they'd look the same)

    Dinner with [personal profile] pameladean and [personal profile] arkuat, plus [personal profile] oursin, [personal profile] boxofdelights, and someone whose online ID if any I know not. Turns out at least half of us would have preferred a smaller group, but it went fairly well, just polarized into a history/literature conversation and a science conversation. [personal profile] arkuat and I pooled our knowledge and his inspiration to reveal that in Rainbows End the scanning of the shredded library is a metaphor for shotgun-style genome sequencing, which thrilled me to no end. Wim later pointed out that there are some real-life projects where computers reconstruct shredded documents, too. Himal Chuli: delicious, with a great variety of vegetarian options.

    I love the Tiptree Auction. Ellen Klages is hilarious, and people's creative works featuring Space Babe were especially amazing this year. Furthermore, I won Flora's Fury. It still ran too long despite revised bidding rules, but was definitely better than usual.

    Talked to [personal profile] rushthatspeaks for a little bit. Then, as I have finally decided that I am not obliged to attend parties if I don't like parties, chilled for the rest of the night. I was sorry to miss the Haiku Earrings in particular, but crowded places are crowded. And loud.

    This entry was originally posted at http://jinian.dreamwidth.org/503193.html. Respond wherever you like.
    bcholmes
         		6:14p
    Notelets about WisCon (and Thereabouts)

    I'm gonna write more about panels soon, but I want to talk about various non-panel things going on.

    ( Cut. 'Cause of the long. )

    This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where the colours are brighter, the conversation wittier, and people will mail you a free puppy when they like what you've written.

    jinian
         		12:36a
    home.
     crash.

    This entry was originally posted at http://jinian.dreamwidth.org/502954.html. Respond wherever you like.
    Tuesday, May 29th, 2012
    feorag
         		12:00p
    My tweets
    • Mon, 12:52: Kenilworth, Edinburgh. No @caskmarque certificate on display due to awaiting one with new manager's name on. Beer not bad at all.
    • Mon, 12:55: Acceptable English Pale Ale. Needs more hops. — Drinking a Three Mills Pale Ale @ The Kenilworth — http://t.co/gFt36H3P
    • Mon, 14:38: The original cask lager. The weather's about to break, but this is perfect. — Drinking a Schiehallion @ Regent Bar — http://t.co/EPWbVTZz
    Monday, May 28th, 2012
    bcholmes
         		2:45p
    The 10,000-Foot Level WisCon

    This con has been everything I've been wanting it to be. It's a great change of pace for me after months of too much work; I've felt really great about the panels I've been on; and I've loved most of the panels I've attended. I've welcomed the opportunity to reconnect with people I only see every year, and I feel like there are a lot of friendships that grow deeper with each WisCon.

    Our guests this year are great: I really valued the way that Andrea Hairston discussed the relationship between theatre and radical democracy -- that's an angle on the conversation that really illuminated some lightbulbs in my head. And Debbie Notkin's whole life resonates with the kind of generosity and support that her marvelous acceptance speech could only describe the contours of.

    Wow. What a great con!

    This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where the colours are brighter, the conversation wittier, and people will mail you a free puppy when they like what you've written.

    jinian
         		12:28p
    my cutie mark is a microscope
     [honestly I am probably an earth pony though]

    Me as a pony by Alex Heberling, who draws fantasy comics as well as MORE PONIES and OUTFITS.

    This entry was originally posted at http://jinian.dreamwidth.org/502714.html. Respond wherever you like.
    icprncs
         		12:01p
    Memorial Day
     For the past several years, it was my self-assigned responsibility to post casualty numbers from the wars of the past decade on this day.

    I can't do it this year. I'm overwhelmed, by many other things but also by the cumulative effect of a decade of war and how difficult it is to live with that always near top of mind. We should not have been at war, in two wars, for a decade. We should not have lost so much and cost others so much.

    Military service is more noted here, more commemorated here, than in Seattle. There are monuments everywhere, notes and gestures of thanks and honor for veterans, and every little municipality has its own parade and service today. It adds to the awareness that's always hovering for me.

    I remember those lost in war, all wars, always.
    Sunday, May 27th, 2012
    norwescon
    [ djwudi ]
         		3:45p
    The NWC35 Volunteer Appreciation Picnic will be Aug. 4th
     Our annual Volunteer Appreciation Picnic comes this summer! Did you volunteer for Norwescon 35, either as ConCom or by stopping by Volunteers during the con? Then you're invited! Are you interested in volunteering for Norwescon 36? Well, you're invited too!

    Saturday, August 4th, 2012, Noon until 5pm, at North SeaTac Park (S 128th and 20th Avenue South, SeaTac, WA) -- Download a flyer here (390KB .pdf): http://www.norwescon.org/documents/nwc_35/NWC35_Volunteer-Picnic-Flyer.pdf

    Setup will begin around 11am, and the picnic proper will get underway about noon (or whenever the coals are ready). We will provide hamburgers, hot dogs, chicken patties, and veggie patties, plus all the fixin's. We'll have water, soft drinks, chips, and other munches. You are welcome to bring desserts and sides.

    Don't forget to bring toys and games as well! And, of course, friends and family are welcome!
    jinian
         		12:07p
    FEELINGSPOST
     Well, I feel like I failed right now. I was just on a panel about self-objectification and geek girls, which I am competent to talk about in a cultural way. Unfortunately it was taken in a direction that was All About Cosplay At Cons, which I am not so knowledgeable about, and apparently I am the only one who thinks LESS objectification OVERALL would be better than ONLY having people who aren't thin-white-pretty-abled-etc. claim their ability to feel sexy by wearing revealing stuff in public. I think that can be great! I also think it can be problematic, for cultural reasons that the panel's source material addresses but our discussion kept veering away from.

    And maybe I should be sorry, but I'm not: I do think individuals have a responsibility for the messages they're sending to others in public, regardless of how they personally feel about the outfit. (See "In Defense of Slave Leia" -- which I like a lot, I just disagree with the conclusion. Not every woman gets empowered.) The personal is political. I didn't expect to be alone in saying that at Wiscon.

    So (1) the panel went wrong for me to begin with; the mod kept asking questions based solely in cosplay and cons, so we never really got to my material. (While I am annoyed with the result, it was a legitimate interpretation of the panel; I just wish we'd talked in advance so we could have modulated based on everyone's input.)
    (2) We were missing a panelist due to injury. We got a substitute toward the end, and I really wish she'd been there all along! Up until then we had nobody who cosplays regularly, nobody familiar with the community, which it sounds like can be really great and supportive.
    (3) I undoubtedly came off more extreme than I felt because it seemed like no one was hearing the cultural stuff I was trying to convey. THERE ARE CULTURAL FORCES, PEOPLE. Sometimes you want to dress up sexy because you're told to want that. No one is immune! Kids and babies are incredibly adept at picking up language and cultural cues, and social animals like us have evolved to be excellent at conforming because conformers don't get killed by their social groups. What I actually think is: when we know what our environmental factors are, we (yay humans!) can consciously choose to conform or not, and there are powerful choices to be made on both sides.

    I wanted to talk about the Science Cheerleaders, man. And fucking Team Unicorn. Clearly cosplay is a huge topic that everyone wants to discuss, though. We didn't get to a quarter of the audience questions. Maybe I'll attend that panel next year (to hear what a jerk I was?). Hopefully I can be on one eventually that talks about the broader geek culture in a way that's more interesting to me.

    This entry was originally posted at http://jinian.dreamwidth.org/502385.html. Respond wherever you like.
    feorag
         		12:00p
    My tweets
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