FogCon: Day 1

Welcome to FogCon 8! I am back in my room after a busy but fun opening day, which featured the following:

- Learning how to play a board game, Terraforming Mars, which is pretty much what it says on the tin. We didn't finish the whole thing because it takes like three hours, we only had one and a half, and we spent a good twenty minutes going over the rules, but I still enjoyed it, and might get myself into a full-length game at some point, depending on what else is going on.

- A panel on aliens, which was nominally about how actors get into the mindset to play an alien role, but ended up being a more general conversation about alien characters. Andrea Hairston, one of the Guests of Honor, was on this panel, and she is a terrific panelist and storyteller. I'm excited for her solo panel tomorrow evening. Probably my favorite bit was a talk about the pitfalls of authenticity; "authenticity is frozen", in Hairston's words, whereas real cultures and people are always growing and changing. Although I didn't say it there, it reminded me of David Chang's complaints about he sees as a misguided search for authenticity in his recent Netflix series, Ugly Delicious.

- Tasty Japanese food for dinner with forestofglory, Jed, Mary Ann, and others.

- The opening ceremony, at which I helped lead the group in a song. So, yeah. I got up and sang in front of other people, not quite solo but almost, and it went mostly okay I think? (Photographic proof.) The song itself is a round based on an Ursula Le Guin poem, "The Creation of Ea", which I know from doing roundsinging at Jed's house, and Jed asked if I would help him and Mary Ann teach the song at opening ceremonies in honor of Le Guin's recent passing. It was fun, if a bit scary. (Even scarier is that I seem to have agreed to do the same thing at WisCon.)

- Another panel, also featuring Andrea Hairston, about science and religion in SFF. The discussion had a few limitations, because all five people on the panel had been raised in a Christian tradition of some variety (though their current beliefs varied quite a bit), but it was still a fascinating discussion that could easily have gone on for another hour.

- ConTention, our annual gathering for debate and silliness and silly debates. forestofglory and I successfully roped the group into arguing about whether cheesecake is cake or pie (kerrykhat must be so proud). Other topics: Dumbledore vs Gandalf, Doctor Who vs Star Trek, who will be the first SFF author to win a Nobel Prize for Literature, is originality overrated?

- An hour of staffing the consuite -- I ran into a concom member who is also a friend right before ConTention and she roped me into asked if I could keep an eye on the place for an hour, and I decided why not? While there, I managed to resurrect the cheesecake debate briefly, which then ranged a little more widely ("is a building a sandwich or a burrito?"); I also got a little Dragon Age chat in with a guy in a Grey Warden t-shirt. Once my relief came along, I dropped by zahraa and Eric's room party, and then it was time for quiet time, winding down, and writing up this post.

Overall I'm very glad to know more people in the FogCon community now, and to feel more comfortable getting into conversations, because it's way more fun. The downside is less downtime, to recharge from being around people non-stop. But if that's the trade-off, I'll take it.

FogCon: Day 2

I'm not expecting that the day is over yet, because it's only 9:30 which is way too early for me to go to bed, but I decided I needed a break from public spaces, so I'm back in my room for a bit, to relax and do my write-up for the day.

I started my day with a turn through the dealer's room, where I didn't buy anything but might tomorrow, and then went to a reading. I was mostly there for Marie Brennan, who read one of my favorite of her short stories. Of the others, the one I particularly liked was Dominica Phetteplace; she was on the aliens panel the day before, and said good and thought-provoking things, so I was looking forward to hearing her work. I was not disappointed, and will mostly likely seek out more of her fiction.

Afterwards was the lunch banquet, where I was joined by forestofglory, Jed, Mary Anne, and SE, who finally came to FogCon for the first time after my literal years of attempts to lure her here. Next I went to a panel on gender in the Terra Ignota series by Ada Palmer, who is one of the guests of honor this year. For some reason I had expected it to look at the topic of gender in fiction more generally, and as soon as it became clear that the discussion was going to focus firmly on a series that I mostly haven't read (I think I washed out after the first chapter of the first book), I should probably have left for the panel next door (on information overload). But I stuck it out, and it was still interesting. Especially as possibly the only panel I've ever attended that was mostly critical of the work of a con guest of honor.

And then it was time for my panel! We talked about taking the Bradford Challenge and other attempts to diversify our reading lists. I felt like we had a pretty great discussion about the benefits and challenges of reading more diversely, and then we spent a good fifteen minutes rec'cing books. I feel like I've gotten better at doing panels with time -- I guess last year's four-panel trial-by-fire at Wiscon was good for something! The last event before dinner was a panel with the title "Glorious, Bonkers Romance", which was pretty much exactly what it sounds like. This one was just fun. Probably the most bonkers of all the bonkers settings was The Iron Seas series by Meljean Brook, an alternate history setting where our world was largely conquered by the Mongols, who then developed mind control nanotech that infects everyone they've conquered, and there are kraken and orgies, and a island of lesbian separatists that is guarded by giant robots, and when the moderator was describing the books at first I thought they were talking about multiple series of books, but no! I asked, and both the mod and SE confirmed that this is all one world. I am tempted to check these out just for the world-building alone.

Then dinner, in the hotel restaurant, followed by my last structured event for the night: a reading and performance by the other honored guest for the weekend, Andrea Hairston. She's a playwright and stage director, and she put on a really wonderful show along with her collaborator Pan Morigan.

Now it's time to chill here a bit more, then decide where to wander next: maybe the bar, maybe the consuite, maybe some other adventure. Whatever it is, today has been a good day.