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livMy two main aims for this year's Eastercon were networking with the 2014 Worldcon crowd, and meeting lots of interesting people to have mind-expanding conversations with. I didn't entirely achieve these aims; I ended up spending most of the time chatting to people I already know, but I had some really good conversations and a lot of fun. It just wasn't quite as thrilling as Eastercon two years ago. I don't think that's really a reflection on the con, so much as the fact that I was already kind of tired when I arrived, and although I did manage to be sensible about getting reasonable amounts of sleep, I just didn't quite have the physical energy to match getting really excited about lots of people to talk to.
There's kind of a pattern emerging with Eastercons: I go to panels roughly about diversity-in-SF, and I get frustrated because congoing, literary SF fandom is many years behind online media fandom in thinking about these things and therefore a lot of the panel time is taken up by making really basic observations and dealing with questions that amount to "whaddya mean there's a problem with representation of [whatever minority]?!" At least part of the issue is the fact that we're even having panels about "minority characters in SF", as if we could cover the whole of science fiction and fantasy and speculative fiction and steampunk in literature and films and TV and computer games and graphic novels in an hour. On some level it feels like there would be more benefit in a few more panels, rather than the one token diversity panel for each type of diversity, and with more focused topics; I mean, the programme didn't have one single panel on "women in SFF" with everything else being assumed to be about men, for example.
Anyway, that said. The "Non-Western" panel was a particularly bad example, not so much because it tackled non-Western SF badly, but because the panellists decided to define "non-Western" so broadly as to be worse than meaningless. I was a bit annoyed by defining as "non-Western" SF written in English for the American market by American people of color, though I could sort of see the point, in that at least some of the writers mentioned were drawing on their ancestral, non USian cultures. I was pretty annoyed with SF written in continental Europe, particularly in non-English languages, as "non-Western"; clearly France and Germany are part of the West. The existence of Russian SF was briefly mentioned but nobody said anything about it. Literally, nothing, a panellist just said "there's also a long tradition of SF in Russia" and that was it. I was really really annoyed by defining SF written in English for the American market as "non-Western" when it has well-rounded female characters and a sensitive approach to rape. I'm perfectly happy that this is a desirable and unfortunately rare characteristic of SF novels, but calling something non-Western simply because it's non-normative or non-mainstream is not a compliment to non-Western cultures, it's just another Orientalism type thing where non-Western means anything that's different or exotic (even in a good way). I completely lost it when one of the panellists started enthusing about the robots in Homer, and I have to admit I heckled at that point. Homer, the father of Western literature, is non-Western now! The other problem with the panel was that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
aliettedb, and the moderator, a Filipina writer called Loenen-Ruiz, were trying to say interesting things about for example the legacy of colonialism and the trope of conquering new planets, and drawing on myths from non-European cultures but not being able to assume a mostly Anglo audience would be familiar with the stories, but the *cough* Western panellists pretty much just talked over them.
The non-white SFF panel was a lot better. They had two guys who introduced themselves as British Asians, as well as an African-American woman andaliettedb actually being allowed to speak usefully. I admit I find it much much easier to relate to British people from recent immigrant backgrounds talking about their experiences of belonging to an ethnic minority over here, than I do to Americans (of any ethnic origin) talking about race relations between Euro-Americans and African-Americans. The panel also had a bit more of a focus because it was somewhat about whitewashing covers and finding characters to relate to, so even though it rambled a bit it wasn't trying to be everything to do with race in all of SFF.
The LGBTQ* characters in SFF panel was... not necessarily a good panel but a really interesting event for other reasons. It was very well attended compared to other GSM panels I've been to at previous cons, though other people said that getting 50-60 people is not at all unusual and the organizers shouldn't have been caught out putting us in a room that was far too small for the crowd. There was something of a vibe that people were there to express an identity as part of the Queer spectrum, as much as to have a specific discussion about the extremely broad topic. And honestly the group was too big to have a very useful discussion, but we had a good go, and it was about nuanced and complex issues of identity and passing and homophobia and gender and all of that good stuff, with really only tangential references to SF works.
One of the panellists was a guy called Simon Ings, who was really interesting (as well as considerably angry I think). He said something good about the fact that it was politically essential to claim "gay" as an identity, as a way of responding to the fact that homosexuality was illegal and people were getting murdered for being thought to be gay, but now that we've addressed that urgent social problem, we're left with a situation where people are forced into a particular identity box when it might not be that important what gender their sexual partners are. Also he said that SF of the 70s and earlier was much more daring in its handling of sexuality, because nowadays it really costs nothing to have a token gay secondary character and people just aren't doing anything radical any more, it's all comfortable and assimilationist.
The other thing that was going on at this con was bits of discussion round the edges about codes of conduct. I think this is partly a response to the Readercon imbroglio last year, and partly to the recent PyCon incident. I wasn't at the panel specifically on this; from what I can gather, what happened was that in the course of the discussion, someone pointed out that the con newsletter had printed something that looks a whole lot like a rape joke. And it turned out that the Eastercon committee had absolutely no procedures for enforcing their code of conduct, which to me means that they never really had any serious expectation of actually needing to. There was somewhat of a consensus that the appropriate thing to do was probably to have a word with whoever had put a rather inappropriate joke into the newsletter and ask for an apology, which to me seems fair enough and proportionate to the original incident. But the consequence was not in fact a printed apology, but a series of increasingly annoying printed comments about how awful and repressive it is to be asked to apologize for printing in-jokes which could be interpreted as rapey in your con newsletter. I was only at the edges of all this, and as far as I can judge it wasn't a horrible awful disaster, but it just makes me eye-roll a whole lot.
My con was bracketed by a couple of basically random panels which shone as much as anything because they were well moderated. One on "Underground London" whererozk was her usual witty and incisive self and brought out the best from her fellow panellists. And one on changes in history which might have led to a different present, which was early this morning and quite refreshingly free of newly published writers who just wanted to talk about their books. And moderated by ![[twitter.com profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
effjayem, who is just astoundingly brilliant. Every time I hear her speak or read her writing I learn something that sparks off all kinds of connections in my mind. She moderated extremely well, too; one of her fellow panellists kind of wanted to drag the whole discussion into "wouldn't it be better if the evil Zionists hadn't been so evil and colonialist and oppressed the Palestinians", and Farah just shut that right down, saying intelligent and nuanced things about the relevant period of history while also moving the discussion on without making the ranty person feel put down.
There were lots of just cool ideas there. What if the Romans had more successfully conquered the region that is now Germany and given us a more Latinized northern Europe? What if the contraceptive Pill hadn't been invented, would there have been substantial progress in women's rights in the last 50 years? I kind of wanted to challenge that on the grounds that feminism has thoroughly run away with the idea that women can be agents in their own lives and achieve important things, but society seems to be a bit shaky on the concept that mothers can also be agents in their own lives, it's not a fundamental fact of nature that bearing children means devoting the rest of your life to looking after them. First of all of course without the Pill women had other ways of controlling their fertility, which the panel did in fact acknowledge. But also I think that feminist progress would have been possible without the Pill (though it is undoubtedly socially important). The other one I really liked was "what if fossil fuels had been much harder to obtain, would there have been an industrial revolution?" We speculated a bit about whether the industrial revolution could have sustained itself purely on water power rather than coal (and later oil and gas), and what that would have looked like. Whether there could have been an alternate industrial revolution in China instead.effjayem made the excellent point that a lack of access to oil might have had much more substantial effects on the chemical revolution of the late 19th and early 20th century than the industrial revolution itself.
What else? For fun I signed up as a contestant for the Weakest Link panel game. I was utterly awful, since it turned out to be entirely SF questions rather than, as I was hoping, a mix of general knowledge and more specialist SF, and I basically know nothing about films or comics or fandom history (and was a bit unlucky with some of the book SF questions I might have been able to answer). But I lasted quite a long time because, as ever in Weakest Link games, I sound confident. The game was pared down since we didn't have the technical capacity to deal with the whole building up a collective score thing; it was fun, but actually the reason I like The Weakest Link is precisely that delicate balance between playing as a team to try and maximize how much money you get, and playing competitively to be the sole winner who eventually takes the money. (I couldn't care less about Anne Robinson being sarcastic at contestants, that's never been the draw for me, I just really like the format.)
And a bunch of us went out to a very nice, very Bradford restaurant called The Three Singhs and had extremely tasty Indian food. I eat kitniyot (pulses and rice) during Passover, which meant that I was able to have a proper meal, having lived pretty much exclusively on matzah with cheese or chocolate spread all weekend. And spent Sunday evening having one of those extended delightful conversations that cons are brilliant for, with IWJ andvyvyan and fivemack and damerell and jack and some people I don't know on LJ/DW and some people I hadn't previously met at all who drifted in and out. Mostly about global climate change (which is a bit depressing really), but we were really having such a good time setting the world to rights and going off on all kinds of tangents.
There was a cute if rather small scale goth disco with Witching Hour, who apparently know most of my friends. I liked their trad goth musical style, and I enjoyed wearing the kind of completely over-the-top dress you can only get away with at cons: shiny purple strapless bodice and ginormous flouncy black skirt with lots of petticoats. But as Saturday night balls go, it wasn't much to write home about.
The Hugos shortlist announcement was honestly fairly meh. I think there was some excitement about some of the smaller categories, but I don't know enough about what's going on with those to understand why this is interesting. The best novel shortlist was pretty much a bunch of fairly mediocre things by extremely well loved in fandom writers, the nth in Lois McMaster Bujold's long Vorkosigan series, Scalzi's latest,seanan_mcguire's latest. Saladin Ahmed's Throne of the crescent moon from all I've heard is extremely generic swords-and-sorcery, though with Muslims. And Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312 which I haven't read, which is probably good because KSR is a thoroughly competent writer, but not exactly a new exciting development for contemporary SF.
Oh, and I bought a quite embarrassing number of books at the Dealers' room. John Barnes' A million open doors which I've been looking for absolutely forever, and both Ian McDonald's early Irish books (King of morning, queen of day and Sacrifice of fools), which I read years and years ago and very much want to reread, plus a new to me book of his, Hearts, hands and voices. Walter Jon Williams' Metropolitan, which he very graciously signed for me even though I'd bought it second hand. (He was GoH at the con and I didn't interact with him very much, but whenever I did he was thoroughly charming.) And an early China Miéville, King rat which was mentioned at the Underground London panel, Mira Grant's Feed which I've been meaning to pick up for a while now, Le Guin's The word for world is forest, Vinge's Marooned in Realtime, RA MacAvoy's Tea with the black dragon, and a pile of other things which I can't quite reel off right now sincejack very kindly took home my twenty or so books in his car so I wouldn't have to carry them. This, by the way, is one of the main reasons I haven't switched over to ebooks completely; a very big proportion of what I like is out of print but still in copyright, so the only way to get copies is to pick them up at second-hand bookstalls.
The other thing that generated a lot of discussion was the BSFA sociology lecture, which was given by Dr Louise Livesey who talked about the media response to the Savile affair and to sexual abuse of children more broadly. She was good, and contentious in the way the best academic stuff can be. I will talk about the discussions she provoked in a separate post I think, cos I don't want to suddenly segue from rambly con report into a topic like that.
There's kind of a pattern emerging with Eastercons: I go to panels roughly about diversity-in-SF, and I get frustrated because congoing, literary SF fandom is many years behind online media fandom in thinking about these things and therefore a lot of the panel time is taken up by making really basic observations and dealing with questions that amount to "whaddya mean there's a problem with representation of [whatever minority]?!" At least part of the issue is the fact that we're even having panels about "minority characters in SF", as if we could cover the whole of science fiction and fantasy and speculative fiction and steampunk in literature and films and TV and computer games and graphic novels in an hour. On some level it feels like there would be more benefit in a few more panels, rather than the one token diversity panel for each type of diversity, and with more focused topics; I mean, the programme didn't have one single panel on "women in SFF" with everything else being assumed to be about men, for example.
Anyway, that said. The "Non-Western" panel was a particularly bad example, not so much because it tackled non-Western SF badly, but because the panellists decided to define "non-Western" so broadly as to be worse than meaningless. I was a bit annoyed by defining as "non-Western" SF written in English for the American market by American people of color, though I could sort of see the point, in that at least some of the writers mentioned were drawing on their ancestral, non USian cultures. I was pretty annoyed with SF written in continental Europe, particularly in non-English languages, as "non-Western"; clearly France and Germany are part of the West. The existence of Russian SF was briefly mentioned but nobody said anything about it. Literally, nothing, a panellist just said "there's also a long tradition of SF in Russia" and that was it. I was really really annoyed by defining SF written in English for the American market as "non-Western" when it has well-rounded female characters and a sensitive approach to rape. I'm perfectly happy that this is a desirable and unfortunately rare characteristic of SF novels, but calling something non-Western simply because it's non-normative or non-mainstream is not a compliment to non-Western cultures, it's just another Orientalism type thing where non-Western means anything that's different or exotic (even in a good way). I completely lost it when one of the panellists started enthusing about the robots in Homer, and I have to admit I heckled at that point. Homer, the father of Western literature, is non-Western now! The other problem with the panel was that
aliettedb, and the moderator, a Filipina writer called Loenen-Ruiz, were trying to say interesting things about for example the legacy of colonialism and the trope of conquering new planets, and drawing on myths from non-European cultures but not being able to assume a mostly Anglo audience would be familiar with the stories, but the *cough* Western panellists pretty much just talked over them. The non-white SFF panel was a lot better. They had two guys who introduced themselves as British Asians, as well as an African-American woman and
aliettedb actually being allowed to speak usefully. I admit I find it much much easier to relate to British people from recent immigrant backgrounds talking about their experiences of belonging to an ethnic minority over here, than I do to Americans (of any ethnic origin) talking about race relations between Euro-Americans and African-Americans. The panel also had a bit more of a focus because it was somewhat about whitewashing covers and finding characters to relate to, so even though it rambled a bit it wasn't trying to be everything to do with race in all of SFF.The LGBTQ* characters in SFF panel was... not necessarily a good panel but a really interesting event for other reasons. It was very well attended compared to other GSM panels I've been to at previous cons, though other people said that getting 50-60 people is not at all unusual and the organizers shouldn't have been caught out putting us in a room that was far too small for the crowd. There was something of a vibe that people were there to express an identity as part of the Queer spectrum, as much as to have a specific discussion about the extremely broad topic. And honestly the group was too big to have a very useful discussion, but we had a good go, and it was about nuanced and complex issues of identity and passing and homophobia and gender and all of that good stuff, with really only tangential references to SF works.
One of the panellists was a guy called Simon Ings, who was really interesting (as well as considerably angry I think). He said something good about the fact that it was politically essential to claim "gay" as an identity, as a way of responding to the fact that homosexuality was illegal and people were getting murdered for being thought to be gay, but now that we've addressed that urgent social problem, we're left with a situation where people are forced into a particular identity box when it might not be that important what gender their sexual partners are. Also he said that SF of the 70s and earlier was much more daring in its handling of sexuality, because nowadays it really costs nothing to have a token gay secondary character and people just aren't doing anything radical any more, it's all comfortable and assimilationist.
The other thing that was going on at this con was bits of discussion round the edges about codes of conduct. I think this is partly a response to the Readercon imbroglio last year, and partly to the recent PyCon incident. I wasn't at the panel specifically on this; from what I can gather, what happened was that in the course of the discussion, someone pointed out that the con newsletter had printed something that looks a whole lot like a rape joke. And it turned out that the Eastercon committee had absolutely no procedures for enforcing their code of conduct, which to me means that they never really had any serious expectation of actually needing to. There was somewhat of a consensus that the appropriate thing to do was probably to have a word with whoever had put a rather inappropriate joke into the newsletter and ask for an apology, which to me seems fair enough and proportionate to the original incident. But the consequence was not in fact a printed apology, but a series of increasingly annoying printed comments about how awful and repressive it is to be asked to apologize for printing in-jokes which could be interpreted as rapey in your con newsletter. I was only at the edges of all this, and as far as I can judge it wasn't a horrible awful disaster, but it just makes me eye-roll a whole lot.
My con was bracketed by a couple of basically random panels which shone as much as anything because they were well moderated. One on "Underground London" where
rozk was her usual witty and incisive self and brought out the best from her fellow panellists. And one on changes in history which might have led to a different present, which was early this morning and quite refreshingly free of newly published writers who just wanted to talk about their books. And moderated by There were lots of just cool ideas there. What if the Romans had more successfully conquered the region that is now Germany and given us a more Latinized northern Europe? What if the contraceptive Pill hadn't been invented, would there have been substantial progress in women's rights in the last 50 years? I kind of wanted to challenge that on the grounds that feminism has thoroughly run away with the idea that women can be agents in their own lives and achieve important things, but society seems to be a bit shaky on the concept that mothers can also be agents in their own lives, it's not a fundamental fact of nature that bearing children means devoting the rest of your life to looking after them. First of all of course without the Pill women had other ways of controlling their fertility, which the panel did in fact acknowledge. But also I think that feminist progress would have been possible without the Pill (though it is undoubtedly socially important). The other one I really liked was "what if fossil fuels had been much harder to obtain, would there have been an industrial revolution?" We speculated a bit about whether the industrial revolution could have sustained itself purely on water power rather than coal (and later oil and gas), and what that would have looked like. Whether there could have been an alternate industrial revolution in China instead.
What else? For fun I signed up as a contestant for the Weakest Link panel game. I was utterly awful, since it turned out to be entirely SF questions rather than, as I was hoping, a mix of general knowledge and more specialist SF, and I basically know nothing about films or comics or fandom history (and was a bit unlucky with some of the book SF questions I might have been able to answer). But I lasted quite a long time because, as ever in Weakest Link games, I sound confident. The game was pared down since we didn't have the technical capacity to deal with the whole building up a collective score thing; it was fun, but actually the reason I like The Weakest Link is precisely that delicate balance between playing as a team to try and maximize how much money you get, and playing competitively to be the sole winner who eventually takes the money. (I couldn't care less about Anne Robinson being sarcastic at contestants, that's never been the draw for me, I just really like the format.)
And a bunch of us went out to a very nice, very Bradford restaurant called The Three Singhs and had extremely tasty Indian food. I eat kitniyot (pulses and rice) during Passover, which meant that I was able to have a proper meal, having lived pretty much exclusively on matzah with cheese or chocolate spread all weekend. And spent Sunday evening having one of those extended delightful conversations that cons are brilliant for, with IWJ and
vyvyan and fivemack and damerell and jack and some people I don't know on LJ/DW and some people I hadn't previously met at all who drifted in and out. Mostly about global climate change (which is a bit depressing really), but we were really having such a good time setting the world to rights and going off on all kinds of tangents. There was a cute if rather small scale goth disco with Witching Hour, who apparently know most of my friends. I liked their trad goth musical style, and I enjoyed wearing the kind of completely over-the-top dress you can only get away with at cons: shiny purple strapless bodice and ginormous flouncy black skirt with lots of petticoats. But as Saturday night balls go, it wasn't much to write home about.
The Hugos shortlist announcement was honestly fairly meh. I think there was some excitement about some of the smaller categories, but I don't know enough about what's going on with those to understand why this is interesting. The best novel shortlist was pretty much a bunch of fairly mediocre things by extremely well loved in fandom writers, the nth in Lois McMaster Bujold's long Vorkosigan series, Scalzi's latest,
seanan_mcguire's latest. Saladin Ahmed's Throne of the crescent moon from all I've heard is extremely generic swords-and-sorcery, though with Muslims. And Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312 which I haven't read, which is probably good because KSR is a thoroughly competent writer, but not exactly a new exciting development for contemporary SF. Oh, and I bought a quite embarrassing number of books at the Dealers' room. John Barnes' A million open doors which I've been looking for absolutely forever, and both Ian McDonald's early Irish books (King of morning, queen of day and Sacrifice of fools), which I read years and years ago and very much want to reread, plus a new to me book of his, Hearts, hands and voices. Walter Jon Williams' Metropolitan, which he very graciously signed for me even though I'd bought it second hand. (He was GoH at the con and I didn't interact with him very much, but whenever I did he was thoroughly charming.) And an early China Miéville, King rat which was mentioned at the Underground London panel, Mira Grant's Feed which I've been meaning to pick up for a while now, Le Guin's The word for world is forest, Vinge's Marooned in Realtime, RA MacAvoy's Tea with the black dragon, and a pile of other things which I can't quite reel off right now since
jack very kindly took home my twenty or so books in his car so I wouldn't have to carry them. This, by the way, is one of the main reasons I haven't switched over to ebooks completely; a very big proportion of what I like is out of print but still in copyright, so the only way to get copies is to pick them up at second-hand bookstalls.The other thing that generated a lot of discussion was the BSFA sociology lecture, which was given by Dr Louise Livesey who talked about the media response to the Savile affair and to sexual abuse of children more broadly. She was good, and contentious in the way the best academic stuff can be. I will talk about the discussions she provoked in a separate post I think, cos I don't want to suddenly segue from rambly con report into a topic like that.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-01 09:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-01 09:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-01 11:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-02 10:35 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-02 06:24 pm (UTC)Also it struck me to say, the diversity conversations do go achingly slowly, but remember this is a group of people who come together as a group maybe once or twice a year. Although cons pack a lot in, that still doesn't leave nearly as much time to have the discussions as being on Dreamwidth all year. (I do also agree with you about more specific panels being more useful!)
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-04 06:58 pm (UTC)The diversity conversations going slowly: I think congoers do talk throughout the year, through sites like io9 and tor.com, in the comments of big blogs like Scalzi's, Charlie Stross', Making Light etc, and on Usenet and mailing lists. But it's true, they don't have DW's really useful platform for learning about all this diversity stuff.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-04 11:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-01 09:59 pm (UTC)Have you seen any panel write-ups on the "Underground London" one? It sounds like it might be relevant to my interests.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-01 10:35 pm (UTC)Apart from
They mentioned quite a lot of fairly classic books about London:
And more recent or at least more genre-ish things:
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-01 10:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-02 10:41 am (UTC)Hawksmoor, by Peter Ackroyd
Kraken, by China Mieville
and on the less fictional side, pretty much anything by Iain Sinclair.
There's also a pretty good line of 'destroyed London' among the 'cosy catastrophe' genre of the 50s and 60s:
The Drowned World, JG Ballard
Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham
The Death of Grass, John Christopher (though I wouldn't class this one as cosy by any means)
And for out and out madness in destroying London in interesting ways, but not necessarily in particularly good movies, there is always:
28 Days/Weeks Later
Reign of Fire
Lifeforce - a guilty pleasure
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-02 01:19 pm (UTC)I've heard a few people recommending Iain Sinclair lately - I may have to take a look.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-02 11:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-02 01:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-02 09:00 am (UTC)And Quatermass & the Pit is new to you???? You have great things to look forward to!
(Actually Quatermass in general, and most of Nigel Kneale's output is great stuff and well worth watching even decades after first broadcast)
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-02 10:30 am (UTC)I am really ignorant of TV, I only know about Dr Who because the internet talks about it incessantly. With strong recs from you as well as Roz I shall certainly seek out the Quatermass stuff.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-02 10:34 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-01 11:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-02 10:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-02 02:30 pm (UTC)*hug*bounce* seeing you really soon. *bounce*
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-02 02:56 pm (UTC)So far I've read the first chapter of the Barnes and I started out by squeeing very much at the Nou Occitan setting and then it kind of broke my heart by the end of the chapter, so I haven't dared start another one yet. So that's a pretty positive first impression.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-03 07:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-03 08:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-04 05:21 pm (UTC)I definitely enjoy my SF but never considered myself enough of a fan to go to a large con, although perhaps Eastercon is a good place to start. I usually go to the Nantwich Jazz and Blues festival but am considering not going next year.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-04 07:10 pm (UTC)#easterconhashtag sounds like the whole thing is white people sitting in bars drinking beer for four days, and that's probably at least as big a thing as the actual panels. There's a ton of deliberately silly panels, which I don't always go to because a lot of the humour seems like in-jokes or else is based on TV shows I don't really follow, but there are loads. And there's usually a bit of LARP, and people dress up in costumes (these days a high proportion is steampunk, but also some more traditional cosplay and goth and vaguely reenactment-ish). Lots of silly games; I did The Weakest Link but there was also Just a Minute and Pointless and people speed-writing slash and there's quite often assassins or a robot jousting thing though not this year. And watching silly or so-bad-they're-funny films is a big strand.