Worldcon 2019: BETTER LATE THAN NEVER ON SCREAMING ABOUT CONVENTIONS

Hello my darlings! I am F I N A L L Y talking about Worldcon! It happened! There was a lot of stuff! I will never stop being confused that the academic track is on a completely different schedule to EVERYTHING ELSE in a way that is maximally inconvenient! I think I've kinda accepted that there is Too Much Stuff and occasionally just going "No, I am going to sit outside and damn the consequences" for an hour is fine too.

This year was a) the first time I've been on a flight on my own, b) the first time I've ever been to Ireland, and c) the first time that I've been in charge of booking the hotel rooms, so I was a LITTLE frazzled. (I did in fact cock up the hotel room booking, by the way; I apparently forgot that Worldcon ran until the Monday.) I shared with redrocketpanda and itsreileyright and they were both absolutely lovely! (redrocketpanda is doing his dissertation on robots in popular culture, and looking for fieldwork/interview opportunities, and itsreileyright is an expert on queer history, they're both REALLY COOL.)

My obligatory livetweet is over here! I've not written up the full panel notes for everything I went to, but if there's anything where you go "Ooh, I want more details of that," let me know and I'll type up what I have! As a fair warning, I continue to guess at the spelling of names and titles! I've tried to correct where I can, but there are some things that I haven't been able to google for an answer.

Other general stuff:

• I hadn't prepared for Dublin to have fucking London prices, oh my god. Three euros for a bottle of pop! What!


• I did mostly live on the cooked breakfast at the hotel and stopping by the Tesco on my way home for a meal deal or something?


• I LOVE that so many panels had everyone state their pronouns in their introduction! Like, it's inclusive AND fantastically useful for me when I'm taking notes! (I have almost definitely fucked up someone's pronouns, I'm really sorry if I have, I've tried to check twitter and author bios where I've not had them written down but if I still fucked up please let me know and I'll fix it.)


• Dublin has trams! I didn't know this, but it meant that I got a week-long pass for the trams and was perfectly happy.


• Apparently the queueing system was a nightmare for everyone involved, because the queues had to snake and be cut off by doors and all the rest of it, but ngl, my main issue tended to be once I was IN the queue, because that was a LOT of people.


• I am really sorry to anyone I was introduced to, because I have forgotten SO MANY NAMES AND HANDLES! If you've added me on a form of social media and I've not followed you back, please let me know so that I can fix it! Or if I owe you an email and it hasn't arrived, poke me about that too!

Thursday
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