Illogicon 2: Day 2

Before I begin, let me say that I think I was unfair in my last post. In my Friday writeup, I suggested that the all-male panels I'd seen had been the result of some negligence on the part of the con's organizers. Yesterday, Margaret McGraw told me that the panels were actually self-selected--that the guests had chosen whatever panels sounded interesting. There was still a gender imbalance among the guests themselves, but if this is one of those cons where you have to apply to be a guest, then the organizers really can't be blamed for that. Sorry I implied it was their fault!

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Day 2
(Click here for Day 1, or here for Day 3)




Saturday, January 12, 2013

I had already planned to stay late and attend the "Eye of Argon" reading, so I planned for a late arrival. This meant that I missed "Finance for Beginning Writers," "Science Fiction and Ethics," and "Comedy in Sci-fi/Fantasy," which I would have liked to see, but I wanted to be well-rested and in a good mood. If I were coming from out of town, and had to stay in the hotel, I suspected I would have spent my time differently--you can be a little more sleep-deprived if you don't have to drive 35 minutes to get home. : )


The "Women and Geek Culture" panel was pretty interesting. A lot of what was covered has been discussed at length on the internet: the 'fake geek girl' idiocy, the 'booth babe' thing. Model Allegra Torres has been an actual booth babe, and said it really hurt her feelings when people started saying nasty things about her and her fellows, since she did it for fun. (Speaking of cheesecake, Torres described The Avengers as "Magic Mike for geek girls.")

Cheralyn Lambeth came in Stormtrooper armor, and said that actually a lot of the Stormtroopers in the original Star Wars movies were women, since they were small enough to fit in the uniforms. (I guess if you want your Stormtroopers to be shorter than Vader while armored, you have to make sure they're on the small side.) Quoth Lambeth: "I want to be a Stormtrooper, and I want to be a Ghostbuster, and I don't want to be the hoochie version of either one of those."

Note: She also made me cringe when she used the phrase "Women and other minorities." No. No. Do not. No. Never. Women are not a minority.

When Lambeth said it was nice not to have to be a "fainting moon princess" as an SFF fan, "Moxie Monroe" said that for black women in SFF, being the "fainting moon princess" once in a while was a nice change. I put her name in quotes because I'm not sure it's the right one: while that was the name on her tag, I couldn't find anyone online by that name who looked remotely like this lady (a young black woman in glasses, a rainbow bangle, and a brilliant yellow cardigan). This is what I get for showing up late. If you know for sure who she is, please let me know! (Edit: Apparently she is Moxie MUNroe of Geekquality. Her nametag was spelled wrong. As was Ms. Barron's, actually. Spelling: fundamental!)

Munroe gave Django Unchained as an example of a movie where the black woman gets to be a helpless damsel in distress for once. I have now heard so many different things about Django Unchained that I'm just going to have to watch it. Munroe was also very vocal about accepting all social roles, and all fannish identities, from everyone. "And if you don't like it, then you can get out....No one gives a shit about your opinion on their life."

The other panelists were Natania Barron and Misty Massey. Barron said she thought women were more likely than men to form emotional bonds with the characters in their fandoms. Massey was pretty quiet most of the time.

Unfortunately, I missed M. David Blake's reading, which occupied the same 4 o'clock timeslot as "Women and Geek Culture." Heard it was very good, though. After the panel, I wandered around, and met two very nice people at the Festival of Legends table. The Festival is close to where I live, and looks like fun, so I might check it out.

There were lots of costumes on Saturday, and lots of younger fans--I guess a lot were in class on Friday. There were more people in general, in fact, though the dealers' room remained small. A heavily scented young man in a bath towel was apparently cosplaying as the Old Spice guy--thanks to Famous Author Bill Ferris for clarifying that. I did hear one fellow being very loud, and very rude, about someone he thought "didn't have the body to pull off" the costume she was wearing. Fortunately, that was the only real negativity: overall, it was a pretty upbeat crowd.

It turned out everyone I knew had gone to the Tim Powers panel, and they all emerged at six. I hadn't read any of his books, so decided not to go, but in retrospect I should have: it's supposed to have been very good. Before I went to YALLFest in November, I had a weeks-long read-a-thon of all the authors whose names I at least recognized. I appreciated the panels there much more, and wish I'd done the same thing for this con. I'll definitely do it for the next one!

Anyway, went to Natania Barron's reading at six with Marc Blake, Ada Milenkovic Brown, and Jason and Megan Peters. I've never read Barron's books, either, but I really enjoyed that reading. Afterwards, we all had a great conversation, along with Bill Ferris and Fraser Sherman.

Marc and Ada and I wandered up to the con suite afterward, and ended up playing inappropriate card games with the staff. Not sure how they felt about that, but I had fun. After that, there was some time to kill before the "Eye of Argon" reading at 11. I'd meant to check out the burlesque show, but ended up just enjoying a little quiet writing time. Even a small con can get a little overwhelming after a while.

I'd read some of "The Eye of Argon" before, and had fun at the reading--I'm told I was "a champion" myself. As Marc pointed out, though, the story's not actually that much worse than a lot of what's been put into the world since then. We only got to the beginning of Chapter 5 (which comes after Chapter 4 1/2, by the way) before the hour was up. When I got home, I looked up Jim Theis and ended up feeling a little sad. Apparently he was only 16 when he wrote the thing, and was so hurt by all the mockery that he never wrote any more fiction after that. The kicker is that though his use of language is pretty terrible, the story itself is not half-bad, given the period and the author's age. If he had taken a few more English classes and found a good critique circle, he could have been a pretty good writer. It made me wonder how his life might have gone if the story hadn't been passed along.

Anyway, I was going to write up both Saturday and Sunday today, but this ended up getting kind of long, so I'll do Sunday tomorrow and the next day. Thanks for reading!