Con report time!
3 pm : Joe and I made it to the con. The line for registration was relatively short. One complaint on my part : the ancient laptop I had to use in order to input all my registration info was too low for comfortable use by a mountainous fellow like myself, so the whole time I was inputting, I was in acute pain from having to crouch down.
This happens all the time when you are significantly taller than average. Sinks, counters, some chairs, some ceilings (erk), and various other things are set at too low a height and we end up having to squish down.
It’s not that big a deal, but it can be really annoying sometimes.
3:30 pm : After registration, I managed to catch the second half of a panel called Page 189,. The premise was intriguing : one of the panelists would read page 189 of a book to the audience, and then ask the audience if they would read the rest of the book based on that one page.
Had a near-miss with a terrible faux pas. The very last page 189 they read out bored me to tears. It was entirely exposition about some primitive submarine’s physical and command structure, and that kind of thing is all noise and no signal to me. Yawn!
So when they asked us if we would read the book based on that page, I was all ready to say HELL NO. But I hesitated.
And it’s good that I did, because it turned out that the book in question was written by the very panelist who was reading it to us.
Yikles. Dodged a bullet there!
4 pm : After that, I went to a panel called Blake’s 7 and Bureaucratic Inertia. The basic idea was to have an open-ended discussion of all the day to day details of life as one of the nameless cogs in the massive machine of an evil fascist empire. This is a topic I find super interesting, so I was eager to participate.
One stimulating notion that emerged was the idea that Blake’s 7 depicts what life is like for everyone in Star Trek’s Federation who is NOT in Starfleet and assigned to high status positions on the flagship of the fleet.
Obviously, this does not fly logically at all, and I furthermore have to strenuously object to it on philosophical and ethical grounds.
But it did bring up an interesting question : seeing as the Federation is a post-scarcity society, what, exactly, do the non-Starfleet citizens of the Federation do all day?
My guess is that most of them have jobs of some sort, but possibly not ones we would recognize as such, but these jobs would be socially rewarding but far from necessary in order to survive.
In other words, you might get status, a sense of accomplishment, the recognition of your peers, and a place in society where you can do meaningful labour out of one of these jobs, but money would not be part of the equation at all.
It’s really not that important.
5 pm : Nothing going on that held my interest, so I wandered over to Hospitality. There, my mind was blown by the fact that they were serving real hot food, including veggie pakora (delish), and OMG SO DAMNED GOOD Shepherd’s pie.
I am not kidding. It was the best Shepherd’s Pie I have ever had (sorry, Mom). The sauce was so rich and tasty. And I am not the only one who felt that way. Everyone who had it was talking about how good it was.
Excellent hot food in the Hospitality suite?
Now that’s what I call livin’.
6 pm : After a small amount of dithering, I ended up wandering in to Ghost Stories Of An Antiquary, a panel about the history of the Victorian ghost story, of which A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickers is the most famous.
It turns out that in England, it used to be a tradition that on Xmas eve, you would sit around the fire and tell ghost stories. That struck me and the panelists as something that hearkened to pagan Longest Night festivals based around the idea that the winter solstice was the night when the barrier between the world of the living and the world of the dead was at its thinnest.
How that got pushed all the way back to October 31 is beyond me.
7 pm : Enough frivolity, it was time for the very serious business of FOOD. First, Joe and Felicity and I tried Denny’s, but it was super busy. So we ended up at our other usual restaurant, ABC Country Kitchen.
Good food, good company, and good conversation. That’s livin’ too.
After that, there was nothing interesting going on until….
11 pm : I went to a fun panel with a highly flawed premise, What, No Sex In The Future? The idea was something like, “why is there no sex in science fiction TV and movies?”, to which we all replied that there is lots, it’s just not explicit, it’s implied, like in the rest of mainstream media. If two people are shown in a passionate embrace in bed, then we cut to them waking up in the morning, we all know what happened in between.
And even that is not true any more now that there are shows like Game of Thrones and Westworld around. They abound with fuckin’.
Still, it was fun to talk about the future of sex. It made me realize that my main worry about a world where, whether via genetic modification or virtual reality, you can have any body you want and make whatever changes you want at any time is that I am pretty sure that would drive a lot of people insane.
Our bodies are our boundries and if they become protean, I am not at all sure that our minds will be able to take it.
So I am thinking that even in a future where the technology allows unlimited bodily modification, there would be a strong set of rules and/or taboos that would keep things from going further than the mind can handle.
Losing your mind that way is a terrifying prospect, when you think about it.
Might make the basis for a heck of a horror story.
I shall think upon it. In the meantime….
I will walk to you nice people again tomorrow,.