Episode 38: Slashers on the Street
Ep 38 Slashers on the Street Transcript
Hosts: elanorofcastile
Reporting on: Tesla*Con
Elanor: Welcome to the Slashers on the Street segment for episode 38 of Slashcast. This is elanorofcastile and this month I went to TeslaCon a steampunk convention in Madison Wisconsin. This year it was the first weekend in December, so I had kind of been aware and kind of looking and admiring the pretty things in steampunk and so I thought well it’s just down the road, why don’t I go? And so, I went, and it was an adventure in many ways because I went by myself too and I didn’t know anyone that was going to be there, except for one vendor and I had a lot of fun.
The neat thing about this convention is that unlike any other convention that I’d been to, it had a theme to it that was really tied into events of the whole weekend. So it was A Trip to the Moon, so it started out with an opening ceremony, where we were in a spaceship and they did a whole acting presentation, where our spaceship was launched to the moon, crashed on the moon and the bad guy you know took responsibility for the crash and we met some aliens and it was really awesome, really interesting.
So it was kind an immersive event, so kind of throughout the weekend different things would happen, like the bad guy would pop up and monologue and have an insult off with the captain of the ship and different things like that would happen. And actually on our way to the moon, we did pick up a passenger, it was Santa. So Santa Claus was around for the weekend and you could go talk to him and tell him if you’ve been good or bad. So that was kind of fun.
So besides kind of the themed events that went with the weekend, they also had some panels and I went to a few and one of them was the panel about women’s suffrage, and so the bummer was that the person who was going to be leading the panel didn’t show up but there was all of us that were waiting there really interested and wanting to talk about, ans so instead we all decided to adjourn to the team room they had, and we all talked and got to know each other, it was really interesting because we were a range of ages we were all hanging out from like my age which is 20s - 30s into, you know, few women that were into and over their 60s. And so talking about their range of experiences, a couple of gals it was their very first convention that they’d ever been to, I know one of the older women had said she’s been going to Star Trek conventions since the 70s. So all the kind of talking about the different types of conventions, especially science fiction conventions, and kind of how convention culture has changed through the years. One of the girls who was mine age, has been since she was a baby going to Doctor Who conventions with her parents. So it was kind of fun.
And then, you know, it was kind of neat to hear about Worldcon, which I hadn’t really been aware of, and that’s The World Science Fiction Convention and actually it’s been going on since 1939, whch holy cow, you know, long time for conventions. It’s you know, wherever there’s been something that people want to talk about and get together, I guess there’s always going to be conventions.
Couple other of the panels I went to, where kind of themed around sexuality and gender and so, one of them was specifically about sexuality and gender identity and it was really neat, it was a panel that was moderated by a professor from the University of Wisconsin and the people on the panel, there was Karina Cooper, who is romance author, she’s written lesbian steampunk fiction, as well as, Lyndzi Miller who is a burlesque dancer and Scott Velasquez who is a gay blogger in the steampunk community, and Kevin D. Steil who is a steampunk community archivist. So there was a great variety of people who talked about different issues and things in the community and things are kind of welcoming and different about the community, since it’s already about presenting an alternate view of the world , then it just naturally kind of fits that queer sexuality, gender identity, different things like that are going to be, you know a part of that, and so kind of the different things like. And then talking about, wanting to be presenting that same sort of openness and welcoming into the mainstream, of making kind of the conversations to of yes we can used it here but how can we use that to broaden views outside.
So that was a really neat panel and then another that was kind of the fun of the evening as it was one of the After Dark panels, which you know, was from many conventions. Anything which was sort of adult, and actually in this on I got carded which was exciting, it was about Victorian and Edwardian pornography because at that time photography was the cutting edge technology, and as we know with the internet anything that is cutting edge technology will inevitably be used for porn. And so, talking about different things, about the images that people were interested in, kind of the amusing fact that you could date the photographs, buy accessories and silly things like that. Because even though the lady might totally be completely naked and hanging out with a girlfriend and touching each other and having a good time, they are probably wearing a hat for some reason, and that will help you.
And then also the fun thing was, there was a common theme, I don’t know why, but there were a lot of really nice chairs. So besides the fact that you got a titillating image of a well do to, or well appointed, shall we say gentleman or nicely put together lady, you also got a really hot chair. So I guess it appeals to a lot of different people. And you know it was 300 slides of erotic photography wow, who knew. It was a great presentation of seeing things that were really artful and pretty tame by some of the things that are out there today, but then at the same time you get that the Victorians not necessarily the most buttoned up of people like they are so often stereotyped. So that was fun!
Kind of the other neat panel that I checked out part of was a group of people there, talking about their book The Steampunk Guide to Sex and so, they talked about, because with steampunk and science fiction come different things like, the inevitability of tentacle sex, you know, because when you’re gonna go for it, you might as well go for it. Then they talk about how, ok now it’s ok we can create a website, we can have Archive of Our Own, we can have Fanfiction. net, we can have any number of websites where we can just put stuff up, put up erotica. But hen at the time, it was about how they had to sneak it in, or be careful about getting it printed, and the lengths they went to get it printer.dSo that was kind of fun.
So yeah overall it was a great weekend. I met some awesome people from the area and from out of town. And danced my feet of, both at the Grand Ball and stuck my head in at the Steerage Ball, and enjoyed some music and watching the folks dance while I rested my feet. And so yeah it was a great time, and I would definitely recommend this to anyone who has any sort of interest in steampunk, there’s all sort of information and things.
And next year’s theme is A Congress of Steam, so it’s going to be talking about all kind of ways that people do steampunk throughout the fandom and there’s going to be, one of the big things is that they are going to be opening tickets to people internationally, that they can get the tickets for free as part of a lottery, because it’s going to be only, I think they are only doing 1000 tickets for people in the US, and then outside the US they are doing another 300-400 and those will be for free. So trying to get a wider audience for the fandom just to kind of talk about all the different sort of things. Which you know as people who are in these sort of fandoms, are kind of aware of sometimes the north American bias that stuff comes through, so this is similar t that they recognize that there is a need to talk and spread out. So that was really cool that they thought about that. So this year was 1400 and next year it will be 1300 people. And it’s Halloween weekend next year so definitely check it out if you are interested. There will be a link about the convention in the post-show post and yeah, so that’s what I had. So if you have any interest in reporting from a convention or writing something that you don’t mind one of us reading and reenacting interpretively in some way for you. Drop us a line, we have our website, out tumblr, out twitter, our livejournal and you can always tell us what you think. And if you have any other comments feel free to post them. Enjoy thanks!
Transcribed by: imifos
Hosts: elanorofcastile
Reporting on: Tesla*Con
Elanor: Welcome to the Slashers on the Street segment for episode 38 of Slashcast. This is elanorofcastile and this month I went to TeslaCon a steampunk convention in Madison Wisconsin. This year it was the first weekend in December, so I had kind of been aware and kind of looking and admiring the pretty things in steampunk and so I thought well it’s just down the road, why don’t I go? And so, I went, and it was an adventure in many ways because I went by myself too and I didn’t know anyone that was going to be there, except for one vendor and I had a lot of fun.
The neat thing about this convention is that unlike any other convention that I’d been to, it had a theme to it that was really tied into events of the whole weekend. So it was A Trip to the Moon, so it started out with an opening ceremony, where we were in a spaceship and they did a whole acting presentation, where our spaceship was launched to the moon, crashed on the moon and the bad guy you know took responsibility for the crash and we met some aliens and it was really awesome, really interesting.
So it was kind an immersive event, so kind of throughout the weekend different things would happen, like the bad guy would pop up and monologue and have an insult off with the captain of the ship and different things like that would happen. And actually on our way to the moon, we did pick up a passenger, it was Santa. So Santa Claus was around for the weekend and you could go talk to him and tell him if you’ve been good or bad. So that was kind of fun.
So besides kind of the themed events that went with the weekend, they also had some panels and I went to a few and one of them was the panel about women’s suffrage, and so the bummer was that the person who was going to be leading the panel didn’t show up but there was all of us that were waiting there really interested and wanting to talk about, ans so instead we all decided to adjourn to the team room they had, and we all talked and got to know each other, it was really interesting because we were a range of ages we were all hanging out from like my age which is 20s - 30s into, you know, few women that were into and over their 60s. And so talking about their range of experiences, a couple of gals it was their very first convention that they’d ever been to, I know one of the older women had said she’s been going to Star Trek conventions since the 70s. So all the kind of talking about the different types of conventions, especially science fiction conventions, and kind of how convention culture has changed through the years. One of the girls who was mine age, has been since she was a baby going to Doctor Who conventions with her parents. So it was kind of fun.
And then, you know, it was kind of neat to hear about Worldcon, which I hadn’t really been aware of, and that’s The World Science Fiction Convention and actually it’s been going on since 1939, whch holy cow, you know, long time for conventions. It’s you know, wherever there’s been something that people want to talk about and get together, I guess there’s always going to be conventions.
Couple other of the panels I went to, where kind of themed around sexuality and gender and so, one of them was specifically about sexuality and gender identity and it was really neat, it was a panel that was moderated by a professor from the University of Wisconsin and the people on the panel, there was Karina Cooper, who is romance author, she’s written lesbian steampunk fiction, as well as, Lyndzi Miller who is a burlesque dancer and Scott Velasquez who is a gay blogger in the steampunk community, and Kevin D. Steil who is a steampunk community archivist. So there was a great variety of people who talked about different issues and things in the community and things are kind of welcoming and different about the community, since it’s already about presenting an alternate view of the world , then it just naturally kind of fits that queer sexuality, gender identity, different things like that are going to be, you know a part of that, and so kind of the different things like. And then talking about, wanting to be presenting that same sort of openness and welcoming into the mainstream, of making kind of the conversations to of yes we can used it here but how can we use that to broaden views outside.
So that was a really neat panel and then another that was kind of the fun of the evening as it was one of the After Dark panels, which you know, was from many conventions. Anything which was sort of adult, and actually in this on I got carded which was exciting, it was about Victorian and Edwardian pornography because at that time photography was the cutting edge technology, and as we know with the internet anything that is cutting edge technology will inevitably be used for porn. And so, talking about different things, about the images that people were interested in, kind of the amusing fact that you could date the photographs, buy accessories and silly things like that. Because even though the lady might totally be completely naked and hanging out with a girlfriend and touching each other and having a good time, they are probably wearing a hat for some reason, and that will help you.
And then also the fun thing was, there was a common theme, I don’t know why, but there were a lot of really nice chairs. So besides the fact that you got a titillating image of a well do to, or well appointed, shall we say gentleman or nicely put together lady, you also got a really hot chair. So I guess it appeals to a lot of different people. And you know it was 300 slides of erotic photography wow, who knew. It was a great presentation of seeing things that were really artful and pretty tame by some of the things that are out there today, but then at the same time you get that the Victorians not necessarily the most buttoned up of people like they are so often stereotyped. So that was fun!
Kind of the other neat panel that I checked out part of was a group of people there, talking about their book The Steampunk Guide to Sex and so, they talked about, because with steampunk and science fiction come different things like, the inevitability of tentacle sex, you know, because when you’re gonna go for it, you might as well go for it. Then they talk about how, ok now it’s ok we can create a website, we can have Archive of Our Own, we can have Fanfiction. net, we can have any number of websites where we can just put stuff up, put up erotica. But hen at the time, it was about how they had to sneak it in, or be careful about getting it printed, and the lengths they went to get it printer.dSo that was kind of fun.
So yeah overall it was a great weekend. I met some awesome people from the area and from out of town. And danced my feet of, both at the Grand Ball and stuck my head in at the Steerage Ball, and enjoyed some music and watching the folks dance while I rested my feet. And so yeah it was a great time, and I would definitely recommend this to anyone who has any sort of interest in steampunk, there’s all sort of information and things.
And next year’s theme is A Congress of Steam, so it’s going to be talking about all kind of ways that people do steampunk throughout the fandom and there’s going to be, one of the big things is that they are going to be opening tickets to people internationally, that they can get the tickets for free as part of a lottery, because it’s going to be only, I think they are only doing 1000 tickets for people in the US, and then outside the US they are doing another 300-400 and those will be for free. So trying to get a wider audience for the fandom just to kind of talk about all the different sort of things. Which you know as people who are in these sort of fandoms, are kind of aware of sometimes the north American bias that stuff comes through, so this is similar t that they recognize that there is a need to talk and spread out. So that was really cool that they thought about that. So this year was 1400 and next year it will be 1300 people. And it’s Halloween weekend next year so definitely check it out if you are interested. There will be a link about the convention in the post-show post and yeah, so that’s what I had. So if you have any interest in reporting from a convention or writing something that you don’t mind one of us reading and reenacting interpretively in some way for you. Drop us a line, we have our website, out tumblr, out twitter, our livejournal and you can always tell us what you think. And if you have any other comments feel free to post them. Enjoy thanks!
Transcribed by: imifos