Alexx's Journal

(Sorry I haven't been posting much lately. So much stuff involved in living life (most of it good) that I haven't had time to write about it...)

Who Watches the Watchmen?  Paul Revere B     Comic     Sat 1:00 PM
Minx No More  	           William Dawes A   Comic     Sat 7:00 PM
All I Ever Needed to Know, I Learned From Comics
                           William Dawes B   Comic     Sat 8:00 PM
Making a Video Game 101    Room 204  	     Science   Sun 10:00 AM
SF in video games  	   Prefunction BC    Gaming    Sun 11:00 AM
The Future of SF/F Gaming  William Dawes B   Gaming    Sun 12:00 PM

If you are an Arisia panelist, check your on-line schedule again. They seem to have done some substantial edits since they sent out their initial announcement.

(Thanks to jducouer for the heads-up.)

Photos from Arisia, and also a bunch from earlier that I've been meaning to upload, but hadn't yet gotten around to. Captions included. Beware of Silly Hats!

Arisia 2008 photos

Christmas 2007 photos

I went to Arisia and it was ok.

I was pretty low-energy going in this year, what with work being stressful and all. I actually spent much of Saturday afternoon napping.

I was four panels this year, and none of them were disasters. Some were definitely better than others, though. I have started (belatedly) to take notes on who I would (and would *not*) like to be on panels with next year.

Notices of who was moderating most of the panels were not given out until the actual con, and even then were in fairly obscure places. The one panel I moderated, I had essentially no advance notice for. I used to think moderating was a scary job, but I've now done it enough to get past that. In fact, I think I need to moderate more in the future. I first volunteered to be on panels on the basic theory that I had more intelligent things to say than lots of the existing panelists did. Nowadays, it's not the panelists I'm competing with (much), but the audience members who won't shut up -- even when they don't actually have anything to say. I'm in favor of a certain amount of audience participation, but lots of Arisia moderators allow far too much of it, IMAO. If I'm the moderator, I don't have to do that.

Another idea for next year's panels: if they do the thing of putting the panelists in touch via email beforehand again, try and settle definitional issues before the con. More than one panel this weekend spent their whole hour trying to reach a concensus definition of something, rather than talking about the alleged topic of the panel. Granted, this often produced entertaining results, but I think there would be better results with a bit more focus.

Spent lots of time chatting with interesting people or exchanging backrubs with pretty people. In the best instances, of course, these were one and the same :)

Never made it to the art show. Made one pass through the dealer's room/row, but only bought a t-shirt that kestrell had asked me for ("Evil keeps me young"). Only saw a few books that even tempted me, and made my saving throw on all of them -- vaguely disappointing, actually. Never went into Nancy's Button shop, as that's one addiction I'm pretty well over. Kes bought me a custom button, though: "Kestrell's Hiro", which I wore on Sunday.

Due to my forgetting to take off the privacy thingy on the door, we never got the regular Housekeeping visit on Saturday. Late in the afternoon, we called down to ask them to send up fresh towels and cofee-maker supplies for the next morning. Before long, they sent up someone -- with just towels. We called again for the coffee fixings. No response. I was heading down to the first floor at that point, so I made a third try by bugging the front desk directly. When I got back to the room, Kes told me that someone had been by to drop the coffee stuff off. I figured it would be best for a sighted person to double-check at this point. Just as well, as we discovered that what he had left was entirely decaffeinated coffee -- and no cups. Kes made a *fourth* call, which shortly produced an apologetic staffer bearing caffeinated coffee packets, cups -- and a carafe full of premade coffee, in case she wanted some right now. Which she didn't, but at least that was a better category of error to be making.

I met cabell, a friend of Kes' who is spending a semester at MIT with the CMS program. She was pretty cool, and had *very* pink hair. At one panel, she was sitting directly in front of me in the audience, and I kept seeing weird purple halo effects around her hair for the first fifteen minutes or so. I think my visual cortex is just completely unused to that color.

I took a few pictures with my cell phone. Not many, as I'm still fundamentally not used to having a camera with me all the time. But I've just worked out how to use Flickr, and uploaded them there.

786 Sexual Revolution as Seen Through SF Lit. Fri 10:00 PM
How far has science fiction literature pushed the leading edge of social change? Huxley's Brave New World envisioned a world where only sexual promiscuity is socially acceptable. In Haldeman's Forever War homosexuality becomes the social norm. Were they foreshadowing or small agents of social change in themselves? Come discuss the parallels of SF fiction and our culture's attitude toward sex over the decades.

742 Fallout of the Singularity Sat 12:00 PM
The technical singularity is a theoretical point at which technological progress accelerates beyond prediction. What are the consequences when technological change outpaces society's ability to address those changes? How will people differentiate themselves intellectually when the sum total of all human knowledge is instantly available to everyone? Will class and status become irrelevant or will they people cling to them out of adherence to tradition?

833 Gaming Addictions: Online, RPG, LARP, SimLife Sat 1:00 PM (EDIT: Confirmed!)
Are you addicted? Are you a gaming widow/widower? Do you need help? Can you moderate yourself well enough to have your fun and a real life too? How to recognize the difference between addiction and just plain having fun.

716 It's Not Fanfic If You Can Make Money At It Sun 11:00 AM
There's an entire shelf full of sequels to Pride and Prejudice; sequels and extensions to the Sherlock Holmes canon are a cottage industry. Is it true that the only difference between these published books and the best of current fanfic is that their original texts are out of copyright and thus derivative works can be published with impunity? Does this mean fanfic is becoming respectable outside of SF&F?