Saturday is usually the “big day” of a convention. Everyone has arrived and checked in and (hopefully) gotten some sleep, so it’s time for the only truly full day of panels!
9:30 am (or so) : Savouring the memory of the previous night’s feast, I eagerly await what breakfast has in store for me in hospitality.
Not much, as it turns out. All we got was a huge pile of muffins at 8 am, and I got the very last one (lemon poppyseed, VERY good and not one seen a lot these days.)
Lesson learned. Sign says lunch will be served at 12:30 pm. I will be there.
10 am : Diversity in Science Fiction. A not too bad panel. Nothing world rocking, but we had an interesting and stimulating discuss about including (gasp) non-white, non-male, non-neurotypical, non-able bodied, and/or non-heterosexual protagonists in science fiction and fantasy.
I am all for it, both for representation (which is SUPER IMPORTANT) and quite frankly for literary merit. I want to slip into the skin of someone who is not like me when I read. I want to see the world from a different point of view. I want to understand what it is like to be somebody else.
And on that level, I am sick to death of all the “normal” heroes.
To hell with yet another angsty Aryan.
Give me a black disabled autistic lesbian from Senegal, god damn it.
11 am : Alien Biology. Loved this panel because there were at least two or three actual scientists on the panel and they could give real answers to our questions.
It may not sound like much, but to me, that was a thrilling opportunity.
We ended talking mostly about whether there could be such a thing as a silicon based life form. Consensus is : no. Not a viable option.
Why? Because unlike that happy little slut carbon, silicon bond only weakly to itself, and so thqat makes it a piss poor substitute for carbon in the chain of life.
Carbon is up for a anything. It bonds with a lot of different things in a lot of different configuations, including itself.
So as far as we can tell, carbon is the only basis for life. But I hold out hope that there is some radically different formulation of the self-replicating pattern known as life out there somewhere, waiting to be found.
12 pm. Video Games as Art. I went into this knowing I would only be there for half of it, as I had an appointment for lunch at Chez Nous at 12:30.
Of course, the whole thing about how the late Roger Ebert said video games are not art came up. I paid as little attention to it now as I did then. Ebert was of the pinball generation and didn’t know a damned thing about video games.
Clearly, he just said that to tweak the tiger’s tail and get a rise out of the Internet.
Regardless, the discussion helped advance my own thinking on the subject.I realized that the only difference between the rest of the world of art and a video game is interactivity. And if interactivity somehow negates something’s status as “art”, then by that logic, you can turn the Mona Lisa from art to non-art simply by installing a button that changes the lighting slightly.
That’s clearly absurd. As usual, the real issue is that the snobs in the world of art can’t help conflating saying something is art and saying it is good. And video games have zero snob appeal and are associated with nerds and are otherwise socially toxic to the sort of person who is keen to have people think they are “sophisticated’.
Let’s move on before I upset myself.
12:30 pm : I arrived at Hospitality to find that lunch was served ages ago. Betrayed!
And the worst part is that I knew this was going to happen. I could feel it coming. It started as a small worry then rapidly grew into a dreaded certainty. Something deep in my bones told me it was coming, and lo and behold, it did.
And that made me angry because god dammit the sign said 12:30 pm but someone ignored that and served lunch early and that isn’t fair, god dammit.
However, there was still plenty of food left, so no harm done.
1 pm : Alien Languages. Always a fun topic. We ended up discussing the possibility of a creature that communicated via radio signals.
It’s more plausible than you might think. The presenter showed us a picture of a crab-like creature that could create an electric spark between its claws. That spark could form the basis of what’s known as a spark-gap transmitter. That, in turn, could be used in some kind of Morse Code type system of langauge.
The amount of energy involved need not be huge as the system only has to reach as far as the human voice does in order to be on par with it. And creatures like electric eels can generate quite a bit of energy in their coils.
It’s an intriguing thought. Though personally, I would go for something cuter than crabs. Maybe some deer-like animal that generates the spark between its antlers.
2 pm : Nap break! I always sleep very poorly on my first night in a new place. So I did not sleep much Friday night. Hence my beed for downtime. I went up to the hotel room, set an alarm for 3 pm, and snoozed.
3 pm : The alarm goes off! Owe Em Gee, it’s time to go to the super important Podcasting 101 panel. I really want to get into podcasting and this panel will tell me how to do it! GO GO GO.
Meh. Nah. Back to sleep.
Not proud of that, but that’s the way the ball crumbles sometimes.
That’s enough for today. Tomorrow will come Part 2, starting with my journey to find out what the heck a Science Slam is and does it hurt.
These and many other answers to questions who never asked will be found in tomorrow’s blog entry, unless I get super sad and need to blog instead.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.