zvi likes tv

I went to Small Press Expo (SPX). I had heard about it on the Big Planet Comics podcast as being really great, and people were so enthusiastic about Flamecon this year that I regretted not going, so I decided not to miss SPX.

The floor is A Lot. There are many people, some smiling, some deeply engaged in their phones, some deeply engaged in conversations with other people, all hoping to sell you books, pins, t-shirts, posters, prints, etc. As someone who does 90% of her comics digitally, it's weird not only to be confronted with so much damn paper, but also for it to be in a bunch of different sizes. Also, comics are sort of…hard to browse? I mean, you can flip through pretty easily and tell whether or not you like the art, but it's hard to guess (a) what the story is about and (b) whether it's a version of that kind of story that you'll like.

What I'm saying is, this shit is an expensive crap shoot, and then, even if you like it, you have to bring it home and figure out how to fucking store it. Comics!

But there's a lot of it, and a goodly amount of it is gay or about magic or girl power or hockey or various other things that I like, so I did buy some. I intend to go through the vendors' room again tomorrow, there were some tables I didn't go to at all and a couple I want to go back to and maybe get other things from.

Some highlights: a mini on queerness, both issues of Old Time Hockey Comics, the Girl Gang pin from Jen Bartel, cat merit badge buttons, and a few other things.

( image of my haul behind a cut to not mess up your layout )

I went to three panels. The panel management was not great; they were not good at moving people in and out in a timely fashion and they didn't actually schedule time for people to move, so the "hour long" panels were all really 45-50 minutes.

Also, none of the moderators seemed really great to me. One moderator had a sort of hostile approach to the topic at hand and, at one point, left her poor panelists having to explain to her why diversity was good and it was great that they had written books with female protagonists, thanks.

Another moderator wanted to talk about decisions about printing as artistic decisions, but hadn't really prepared her panelists to think about the topic in that way, so they ended up mostly not. I mean, they were engaging and they did talk about printing, but I don't think it was the panel the moderator envisioned.

The first panel I went to was the best one I went to, on being a publisher in indie comics. The basic message was, you're doing this to make sure comics you love, possibly made by people you love, exist in the world. (It is definitely not for the money. If you want to do comics for the money, you need to go to Marvel or DC.)

Going back tomorrow for 3 panels: Artists talking about their emotional connection to making comics, American Magical Girls, and Erotic Comics. And hitting the floor, again.

P.S. I need a comics icon!

Dunno if anyone cares, but here it goes

Fri Jun 15, 2012

10am - 11am Registration
11am - 12pm USA Network Fan Service in Adams
2pm - 3pm Fandom on E-Reader in Adams
4pm - 5pm Lost Girl in Adams
5pm - 6pm Community 201 in Grant
7:30pm - 12am Disco Duck in Consuite/Kennedy

Sat Jun 16, 2012

10am - 11am Avengers Fans Assemble in Grant
11am - 12pm Subtext is not the only text in Grant
12pm - 1pm Haven: Year 3 of the OT3 in Adams
2pm - 3pm Femslash Fandom Faire in Grant II
3pm - 4pm Handling Problematic Characterizations and Storylines Through A Social Justice Lens in Grant II
Conference
4pm - 5pm The Phylogeny of Speculative Erotica in Grant II
7:15pm - 8pm Cocktails in Consweet/Kennedy
8pm - 10pm Vid Show in Consweet/Kennedy

Sun Jun 17, 2012

10am - 11am Security
12pm - 1pm On Beyond Pairings (Moresomes) in Grant I
2pm - 3pm Hot girl-on-girl action in Grant II
3pm - 4pm Dead Duck

I am modding 3 panels: Subtext is not the only text (share your favorite canonically QUILTBAG media), Femslash Fandom Faire (share your favorite femslashy canons), Hot Girl-on-Girl Action (write girlporn! post girlporn! encourage girlporn!).

There are a number of panels that look good on the full con.txt schedule that I'm not going to attend or that I'll see what I feel like once I get there. I'm getting in Thursday night. Anyone looking to dinner somewhere that's not the hotel restaurant? I bought a box lunch for Saturday but I'll probably be looking to lunch out on Friday (unless I go swimming.)

I still need need to get a new icon. :/

NB: This advice is for a generalist panel, one that's either about canon or standard fannish behavior. If you're doing a specialist panel, where you're attempting to impart specific information (e.g. like "What CSI didn't teach you about murder police" or "Copyright and filing off the serial numbers" or "Making Icons with the GIMP",) it's a lot more like an oral presentation you might do for school, with notes and an outline and possibly slides. If you're talking about kyriarchy or writing tragedy or combining family and fandom or anything with implications for people's actual lives, you should: (i) fucking well refuse to do it without a co-mod, (ii) do some pre-reading and (iii) define some base rules of behavior and define your terms, and let people know that if they don't want to do the panel that your base rules are establishing, they don't have to stay.

But say that you're going to do the panel on "Is manpain ever appropriate on my tv screen?" or "[Your OTP] in [Your Fandom]: how so awesome?". This is what you do:

1) *Think of five to ten things to talk about that have to do with the panel topic.
2) Show up on time.
3) Start talking about the thing from your list you most want to talk about.
4) Call on people when hands go up.
5) Mention something else on your list if the conversation dies down.
6) Mention something else on your list if the conversation goes way off-topic.
7) Start wrapping up when you get your five minute warning.

*You do not have to think of these things ahead of time, but it is less nerve-wracking if you do, and you are less likely to wind up at the 25 minute mark with the awful realization that you have only thought of four things.

Optional

A) Take notes or con someone in the audience into taking notes.
B) Write a panel write up afterward.

---

Some easy ways to stall for time get the conversation started:

1) Make lists of things
2) Ask what makes the things on the list similar or different
3) Ask if [some other kind of fan] does things differently than [kind of fan having the con]
4) Talk about meta or fic or art or canon that is an example of the topic of the discussion done well or done poorly.
5) Gentle sexual innuendo. Gentle mocking of fandoms widely acknowledged to have poor quality canon. (The Sentinel and Enterprise are awesome for this.) Other gentle forms of humor. Talking about how [panel topic] makes you think or feel or react. Make it personal, about you, as the moderator.
6) Ask if people did this or thought about this in the old days, back when you made your zine on a mimeograph machine and were damn glad it wasn't carbon paper. Or the old days of Usenet. Or the old days of Yahoogroups. (I refuse to think about any more recent old days.)
7) Ask if anyone has something they would like to say.

So, on zazzle, I can make a navy long sleeved shirt with a white doublevenus on the front. (Sadly, they do not offer any men's v necks, and all of the women's shirts would be very tight.)

Points to ponder for looking like my icon. I have duck slippers, but I don't currently have bunny slippers. Will people notice if I substitute duck for bunnies?

Remote control, y/n/my XO-1 (the little green laptop that looks like a toy) is an adequate substitute?

Also, do I dress like my icon on the first day of the con, when people who haven't seen me before might be looking for me, or on the second day, which will have higher traffic and more people to get the joke?

Also, also, someone should suggest a panel I would really like to mod. I think the issue I'm having is that, of the fandoms I would like to talk about, only in one is my primary pairing a slash pairing, and there's nothing to say about Shawn/Gus except MFEO. The end. (Shawn/Lassiter shippers, I'm sorry, but you are wrong.) Well, also, in Castle, there's Ryan/Esposito, what is the heterosexual reading of this text?

It seemed as if I wouldn't get the chance to write up the rest of my con report, but I'm temping at a job where I'm not doing anything except printing and scanning memos at long intervals, so, although I don't have any of the few notes I did write, here we go:

renenet up. I was an unusually horrible roommate this year. I'm not sure what was wrong, except Renenet had the room set to 69 degrees, so I didn't want to spend any time in it. Tooooooo cold.

I went to Con.txt 101, and gblvr was great as the mistress of ceremonies. I don't know if the intro session was unusually awesome; although I have been to probably 10 cons, slash and not before, this was the first time I'd actually made it to an opening session. I do know con.txt ran unusually smooth for me, and, reportedly, for many other attendees.

I did my first panel, and then got lunch. The boxed lunch was good, but way too much food, especially since I'd made a point to eat breakfast before I went to the con. While I deeply applaud making sure that either a vegetarian or a carnivore would have enough to eat, maybe they should just have people select a vegetarian or carnivorous selection beforehand, and only give you enough for one lunch? (OTOH, I would have fallen down dead on Saturday if I hadn't had the remains of Friday's lunch to nibble on, so it worked out alright for me.) Sat with reginagiraffe and … some other people and had a nice time, then hung out at the orphan zine table where, um, serpentjen? was working, and didn't buy anything.

I'm in a weird place with zines where I pretty much will only buy reprints of stuff I've read and loved on the web. I've been burned too many times by crappy, slapped together zines and I only want to pay for them when I know exactly what I'm getting.

The first panel I went to on Friday that I didn't moderate was Retcons, reboots, and multiple continuities. We spent a lot of time defining the differences between those and talking about exemplars without necessarily talking about what makes a good one. We did talk a little about how fic authors should identify the continuity and canon from which they are writing. On the one hand, as readers, the more specific an author is, the better (particularly in the crazy wonderland that is comics, where canon is sometimes rendered not true just because with no explanation.) On the other hand, as a fic author, one may or may not be entirely sure what the canon source is for a thing, or you may be drawing bits and pieces from multiple canon flows, and easy labeling is not possible. This was seperis and cmshaw.

Next, I went Fandom Tech with treewishes and minotaurs. It was a good panel, but I knew just about everything they covered before I got there. I was really hoping that someone would have an EEEpc or Kindle I could look at. Denied. Someone did have an OLPC and it is totally as cute as it looks in the pictures. I know some people find it dorky-looking, but I think those people have a flawed design aesthetic.

After the hot topic panel, I went to the GIMP panel. It was a very introductory level panel, but I did learn about something I'd never seen before (curves). Also, melannen had prepared a tutorial that I think is a really good intro to turning a basic crappy screencap into a basic fannish icon. I resolved to go to the Advanced panel she was offering as a DIY on Saturday.

caorann and Caorann and Brak's friend. This was after the Fandom as a Safe Space for FOC panel, so I had two glasses of Shiraz and a deep-fried cheesecake for dinner. Delicious! (My health was maintained by eating the cucumbers, olives, and tomatoes from Caorann's salad. I would have preferred mozarella sicks, but once again, DENIED.)

Getting ready for Disco Duck was kind of hilarious. I brought two outfits and makeup, and dithered over what to do, and put on stupidly bad looking eyebrow pencil/mascara. Thankfully, the dance floor was way dim and women were willing to dance with me anyway. (And, I just want to say again [I mentioned at Disco DEAD Duck], I was so, so happy that among the hot people flashing on the wall were a number of beautiful women. I really appreciated it, even if the crowd failed to scream for girls.)

Sadly, the number of people who could find a beat were sorely outnumbered by those who could not, so there were only about five people I could dance with. Also, the crowd's disdain for most modern dance music and preference for late 70's/early 80's disco was extremely disheartening to me. I thought gblvr did a great job of balancing, considering how the dance floor emptied out at anything released in this century.

I drowned those sorrows in alcohol, so my life was not too hard to deal with. Around 11:30, I was too drunk to dance, and there was a sweet young thing <ETA> named solar_cat </ETA> on the floor in the hallway offering herself up for petting, so I curled in with her and the person currently petting her. We wandered away to a room party, but it turned out to be a dS crowd, so I cut out fairly quickly.

melannen showed me how to use a selection tool which will change the way I do fanart. (Everyone who ever gotten fanart from me now sighs in relief.) Next, she showed me how to do simple animation! Whoowee! Also, breakfast was a REAL breakfast, with, like, bagels and breakfast sandwiches and four kinds of juice. Well played, Con Comm, well played.

My first official panel was the crossovers panel, modded by giddygeek and Melannen. That was a lot of fun, as people listed off all of the whacky yet successful crossovers that they had read, and there were repeated cries of, "Wait, wait, where can I find that?" We also talked about how to define a crossover (does fusion count? two different properties in the same media universe, e.g. SGA and SG1?) And we debated the perennial question of whether it is easy or nearly impossible to write a good space universe crossover. (The answer, I regret to inform you, is nearly impossible. And if you disagree, well, you can be Wrong, Wrong, Wrong on the Internet for as long as you like.) What we were able to agree on was that a good crossover generally rests on a fulcrum, some very good reason intrinsic to each universe that those characters would be in the same time and place. Also, that a crossover story should be about the characters from both universes, instead of serving as an excuse for one set of characters to be befuddled by the whacky hijinks of another set.

From eleven to twelve I went swimming, which, in the fullness of time, I recognize as a complete mistake. It was fucking cold, the pool is a funky shape that makes laps difficult, and nobody was out there except the not!lifeguard and a woman who had removed her hearing aid, so all I got was a thorough chill, sore muscles, and lightheaded from not eating lunch.

Twelve to one was ficathons, which was bethbethbeth and penknife. It was a very good panel, but I don't think I'm going to change anything about how I run Three Ships. It's pretty much working for me. I'm totally giving up doc_santa, though. That was thoroughly unrewarding, and I'd rather do yuletide.

Femslash was sort of a weird panel to attend. I had proposed it, and I had a pretty specific vision of it, but since qurinas and hederahelix were actually modding it, it wound up being the same planning meeting I go to at every convention with a femslash panel. (Girls are awesome, non-negligible portions of m/m fandom are creepily misogynist, het fans hate us, how do we hype our fandoms?) I did manage to suggest that people reccing femslash pairings in their own journals or in more general rec communities would probably do more than starting another femslash challenge (for some reason, most of the people in the panel didn't seem to know about femslash08.) What I had wanted was something closer to the Fannish Trade Show Elke organized at Escape Escapade ?3? years ago, where we could all go around the room and say, "These chicks are awesomely hot together, come watch my show." The thing is, I like the idea of femslash, but I don't see it on TV as often as I see melslash. And while I am A-OK with melslash pairings which are totally fake (see my unholy love for McDex), I only like femslash when I feel as if canon supports it. (So, for instance, I never, ever, ever, ever read Willow/Buffy, because Willow and Buffy are not gay for each other, although I am down with Willow's lesbianism and believe that Buffy would have totally been gay for Faith.) (Also, I am totally not slamming the way the panel was run. They are more invested in femslash as a community, than I am, really. And it was a good panel, just not the one I was hoping for.)

I went to the Writing Long panel, and remembered about fifteen minutes in that I hate writing fiction, and, even more than that, I hate revising, and that this is the true source of my inability to write long stories. I bugged out before the end, but probably not as fast as I should have. The panel was a good one, just not for me.

The Dreamwidth panel was great. synecdochic was basically saying, "We're gonna do awesome things," then listing out features which were awesome (importing from LJ means comments and icons as well as entries! a bunch of other stuff I can't remember) and then asking us what ideas did we have. I know that, when other journaling services have opened up, I've said that I'm only moving if the rest of fandom goes, and I never felt a critical mass at either journalfen (not a fan of wank) or isanejournal (not into Harry Potter or DCU [aside: my impression really is that DC went to IJ, but Marvel stayed at LJ. Am I crazy, or did that split really happen? If so, does anyone know why?]). I don't care what the rest of y'all bitches do about this one, I'm moving to dw. I had no idea I was so unhappy with LJ until I saw the announcement of this fork.

I went and wandered around the Consweet after that panel, eventually wound up at the table where synecdochic was holding court and talking about social networking and money. The gist of it: ads don't actually pay money, and enough users will subscribe to services they like.

Then I went to the OTW panel. I haven't talked about it a lot, but I am an OTW staffer. The rumors that were going around were mostly not insane conspiracy theories, the_shoshanna is an awesome speaker, and, I managed to get called flip, dismissive, and ignorant of the burdens of being queer. The thing which pissed me off is that the history of homosexual rights actually argues against the person who was calling me glib. This was a person who thinks that OTW raising the profile of fandom is potentially dangerous, and I pointed out that mediafandom is actually really atypical in the great tree of fandoms (by which I mean SF, horror, Sherlock Holmes, Jane Austen, etc.), and many other fandoms have been able to flourish for decades with people knowing full well they exist. To the extent that mediafandom is a place where people enact their queerness (and, people, just a reminder, while it can be credibly argued that OTW is too LJ-media- metafandom-y, it's never been set up as a slashy place, het and gen have always been a part of the vision for the archive), the history of homosexual rights and cultural acceptance argues that it is only as people become more familiar with queers that queers can be safe in the larger society. One of the reasons Bowers v. Hardwick was decided the way it was is that the swing vote, Powell, assumed that the ruling would not affect very many people, since he didn't know he knew any gay people. Grrrrrr.

sanj, neotoma, and ellen_fremedon. It was a very nice Vietnamese? Thai? place. In any case, there was ginger pork and plenty of it, and I had my first ever avocado milkshake. Good without tasting anything like guacomole. Also, more Who discussion than you can shake a stick at.

The vid show was good, but the noisy room failed at noisiness. I hope Con Comm takes to heart the suggestion to add a bar. Glad to see that the show was not DS vid after SPN vid after TW vid, although, of course, all of those fandoms were included. I wish I had thought to try to point a Grey's Anatomy vid in their direction, but I pretty much only ever think of vids at all during vid shows.

Afterwards, we played Slashium. It was a pretty fun game, but I still suspect the spelling category was rigged (our team got all the SF words, the other team got standard English.) Also, treewishes clearly demonstrated that 'fanfiction' and 'porn' are in no way different categories in her head. Weirdly, I appear to have some talent for humming TV theme songs.

I went to the comics room party, where I played both Iron Duck and Quacktain American in my first porn photoshoot ever. grey_bard put pictures up somewhere on the Interwebs, but I know not where. I'll let you know when I find out. I also failed in my ambition to read the second volume of PS 238, as I did not finish rereading the first volume by 3 AM, when I left. <ETA> My Little Ducky porn shoot</ETA>

( Sunday )

But that was my con.txt, and I am so, so, so glad I went.

A couple of quotes from the comic book party that didn't quite get pushed onto the quote wall:

-- Where's the Iron Man Duck? I need it to do porn.

-- I think if you have one duck, it really has to be another duck, or else it gets a little hinky.

-- 172 doesn't entirely make sense without the date rape context.

-- If you figure out how to clone people, I have a list.