Saturday, March 7, 2015

11 am : Turkey Readings. Yes, you read that right, VancouFur now has its own version of the Turkey Readings. I was beside myself when I read that. The Turkey Readings at Vcon are the most fun thing I do all year and to have them happen at VancouFur is like having two Xmases for me.

Turnout was… not great. There was like six of us and that included the host. Compared to the 100 plus attendees at the Vcon version, that’s not much, but this was the debut of the event at VancouFur and I am sure it will grow with time.

And those there were very generous! Our little 45 minutes of fun raised almost $200 for the Vancouver Orphaned Kitten Rescue Association, or VOKRA. VOKRA was this year’s (and last year’s) chosen charity for VancouFur and really, how can you argue with a charity like that?

ORPHANED KITTENS, people. Sad little kittens with no homes. It doesn’t get more sympathetic than that!

Artist’s rendering shown here.

2:30 pm : Everyone’s A Critic. Another writing type panel that I went to without looking up the particulars. Turned out to be about what you’d expect. Discussion of the art of the critique and how to supply someone with that most vital of artistic nutrients, constructive feedback.

It was hosted by the same pair as Friday’s Writing In 3D, and had the same problems from my point of view. Slow, unfocused, and I didn’t feel that the hosts really brought anything to the panel. They were both nice guys (one of them with a sexy British accent, rawr) but I would have appreciated a little more drive and a little less audience chatter.

One thing that struck me was that the idea of constructive criticism is that it should leave the person feeling encouraged to keep writing (or whatever). I had never thought of it quite that way. When I critique, I do try to phrase it in the form of “this could be better” rather than “this stinks and so do you”, but I tend to be very thorough and incisive, and I suppose that might well come across as discouraging.

There goes that machine of mine again.

And to be honest, a very bitchy part of me was thinking “Oh, but some people SHOULD be discouraged from writing. Very, very strongly. ” But that is an unworthy thought. It’s neither my job nor my responsibility to choose who writes and who doesn’t.

And who knows, someone who seems absolutely without talent today might bloom into a great writer with a little sunshine.

4 pm : Furries in the Media. Always a great panel. Pleased to see that, in response to last year’s incident with a very tightly packed panel in far too small a meeting space, this year’s panel was held in the entire ballroom area. Plenty of space there!

Sadly, the demon of modern AV equipment sank its teeth into this event with a vengeance. It took one and a quarter hours for two extremely competent nerds in full techie communication mode (I understood about one word in three) to get the host’s laptop connected to the big projection screen.

All the while, the host, poor Carthage, had to basically improvise in lieu of the presentation he had so carefully prepared.

Luckily, we got things going eventually and got to discuss the topic. We furries are real, real sensitive about how we are seen by the world, and so this is always a hot topic for us.

This year, we of course talked about that chlorine gas attack at last year’s Midwest Fur Fest. Briefly, someone or other threw a can of pure chlorine into a stairwell, and everyone in the hotel had to go outside in the December 2014 cold at 3 am and four people got quite sick.

Carthage made an excellent point that, as awful as that incident was, it also functioned as a turning point for the Internet’s view of furries. We of the fuzzy community have gotten used to being open to abuse by the whole Internet (everybody loves having a group they can shit freely upon) but the gas attack made us sympathetic, and a lot of people suddenly said “Hey, why are we making fun of these people?”

Sometimes tragedy forces people to grow.

5:30 pm : Youtubealoo! Took a while to get started, but once it did, it was a very interesting collection of YouTube videos of various sorts. I think the organizer/curator must have decided that there was no point in including any videos that had gone viral, because by definition, odds are we have all seen them.

An intriguing find : There are two gentlemen on Fiverr.com who will perform absolutely any script for $5. A fellow with a Jamaican accent, and one with an Australian accent.

I assume there is a time limit, but still. Any script. Five bucks.

You can bet that got the little wheels turning in my head.

10 pm : Eye of Argon. Where to start. Well, the Eye of Argon is widely considered to be one of the worst pieces of fantasy fiction ever published. Its use of language is heavy-handed and repetitive. Its story is extremely hackneyed and predictable, the prose goes beyond being purple and becomes ultraviolet, and as the story goes on, the author starts to just plain make up words.

And that only scratches the surface of its literary crimes. Read it at your own peril.

Eye of Argon as an event takes this rare gem of suckitude (as one panel said, it’s a story famous for its quality) and turns it into a game. The idea is that everyone sits in a circle, and when it is their turn, they read the literary magnum opus aloud for as long as they can without laughing (or until they reach the end of the page).

If (when) you laugh, you pass it on to the next person in the circle, and so on and so forth till the whole thing has been read.

This usually takes two hours (for a 17 page work) and makes everyone involved laugh themselves silly from lack of oxygen.

I was no exception.

Sunday, March 8, 2015

4 pm : Closing Ceremonies. Not really keen on ceremonies myself, but there are so many people I know involved with the convention now that I kind of felt obligated. And it was okay. Nice to see people get recognized for the awesomeness they do, and happy to learn that there were 720 (!) attendants this year, and that we raised, in total, over $1700 for all those poor little orphaned kittens.

And that’s a lot of kitten chow!

That’s all I did on Sunday, panel-wise.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. ]