Swancon Panels 4

[alias_sqbr]

Today was nicely restful, though I'm missing having staff to magically clean up my spills while I'm out of the room. (I'm such a slob, I always feel bad for the hotel staff)

I've added a few small things to previous posts that I missed before but nothing major. And now I'm done!

I was really tired and a little grumpy and found myself lacking the patience for most panels. On the plus side I had some nice if sleepy conversations with various people. There are serious issues with the accessibility and service at the Hyatt, but the central open bar/cafe was nice for random chats.

EDIT: Also, I mostly agree with stephbg's thoughts about the art show.

Social media and science fiction fandom

• "Back channel": discussions during a panel via twitter hashtags etc, a whole parallel conversation. Some speakers pay attention to it during the talk and adapt to suit, this can backfire.
  
• Unless you lock your posts the audience can snowball once you get retweeted/linked etc, criticising popular/powerful people is scary. I made a conscious decision not to bring up Racefail since it was early on the last day of the con and I decided we were all too tired to deal with the subject. But I do think it's relevant.
  
• In the other direction, trolls etc can dominate hashtags and other open channels of communication. Two options are blocking people and having moderation eg a central account retweeting interesting things (as NatCon50 did for this con)
  
• Style mavens: people who post cool things, rather than sorting through lots of more primary sources yourself. Aggregators are useful too eg newsletters.
  
• A successful blog needs to update consistently and fairly frequently with interesting content. Dull repetitive self promotion/advertising is incredibly off putting.
  
• Different sites suit different people.
  
• Lots of sites have social networking dynamics when you wouldn't expect it eg people on Youtube communicating with each other through little videos. (Is there any groups of fans doing this? Tumblr kind of does with art)
  
• Facebook is used by a lot of people just as an address book and for announcements.
  
• A lot of people don't mind personalised ads, they may even like them.
  
• You can look at which hashtags are most popular for particular locations (how?)
  

Comics you should be reading

Rasl, Daytripper, The Unwritten, Criminal, *Echo, Green Hornet (Kevin Smith run), The Boys, Buffy Season 8, Sherlock Holmes by Bleak House (I can't find their website, I think I wrote this down wrong), *Marvel Heralds, Batman and Robin,*Batwoman Elegy, *Axe Cop, **Tale of One Bad rat, *Batgirl, Thor (JMS run), Batman and Houdini, *Gotham by gaslight, Chew, Ghost in the Shell, The 99, Fables, American Vampire, Northlanders, **From Hell, *Xmen Dark Phoenix Saga, The Sixth Gun, Kolchak: Lovecraftian Horror, *Morning Glories, Rurouni Kenshin

Mixed opinions: Scarlet, Uncanny Xmen Nation X

* I plan on checking this out
** I can personally rec this

Closing Ceremony

This was relatively on time and enjoyable as closing ceremonies go. A big plastic ball was thrown around the room while they got ready which was fine for a while but it went on rather long and was a bit stressful for those of us not awake enough to fend it off (such as the person next to me who got hit right in the face).

There was an auction of Sarah Parker's fantastic Tardis gingerbread, in the end Sean Williams and and Grant Watson split a $100 bid and then smashed it up for everyone to eat. This was a lovely note on which to end the con :) (Cam and I didn't stay to eat any since we don't eat gingerbread for various reasons, but it was still nice to see)

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