![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starladyI took a break from my spring break this weekend and went out to FOGcon 2 in Walnut Creek. All in all, I had a good time, with many awesome people, and I'll definitely be happy to go back to FOGcon 3.
Sitting in the @fogconvention cover panel thinking about how in Haywire when she takes off her heels it's to beat a guy to death.
Okay, Frank Herbert's BDSM novel with a submissive star is now the strangest thing I have heard at @fogconvention.
Though dubcon dragon claw somnophiia is up there too.
I was going to say something about Fogcon. I forget what. I want it to be way more fannish, that's what.
Oh god Jackie Gross is the best.
Panelist: "I feel like the REAL ending to Casablanca is on the Archive of Our Own." #fuckingwin
Problematic things panel degenerating into "Orson Scott Card 201." At least Mary Anne Mohanraj isn't here to defend him.
Thank fuck I am sitting in the fandom row for this panel.
Fannish takes on the existence of Dumbledore's ex-boyfriend diverge radically from the non-fannish.
"Bruce Wayne lost his parents and that's horrible, but he's always lived in a mansion."
Virtuously not mentioning mpreg as Charles Xavier's secondary mutation in this X-Men panel. Wishing @wintercreek were here.
Home from @Fogconvention. Starving. Work to do. See everyone next year!
FOGcon is a young con, and I do think, unsurprisingly, that it had more energy last year, but I also think the con has a lot of potential. That said, the con runners need to put a bit more thought into the panels and the panelists, so that it doesn't feel like Pro and Semi-Pro Con all the time, as it did at times this year, and so that all of the panels aren't overlapping at points, like I felt the programming was this year. Another thing I'd like to see is at least one panel devoted exclusively to (each of?) the Guests' of Honor works, or otherwise what's the point of having Guests and a Ghost of Honor? I don't really know anything more about Nalo Hopkinson's works than I did going in, for example, which makes me glad that she'll be a Guest of Honor at Sirens in October, since Sirens' format will force all the attendees to think about her works explicitly.
The other thing is that I think FOGcon needs to be more fannish--not even a lot, but there needs to be more of fandom officially on the programming than a one-hour vidshow and a "you kids get off my lawn!" fannish history panel. The vidshow, run bylaurashapiro, was one of my favorite things about FOGcon, actually, and in some ways it also did one of the best jobs of any of the panels I attended of thinking critically about the theme of the convention. I'm not surprised that ("new") fandom brought its critical analysis and squee, but "old" fandom and the pros and semi-pros need to meet us halfway. And the way we're going to do that, until and unless FOGcon gets a lot bigger, is via programming.
What did everyone else think? Did anyone else have the frustrating experience of five hotel keys demagnetize in less than 24 hours?
Sitting in the @fogconvention cover panel thinking about how in Haywire when she takes off her heels it's to beat a guy to death.
Okay, Frank Herbert's BDSM novel with a submissive star is now the strangest thing I have heard at @fogconvention.
Though dubcon dragon claw somnophiia is up there too.
I was going to say something about Fogcon. I forget what. I want it to be way more fannish, that's what.
Oh god Jackie Gross is the best.
Panelist: "I feel like the REAL ending to Casablanca is on the Archive of Our Own." #fuckingwin
Problematic things panel degenerating into "Orson Scott Card 201." At least Mary Anne Mohanraj isn't here to defend him.
Thank fuck I am sitting in the fandom row for this panel.
Fannish takes on the existence of Dumbledore's ex-boyfriend diverge radically from the non-fannish.
"Bruce Wayne lost his parents and that's horrible, but he's always lived in a mansion."
Virtuously not mentioning mpreg as Charles Xavier's secondary mutation in this X-Men panel. Wishing @wintercreek were here.
Home from @Fogconvention. Starving. Work to do. See everyone next year!
FOGcon is a young con, and I do think, unsurprisingly, that it had more energy last year, but I also think the con has a lot of potential. That said, the con runners need to put a bit more thought into the panels and the panelists, so that it doesn't feel like Pro and Semi-Pro Con all the time, as it did at times this year, and so that all of the panels aren't overlapping at points, like I felt the programming was this year. Another thing I'd like to see is at least one panel devoted exclusively to (each of?) the Guests' of Honor works, or otherwise what's the point of having Guests and a Ghost of Honor? I don't really know anything more about Nalo Hopkinson's works than I did going in, for example, which makes me glad that she'll be a Guest of Honor at Sirens in October, since Sirens' format will force all the attendees to think about her works explicitly.
The other thing is that I think FOGcon needs to be more fannish--not even a lot, but there needs to be more of fandom officially on the programming than a one-hour vidshow and a "you kids get off my lawn!" fannish history panel. The vidshow, run by
laurashapiro, was one of my favorite things about FOGcon, actually, and in some ways it also did one of the best jobs of any of the panels I attended of thinking critically about the theme of the convention. I'm not surprised that ("new") fandom brought its critical analysis and squee, but "old" fandom and the pros and semi-pros need to meet us halfway. And the way we're going to do that, until and unless FOGcon gets a lot bigger, is via programming. What did everyone else think? Did anyone else have the frustrating experience of five hotel keys demagnetize in less than 24 hours?
(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-02 13:28 (UTC)I agree with your analysis -- the con felt really heavily weighted toward the pros, to me, to the point where I had trouble feeling like I belonged there.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-03 05:16 (UTC)Vidshow! \o/
(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-02 13:38 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-02 15:48 (UTC)ETA: Correction: it was "Are New People Ruining Fandom?"
(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-02 16:03 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-02 16:07 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-02 16:10 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-02 20:59 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-03 03:19 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-03 05:14 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-02 15:47 (UTC)From the assorted conversations I had at the con, I got the feeling that the older crowd there had a very different view of the panel composition. I heard a lot of people being excited, for instance, about how many non-pros were on the panels, but I agree that many of them were semi-pros. Since Potlatch is a younger con, I keep being excited that FOGcon has so many younger attendees in general--at Potlatch I often feel like I'm the only attendee under 50.
I do agree, though, that we need to get more young-fandom panels in the mix. The best way to do that, I suspect, is to nominate and vote for a lot of panels we're interested in. There tends to be a gap in the set of nominated panels that gets filled by concom nominations, and the more we can provide the smaller that gap is. (I know I personally had at least two ideas that I failed to nominate in my December-January retreat from nonwork life; I'm hoping to do better on this front next year)
Also: these are my crossed fingers for a FOGcon 3. Come on FOGcon 2 budget--turn out to have worked out! (something the concom won't know for a month-ish, minimum)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-03 05:19 (UTC)I know I am preaching to the choir here, but it's not even that I want things to be more media fannish per se, but that it would be nice for the con to not be pushing the interpretation that the only way to do SFF fannishness is to be somewhere on the track to a book deal or trying to maintain a career. because it's just not true!
I heard all about the dubcon dragon claw somnophilia from the author on the "Mars Wants Our Genitals" panel Friday night.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-03 07:00 (UTC)I will say that while I did definitely see the dynamic you're talking about, it read to me as cliquishness rather than as publication-based snobbery. I don't know for certain because I'm out of the loop, but I strongly suspect that that more a matter of who signed up than of a selection bias on the part of the programming chair (who is, side note, the author of the dragon story).
This year was definitely smaller this year; there was a much smaller pool of programming submissions at the time I left the concom than there were at the same time last year; and there seemed to be a much smaller pool of program participants. The most likely reason programming items didn't wind up on the final schedule is a lack of available participants more than overall unpopularity. And, of course. in order have pushed for more equality, the concom would have had to KNOW what imbalance they should be addressing, and both Vito and I wound up leaving for life-related reasons this year. It's a lot easier to keep con-running at the top of your priority when there are professional advantages to doing so...
(Also, I think a lot of people are sort of incidentally published and only brought it up because of the context. I've known Stephen for years, and last weekend was the first time I found out he wrote fiction, let alone dubcon dragon claw somnophilia. Given a community as fannishly productive as ours, but incentivized rather than discouraged from publication, and you wind up with a whole lot of people with a short story published here or there in a semiprozine.)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-03 03:26 (UTC)I wish we could generate a list of panels that have been done to death, and distribute it to all the likely sercons. And on the other side we could have some new&exciting panels. (Yeah, I live near Chicago, if I want a national movement I should seek out WorldCON.)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-03 05:20 (UTC)There were a lot of interesting panels on the programming signup, and none of them made the cut except for the X-Men one, more or less.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-08 01:53 (UTC)