Terror Australis

[fhtagn]

Well, that was a more unpleasant experience than it strictly had to be. My usual nervousness over talks aside (and the traditional realisations that I’d forgotten at least one point on every slide ignored as well, of course), I still ended up horribly hoarse over the course of the talk. The silence when the floor was opened for questions was

Comments

[fhtagn]

Just a conference. And yes, if by wintery subzero craziness you mean "Average temperatures of 15C, light breezes and clear, sunny skies". It's really quite pleasant - I'm far enough south that the low winter sun isn't too unpleasantly bright most of the time.

[rochvelleth]

The (lack of) reaction of an audience can be a real downer, can't it? I gave a paper to a bunch of miserable historians a few months ago and they completely failed to laugh at the jokes - I gave the comic pause, and there was silence. I think eventually I got a titter at a tongue-in-cheek comment about Welsh bilinguals (don't ask), but it was disappointing. Lack of interest is even worse. It could be that you simply hadn't left questioners anywhere to go though? Often that can happen with a very comprehensive paper, even if people found it interesting.

Oh well. At least it’s over now.

Sometimes, this is as good as it gets! At least the stress is gone and you can 'enjoy' the rest of the conference.

[fhtagn]

Ech, mostly I think it was somewhat stuttery and nervous delivery combined with only tangential at best relevence to any of their work which did it. I did get some people speak to me afterwards and say that it looked interesting, if difficult to do and not really their field.

On the other hand, variety and all that.

For the joke, did you do the hand gestures? Sometimes they only need to be quite small gestures.

[rochvelleth]

I don't think I had any hand gestures. Come to think of it, I'm also not sure the joke was funny...

[weebleflip]

Bah - as you say there're few closely-related talks, it's perfectly possible that a good number of people did find it interesting, but just didn't feel they knew enough to ask an intelligent question!

*hugs* Also, stop being on the wrong side of the planet before too long, you!

~KT