Worldcon 2019: BETTER LATE THAN NEVER ON SCREAMING ABOUT CONVENTIONS

[spindizzy]

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

• I was definitely not packing my bags at 23:00 the night before, specifically digging out all of the ARCs and comics that I wanted to get signed and stashing them in my mostly-empty luggage! No one was doing that!


• As always, shout-out to readingtheend for introducing me to packing cubes, because they continue to be absolute life-savers for cramming everything into one bag.


• hardlyaverage and captainraz dropped me off at the airport at like 3:30am, because they are absolutely sweethearts and also because I'm pretty sure that was the week that the exhaust on lexgarrett's car fell off. They got me to the right place! I was fine!


• It turns out that Past!Susan was actually really smart and/or paranoid and booked me a checked bag just in case? Like, I don't remember doing that, but I'm very glad that I did. I didn't need it on the way out, because I managed to fit everything into my cute stripy satchel and the huge bag I brought, but yay, options!


• I read Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells on the way over, because I figured "bot with intense social anxiety who would rather be watching tv but is in fact on transports trying to do sensible things" was an appropriate book for the flight.


• So yeah, because of the way the flights shook out, I ended up in Dublin by 7am, dropped off my bags at the hotel (where I ran into itsreileyright!) and bimbled across Dublin to the convention centre. I got somewhat confused by the registration system, but the badges were really cool! They had art from Monstress on them! And there were actually pronoun stickers, which is something I didn't see at Helsinki! ... And I ended up next to Joe Hill (yes, the writer) in the queues, because apparently that's just how conventions work? Idk, I was slightly more starstruck by Jeannette Ng.


• In news about how being medicated for my anxiety and ADHD affects my con-going experience: it turns out that I can actually RECOGNISE the anxiety spike when I leave panels (relatively little visual stimuli, one focus point, few moving pieces) and go back to the con floor (LOTS of visual stimuli and everything is moving). And then once I know, I can do things like "Take the stairs down instead of joining the TEN THOUSAND SHIFTING QUEUES THAT WERE ALL UNLABELLED AND BARELY CORRALLED on Thursday."


• The only thing on my list for Thursday was going to the aliettedb signing and squeeing a ridiculous amount about The Tea Master and the Detective, but I missed it! Woe! Despair! ... I managed to pick up a hardcopy of the book though, so I'm okay with how that shook out.


• I definitely didn't typo that as The Tea-Dragon and the Detective, although I would read that fic in a heartbeat.


• My first panel of the convention: Writing From Non-Western Cultures! Where part of the introductions was "Hi, here's who we are, here's what we do, also we were supposed to have another panellist but the Irish government wouldn't process her visa, SO."
  
  • The panelists specifically highlighted that even the TITLE of this panel centred the Western perspective, because that was fantastic example of the problem. Especially because "non-Western" covers about 80-90% of the world.
  
  
  • The choice apparently continues to be between "Write for the audience that you have in mind who will understand the concepts you're using" and "Write for a (presumably white) mass market audience who're unfamiliar with your culture because that's where the money is," which, y'know, just a smidge appalling for fucking 2019. (The example that Tasha Suri used was "How do you translate respect?" and wow, yep, I see the problem.) Especially because a lot of things will lose their nuance if you translate them.
  
  
  • As an interesting point on translation, I loved that Vida Cruz was like "Nah, I'll put Tagalog in there, people can google." Apparently this doesn't work for all languages – her example was Taglish, and Yasser Bahjatt's example was trying to google arabic characters, or find the cultural connotations/idiomatic meanings. Plus, I feel like the point is that translations don't just go from language to language, but from culture to culture, is a really interesting one.
  
  
  • I just have a note that says (verbatim) "The Devoured, viking cannibals." I feel like this is something that scarimonious either has or would put in her face, but I have no idea what the context for that note is.
  
  
  • Recommendation from Vida Cruz: Yvette Tan's "Seek Ye Whore" about a white man and his mail-order bride who arrives in literal pieces. (SUPER NSFW, but I definitely understand her point about weird and angry fiction.)


• Then I went to the Writing robot and nonhuman intelligence panel, where I was absolutely BAFFLED by the decision to have Martha Wells as the moderator and not someone who'd be answering questions, because real talk the person I was most interested in hearing from was Martha Wells! ... Also, somehow, in a panel where time was devoted to applying human wants and needs to AI/robots and what humans THINK AI will want, no one talked about romancing robots and AIs. What the hell. (I do respect Martha Wells for hearing someone recommend Lovecraft and then going DON'T READ ACTUAL LOVECRAFT, READ REVISIONIST LOVECRAFT INSTEAD.)


• I also learned about Ann Leckie describing "evil AI" stories as slave rebellion narratives where the slaves are the villains, which... Well, she's not wrong.



• Overheard at Worldcon:
  "Let's loot, murder, pillage!"
  "Or we could buy a sandwich."

  — Susan (@Spindilly) August 15, 2019



• I FOUND A WILD ClaireRousseau, or rather she found me, and ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I'd missed Claire hugs! It was amazing getting to see her again!


• AND THEN I had to make the cruelest decision of all, because I had to choose between a panel on gender in anime and manga and a panel on sapphic literature, which. What. Who. What monster decided those two needed to clash so that I couldn't go to both! Why not let me support the content I want to see more of at Worldcon! (Seriously, I remember there being Discourse about anime/manga content at Worldcon a few years ago, and I think the sapphic content thing is covered by the fact that the Puppies were angry about queer people AS WELL as POC!) I ended up going to the gender one in the end, but if anyone knows has a livetweet of the sapphic one, I'm interested! (I heard that something went down at the sapphic one, I think, but that's literally all I got. I'm the worst at con gossip.) But if you want to see the notes from it, I've posted them here!


• This was also the point at which I suddenly started to wonder how I could be so okay with panels and not with the corridors! I mean, sure panels have one focus point and very little visual stimuli because I'm looking at a notebook, and the corridors are full of moving people and noise and constant information and I have a neurodivergence that means that I find stimulus overwhelming OH MY GOD HOW DID IT TAKE ME THIS LONG TO REALISE THE PROBLEM.


• So yeah, I avoided the main concourses and took the (mostly abandoned) staircases as much as I could, and weirdly I did a LOT BETTER! Fancy that!


• I can't remember what panel I tried to get into in the slot after that, but a) it was chaos, and b) that first day the queues were anarchy, so I went to check out the dealers' room! Which was a terrible idea when I was already feeling overwhelmed, because the dealers' room after lunch is REALLY FUCKING BUSY! I did a quick scurry; there were some amazing earrings that were wire bent into fancy patterns but I DEFINITELY couldn't afford those, but I DID find some cameo-style and laser-cut wood earrings! (One of the keys snapped in half, but I THINK I've managed to glue it back together.)


• I fucked up meeting redrocketpanda and itsreileyright due to a comedy of errors involving trams, but EVENTUALLY we managed to meet up and find out hotel room! It turns out it was UNEXPECTEDLY FANCY! And the buffet breakfasts were SO GOOD! Like, one of the routes to it was a bit intimidating at night because it involved a few more back alleys than I was comfortable with, but it was pretty good!


• So yes, didn't manage to make it to the Aliette de Bodard signing, but I did manage to get into the Hopepunk panel! It was the first panel where I was seriously, noticeably narked at all the white men standing up and asking the panel to validate their favourite media. But the panel itself was good! I didn't understand why one of the panelists was there (So you... Got paid to summarise the shitposts of someone else at this table? Wut?), but I really enjoyed how thoroughly the panel focused on building lives as well as overthrowing regimes, and how yes, we want hopeful, gentle stories, but we need the anger first. We're not close enough to the end that hope can be a wholly soft thing yet.


• Met up with justira and their partners Trav and Elks! I have heard so much about them and I finally got to meet them in the flesh! We went out for fancy burgers and Trav tried to explain how tips work in America while the rest of us were like "NO, THAT IS NOT FAIR, THAT IS SUCH BULLSHIT OH MY GOD!" A+, would recommend going out with them again, but also I capslocked A LOT of confusion about American payment/taxation systems.


• Ira had a bunch of the Games Hugo ribbons and cards, and they specifically saved me some! Yay! I think I managed to foist a lot of mine onto unsuspecting people, which was pretty cool! AND they made Lady Business ribbons and I am CRY because they're so sweet!


• My last panel of the night was Making the Asexual Textual, and I just – I have feelings and I don't know what they are, but this panel managed to be validating and hilarious, it was fantastic.
  
  • (Before the panel starts)
    Edmund Schluessel: Gaze into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back.
    Audience member: No, that's the audience.
  
  
  • There was discussion about how to try to make it clear that a character is ace/aro when it's a second world fantasy or a far future and the terms we have don't feel right! The example was "How do you avoid 'I looked in the mirror and was ace today'?" which made me laugh.
    
  • My favourite "Allos explain" of the panel: Wendy Metcalfe writes golden-age style SF, and never thinks about sexuality because their stories are about interstellar portals and no one wants to put their penis in one. Darcie Little Badger had "Should this character being thinking about [their asexuality] more? Should it be a bigger part of the story? And her response was "... No? It's a murder mystery?" Edmund Schluessel was like "The thing about being an asexual Marxist on the autism spectrum is that sexual attraction is RIDICULOUS," and I'm sorry to all of the allos that I love but I DID cheer a little bit.


• I didn't deliberately make it a goal to use up half my pens while I was writing my panel notes, but from the changes of ink I might as well have. I think I burned through half a dozen pens on this trip!


• And... That was my night! I was pretty knackered so I didn't try to find the barcon, but on the plus side: it meant that I could just put my head down on the pillow and go straight to sleep. I was sharing the bed with Reiley and I THINK at one point I woke up in the night, sleepily reminded myself not to poke her in the face, and then dozed off again.

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks for boosting this in ladybusiness -- great write up!