#LonCon3: Saturday
WorldCon wasn't something that had pinged my radar at all, yet suddenly everyone I knew seemed to be talking about it. And hey, most years it was somewhere far away, like America, but this year it was at the ExCel Centre, which is, in London terms, on my doorstep. Had it been as distant as, say, the Ally Pally, I might not have bothered, and that would have been a pity, because I had an amazing time.
Saturday
I elected to buy day passes for Saturday and Sunday rather than take time off work for the surrounding weekdays. I took the Woolwich Ferry in on Saturday morning, arrived just after nine, and was registered five minutes later. Shortly afterwards I walked into snowballjane, who had been on the premises for about twenty seconds, followed by jayblanc, who was going to the same panel as me, and hrrunka, who was at a loose end until the filk recommenced.
The first panel I attended was on the Sense of Wonder in Children's SF, and was an interesting refresher in how children read and how childhood feels, as well as a lovely nostalgia-fest as the panelists named their own wonder-defining reads. A reminder that the world has not yet become an entirely logical place for children, and that finding Narnia always seemed possible if one only happened upon the right place at the right time.
I moved on to Sex in SF&F: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, including an introduction to the fascinating dinosaur porn genre. After this I fancied the panel on military sci-fi, but the room was already full and I was turned away. Instead, I attended Where is the YA Humour?, which concluded that there is actually a great deal of YA humour, it's just overshadowed by the big hitters' tendency towards the darker side of things. Then I caught up with foozzzball to compare notes on Our Con So Far.
After lunch I trotted off to a panel on Agent Hunting, to which one attendee had brought an enormous replica weapon. Not that sort of hunting, though it's sometimes tempting. On emerging, I ran into jvvw, whom I hadn't seen for eight or nine years, then met with a posse of furs, some old acquaintances like balto_mike, some new to me, and we hung out for a while before proceeding to the panel on Furry: Not What You Think which kyellgold, foozzzball and I were presenting, with Mike as compère.
This seemed to go pretty well. As I'd suspected, a fair few of the audience were furries who'd come to see what kind of a mess we were going to make of it, but others were new to the idea and curious. We had a fursuiter, the lovely Tachyon, who went down a storm. We took questions on demographics (thanks to greenreaper for having all the facts!), on fursonas, on bronies, and, right at the end, a lovely woman very apologetically asked if furry wasn't a kink? For a minority, we answered, just as there may be a few Trekkies who can't get off unless their partner has blue skin.
I spent the rest of the evening coming down from the experience in the company of lovely friends old and new, including klepsydra. Shortly after ten, I set off for the (incredibly creepy after dark) car park and home.
Saturday
I elected to buy day passes for Saturday and Sunday rather than take time off work for the surrounding weekdays. I took the Woolwich Ferry in on Saturday morning, arrived just after nine, and was registered five minutes later. Shortly afterwards I walked into snowballjane, who had been on the premises for about twenty seconds, followed by jayblanc, who was going to the same panel as me, and hrrunka, who was at a loose end until the filk recommenced.
The first panel I attended was on the Sense of Wonder in Children's SF, and was an interesting refresher in how children read and how childhood feels, as well as a lovely nostalgia-fest as the panelists named their own wonder-defining reads. A reminder that the world has not yet become an entirely logical place for children, and that finding Narnia always seemed possible if one only happened upon the right place at the right time.
I moved on to Sex in SF&F: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, including an introduction to the fascinating dinosaur porn genre. After this I fancied the panel on military sci-fi, but the room was already full and I was turned away. Instead, I attended Where is the YA Humour?, which concluded that there is actually a great deal of YA humour, it's just overshadowed by the big hitters' tendency towards the darker side of things. Then I caught up with foozzzball to compare notes on Our Con So Far.
After lunch I trotted off to a panel on Agent Hunting, to which one attendee had brought an enormous replica weapon. Not that sort of hunting, though it's sometimes tempting. On emerging, I ran into jvvw, whom I hadn't seen for eight or nine years, then met with a posse of furs, some old acquaintances like balto_mike, some new to me, and we hung out for a while before proceeding to the panel on Furry: Not What You Think which kyellgold, foozzzball and I were presenting, with Mike as compère.
This seemed to go pretty well. As I'd suspected, a fair few of the audience were furries who'd come to see what kind of a mess we were going to make of it, but others were new to the idea and curious. We had a fursuiter, the lovely Tachyon, who went down a storm. We took questions on demographics (thanks to greenreaper for having all the facts!), on fursonas, on bronies, and, right at the end, a lovely woman very apologetically asked if furry wasn't a kink? For a minority, we answered, just as there may be a few Trekkies who can't get off unless their partner has blue skin.
I spent the rest of the evening coming down from the experience in the company of lovely friends old and new, including klepsydra. Shortly after ten, I set off for the (incredibly creepy after dark) car park and home.