Wiscon 36, Day One
I flew in yesterday via Chicago, which has a spectacular brachiosaurus skeleton replica just hanging out there, and got to the hotel around 8 p.m. Other years, I've gotten here early enough to attend the Honored Guests readings at the "Room of One's Own" bookstore on the Thursday afternoon before Wiscon. This year, though, I came in so late - and tired - that all I could do was hang out with my Clarion buddies Kater and Julie and say hello to a few people before crashing. So today really was Day One for me.
It started at The Gathering, where Kater gave me my first ever Tarot reading. I'd gone in a couple of minutes early to drop off a couple of things at the Clothing Swap, and I'm glad I did, because as soon as she was done, I turned round to see a crowd of people waiting for their turn. The Tarot crowd mingled and merged with the ARC book crowd (where you can pick up advance reader copies of books for $1), and that overflowed into the garment crowd and the Found Words poetry assemblage crowd. In short, the place had the atmosphere of a fair, and was such a lovely beginning to Wiscon.
Later, I made a round of the Dealer Room, and got caught up in an interesting conversation with a woman recently returned from India. She'd brought back various depictions of Hindu goddesses. I barely had time to peek into two panels, one on asexuality, the other on the "Religious agenda in SF." They both looked excellent. LaShawn Wanak moderated the Religious panel, and cracked us up with her comments on the movie precursors to the book series Left Behind.
After dinner, I got to YA Love Triangles, moderated by Sharyn November. It was a pretty vibrant discussion about writing for teenage girls. Some of the points made: 16 yr-olds shouldn't be acting as though they're choosing their forever husbands. It's the first love, not necessarily their last love. The books seldom have the protag interested in other things (Bella from Twilight was a "cipher"). Katniss of Hunger Games was an honorable exception. Sharyn asked about love triangles with a boy at the apex. Someone mentioned Archie, from the Archie comics. One person from the audience suggested that this trope was perhaps about (a) avoiding pre-marital sex - or at least pre-true-love sex; and (b) about society's preferences for eternal love [ETA: and "purity."]
I tried to decide next about parties vs panels, and got sucked into a fascinating discussion about whether the internet could become sentient: A Conscious Internet: Should we be worried? The tech people thought it was far from imminent, both for reasons of architecture and energy requirements. But the discussion got into issues such as how consciousness was defined; and how would we even know if the internet became conscious? In the old stories, it talks. But we already have things that talk, like Siri. Is the Turing test still valid? A lot of questions, good discussion, no real conclusion. The consensus seemed to be that a conscious Internet wasn't likely to be user-friendly; it would have its own agenda. We speculated about viruses and botnets as seeding some kind of consciousness into the network. [Edited to Add: One suggestion for determining consciousness: Computers would start doing something that no person or input program had asked. Problem with this - the IT guys would probably notice and shut it down, because it would be wasted capital resources. While transmission resources have lots of spare capacity with optic-fiber cables, computers don't.]
I finally made it to the parties; the Outer Alliance party was still alive and well. I stopped there for a while, chatting with a number of people including Ada from Codex and Keffy Kehrli. And - I won a book! I never win anything! "Maybe it's a beginning and you'll keep winning things," said Julia Rios, who hosted the party. That's it, up there.
[Edited to Add: Here's a link to my Day 2 post]