wombat_socho

The Bleat.:

Which leads to the question of how you – I mean, you – define your passage through time. I’m not sure I can answer the question; it’s a combination of personal plots, locations, and cultural markers. As I’ve said before, I feel bad for kids now who grow up in an era when all culture is potentially current culture, when it’s all the permanent now, with no demarcations between styles and eras. You have to be able to read the past to know what led to the next thing, and why we’re where we are. This is the vaguest paragraph I have ever written.

This is actually very profound, at least to me. I am, perhaps, overly concerned with the past. I certainly spend enough time thinking and writing about it, perhaps out of fear that sometime in the future I won't actually be able to remember it, and I'll have to rely on these written accounts of what happened when, how I felt about it, and what the ambient music was.

I'm also concerned with the past because I feel - no, fuck that, I KNOW - that people in general don't pay a lot of attention to the past and tend to forget what happened 10, 20, 30+ years ago. It all dissolves into a white-noise blue screen for people, and they don't remember even the things which are important to them personally and the subculture they belong to. That's why I keep banging on about the HRMP War, its causes and its effects - because people don't/won't remember why the subculture they live in is the way it is, and why it's prone to dumb shit like that. Somebody has to remember this stuff and remind the forgetful.

I'm hauling out the MacArthur icon for this because I'm putting on my ex-Chairman hat for this post.
( Sensitive, caring fans will probably not want to read this. )

Wound up doing my good deed for the decade by hauling a pizza out to P's place for various reasons she can explain if she wants to, but it was worth it to get caught up on all the Detour gossip/drama** as well as getting her take on this year's Convergence (now with 400% more SEX, LOL) which included pole dancing, go-go dancers at the Oddcon party, and a kissing booth for some worthy cause that featured increasingly scantily-clad young ladies as the weekend progressed. Judging from the photographs posted so far by verrant, among others, Allen Carpentier's criticism of femmefans* no longer applies, at least not at Convergence where, apparently, attracting da yoots of Minnesota is not a problem. :)

Nothing much of any consequence accomplished today otherwise; hope to change that tomorrow.






*"Half-pretty women half-dressed to show it." Inferno, chapter 1 IIRC
**Relax, stuckintraffik, it's all good. ;)

I think it's a cliche that people join fandom looking for community. Traditionally, this has certainly been the case, and to some extent continues to be the case for some people, but now that SF and fantasy have become part of the mainstream I don't think it's quite as common as it used to be. The result of this is that fandom is less of a ghetto than it used to be, and some of the social aspects have weakened as a result.
( Would you like to know more? )

I hadn't really thought about it all that much until the call for panelists went out, but it occurs to me that I probably should have mentioned on here that I most likely won't be coming north for Convergence. Given the flakiness of the job situation and the expense involved, going back to Minneapolis for the July 4 weekend really makes no sense to me...quite aside from the fact that the Sheraton is almost certainly sold out by now, and while I could certainly get rooms at the Thunderbird that weekend (for less, and with better food) that would also mean I'd have to either rent a car for the weekend (and not use it most of the time) or bus back and forth, which would be a massive pain in the ass. So I'm just not going to bother.

So, yeah, programming handoff meeting. petsnakereggie and thaadd were already there when I got there, romeoa was pulling up as I walked in the door, and mattmn arrived shortly thereafter. It was pretty productive; sounds like the incoming co-heads have a Foolproof Plan in mind to handle the additional load of 30 guests and an extra day's worth of panels, and I hope it works. A lot of the discussion revolved around things brought up in my post-mortem notes and concerns thaadd and I had about the local pros and panelist comp rules. I think they'll be okay.

After that I picked up jamestrainor, who helped me clear several more boxes of stuff out of the apartment, including the badly-missed tote with my antibacterial soap, DVDs, and miscellaneous paperwork. We then went to the Thunderbird, lolled around in the outdoor pool (first time either of us had been in it) and then went grocery shopping. The big storm everyone had been expecting since 1600 finally rolled in, making the trip back to his place a lot more exciting than it usually is, what with flooded intersections, power outages, and other such fun. My eyes still ache from all the lightning, and I'm damn glad to have made it back to the hotel without flooding the poor Sportage's engine. Definitely sleeping in tomorrow!

Tomorrow I'll clear out a few more things from the apartment and then quit the place until it's time for me to pay the long-delayed August rent and hand back the keys, which will happen about 2 minutes after I find my distribution check in the mailbox. They can either take my personal check or eat my shorts.

Oh yeah - anyone want a frozen turkey?

Wow, almost no time for internet spaceships at all this weekend. :)

Spent most of my time yesterday at the Convergence post-mortem, which actually went better than I thought it would. This is a process I think AD could stand to adopt, since feedback sheets and the public post-mortem panel alone are not enough to give us a feel for how we're doing from year to year. After the post-mortem and breakout sessions were done it was 1800 and pointless to go home before the volunteer party started at 1900, so I went over to BK and grabbed some burgers and rings. There was still time to kill after I walked back to the hotel, so I talked to Bridget (who runs parties for CVG) in the Garden Court. qob, tjstriker, Don, and one of the Detour folks who spent most of his CVG as a wandering host dropped by, so we had a nice little conversation before things got rolling in 214 and we all headed upstairs.

More conversation and munchies ensued, continuing until 0100 when windelina finally kicked the handful of us still watching Soylent Blue out. Which was a lot longer than I meant to stay, but michaellee and geekboyonlineand kurai_tsuki and cajones and lots of other folks were there, and it was all good.

So between that and finishing Drake's Counting The Cost, I didn't get to bed until 0300, which is why I didn't get over to redmartel's for gaming until noonish. We played about a third of the way through White Eagle Eastward before I used my hideous advantage in political points to end things with a Polish win. Wargame and convention geeking followed until I left at 1900 to pick up jamestrainor for the weekly swimming. We didn't stay in the water long on account of not getting into the too cool water until 2000, and since all the Chinese places were closed we wound up eating at Little Caesar's down on Lake Street. It's where the Trieu Chau restaurant used to be, and I have to say Little Caesar's has changed a lot since I was an assistant manager for them back in the early 1990s. No Deliverators or Abkhazian managers, but they've radically stripped down the menu so that you can now get a decent large pizza for $5 in about 30 seconds. Pretty impressive. Pan pizza is still square and yummy but is now cut like a normal pizza, and the soda available (only in bottles) is Pepsi. :(

Home to change skills, giev post, take meds and head for bed. I'll probably get stuck doing balancing tomorrow fuck the EBN oh wait I did already.

And now a few words about Convergence...
( This won't take long )

( I HAS A DRAMA IN MY HEAD )

There was enough work to keep me busy most of the day, even though I felt pretty apathetic about doing it.

Spent most of the afternoon sorting out P's books and selling the stuff she didn't want to keep, which reduced the number of boxes in the Sportage to four from seven. This meant that laundry and packing got pushed back to tonight, after a brief stop at the hotel to pick up my badge, get updated on more things that have gone awry for Programming, and discover that I couldn't check in to the hotel quite yet. :(

Well, time to get the laundry done, pack, pick up the things at Wal-Mart we need for programming, and get over to the hotel. Probably no posting this weekend since the Sheraton doesn't have free wi-fi and I'm damned if I'll pay them for it. See y'all at Convergence or on Monday.

What good is having a $300 PDA if you can't even use the damn thing to keep your schedule straight? For some damn reason I got it stuck in my head that the programming meeting was tonight. It's actually tomorrow night. Just like it says on my TX. *bangs head on table*

Well, at least I won't have any problem getting the laundry and the kitchen cleanup done.
*packs up laptop and heads home*