Conflikt 5
Last weekend I went to the Seattle area to attend the filk con that I attend every year.
As I tend to do, I came up with a instafilk at the special lunch event on Saturday. They put slips of paper with words on them on each table as prompts; our words were "knight" and "dance". I went with personifying a chess knight, and interpreting its move in the game as a dance. Other people at our table wrote a Toby Daye song to the tune of "Night and Day". (Later, I had the surreal experience of having Bob Kenefsky approach me with the suggestion of encoding the knight's move into the rhyme scheme of the song, which makes me wonder what Kenefsky is putting into his own lyrics that he's not telling us about, and how he could manage to put that sort of thing in and still write things that are awesomely clever on every level that is accessible to mortals.)
Some moments I'll keep: Talis Kimberley's concert was pretty awesome. The Suttons breaking the signer, followed by the signer breaking Brenda Sutton. Char McKay's Twinkie song, with actual Twinkies raining upon the audience. The story of how the talking hotel elevators at a Worldcon hotel were surreptitiously given plaques that read "ANOTHER FINE PRODUCT OF THE SIRIUS CYBERNETICS CORPORATION" (Which was especially awesome because
algeh and I were listening to the Hitchhiker's radio series in the car on the way up.)
At 5 p.m. on Sunday, I checked my email for the first time since I left. Before I left I had suggested meeting up with folks on IFmud on Sunday night, but I hadn't heard anything back from them, so I assumed nothing was happening. But at that moment I saw an email exchange where a meeting was set up, and fortuitously another mudder (Stacy) was also visiting from out of town, so the meeting was going to happen despite my failure to respond to the emails. So I got on the light rail, sort of taking it on faith that the meetup hadn't been canceled or moved, and Jacq and Sam were there, and Stacy showed up with a friend a bit later, and then inky showed up, and we played an epic game of Balderdash, in which I barely managed to eke out the win by guessing the definition of "perjinkities".
By the time I got back, the Dead Dog Smoked Salmon circle was winding down, and people were at the point of mostly singing their maudlin farewell songs, and I don't have any of those, so I didn't sing anything.
Songs of mine that I sang in circles: My Poor Assistants, Jar of Tang, Fine Brains for Zombies, and Slugs in Winter. I'm thinking about starting a policy of not repeating any of my songs for a couple cons after I sing them. I hope this will encourage me to write some more. My Poor Assistants is about my only new song in a very long time, and I'm sure people are getting tired of hearing some of my songs. It's funny how I can write a decent half-song in 40 minutes, but I don't manage to do anything for months before and after.
As I tend to do, I came up with a instafilk at the special lunch event on Saturday. They put slips of paper with words on them on each table as prompts; our words were "knight" and "dance". I went with personifying a chess knight, and interpreting its move in the game as a dance. Other people at our table wrote a Toby Daye song to the tune of "Night and Day". (Later, I had the surreal experience of having Bob Kenefsky approach me with the suggestion of encoding the knight's move into the rhyme scheme of the song, which makes me wonder what Kenefsky is putting into his own lyrics that he's not telling us about, and how he could manage to put that sort of thing in and still write things that are awesomely clever on every level that is accessible to mortals.)
Some moments I'll keep: Talis Kimberley's concert was pretty awesome. The Suttons breaking the signer, followed by the signer breaking Brenda Sutton. Char McKay's Twinkie song, with actual Twinkies raining upon the audience. The story of how the talking hotel elevators at a Worldcon hotel were surreptitiously given plaques that read "ANOTHER FINE PRODUCT OF THE SIRIUS CYBERNETICS CORPORATION" (Which was especially awesome because
algeh and I were listening to the Hitchhiker's radio series in the car on the way up.)
At 5 p.m. on Sunday, I checked my email for the first time since I left. Before I left I had suggested meeting up with folks on IFmud on Sunday night, but I hadn't heard anything back from them, so I assumed nothing was happening. But at that moment I saw an email exchange where a meeting was set up, and fortuitously another mudder (Stacy) was also visiting from out of town, so the meeting was going to happen despite my failure to respond to the emails. So I got on the light rail, sort of taking it on faith that the meetup hadn't been canceled or moved, and Jacq and Sam were there, and Stacy showed up with a friend a bit later, and then inky showed up, and we played an epic game of Balderdash, in which I barely managed to eke out the win by guessing the definition of "perjinkities".
By the time I got back, the Dead Dog Smoked Salmon circle was winding down, and people were at the point of mostly singing their maudlin farewell songs, and I don't have any of those, so I didn't sing anything.
Songs of mine that I sang in circles: My Poor Assistants, Jar of Tang, Fine Brains for Zombies, and Slugs in Winter. I'm thinking about starting a policy of not repeating any of my songs for a couple cons after I sing them. I hope this will encourage me to write some more. My Poor Assistants is about my only new song in a very long time, and I'm sure people are getting tired of hearing some of my songs. It's funny how I can write a decent half-song in 40 minutes, but I don't manage to do anything for months before and after.