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![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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 sheroped 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.
- 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
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.