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I'd tell you more about myself, but that's what my profile -- and the rest of my journal -- are for.
A few of you here may be familiar with a pair of evil filksters named Jeff and Maya Bohnhoff. For those of you who aren't, the two of them are responsible for some really hilarious songs, like a song about Iron Chef called "The Night Kaga Brought the Lutefisk Down" to the tune of "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," a song about a crossdresser in the King's service called "Knights in White Satin," and a song that started out as "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" by Tears for Fears but was all about Pinky and the Brain by the time they were done with it.
(Their two filk CDs are Retro Rocket Science and Aliens Ate My Homework. They have other CDs that, while very good, aren't filk.)
At a guess, only a few of you have heard them... and of those few, even less are going to start randomly entertaining questions like "what if the Bohnhoffs had gone into progressive rock instead of filk?" If you are one of those two or three, a prog-rock Bohnhoff duo would sound a lot like Illumion.
And if you're not, Illumion is still good. A little tame for my usual listening habits, but still, quite good.
I took a lot of notes in my smartphone at BayCon, partly because I knew that I'd be drunk at the parties and thus unlikely to remember everything. Well, that's not entirely true. Let's face it, I was surrounded by geeks, and neat ideas were flying all over the place: good quotes, recommended books, tasty foods and drinks I haven't tried yet, the list goes on and on.
I've still got the codebreakers working on parts of my notes -- between sleep deprivation and intoxication, some of my notes are a little sloppy. Still, I captured a lot more than I would have without these notes. A few samples below:
Notes on Music:
I ended up chatting with about two or three people on music quite a bit. My notes here are a little fragmentary, but they're enough to summon more complete memories, or if not, I can punch them into Wikipedia and learn more. For instance, one of my notes was "helicopter quartet." This led me to the Helikopter-Streichquartett by Stockhausen, and then, "oh, yeah! That gent told me a lot about Stockhausen! I'm going to have to look that up!"
Some of the talk got very detailed, even arcane. You know how it's possible for engineers to completely geek out with each other, getting so technical that everyone who isn't also an engineer is completely left behind? Music theory can be just as bad. There was one chat with me, jon_decles, and one other gent whose name I don't remember, but I ended up chatting about Indian Music Theory with him last year -- and the three of us ended up driving all the non-music geeks off without realizing it.
Notes on Alcohol:
Noble fir vodka: I have no idea who came up with this, nor what possessed bovil to try it, but I'm very glad he tried it, and was then eager to share it.
Ginger liqueur (Koval, I think): Needed more ginger, but trust me to say that.
Caol Ila: this is one of the really smoky whiskeys -- it's a slightly lighter Talisker, for lack of a better way to describe it.
Ardbeg: For a moment, this one tastes really smooth and gentle. Then, it whacks you with a hammer and yells in your ear: "Ha ha, I'm smokier than Laphroaig!" Wonderful, wonderful stuff.
Glenmorangie: I tried a bunch of these at the Whiskey Brothers party. This was an education! All Glenmorangie is made by a single process, but aged differently -- a batch that's aged in barrels that were originally used for sherry is going to taste different from a batch aged in port barrels, and I took this as my chance to find out how. (They're all good, if way too mild for my tastes.)
Glen Kinchie: Very gentle. It's a little like Dalmore in how gentle it is, but it smells wonderful.
Vanilla Whiskey: apparently really damned popular. I shared this with several people, most of who really liked it. If I bring a hip-flask next year, this is what's going in it.
Notes on Food:
Edible flowers. Have never really gotten into them, but now I should. Violets are apparently criminally underrated.
Macapuno is a variety of fucked-up mutant coconut. Where most normal coconuts have crunchy meat and water inside, a macapuno has no water, and its meat is gelatinous. I've never heard of it, but thanks to caprine, I now need to find some, and then find a use for it. Apparently they're wicked good in ice cream. Terrific! I have a couple of friends with ice cream makers.
If farmount offers you chocolate... say yes, you idiot!
If elaryn offers you homemade toffee... say yes, you idiot!
Aw, come on. Don't look at me like that. A friend bought me a T-shirt that says "and then Buffy staked Edward. The End," which I'd brought to the convention. (Thank you, diziara. I got no end of compliments on this shirt.) Because I had this T-shirt, I was pretty much obligated to attend this panel in it. So, there I went.
It was actually a hell of a lot of fun. There were tweens there, so certain more raunchy instances of batshit fandom didn't get mentioned, like the nutter who turned an Edward doll into a vibrator and tried to get it autographed. On the other hand, F-bombs did get dropped, and one of the panelists mentioned that she was a member of ontd_twatlight. (Somewhere, there's a picture of her in her official Twilight shirt and me in my Buffy shirt, standing side by side, both very much amused. Must look for that later -- I'm sure it'll be on the net soon, if it isn't already.)
Anyway, this panel was a lot of fun. It included a lot of hardcore fans who, nevertheless, could see why other people hated it, and didn't feel compelled to physically attack the hatersstand up for their all-time favorite book. For that matter, while I'm sure there were a few people who'd not only love to see SMeyer die in a fire but would provide the gasoline, no one actually said so. Granted, the extent to which Mormon Theology colored her books did come up just a little, and I'm sure that stoney321's review got a bunch more hits over the weekend. And of course, the sexual politics came up...
Anyway.
I'm still not likely to read the books any time soon, but it was good to meet fans who weren't apeshit crazy. Helps keep things in perspective, especially since I'm in a comm on JournalFen devoted entirely to the crazy in Twatlight fandom.
Having fun here, and seeing friends is always great, but I'm quite sleep-deprived at this point. Seriously loopy. Tried to take a nap. Didn't work so well.
Con is great. Hotel is not. Had one meal in the hotel on Friday -- the waitress took my friend's order, then walked away before I got a chance to order, and then it took three to five minutes to flag her down. I'm accustomed to hotel food being overpriced, but that was just plain rude. And I swear, I'm going to drive a fucking sledgehammer through the toilet in my room...
Sorry. Minor complaints. Just getting them off my chest, so I can get back to enjoying the con. One more attempt at a nap...
My first reaction to these suggestions is that they are all obvious, common-sense kind of things. On the other hand, we all know how common "common" sense is, don't we?
I've only attended two different conventions: BasCon and BayCon. Of the two, I'd have to say that BasCon was more civilized, but I should add that this isn't a fair comparison since BasCon is less than a quarter the size of BayCon, and its attendees are about 99% women and 100% legal adults. (The one time I went with btralmnd, I think it had a few hundred women, and I was one of three men.)
BayCon is generally a pretty civilized con -- if it weren't, I wouldn't have been going every year for the last five or ten years, and I wouldn't be planning to go this year. And still, it ain't perfect. I occasionally pop into the Gaming Room, because an old friend of mine works that room, but if he's not around at the time, I don't stay very long because a lot of other people there aren't clear on the concept of personal hygiene. And as for touching other people uninvited... that happens a lot. Two years ago, someone created a system of colored dots that people could wear to discourage unwanted touching -- at the time, I thought it worked, but would later discover that it not only didn't work as well as I'd thought, but people were getting sneered at for having the temerity to wear red dots.
And the thing is, there are conventions much less civilized than BayCon. I've heard horror stories from friends about how shocking it is that a black person might actually like anime enough to go to an Anime Convention. I have friends who try to drag me to Gaming Conventions, and I wonder if the whole damn convention smells like that one little pocket of BayCon that I generally avoid. I've heard talk, from people I trust (poetic exaggeration aside), about how at Comic Conventions, ten individual Cat Piss Men unite like Voltron to form something truly unspeakable. And while BayCon has its share of individual ass-grabbers, as far as I know it's never seen group ass-haberdashery like the Open Source Boob Project.
I'm not saying that everyone at a convention is uncivilized like that. If they were, I'd have long since given up going to cons. I'd say that 99% of the people I've met at cons have varied from "inoffensive" to "a hell of a lot of fun." Let's say that only 1% of the people at a given convention are thoughtless assholes.
At a convention of, say, three thousand people, that's still thirty thoughtless assholes. Maybe not enough to ruin a convention, but more than enough to leave a hell of a bad impression. I can definitely understand why this person might want to punch up a bunch of rules we all ought to know, and keep it rolled up in his pocket, ready to be used to whack thoughtless assholes on the nose and yell "NO!"
As discovered here, it's TwiCon, a convention aimed at fans of Twatlight. In this case, it's fitting that the subject matter of Twatlight is vampires, because this convention seems to have the single goal of bleeding people dry, as quickly and efficiently as possible.
For instance, registration is $255 per person. By comparison, registration for BayCon is currently $60, though it will go up in mid-March. If you want to sell stuff in the vendor room at TwiCon, that's $750. By comparison, I asked one of the gents over at Other Change of Hobbit what they paid for vendor space at BayCon, and he said it was a couple hundred -- and while he's allowed to sell sci-fi at a science fiction convention, vendors at TwiCon aren't allowed to sell anything Twilight related, because of intellectual property issues.
(After the gent at Other Change of Hobbit gave me this information, I explained why I was asking, and told him about TwiCon. He was still sputtering incoherently when I left.)
It gets better. Keeping in mind that most of Twatlight's fan base is under eighteen, they have special rules -- mostly, minors have to be attended by parents or chaperones who must attend all functions with them, who must also pay $255 to get in the door. Oh, and each chaperone can only attend three minors -- more minors, more chaperones, and more registration fees, even if they're all in the same group.
(Actually, I can understand the reasoning for this. The organizers are probably worried that a great big mob of unsupervised underage girls is a ticking bomb waiting to go off. Now picture adding to that mix one or more pretty boys with $255, no scruples, and a few bottles of body glitter, and you have a PR nightmare in the making, along with no end of liability issues.)
Obviously, I'm appalled that this convention exists... but I find it amusing in a few respects. Mostly, because given our current economic climate, I half-expect TwiCon to fall on its face.
Well, not all of fandom. Most of fandom is just like you and me, with no major crippling social defects. Then, there are the ones with no social skills and no concept of personal hygiene. Then, there are the real crazies. But let's face it, even the more sane elements of fandom include elements that the people with the fans aren't really meant to know.¹ And of course, the fans insist on showing them, because the looks on their faces are always worth it.
In this video, Christopher Judge (Teal'c, Stargate SG-1) is on the panel at DragonCon. Someone brings up furries, and someone else brings up slash. Now, Judge seems to know what slash it, but he's completely naive about furries. Or, well, he was.
In this video, Orlando Bloom learns on the Graham Norton show that there are over a million sites devoted to him. If that wasn't scary enough, he also learns that a lot of his fans have really overactive imaginations and pick fights with each other on message boards.
In this video, David Ten-inch² Tennant (The Doctor, Doctor Who) is on the Friday Night Project. The two hosts inform him that there are, indeed, Doctor Who porn sites. They even read bits to him. One scene with him and Martha Jones, another scene with him and Captain Jack.
Well, sometimes they're not meant to know. I'm told that two oft-slashed members of DS9 have been known to get drunk together, read slash out loud, and laugh their asses off.
Billie Piper apparently gave David this nickname. I can't imagine why.
A while back, I went to a science fiction convention, and had a lot of fun. In addition to having a lot of fun, though, I noticed that a distinct mood. Men were on their best behavior, with respect to avoiding not only harassment, but the appearance of harassment. Women, in general, seemed to feel safer... or if not safer, at least more able to voice complaints if the need came up.
Granted, I didn't believe that this was a renaissance or anything. This convention was a bit over a month after the Open Source Boob Project exploded all over the internet, and the fireworks were still fresh in our minds. I'm sure that some of the guys were not so much enlightened, but more conscious of the risk of being the next barbequed Ferrett.
Well, it seems that barbequed Ferrett has a very short shelf-life, because the whole damned subject is raising its ugly head again.
One of the neat things about conventions is dressing up. Sometimes, this is all the fun of Halloween, except that grown-ups can do it too, and no one looks at us funny. And a lot of it is done really damned well, by people who choose their costumes with care. I've enjoyed dressing up as the Dread Pirate Roberts, a few more of you have played much better pirates than me, I've seen one of you play a damned fine Spark, and I've read one of you planning to play what will surely be an excellent Lucrezia Mongfish. Sure, the mundanes may accuse us of lacking lives, but it's fun.
Unfortunately, it's a Law of Nature: at every convention with costumes, there are a few walking eyesores. The Human Turd is easily the most infamous, with Man-Faye a close second, though there are plenty of others. Women with multiple skin conditions in skimpy chain mail. Ninety-pound men dressing as Conan, the Barbarian. (This is one reason I won't dress up as Carrot Ironfoundersson any time soon -- I'd need at least another thirty pounds of muscle mass and a buzzcut to do it properly.) Guys in kilts with nothing on above the waist except for pasties with tassels. And the cautionary tale currently making the rounds on the internet: this guy.
I'd like to point out one of those things that every guy needs to know about spandex: you need padding in the crotch. I don't care if you're indignantly insisting that you don't. I don't care if you have an army of past lovers and two medical professionals ready to testify that your junk is three standard deviations above average in size. I don't care if you're John fucking Holmes. The point of padding in tights isn't to put up a false front -- it's to keep people from being able to tell at a glance if your parents were Jewish, and to keep you from getting arrested for indecent exposure.
Okay, with that little technical observation out of the way... what the hell is this guy supposed to be? To quote a friend, "did The Tick let himself go, then discover Slipknot?" What's with the short shirt on top of the spandex? Why is the smell of stale cheetos wafting from my screen when he's on it? And where can I pick up some goggles that don't do nothing?
A few of you may have noticed I just friended you. Maybe I met you, however briefly, and thought you interesting. Maybe I got a chance to talk with you, and thought you interesting. Maybe we have friends in common. Knowing me, probably a little of each. In any case, if you're the sort of person to say to yourself, "who's this guy who just friended me," and then to look over their journal to get a feel for them, this paragraph is for you. Hiya!
(If it helps you place me, I have long red hair, and you may have seen me as the Dread Pirate Roberts.)
Caffeine, my sweet bitch-muse...
I sorta fell off the wagon, with respect to my long-dormant Mountain Dew habit. Well, no. "Fell off the wagon" isn't the right expression -- a better description might be "took an olympic caliber high-dive off the wagon." Or swan-dive, I'm not sure which. After drinking an average of a liter and a half per day at the convention, I'm weaning myself off of it again. Down to a can a day, but man, I'm feeling it.
Ugh. It's only barely 10:30, and I'm already off to bed.
Generally, I try to organize my Con-related posts, so that I'm not spamming you guys with shitloads of "OMFG I had so much fun" posts. Sadly, this year I really can't, so I'm wrapping it all up here. Yes, I'm leaving a lot out. It can't be helped.
I had a couple of chats with a couple of friends I know online, but I only end up seeing once a year. In addition to just having a lot of fun chatting, I got some interesting new insights into [Igor]'s habit of stealing small parts from my shop, before we caught him and told him never to come back. (Try to imagine a grown-up and homeless Linus, from the comic strip Peanuts, stealing from Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Now picture him as a long-unemployed electronic engineer.) In addition to this, they discovered a terrific pizza joint, and took me there for lunch. Tony & Alba's. I recommend them highly, and these friends liked them enough that they ate there three times over the weekend. Damned good stuff!
For those of you unfamiliar, Regency Dancing is a lot like square dancing, except it looks a lot more elegant, and the music is much better. I'd never done it before because I have this fear of looking silly and/or incompetent, but I decided that this was a stupid thing to fear, so I did a running tackle on it. It turns out that the fear was needless: it's easy to learn, and a lot of fun. And yes, unless you've been at it for a while, you will look silly, but so will a bunch of people around you, so lighten the hell up.
There was a panel on coping with Drama Llamas, which I attended mostly to pick up pointers just in case I ran into [Brad] and [Janet] again. Of course, I never saw them. Please note that I'm not saying that they weren't in attendance -- only that I never saw them. For all I know, they weren't there. Or just as likely, they avoided me. Or just as likely, they were having so much fun they forgot about me completely, and fate just decided that we didn't need to run into each other. I find I'm hoping for that third option. We've had more than enough of each other already -- why reopen old wounds?
Saw some neat stuff in the Art Show. Todd Lockwood was the Artist Guest of Honor, and his work definitely lived up to the title. Still, I got to check out a bunch of other artists. Some of them were amazing. And of couse, some of them were so bad they made me wonder why I put down my color pencils, because I could do ten times better in my sleep. And then I remember that I put down my color pencils some time after I started getting good on guitar. Go many arts, so little time...
I'm not generally fond of pornography (all that web design work killed whatever appreciation for it I might have had), but I do enjoy watching artists put one toenail over the line between Art-with-a-capital-A and pornography. My favorite examples of this were Sarah Clemens' "Patron Saints of Pornography" (NSFW) series, combining well-done nudity with sly, gutter-level humor (though the quadruple-dragon-nipple-piercing was a little too hardcore for my tastes). Well, those, and a couple of Sandra Santara's centerfolds. Her vision of Odin (NSFW) also dances on that Art/Porn line -- he's certainly arty. He's also discreetly, but unmistakably erect. And hot. (What? I'm straight, I'm not blind!)
I also tried to donate blood. (Every year, there's a blood-van in front of the hotel.) To save both my time, and the time of the warm-hearted vampires with the needles, I asked for a list of disqualifications, and found that it hasn't changed -- I'm still, more or less, permanently on the "please don't donate... ever" list. (I've shot up once. I also have male partners. Either of these alone is a permanent disqualification, no matter how careful I am about it.)
Lest we forget... every Monday morning at BayCon, there's a panel celebrating the lives of the people who've died since the previous BayCon. This panel is hosted by an old friend of mine, and a nice guy to whom I used to sell comics on a regular basis. This year was a bad year: Arthur Clarke, Utah Phillips, Robert Asprin, Steve Gerber (Howard the Duck), and Rory Root, among many others. My con experience is as much wall-to-wall fun as I can cram into it, with the exception of this panel. I can't say I have fun at it, per se, but I feel better for having attended it.
Sadly, there are things I didn't get to do. There always are. I missed Rocky Horror because I was low on sleep, and I missed Eye of Argon because I was on the party floor and forgot about it entirely.
There are also people I didn't get to see. Again, sadly, there always are. This year, they include a couple of friends whom I'd apparently successfully cajoled into showing up, but I never get a chance to say hi. There's also a friend I kept an eye out for, and I didn't remember until after the con that she was in Con Ops. There are others, but if you're reading this, you know who you are.
After the Con, I always feel a hint of sadness as I have to return to the real world. This makes me especially grateful for the blast I'd been having the last few days, and I always swear that next year, I'll have at least as much fun. (And next year, I simply won't bother with the elevators. I was on the sixth floor, and half the time I went to and from my hotel room, it was faster to use the damned stairs.)
Anyway, this concludes my batch of posts for BayCon 2008. I now return you to our regular programming.
A while back, the internet was set on fire by a spectacular bit of ass-haberdashery known as the Open Source Boob Project. Since this originally happened at a con, I guess it's no surprise that the impact is being felt at subsequent cons.
I attended a panel on Fanboy Etiquette, mostly to see if someone would bring theferrett up. Sure enough, someone did. Well, almost. Someone brought up this incident they read about on the internet, and didn't get a chance to describe it in any more detail than that -- and in a room of about twenty-five people, at least fifteen groaned all at once. The moderator dealt with this issue as quickly as possible, told us that asking to touch some random girl's boobs is a bad idea, and then changed the subject. It wasn't that she felt the subject deserved no attention -- she gave it attention -- but this was a panel on Fanboy Etiquette, not a Weasel Roast.
After this panel, I ran into a friend. I mentioned that I'd just been in that panel, and I went mostly to see if a certain incident would be mentioned. The next bit of the conversation went something like this:
(Both of us are fully capable of complete sentences, but you'll notice that neither of us needed them; each of us just knew.)
I also saw quite a few women with shirts that said things like "they're not going to talk to you," "my eyes are up there," and "these aren't the boobs you're looking for." I commented that I liked these shirts, and at least half of them thanked me, grinned, and mentioned "that guy online."
As far as I can tell, the guys at this convention behaved themselves. I choose to believe that all it took was a really bad example to educate a lot of people. It's possible, though, that for some, the motivation was fear of being the next dumbass to be barbecued.
(Admittedly, a few women did not. On a handful of occasions, I was slightly annoyed at the time, and permitted myself a sly grin once either I, or the lady in question with the wandering hands, walked away. But this is how I choose to react. It no way diminishes the rights of women to react to being manhandled differently from how I react. Nor the rights of other men -- one guy on my list (who shall remain anonymous, unless you're on his list, or he chooses to name himself here) was less than pleased by people groping him, and made a point of saying so.)
The first party I attended was a massive whiskey tasting, which was being held for a no-doubt-worthy charity whose name completely escapes me. For $25, you get a tour, of sorts; they ask you questions about your tastes, and then give you a sip of each of a bunch of bottles. Fortunately, I took notes, typing things in my treo as I tasted each one. (Typing has been cleaned up, and I've elaborated on a few entries. As you might imagine, the later ones became a bit sloppy.)
Pappy van Winkle smells almost too good to drink.
Talisker smells like a butterfly and stings like a big-ass wasp.
Auchentoshan smells like a rose garden and tastes like butterflies.
15-year Laphroaig is like my favorite trashy girlfriend, all grown-up and cultured.
Yamazaki is every stereotype about Japanese manners, grace, and elegance boiled down and capped in a bottle (with absolutely none of the stereotypes involving really awful porn).
Dalmore is even more gentle than Highland Park. At first, it seems to lack character and complexity, but it sneaks up on you. "Ha ha! I'm liquid crack, and now you're hooked!
Cragganmore is what Highland Park would be if it were made by people who bred orchids.
Black Bush is like regular Bushmill's, but better. I bet it would be awesome in coffee!
Eventually, I noticed that I was impaired, and recalled that I'd intended to watch what I drank at this con. When it was my turn for another taste of something, I asked the guide to pour about a third of what he'd poured me the last time, and told him I was a wussy lightweight. He agreed that he would need to cut me off soon, and my last few tastes were perhaps three or four millimeters in the bottom of a shotglass. He also made those last few count. Eventually, I thanked the hosts, went to my hotel room, took a leak, and drank several glasses of water. Then...
High Society
The next party I attended was a rather posh affair with tea, Turkish coffee (sadly without the foam, but thankfully without the grounds in the bottom of the cup), and various sweet stuff. Good stuff, all of it. Edmund may have been a treacherous prat, but I can definitely see why he liked that particular confection so much -- though personally, I preferred the baklava. I don't remember as much about this party -- more about the people I was chatting with than the party itself. Several interesting people, and I actually got to chat with them, where the tasting was a little too loud to really get to chat much.
High Notes
The third party was karaoke. This one was a small party, and not on the main party floor; someone saw me in a hallway and told me the room number, and there I went. Now, I have a few major disadvantages when it comes to popular music. One, I'm a bass, and most popular music is written for tenor. Two, if I must, I can reach notes above C4 (middle C), but I can't really hit them. And three, if I try to go from any note above C4 to any note below A3, or vice versa, my vocal cords play tricks on me. This limited my choice of songs a lot.
I could handle Billy Idol and David Bowie. U2 was harder, but I was able to do "With or without You" with little trouble. I had to drop an octave on Oingo Boingo. Apparently, though, I'm really not bad. I was thanked for showing up, profusely, the next day. The lady who ran this party assures me that next year, it will be much bigger, and she plans to have it on the party floor.
High Education
Another party had no alcohol, but it had killer conversation. I had about a half-hour chat with one gent there; we discussed mathematics, music theory, Indian music theory, and Unicode. (The last time I studied Unicode, it was limited to about 65 thousand characters. The standard has become much roomier since.) This same gent also has dreams of teaching calculus to kids in Elementary school, and by the time he finished explaining the methods he hopes to use, I was fully convinced that he could pull it off.
Once he left, I ended up discussing fan convention Urban Legends with a few other people. For instance, there's a story about a few people with a block of metallic Sodium, cutting off little specks and dropping them in the hotel swimming pool and watching them spark and dance on the surface. (Sodium reacts explosively with water. It also floats.) Then, someone dropped the whole block in, and reports vary, but either this turned the pool into a ten-story geyser, or shattered hundreds of windows facing the pool. (There are plenty of people who don't believe this one. The story about the guy dressed up in lots of peanut butter, however, is much better documented.)
I also ended up talking about pornography -- from technical and anthropological viewpoints -- with a few other people, without a single prurient thing about the conversation... and my dear god, we're such geeks!
This is why I love BayCon. The parties are great, sure. The costumes, yeah. But mostly, it's the ability to hang out, and let my hair down, with a couple thousand of my fellow geeks.
(Note: This entry is about all the sex I had at BayCon. Despite the fact that I successfully kept it in my pants this year¹, it may still be kinda long.)
With any kind of magic, there are dangers to casting a spell that is bigger than you are. I recently learned that costuming is a form of magic.
My costume this year was the Dread Pirate Roberts. A simple spell, as far as the components go: a scrap of leather with eyeholes cut in it; a black t-shirt cut up, and tied into a bandana; a poofy black shirt and tight black jeans I already own. I didn't even have proper boots, and was just wearing black sneakers. This costume was surprisingly little work; it took me all of fifteen minutes to get it together at home, and about five minutes to put it on before I left my hotel room.
As myself, I'm fairly well-assembled, but not devastatingly attractive or anything; I just have a few striking features, and enough confidence (on my good days) that I'm sometimes mistaken for it. As the Dread Pirate, I was apparently sex-god on toast. I got a lot of good offers. Several women, and a few men, all conspired to inform me that if I had the inclination (and the stamina), I could have probably spent all three evenings of this convention bouncing from one bed to the next.
There were other effects, too. I'm a redhead, and as such, I tend to be very easily identifiable... usually. Covering my hair meant that I could step outside myself, at least partly because a lot of people who know me didn't instantly recognize me; many didn't recognize me at all, until I spoke to them. An odd feeling, that. I wouldn't do it every day, but occasionally it can be fun.
So far, I've just been talking about my costume, when in fact a whole lot of magic was flying in all directions, most of it by costumers much more skilled than me². What of all these people? Do they gain some immunity from other people's spells, being more knowledgeable about how those spells work? If two people in costume pick each other up and decide to get to know each other a lot better, does the spell end the moment the costumes come off?
(The answer to this last question, as I learned from a friend well-versed in this sort of magic, is that it does, but not immediately.)
A few people were interested in the guy under the mask, though. In particular, I was propositioned by a woman I regard so highly, I'm really tempted to brag about it. "Holy shit, [Jane] fucking [Smith] wants me!" As it is, I declined, but only for reasons having to do with my own issues; if not for those, I'd totally have jumped at the chance. Still, I was well past flattered, and into honored. The best offer I got the whole con!
(And [Jane Smith] is the only name you guys are getting from me. I haven't dropped names from my LJ up to this point, and I'm not starting now.)
One other wrinkle: there was a panel I intended to go to on writing outside your social group. A sci-fi writer can write about alien beings without anyone raising an eyebrow, but if a straight white male author writes from the POV of a black character, a woman, or a gay character -- especially a gay character -- people will sometimes get upset. I went into what I thought was this panel, and after about five minutes, I realized that I confused that panel with the GLBTQ panel. Oops.
This sort of mix-up is the kind of lame plot device I'd be hissing about if I saw it in a bad sit-com, and here I am in real life, subject to that mix-up. And just as it would in a bad sit-com, this led to a few awkward moments later... but I've had practice in dealing with those.
(Comments are screened.)
My reasons for doing this have to do with personal issues. I've already dropped hints about them in other LJ entries; if I decide to write about them more candidly, it will be in a locked post.
Of course, not all of the people in costume did it well. Some people are just plain bad at it, or choose costumes that suit them very poorly. I didn't see any 102-pound guys dressing up as Conan, or women with nasty skin conditions in skimpy chainmail... but I did see one guy who was paler than me (which should be impossible), in a kilt, with nothing on above the waist except for pasties with tassels. It was somewhere between amusing and horrifying.
So, a couple of years ago, Harlan Ellison groped Connie Willis onstage at WorldCon. All Hell broke loose, and Harlan got tarred and feathered in the fan community.
One year ago, random groping was enough of a problem at BayCon that someone came up with a system of colored dots to try to counter it. At the time, I thought it worked -- I wanted to believe that the gropers were not dangerous so much as completely fucking clueless, and that after the first person whacked them with a clue-by-four, they'd learn. I've since learned that it wasn't entirely successful, and had some nasty side-effects.
And this year, that fiasco with the Weasel. Again, lots of tar and lots of feathers.
This has always been a touchy (sorry, sorry) issue. Now, it looks like a powderkeg. The next stupid bastard who lays a hand on a lady at a convention without explicit permission is probably going to lose that hand.
In possibly related -- though I hope not -- news, in about a month, I'll be going to BayCon. I can't help wondering if I should keep my ear a lot closer to the ground this time. I've never led an internet lynch mob before -- maybe this will be my big chance?
Nah. Chances are I'll learn about it the same time the rest of you do -- when someone with faster fingers posts it, and it starts spreading like crabs at a frat-house. Besides, as much fun as internet lynch mobs are, I personally prefer prevention. I wonder if it's too late to suggest an addition to the newsletter?
WARNING: IF YOU GROPE SOMEONE UNINVITED, YOU RISK BEING YELLED AT, SLAPPED, PUNCHED, SLUGGED, KARATE-CHOPPED, THROWN INTO A WALL, KICKED IN THE NUTS, AND/OR HAVING THE WHOLE DAMNED INTERNET KNOW THAT YOU'VE GOT WANDERING HANDS AND NO RESPECT FOR OTHER PEOPLE. YOU WILL ALSO LIKELY HAVE EVERYTHING YOU'VE EVER WRITTEN ONLINE PICKED OVER WITH A FINE-TOOTHED COMB IN SEARCH OF FURTHER EVIDENCE OF YOUR ASS-HABERDASHERY, MOSTLY BY WOMEN WHO ARE SICK AND TIRED OF NOT FEELING SAFE AT CONVENTIONS BECAUSE OF PEOPLE LIKE YOU!
SCARY, HUH? LUCKILY, YOU CAN NEATLY SIDESTEP ALL OF THESE HAZARDS BY KEEPING YOUR HANDS TO YOURSELF, UNLESS YOU'VE BEEN INVITED. AND DON'T TAKE INVITATIONS ANY FURTHER THAN THEY WERE INTENDED; FOR INSTANCE, A LADY WHO CONSENTS TO A HUG IS NOT NECESSARILY CONSENTING TO HAVING HER ASS PINCHED AS LONG AS YOUR HANDS ARE IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD, SO DON'T TRY IT!
PERSONAL SPACE, MOTHERFUCKER! DO YOU SPEAK IT?
Probably a little too harsh for newsletter. Maybe just a leaflet independent of the newsletter? Hell, maybe I could just print out a few hundred of them at Kinko's or something, and leave them in places where they'll be picked up. The table with all the other flyers, for instance.
And maybe in small print, include the URLs for the sites describing previous tarrings and featherings.
I used to like peanut butter just fine. As a small child, I ate a lot of it. I haven't touched it in years, though, because the stuff makes me sick. I can eat peanuts without having any problems, but the very thought of eating peanut butter makes me want to throw up. In fact, peanut butter makes me so sick that if I'm trying to describe something disgusting, I'll sometimes add gratuitous peanut butter to the mental image, which no doubt confuses or amuses some people.
"What's more disturbing than Rush Limbaugh and Michael Moore having sex?"
"I dunno, what?"
"Rush Limbaugh and Michael Moore having sex while covered in peanut butter!"
"You are so weird."
"Come on, doesn't the peanut butter make it a hundred times worse?"
"Um, no. Not really."
I think I know why peanut butter bothers me so much. Several years ago, at a science fiction convention, I looked through the short list of rules, and found something called "the no peanut butter rule." I asked what this was, and heard the most... ahem, amazing story.
(Now that I can post again, I have catching up to do!)
One of the things I did a lot more at BayCon this time around was hunting for music. Sadly, Jeff and Maya Bohnhoff were not there, but I still heard a lot of great stuff.
Aside from Moira Stern and a Lady in Purple who had the same kind of low gruff voice that I like when Stevie Nicks uses it, I heard Seanan McGuire. I liked her enough that I bought both of her CDs.
There's something sad about them both, though. In real life, she has an amazing voice, and it could probably hit the back of a stadium from the stage. On CD, she still sings well, but the power in her voice is only hinted it. In real life, she also happens to be a gorgeous woman. There are photos of her in both CD covers and on her site, and they range between "she looks kinda okay" and "she looks like hell." (I attended a panel that she moderated on recording your own music, and photography came up. Cameras don't like her. The feeling is mutual.)
I suspect she's just one of those people that technology can't capture well. I recommend the CDs wholeheartedly, but you should also try to see her live. And if possible, get the CDs first. (There are snippets of most of her songs on her website. Go look!)
At this con, I drank a lot more than I usually do. I didn't go completely out of control or anything, but I was definitely impaired, and I was told on several occasions that I was really funny to watch.
Friday night, I attended a service held by the Whiskey-tarians, and this time I had an offering of my own. Oddly, this was the night on which I drank the least.
Saturday night, I went to a party that had spicy snarky brains in the title. And fruit salad, with melons and mangoes. And punch that was probably about 90% rum. The conversation was fun, intelligent, and more than a little mean-spirited. It was a lot more low-key than many of the other parties, but it was a terrific party nonetheless. If it wasn't for the midnight Eye of Argon reading, I would have happily stayed at this party a lot longer.
(As it was, I attended Eye of Argon drunk. This made it harder to read the text without laughing, but members of the audience acted out the action, too. I played the ginormous rat in Chapter Four, complete with wrestling with Grignr, and getting my pantomime guts torn out.)
Sunday night, A few more parties, one of which was the Evil Geniuses. As I understand it, every year the Evil Geniuses have some highly unusual alcoholic concoction, and hand out "Lab Rat" ribbons to anyone who will try it. In this case, I went up to them and said, "so I hear you have something spicy!" One of them handed me a small plastic cup and warned me not to slam it, because it would blow the back of my head off. I tasted it very gingerly, waited a moment, and then sipped it... and asked if I could have another, which I promptly slammed. And another. And another...
(The stuff was chipotle vodka, if you're at all interested.)
I also ended up having a few Irish coffees on all three nights, and shared alcohol with a few friends: an Irish coffee for one person, and bottles with a small amount of Highland Park to two friends. (And a friend's job fairy. Long story.) I probably would have shared more, but I didn't know how the hotel staff would handle open containers, so I kept the public booze-sharing to a minimum.
I'll need to watch myself a little more closely next year, but that was a lot of fun, and nothing bad came of it, so I'm treating it as a fun learning experience.
Dinner tonight was chicken and a thrown-together spicy mango salsa. One of my friends in meatspace would call this a flavorgasm, and I'll go along with that, just because it sounds much better than "yummo."
Normally, I wouldn't bother mentioning what I ate for dinner, but this is a special occasion. Except for one snack with hilarypoet and N-the-LJ-less at the hotel, and one meal at a nearby Chinese restaurant with elaryn and nolofinwe, I've been living off raw veggies, apples, oranges, and sandwiches. Oh, and booze and coffee. Aside from the booze and coffe, it's nutritious, but the lack of variety was starting to get a little annoying.
(And yet, whenever I go to a con, I always do this. Why? Because hotel food is fuckin' expensive!)
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