Monica

Thanksgiving dinner with my family was good. My nephew (Zachary) is still loud, self-centered, and generally obnoxious, but he has mellowed a bit. He is now merely an obnoxious pain in the ass, rather than an unbearable obnoxious pain in the ass. Kim (my neice) seemed to be more sociable than she has been the last few visits, which is good. I can't believe she's a junior in high school already.

My parents had a painting that Kim did not too long ago. She is a really good artist, at least when copying. She did an oil painting from a photo that looked *very* nice.

Dinner was quite tasty, as usual. There was some maternal angst because the turkey was taking "too long"; she thought the timer should have popped up an hour or so before it did. We checked with a meat thermometer and the timer was right; it just takes a while to cook a large bird.

D&D Tuesday night was fun. We didn't make much "plot progress", but we made "character progress" and it was fun to play through some of the interactions. I think I'm getting a better feel for how to play my character.

I'm headed out tomorrow morning for the con. On the Mark only has one performance this year (not our usual two), and it's Friday night. So we'll be able to relax the rest of the weekend. Clam Chowder will have its usual fabulous Saturday-night performance, I presume. Yaakov will be there this year (he wasn't last year), and I'm looking forward to chatting with him. He said we'd talk about the synagogue board thing; he's a past shul president, so he's familiar with the inner workings of at least one type of synagogue. (I had sent him mail and he suggested talking in person.) Maybe he can advise me.

The machine on which I'm typing this has a Sun logo on it and kind of looks and behaves like a Mac. (I haven't used a Mac in several years. There's no uber-menu with the apple icon at the top of the screen, but maybe that can be disabled. They really only want people to use Netscape here at the con, after all.) I wonder what the heck this box is.

The Harry Potter book won the Hugo for best novel last night. I am disappointed. I haven't actually read any of the nominees, so I can't say what the best novel was this year, but I am highly skeptical that Harry Potter was it.

The winner for drammatic presentation was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and they showed it after the awards. I didn't see it in the theatre because I wasn't willing to spend 8 bucks to find out whether I would be able to read the subtitles (size, contrast, and speed of deployment being highly variable in these things), so I went to the free showing at the con. I missed the first couple minutes, but I don't think I missed anything essential. It was a decent movie, but I'm not really sure what all the fuss was about. (I'm also not really convinced that it's SF or fantasy. If you replaced the swords with guns would the movie still be elliglbe, or would it be a western?)

I will admit to some puzzlement at the ending. I suppose that was intentional. If both of them had taken the action taken by the woman, I would know the result; as only she took that action, I don't know if he got the desired results. (I'm being vague to avoid spoilers here, but won't be vague in any followup comments.)

This has been a pretty good con for programming -- better than I remember Bucky (Worldcon 3 years ago) being. I've only been to these two worldcons, so I can't generalize.

We shared the convention space with a group called "For His Glory" this weekend. (They seem to have disappeared Sunday afternoon.) They are obviously a Christian group, though I don't know what specific denomination. (They were most prominent Sunday morning, when several hundred were gathered -- all wearing white robes -- and singing and drumming. Kind of neat to listen to.) They were very polite and easy to share space with; no proselytizing, no public evangelizing, no in-your-face tactics, no pamphlets. But friendly to talk to in the elevators and the like. I hope that the anti-Christian (and anti-religion-in-any-form) elements of fandom were paying attention; for a community that gets branded (often unfairly) as dangerous weirdos, you'd think fans would be a little more open-minded about other groups.

I was on two panels yesterday. The SCA/fandom one was poor; the other person did show up (late), but didn't go to the green room beforehand. So we had no opportunity to figure out what we were going to do. It turned into heavy audience participation, which is good, but the audience contained one annoying person who would not shut up or stay on topic, and we had to stomp on him a few times. That was kind of frustrating. (Also frustrating: I spottee some friends there, Justin and Caitlin from Carolingia, but I had to run off to my other panel so I didn't get to talk with them. And I haven't seen them since.)

The other panel, on performing with other people, went pretty well. It was a fun group of people to be with, and it looked like the audience was enjoying it. It would have been nice if we'd been able to continue the conversation informally, but there was a concert immediately after (that one of the panelists was in), so we all went to that instead.

Three Weird Sisters is a good band, by the way. I don't think I had heard them before. There are three of them (duh); all sing, and the instruments are wire-strung harp, guitar, bodhran, and string bass. I picked up their CD, which I gather they just released.

Apropos of nothing, I have noticed a much higher density of wheelchairs at this con than in the general public. I wonder whether this says something about who's attacted to fandom, or about Philly, or about Worldcon, or what. (It could be the last: Worldcons tend to be kind of spread out, so people who might normally not use a chair might need to here.)

I talked with Rabbi Berkun (at Tree of Life) this morning. He's very happy with the job I did last Friday and wants me to do this again. (That had been my impression, but it's nice to have confirmation.) I'm next doing this at the end of September.

Dani and I are headed off to Worldcon. I don't know what there'll be in the way of net access; on the one hand, it's a con full of geeks, but on the other hand, more and more people have laptops and the like, and there are data ports in the hotel rooms. So the days of public clusters at large conventions may be past; I'm not sure.

Well, whatever. I'm not all that worried about it. After all, there are (gasp) more important things to do at a con than surf the net. :-)

Worldcon is in Philly this year, and Jim and Laurie Mann are in charge of programming for it. (Jim is a former co-worker of mine, and Dani and I are friends with both of them.) So it's not too surprising that Dani and I both ended up being asked to be on program.

I have an odd set of panels: two music-related (which sound like fun), one costume-related (makes me wonder why I'm on it, but it's an SCA-fandom crossover panel so I guess that makes sense), and one about the link between the SCA and fandom. There are two problems with this last one that I'm not sure how to handle: (1) I really wasn't *there* -- yes, I've been in the SCA for 20 years and I've been going to cons for almost as long (a couple a year, though, not a lot), and there are other people who do both, but I'm not sure there's much I can actually *say* about any of this. And (2), the original collection of panelists has dwindled to two people; the other person is one of the founders of the East Kingdom but hasn't been playing in the SCA for years. (I don't know how active he is in fandom.) I'm trying to figure out what on earth the two of us can do with this topic. I'm kind of hoping that they decide to drop this panel (unless they can add a couple people to it at the last minute), but I'm not sure I should try to initiate that. I did tell Laurie that I'm uncomfortable with its current make-up, but I don't know what she'll do about it.

The music panels should be interesting. One is called "performing with other people", and I can certainly bring experience from On the Mark to bear on that. (They actually made me the moderator of this one, so I have to think about topics before the con. I'm on another item right before it, so we can't just huddle right before the panel. I sent out email to the other participants; I hope they have time to respond before heading out to the con this week.) The other one is called something like "connecting with the audience"; the three of us who are on this have interpreted this to mean mostly performance technique (eye contact, gesture, emotion, that sort of thing). I'm not sure exactly what we'll do with this yet. It's actually listed as a "workshop" in the program, so I suppose we can try for some audience participation. (I suggested to the other people that we have one of us do a "bad" performance and have the audience identify what specifically we're doing wrong.)

Dani and I are driving out there Thursday after work. Worldcons tend to be huge, so I have no idea if I'll actually be able to meet up with any of my co-panelists before we show up for our panels. We'll see, I guess. I'm new to this...