Life update: Cons and moving drama
Hey everyone! How's things? Been having a bit of a month over here.
Since my last post I have attended a con, moved house and been separated from the Internet for nearly two full weeks. Granted though,, even if I had had Internet connection, I would probably not have had time to write this post.
Swancon
The thing about a con that you've been going to very nearly every year for the last ten years is that no matter how much you enjoy it, you start running out of things to say about it that you haven't said before. It would be nice to say they've gotten consistently better over the years, but more realistic to admit that the quality of any given Swancon is something of a random variable distributed around an average of 'a very enjoyable weekend', with Swancon 2004 at the far end (as the con that will very probably never be beaten, though Swancon 2008 does come a very respectable second), and a pretty strong correlation with whether or not the guest of honour is someone I'm interested in... anyway, the point is that at it's best, Swancon is awesome, at it's worst (excluding major con drama, which we will not talk of here), it's a long weekend spent in a big hotel full of other fans - many of whom are old friends we hardly see outside the con these days - and this one was solidly in the latter category. Nothing particular to recommend it (the committee did not seem particularly with it this year, the convener's speech at the opening ceremony was embarrassingly bad), but no drama and rarely too many gaps where there was nothing on we wanted to see. Generally a fun, relaxing weekend in good company.
A couple of memorable highlights, in no particular order:
1. The 'Iron Brain' competition. One of those old fannish traditions where the panel is challenged to read, out loud, passages of the worst fiction the organisers could find, winner is the one who cracks up last. Though Swancon's been hosting varients on these for years, usually late at night, this was the first I'd actually attended. This did involve the experience of looking around the room and going '...so much surprise? Hasn't everyone with the Internet laughed there way through their share of horrendous badfic before? Seen weepingcock? No? Just me?', which is possibly this is a sign one has had the Internet too long). But the important thing is that the fiction chosen was truly hilarious, and I can finally vouch that the Eye of Argon really is as bad as its reputation holds it to be.
2. The Rumble of the Prose panel: Writers, amateur and professional, are challenged to write a short scene around a choreographed fight scene performed by a couple of local martial arts enthusiasts, audience voted for their favourite. Winner does so by producing a well received piece of very funny RPS (and practically canonical RPS at that). Winning writer happily declares he knows his audience well. (rallamajoop checks another point off her 'things she never expected to see at Swancon' list.)
3. The Masquerade. As always. Not a great turn out this year, the dance floor was almost deserted by 10:30 or so, which is a crying shame because it was only after that that they played the best music. Goth-Loli Joshua for a costume again, which seemed to go down well even though no-one had the faintest idea who I was meant to be. Possibly it was the short skirt.
On the downside, the Doctor Who panel was rather disappointing this year, given that the no-spoilers policy meant that everyone wound up discussing the same things that have already been discussed to death over the last few years rather than being allowed to talk about new stuff. Several panels which looked interesting on the program turned out to be missing their main panelist, or to be being run by just one guy, which rarely works very well. And, as always, if there were ever just two things I really wanted to see in one day, you could bet they'd be scheduled at the same time.
Next year's con is sounding pretty promising, what with it being a Natcon year, which means a bigger budget and (finally!) a new hotel. Not keen on the organisers' policy of raising all their prices though - I mean, if it costs just as much to go to a Swancon screening of a movie as the regular ticket price (which yes, you get to see with other fans, but on the other side of Perth at an incovenient hour), then you've lost a big chunk of the appeal. You do not raise more money if your prices mean people don't bother to show up at all.
Speaking of Swancon, I was a little surprised after the con to randomly track down one of those online discussions I'd heard of in passing where people were discussing why they did or didn't come to the con, and found the main complaint seemed to be... Swancon is too clique-ish? Really? But then I have to admit I'm probably not in a good position to be able to judge one way or another, since my introduction to the con came from a group of people who already went each year (the old JAFWA crowd, back in the day when it was still a successful club), so I guess if there ever was a 'clique' it might well have been one I was in on before I got there. Still, I've made a lot of new friends through Swancon since then, and I've always felt that one of the best things about Swancon is the whole close-knit fan community feel to it - especially when compared to events like Waicon and Supanova, which certainly have their own appeal, but are so much louder and more commercial and generally feel more like a bunch of completely random strangers packed into the same building. If that makes things clique-ish, then I'm not sure it's something I want changed. Even the guests have been known to comment on it as a positive.
That said, there's no doubt they have a real problem with attracting younger fans. Nice as it is to see the older fans keep coming back, the con's doomed in the long run if it can't attract new people, and as one of the (relatively) younger crowd I'd hate to see it die with the older generation of Perth fandom. Which is to say I'm very glad to see that the 2012 bid by the team who wanted to base their con around 'fannish stuff that came out between 1970-1989' didn't get voted in. Nostalgia's all well and good, but really not the focus I feel the con needs at the moment. I am absolutely biased on this one given that the counter-bid was being run by friends of ours, but they're friends who are known to be very vocal on the issue of how to attract the younger batch of fandom, which sounds like a much better sign.
Then we got back from the con and had to start packing ASAP.
The Move
I guess the move went about as smoothly as could be expected. On our last move we were moving out of home for the first time - you'd think that would be the more daunting job - but we only had half as much furniture to shift back then, and no messy clauses requiring us to keep paying expensive rent to our parents for as long as it took to scrub everything squeaky clean in the hope of getting all our bond back. As it wound up, Saturday the 10th was moving day, most of the evenings of the week after were spent cleaning up the old house and moving the last few delicate odds and ends over, the following week after that was largely lost to catching up on uni work (ARGH PRESENTATION TIME), and my birthday, somewhere in the middle, was spent assembling all the new Ikea furniture required to give us somewhere to unpack things into. With luck, we may even be done unpacking boxes within another week or so.
It has, to put it mildly, been a bit of an adventure. But moving always is.
The good news is that the new place is just about everything we were looking for - newer, cleaner, much more convenient for current working situations - and, more importantly, lacks the one big thing we were emphatically not looking for, which is a massive garden which the landlords expect us to keep watered and healthy despite the reticulation not having worked in god knows how long. It is amazing just how novel it is for us to be living in a place where everything works. It's a little smaller than our old place, but since we've been down a housemate for most of a year we're not losing any space we desperately need. Took a couple of weeks to get Internet connection set up at the new place, but given that last time it took well over a month, we are not complaining at all.
Took a quick snapshot of all my props while I had them together; also to demonstrate why it took so many trips to transport everything over. While not all of them are so delicate they need to be nursed carefully for the full journey, none of them pack easily. Ordinarily, some of these are hung, or in one case tied, up in various places around the house, so having them all together is a pretty rare event.
From left to right, the Fuuenken, Paracelcus, Hiei’s sword, Syaoran’s sword, and Yuffie’s 4-Point Shuriken and the Conformer at the bottom, plus the Pipe Fox, just because.
Probably going to be having some kind of combined housewarming/birthday party in a couple of weeks time. Depending on how long it takes to get ourselves organised, and all that.
Since my last post I have attended a con, moved house and been separated from the Internet for nearly two full weeks. Granted though,, even if I had had Internet connection, I would probably not have had time to write this post.
Swancon
The thing about a con that you've been going to very nearly every year for the last ten years is that no matter how much you enjoy it, you start running out of things to say about it that you haven't said before. It would be nice to say they've gotten consistently better over the years, but more realistic to admit that the quality of any given Swancon is something of a random variable distributed around an average of 'a very enjoyable weekend', with Swancon 2004 at the far end (as the con that will very probably never be beaten, though Swancon 2008 does come a very respectable second), and a pretty strong correlation with whether or not the guest of honour is someone I'm interested in... anyway, the point is that at it's best, Swancon is awesome, at it's worst (excluding major con drama, which we will not talk of here), it's a long weekend spent in a big hotel full of other fans - many of whom are old friends we hardly see outside the con these days - and this one was solidly in the latter category. Nothing particular to recommend it (the committee did not seem particularly with it this year, the convener's speech at the opening ceremony was embarrassingly bad), but no drama and rarely too many gaps where there was nothing on we wanted to see. Generally a fun, relaxing weekend in good company.
A couple of memorable highlights, in no particular order:
1. The 'Iron Brain' competition. One of those old fannish traditions where the panel is challenged to read, out loud, passages of the worst fiction the organisers could find, winner is the one who cracks up last. Though Swancon's been hosting varients on these for years, usually late at night, this was the first I'd actually attended. This did involve the experience of looking around the room and going '...so much surprise? Hasn't everyone with the Internet laughed there way through their share of horrendous badfic before? Seen weepingcock? No? Just me?', which is possibly this is a sign one has had the Internet too long). But the important thing is that the fiction chosen was truly hilarious, and I can finally vouch that the Eye of Argon really is as bad as its reputation holds it to be.
2. The Rumble of the Prose panel: Writers, amateur and professional, are challenged to write a short scene around a choreographed fight scene performed by a couple of local martial arts enthusiasts, audience voted for their favourite. Winner does so by producing a well received piece of very funny RPS (and practically canonical RPS at that). Winning writer happily declares he knows his audience well. (rallamajoop checks another point off her 'things she never expected to see at Swancon' list.)
3. The Masquerade. As always. Not a great turn out this year, the dance floor was almost deserted by 10:30 or so, which is a crying shame because it was only after that that they played the best music. Goth-Loli Joshua for a costume again, which seemed to go down well even though no-one had the faintest idea who I was meant to be. Possibly it was the short skirt.
On the downside, the Doctor Who panel was rather disappointing this year, given that the no-spoilers policy meant that everyone wound up discussing the same things that have already been discussed to death over the last few years rather than being allowed to talk about new stuff. Several panels which looked interesting on the program turned out to be missing their main panelist, or to be being run by just one guy, which rarely works very well. And, as always, if there were ever just two things I really wanted to see in one day, you could bet they'd be scheduled at the same time.
Next year's con is sounding pretty promising, what with it being a Natcon year, which means a bigger budget and (finally!) a new hotel. Not keen on the organisers' policy of raising all their prices though - I mean, if it costs just as much to go to a Swancon screening of a movie as the regular ticket price (which yes, you get to see with other fans, but on the other side of Perth at an incovenient hour), then you've lost a big chunk of the appeal. You do not raise more money if your prices mean people don't bother to show up at all.
Speaking of Swancon, I was a little surprised after the con to randomly track down one of those online discussions I'd heard of in passing where people were discussing why they did or didn't come to the con, and found the main complaint seemed to be... Swancon is too clique-ish? Really? But then I have to admit I'm probably not in a good position to be able to judge one way or another, since my introduction to the con came from a group of people who already went each year (the old JAFWA crowd, back in the day when it was still a successful club), so I guess if there ever was a 'clique' it might well have been one I was in on before I got there. Still, I've made a lot of new friends through Swancon since then, and I've always felt that one of the best things about Swancon is the whole close-knit fan community feel to it - especially when compared to events like Waicon and Supanova, which certainly have their own appeal, but are so much louder and more commercial and generally feel more like a bunch of completely random strangers packed into the same building. If that makes things clique-ish, then I'm not sure it's something I want changed. Even the guests have been known to comment on it as a positive.
That said, there's no doubt they have a real problem with attracting younger fans. Nice as it is to see the older fans keep coming back, the con's doomed in the long run if it can't attract new people, and as one of the (relatively) younger crowd I'd hate to see it die with the older generation of Perth fandom. Which is to say I'm very glad to see that the 2012 bid by the team who wanted to base their con around 'fannish stuff that came out between 1970-1989' didn't get voted in. Nostalgia's all well and good, but really not the focus I feel the con needs at the moment. I am absolutely biased on this one given that the counter-bid was being run by friends of ours, but they're friends who are known to be very vocal on the issue of how to attract the younger batch of fandom, which sounds like a much better sign.
Then we got back from the con and had to start packing ASAP.
The Move
I guess the move went about as smoothly as could be expected. On our last move we were moving out of home for the first time - you'd think that would be the more daunting job - but we only had half as much furniture to shift back then, and no messy clauses requiring us to keep paying expensive rent to our parents for as long as it took to scrub everything squeaky clean in the hope of getting all our bond back. As it wound up, Saturday the 10th was moving day, most of the evenings of the week after were spent cleaning up the old house and moving the last few delicate odds and ends over, the following week after that was largely lost to catching up on uni work (ARGH PRESENTATION TIME), and my birthday, somewhere in the middle, was spent assembling all the new Ikea furniture required to give us somewhere to unpack things into. With luck, we may even be done unpacking boxes within another week or so.
It has, to put it mildly, been a bit of an adventure. But moving always is.
The good news is that the new place is just about everything we were looking for - newer, cleaner, much more convenient for current working situations - and, more importantly, lacks the one big thing we were emphatically not looking for, which is a massive garden which the landlords expect us to keep watered and healthy despite the reticulation not having worked in god knows how long. It is amazing just how novel it is for us to be living in a place where everything works. It's a little smaller than our old place, but since we've been down a housemate for most of a year we're not losing any space we desperately need. Took a couple of weeks to get Internet connection set up at the new place, but given that last time it took well over a month, we are not complaining at all.
Took a quick snapshot of all my props while I had them together; also to demonstrate why it took so many trips to transport everything over. While not all of them are so delicate they need to be nursed carefully for the full journey, none of them pack easily. Ordinarily, some of these are hung, or in one case tied, up in various places around the house, so having them all together is a pretty rare event.
From left to right, the Fuuenken, Paracelcus, Hiei’s sword, Syaoran’s sword, and Yuffie’s 4-Point Shuriken and the Conformer at the bottom, plus the Pipe Fox, just because.
Probably going to be having some kind of combined housewarming/birthday party in a couple of weeks time. Depending on how long it takes to get ourselves organised, and all that.