This is my front page. All comments here are screened; if you don't have my email address, you can drop me a line here. If I know your email address, I'll reply by email -- if not, I'll reply to your comment, and then rescreen both your comment and my reply.
It's also got every tag I have -- this is because my current LJ style doesn't include a tag index. (At least half of my participation on LJ is on my Treo. I chose this style because it loads quickly and it's still readable on a small screen.)
I'd tell you more about myself, but that's what my profile -- and the rest of my journal -- are for.
I haven't seen New Moon, nor read the book, but I'm going to comment on it anyway.
"Was it better or worse than Twilight?"
I like New Moon much better than the first movie. For one thing, it probably doesn't have James in it. As a result, I'm not likely to have Twilight fangirls coming up to me commenting on how much I look like him. It's not that I object to being told there's a resemblance, per se -- by all accounts, Cam Gigandet is a hunk, and if someone says I look like him, I'll certainly accept that as a compliment. The part I object to is that nearly all of the girls cooing at me and occasionally making very bold passes at me were HALF MY AGE!
I'm in my mid-thirties, for fuck's sake. You kids should be asking me what it was like to live in caves and hunt mammoths, not dropping unsubtle hints that you want... well, I'm not going there. It's bad enough you went there. Well, now you all can go after Taylor Lautner, who, like you, is also underage.
Ahem. Sorry. I've been biting my tongue on that rant for a while now.
With that out of the way... I can't comment much on the story, much as I loathe this series of books. Sorry, I still haven't read them, and I still don't plan to. Sometime, I really should make a new icon. "Everything I know about Twilight, I learned from stoney321."
(Seriously, why do they keep letting Twatlight fangirls come up with writer's block questions?)
So, a friend of mine (who shall remain unnamed, unless she cares to comment here) found herself the owner of two tickets to an opera, and didn't want to go by herself. As a result of this, I recently got my first taste: Il trittico, by Giacomo Puccini.
(Unless you've lived under a rock, you've heard Puccini. Trust me.)
It was amazing. The hall itself was a marvel of engineering -- everything you've ever heard about the acoustics in great theaters is absolutely true. Despite being over a hundred feet away from the stage (and the orchestra pit below it), I could hear every note clearly, and there wasn't a microphone or a speaker to be seen. In the second of the three acts, there were several ailing children onstage; the sounds of their crutches making contact with the floor, and the wheels of their IV stands clattering on the floor, were all clearly audible. In the third act, in which several people are rummaging through papers to find a will, I could hear paper rustling.
The lyrics were all in Italian, but for the benefit of those of us who don't speak Italian, there was a screen above the stage, about ten feet tall and sixty feet wide at a guess. As the actors sang, the translated lyrics were projected on this screen. A nice touch, that. I don't know if all opera houses do this, but I can hope, right?
Anyway, the opera itself was three separate plays, each told in a single act, and all of them were wonderful. The first, "The Cloak," is about a married woman who takes a lover, and it ends in a murder. The second, "Sister Angelica," is about a nun who discovers that the child she birthed before going to the nunnery (and hasn't seen since) died at the age of five, and it ends with her suicide. The third, "Johnny Skeevy," is about a bunch of people who engage a swindler to forge a will, and it's hilarious.
(These three plays are frequently performed separately. Puccini never liked this -- he felt that they all belonged together, despite having nothing in common thematically. I'm inclined to agree with him. They all just seem to fit.)
Anyway, I has half-worried that I'd be bored to tears at the opera, despite the fact that seeing an opera was on my list of things I want to do at least once before I die. I was also half-expecting to be completely confused, like Spike Jones going into Pagliacci expecting a western, and then being surprised to see a fat guy in a clown suit onstage. (You can hear that tale here. It's amusing.) Anyway, it turned out these fears were needless.
If I'd tried to go to an opera at the age of twenty, I'm sure I would have hated it. As it is, I was not only well-entertained, but enchanted. At the end of each play, the performers all came onstage and took their bows -- I suspect that they do this partly to get some well-earned applause, but also to gently bring their audience back down to Earth.
Opera is not a cheap habit to get into, and I don't expect to be able to go very often... but I am very glad I got to go this one time.
My plans for today originally included spending a significant portion of the day in bed. Unfortunately, while the letter of my plans still obtains, the spirit has very much changed.
Yeah, I'm sick. I ache all over, there's a fog living in my brain, and my voice has gotten lower to the point that I can sing a C2, where my limit is usually an E2 when I'm healthy.
I'll be online quite a bit more than I usually am, today and tomorrow. However, if you catch me on chat, I may suddenly go silent with little or no warning. Don't take offense. I'm making canned soup, or throwing honey/lemon/booze together, or taking a nap.
About a week ago, my manager's wife went into surgery. She's recovering nicely (but could still use the good thoughts), but he's taken a couple of weeks off, so that he can do all the little things at home while she recovers.
As a result, I've been working more hours, and will be for the next week or so.
In related news, Yahoo mail has started to delude itself into thinking it's a chat client, and I'm finding that if I don't remember to close it, it logs me in when I'm not around. If you've had trouble reaching me when you thought I was home, that's why. I'm not ignoring you -- I'm just not here, and I typically don't think to close my browser windows when I leave. Up until now, it hasn't been necessary.
Also, I've probably missed quite a bit. Among other things, two friends deleted. (I can ask gtonizuka what happened, since I know him in meatspace. Not so for tomecatti. Anyone know where he went?)
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...
A while back, I discovered Sandra Lee. Well, not quite -- lysana mentioned them to me in this post, and I eventually exploded over here. Sure, it could be argued that I overreacted -- in fact, a few of you argued just that -- but I was seriously appalled that Sandra Lee actually had a show.
Anyway, I bring this up because I'm starting to get the feeling that Sandra Lee is the goatse of cooking shows -- just as you never forget the first time you were goatse'ed, you never forget your first exposure to Kwanzaa cake. I'm sure that Jesse Taylor over at pandagon won't forget either. And this rant is superior to mine -- I couldn't find video at the time I first posted on this subject, and for all the mean-spirited attacks I made on her, I didn't think to call her a "domestic failorist."
This shit'll kill ya!
And on the subject of absurd, edible-but-only-technically food, I give you the website this is why you're fat: a collection of jumbo-sized food atrocities from all over the net. It's all here, as far as I can tell: the Bacon Explosion, Bacon Explosion Wellington, deep fried candy bars, pizza with toppings ranging from corn dogs to big macs, Turducken with bacon layers, a messy chili dog combining wagyu beef and crushed Fritos (why, god, why?), krispy kreme donut-bacon-cheeseburgers, and many more crimes against both food and humanity.
I've looked at every foodstuff on the site, and alternated between howling with laughter and adopting the fetal position on the floor. Not that I expect that all of these things are being eaten at once. Some of them, like the 30x-stuff oreo, and the two-foot-cube rice crispy treat, were clearly made for fun.
OMFG, I'm dyeing!
Oh, and one last food-related thing. A while ago, I tried beets, and rather liked them. I did notice one odd side-effect of eating them, though.
Y'see, there's this stuff in beets called betanin (C24H27N2O13), a natural reddish dye -- it's what gives beets their characteristic dark red color. I was careful not to touch the beets with my hands as I was steaming them, and in fact used a plate instead of a cutting board so that I wouldn't permanently stain the cutting board, because beet juice stains everything.
Anyway, betanin is a strong dye, but relatively harmless, and it's apparently also an antioxidant. In most people, it's broken down, but sometimes, in some people, it goes from one end of the digestive system to the other without breaking down. Then they go to the bathroom, and suddenly become very alarmed...
Power's gone out. My phone's set to wake me up so I can open the shop. I hope the backup battery in my usual alarm clock isn't dead. I hope my phone's alarm is loud enough to do the job if my alarm clock fails.
The last bits of dinner are steaming as I type this. Then, I eat. Then, plenty of chamomile and/or cognac to try to put myself out early, since I need to be up at about 3:30 in the fucking morning tomorrow. Hunting season starts at 6:00 tomorrow, and I'm so godsdamned motherfucking nervous right now!
...before I have to call the local courthouse and find out whether I have Jury Duty again.
I can't complain too much. I asked for a six-month postponement when I got my summons last year a few days after Thanksgiving. (I work in retail, and I'm on commission. If I'd had to spend the Holiday Season on a Jury, I'd not only have been screwed moneywise, but my colleagues in the shop would have had to scramble for coverage. Suckage all around.)
So, I'm nervous.
Also, it's hot. I'm going to try a nap.
Edited to add: Not tomorrow morning, but at 11:00, I have to call again. Annoying, that.
Today is the last day that you can drive and talk on the phone without an earpiece or speakerphone in California. Tomorrow, if you get caught doing that, you'll be ticketed. And speaking as a pedestrian who frequently has to avoid getting run over by idiots with their cellphones who aren't paying attention to the road ahead of them, this new law couldn't have come soon enough.
At my workplace, we've been telling customers about this law, and suggesting that they beat the rush, for a few months now. Of course, people being what they are, most waited until the last minute, so today was somewhere between "very busy" and "absolute zoo." I made at least twice as much money as I do on an average day, just on commissions from Bluetooth sales. (Not that I didn't sell phones or USB modems -- on the contrary, I did. I just sold a shitload of Bluetooth stuff.)
My manager will have enough energy to tuck his kids into bed, and if he's lucky, he'll even manage getting to his own bed before collapsing. Me, I loved it, and I'm so riled up that I probably won't be able to go to bed for another few hours (it's 10:30 PM as I type this). He thinks I'm crazy, but hey, hyperactivity should come in handy for something, right?
Granted, my concentration is back and the headaches are gone, for the most part. Still, I'm irritable, and I'm coping a little poorly with those little daily part-of-life annoyances that I can usually just laugh about. Further, old grudges that I was pretty sure I'd buried are starting to make noises in their coffins.
I swear, quitting meth was less painful than quitting the Dew!
Still, it's been six days. I'm pretty sure I'm through the worst of it, so giving up now would be even stupider than giving up on, for example, Day Two. Also, having quit before, I know how much better I'll feel once the pain is over, so I have that to look forward to, at least.
The thing is, I have a handful of excuses that I've used to start hitting it again. Short on sleep due to persistent nightmares? Take a drink. At a convention, and don't want to miss anything, even when I should be sleeping? Take a drink. A girlfriend who makes fabulous spiced coffee? Take a drink.
I see [Sayeda] fairly rarely, so I may still make exceptions for her. But beyond that, the excuses have to go.
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.
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