Post-con write-up at long last.
Two years ago, I flew to con_txt from Pittsburgh the morning of its first day. This time around, I took a train in from New York City the day before, which made for a much better start to the whole affair. When the train was pulling into Union Station, I was listening to Get Sharp by The Limousines, and some lyrics from "Very Busy People" set the tone for the weekend:
We are very busy people
We are very busy people
But we've always got time for new friends
So come on over and knock on the door
It's open, what you waiting for?
We might be sprawled out on the floor
But we still make lovely company
Oh, just so everyone knows: the Vitruvian Turtle is still available.
After I arrived, dropped off my stuff, and managed to get a little workout at the LA Fitness around the corner to stop feeling so restless, I met up with my brother for dinner and dragged him to the registration party, where I think I had more fun than he did, especially when we all started lusting over Jeremy Renner's arms. It's been so long since I've been in a group of fans, the feeling of "my people, my tribe, people who know me" was so strong and palpable that first hour - just so delightful on so many levels when I can pound my fist against the table in recognition of the cracked-out AU that's been making the rounds and finally match names and faces and smiles.
Friday started with a dull breakfast and Fandom IRL. How to meet people in your area for coffee and conversation isn't always the easiest, and sometimes a good strategy's needed. Networking is that hoary old chestnut that doesn't always work - it depends on who's listening when the question for "do you know anyone else in my area" is asked. But it is one of the best ways to start, as is figuring out how to drop in hints towards fandom into conversations. Places tangental to fandom, like reading groups and Stich and Bitch communities, can be used to scratch the fandom itch if done right. "Online writer's group" tends to be code for "slash fandom" too, and there's always the opportunity to bring fellow fans into fandom if done slowly and carefully, as not to scare them off. How to Win Friends and Influence People is always worth a read. Conversation skills were discussed as well, and as ever, being up-front about certain things like having trouble with going overboard about Joss Whedon's body of work is helpful when talking to new people.
Fandom Speed Dating might well be the highlight of this year's con for me. Three people got to pimp their small fandoms anonymously to a fourth person - everyone sat facing the audience so the pimps could hold cards identifying their fandoms for the audience's benefit, with the fourth person asking questions unaware, and deciding to get into whichever fandom he or she enjoyed the answers for most. I pimped Team Fortress 2, set the room howling with laughter, and since I won the round, need to write up a set of recs.
I also wrote down the questions as best I could remember them.
1. When would I take a drink in your fandom? In the fandom, take a drink whenever someone accidentally gets tentacles. And please note, I said accidentally! Sometimes it happens on purpose!
2. What are five common kinks in fic? Size kink, crossfaction, coming out of the closet, homemade sex toys...and experimental surgery.
3. How would you get your fandom back to the Age of Sail? One of the characters has a wizard for a roommate and he already sent them back to Medieval Europe when he got mad one time, so it wouldn't be too hard for someone to not do the dishes and get him mad enough to send them back in time again...also, one of the characters already dresses up as a pirate sometimes, so he's ready to go! And the guy who dresses up as a pirate also has an eyepatch.
4. How long would it take to get through the whole canon? Assuming there's a speedy enough internet connection, thirty-five minutes.
5. Summarize your favorite fic. I'll just be filthy and quote a line from my favorite: "For a moment, he wished that he still had a dick, so that he could fuck his own amazing cunt."
To which someone pointed out, "That's just unfair! How do you follow THAT?"
I've said it before and I'll say it again: I love this fandom.
I followed neotoma and someone whose name I didn't get to a nice upscale wine bar/restuarant for lunch, and got back in time for Gender and Sexuality Across Cultures, which discussed mandated gender behavior, social mores as reactionary movements against emerging trends and the general tidal feeling of restrictions and freedoms, the power and vocabulary of clothing and dress, social class impacting a person's given behaviors, and how there have always been queer people. There was a nice bit in the middle where people got to talk about how observations can be clouded by preconceived judgments, such as archaeologists gendering skeletons based on grave artifacts...and gendering grave artifacts based on skeletons. A much more somber discussion than most of the other panels, and a discussion well worth having.
Size Doesn't Matter spent more time on what constitutes a longfic than how to make them, which was the point of several people's visit to that panel. Sometimes it's hard to stay on topic when there's no clear-cut definition for what the topic ought to be about. We still had a reasonable time talking about the notion of time investments with stories given the format of fic as opposed to original fiction which went through the traditional publishing process. There's the universal need to grab someone in the first couple of paragraphs, and there's reading on a screen instead of paper and ink.
I took an hour to check e-mail and coordinate meeting someone for dinner, and made it downstairs in time for Community 201. Much, much love for the source and hope for the fourth season. And much, much love for the characters. There was an astute comment that out of everyone at Greendale, Chang is the only malicious one: others might cause hurt, but he's the only one who actively seeks out opportunities to do so and antagonize. As a whole, it's a remarkably affirmational and positive environment. There's no shaming of Britta or Dean for their sexual appetites, whatever those might be, there's the acceptance of Abed and Troy and their strange inner worlds, there's the acceptance of being a geek and having a place for that - all lovely things of that nature. Pretty much everyone expected there to actually be a crossover with the alternate timeline for real, not just in Abed's head, even though this is a show which ostensibly takes place in the real world. It's just crazy enough for that to have worked. And kudos to referencing the obscure part of 2001, not just the bits everyone knows.
We brainstormed potential ideas for future episodes, as well as why there isn't more fic for that show, and someone else was smart enough to write those lists down:
Love Boat
Upstairs, Downstairs
Groundhog Day
"Lower decks" ep
Three's Company
Amnesia
Future ep, or time-traveling study group from the future
Bizarro version of study group - hopefully genderswapped! Or - Sliders! Or Quantum Leap
Silent ep or all voiceover
Tristram Shandy
-
Hard to match tone
Hard to write comedy, esp for a show that's already funny
Not enough broken parts/gaps
Very visual
It's so much of its medium
Need deep knowledge of the canon and of popular culture
Very distinct character voices, and many characters
Dinner was pho with a friend, and was followed by the Disco Duck, where I brought my older brother to give him a greater idea of what fans do when they get together. Mostly he came to see what happened when I got drunk. Also, to introduce him to the female gaze and show off the good look of a cape over a tuxedo. Once I finally settled down to talk to someone instead of floating around hoping to do so, I had a much better time discussing the housing market in San Francisco and tag-wrangling on the AOOO. We bonded over "bullshit Tumblr tags" and moved from there. I was two drinks into the night when the wrangler growled at me, "You Team Fortress 2 people, and your generic Spy and Sniper and your -!" I slammed my fist against the table and shouted right back, "I'm right here, motherfucker! Come and get me!" So good.
deelaundry and I shared the suite for the night, and looked over the farmers' market before it opened. I headed to Avengers Fans Assemble! which was just a "let's sit around and talk about our fandom feelings" thing, which are always better in real life when you can hear everyone laugh than hanging around online. It took up two full rooms and covered the costuming department, Coulson theories, why people do and don't go for Loki, what made the movie work, Norton versus Ruffalo and how Thor and the Hulk interacted in a very brotherly manner. We need a Black Widow movie soon much more than we need another Hulk movie - the Everest of Marvel movies, it's claimed so many lives already - and we need to get the director's cut on DVD already.
Five-Minute Fandoms and Oneshot Deals was my first time moderating anything, and that was helped by the panel never getting more than eleven people at its largest. I'm still calling it a success because we managed to talk about the topic at hand. Without modern technology we wouldn't be talking about these little things, because they'd just be lost in the void. Vividness was important, as is having just enough to go from. Humor's important too, to get into these little things - it's a great way to grab someone right away, and now with ad campaigns running for quite some time, like the Mac/PC ads, it's possible to see development and change within the small-format works as well.
I skipped going out for lunch and the next couple of panels to find a streaming link for the morning's episode of Legend of Korra, and didn't mind in the least.
Old Fandoms Never Die considered what makes an older fandom keep on going. Stuff like The Professionals, due South, The Sentinel, The Magnificent Seven, Blake's Seven, Highlander, and Starsky and Hutch have been going strong for decades without anything new, and it's interesting to see why, as well as what happens to bring in new people. TV stations broadcasting these for new generations of viewers helps, like when the Sci-Fi channel used to live up to its name. DVDs help, too, as does just having a few people to talk to and keep the energy levels consistent throughout the months and years, even if it's not at a high setting - if the canon is inspirational enough, in good and bad ways, there's enough to keep someone going for years. Sometimes new parallel canon comes, like the Star Trek reboot, and sometimes there's an actor doing another film or TV show, that gets people back into the older fandom. Vids are good, too, as is changing online platforms and bringing old stuff over to show to new people, like someone uploading their old work to a big archive and getting a new audience.
Now, it is possible for fandoms to die - especially small fandoms can go if there's something which makes it too unpleasant to continue, like the original creators taking legal action or the canon going much farther than just too far. Real life can impact fandom too: Sports Night had to take a two-year break after September 11. But as long as there's someone making something, and there's enough energy to keep going with a good critical mass to build from, the fandom won't ever really leave us. Which is nice.
I spent a little time in Going Pro, which was about getting published, then followed the laughter to the next room over for The Phylogeny of Speculative Erotica. A decision well made. With cons like this, you need to follow the laughter. Everyone suggested kinks from speculative fiction and fantasy, what their appeal is, how to work them into a story. The listing of kinks went on for almost twenty minutes, from tentacles and sex pollen to dom/sub universes and soulbonding to animalistic genitalia and clones to cyborgs and non-human sex to robots and magic toys and even dendrophilia. There are all sorts of reasons we like these, too. Sometimes we need something to spice up a sex scene. Sometimes they're a way to explore a character trait within a larger framework. Sometimes it's a shame/comfort trope to allow an individual to explore something in the safe zone of fantasy and reclaim something of their body in a roundabout way. I suggested that it can be an opportunity to explore a very alien point of view, like how someone with tentacles instead of legs would try to maneuver in three-dimensional space. Sometimes a kink is just a kink, and sometimes it can be used to communicate something deeper, and knowing which one is which can be difficult. I prefer the ones that take the worldbuilding into account, but I've come to accept sometimes things are just overlaid to see how the characters would work with these new parameters. Still. Tentacles!
Doctor Who: Moffat's Long Game was half-squee, half-meta, with a good dose of criticism and nitpicking. Wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey, with the answer to every question about Doctor Who canon being "yes." We'd like to see a companion who isn't a white female from the contemporary era, and the Doctor's past to catch up to him. Also old villains given a good budget would be fun. The changes in the Doctor's personalities are almost even enough it can look like the BBC did a lot of things intentionally, and the showrunners sometimes need people to say "no" to them. We agreed Moffat is very good at small contained plots, or when working with his own characters, and is probably over-stretching himself right now. The moderator suggested they change showrunners every season, and that got murmurs of approval.
Dinner was a salad from the Whole Foods buffet and possibly the most satisfying food I'd had since the scrambled eggs I'd made Wednesday morning. It was closest to what I usually eat when I'm cooking: just a giant plate of plant matter. I and a few other fans hung out around the place for a while, talking about Captain America vodka - I maintain he's Swedish by descent - and potential AUs and vintage clothing.
Then came the vid show. No sing-alongs this year, which was a minor disappointment - maybe next time - but plenty to laugh at just the same. I'm going to need to get a copy of Big Eden now, and see what else I can get my hands on.
The following morning I found a table with people talking, and sat for almost an hour discussing GPS, Canadian French, technology of the future, ready reference sources, the boring parts of intelligence work, and how great it is to be in a place where intense conversation is the norm, not the exception. My tribe! My people! Cons are where they speak your language.
After the auction, of which I only saw enough of for someone to set a new record for single-item bid, I went to Avatar: Not The One With The Blue People. We're all excited for what will come next, and we all want to see more of what the world has to offer us. It's a children's show and Legend of Korra only has 12 episodes a season so there's only so much they can do. Which is where fandom comes in. AUs, exploration, meta, regular fic, all that good stuff. (Oh, I checked: it's 'swatkat' on Tumblr and swatkat24 on Livejournal.) I still want more combat airbending and Air Nomad anthropology, and everyone loves Lin and wants to see Korra get to the Avatar state and kick serious ass.
Shifting Genre was all just a blur of good fandom talk. What's a pairing? What does a M/M/F threesome count as? Where do you put fic with a pairing within it that doesn't have the pairing emphasized as part of the major action? These aren't things which get definitive answers, just more discussion, which is best served face-to-face.
I cleaned up my room and napped, and hit up Bring Back That Loving Feeling as my last panel of the day. How to accept the loss of love with a fandom and move on, and how to bring that love back. There was a lot of overlap with Old Fandoms Never Die for how to maintain action and what brings people back. Other suggestions were to commit to a challenge or activity, giving up commitments to challenges and activities, take a break, try to find something new to rekindle fandom love in general, find more people to talk to, look for something to bring about external inspiration from non-fandom sources, pick up a new fandom. It was as close to therapy as the con got, to the point where it ended in a group hug. Which someone suggested we follow with a group grope, because this is fandom we're talking about.
The Dead Duck was a chance to clap for the con committee, and I left before it ended to catch a train back to the city, wherein I just went to bed. And now that this is as done as I think I can get it, bed looms once again.
Two years ought to be enough time to recharge for the next one. In the meantime, anyone in the area want to meet for coffee and meta? My treat.
We are very busy people
We are very busy people
But we've always got time for new friends
So come on over and knock on the door
It's open, what you waiting for?
We might be sprawled out on the floor
But we still make lovely company
Oh, just so everyone knows: the Vitruvian Turtle is still available.
After I arrived, dropped off my stuff, and managed to get a little workout at the LA Fitness around the corner to stop feeling so restless, I met up with my brother for dinner and dragged him to the registration party, where I think I had more fun than he did, especially when we all started lusting over Jeremy Renner's arms. It's been so long since I've been in a group of fans, the feeling of "my people, my tribe, people who know me" was so strong and palpable that first hour - just so delightful on so many levels when I can pound my fist against the table in recognition of the cracked-out AU that's been making the rounds and finally match names and faces and smiles.
Friday started with a dull breakfast and Fandom IRL. How to meet people in your area for coffee and conversation isn't always the easiest, and sometimes a good strategy's needed. Networking is that hoary old chestnut that doesn't always work - it depends on who's listening when the question for "do you know anyone else in my area" is asked. But it is one of the best ways to start, as is figuring out how to drop in hints towards fandom into conversations. Places tangental to fandom, like reading groups and Stich and Bitch communities, can be used to scratch the fandom itch if done right. "Online writer's group" tends to be code for "slash fandom" too, and there's always the opportunity to bring fellow fans into fandom if done slowly and carefully, as not to scare them off. How to Win Friends and Influence People is always worth a read. Conversation skills were discussed as well, and as ever, being up-front about certain things like having trouble with going overboard about Joss Whedon's body of work is helpful when talking to new people.
Fandom Speed Dating might well be the highlight of this year's con for me. Three people got to pimp their small fandoms anonymously to a fourth person - everyone sat facing the audience so the pimps could hold cards identifying their fandoms for the audience's benefit, with the fourth person asking questions unaware, and deciding to get into whichever fandom he or she enjoyed the answers for most. I pimped Team Fortress 2, set the room howling with laughter, and since I won the round, need to write up a set of recs.
I also wrote down the questions as best I could remember them.
1. When would I take a drink in your fandom? In the fandom, take a drink whenever someone accidentally gets tentacles. And please note, I said accidentally! Sometimes it happens on purpose!
2. What are five common kinks in fic? Size kink, crossfaction, coming out of the closet, homemade sex toys...and experimental surgery.
3. How would you get your fandom back to the Age of Sail? One of the characters has a wizard for a roommate and he already sent them back to Medieval Europe when he got mad one time, so it wouldn't be too hard for someone to not do the dishes and get him mad enough to send them back in time again...also, one of the characters already dresses up as a pirate sometimes, so he's ready to go! And the guy who dresses up as a pirate also has an eyepatch.
4. How long would it take to get through the whole canon? Assuming there's a speedy enough internet connection, thirty-five minutes.
5. Summarize your favorite fic. I'll just be filthy and quote a line from my favorite: "For a moment, he wished that he still had a dick, so that he could fuck his own amazing cunt."
To which someone pointed out, "That's just unfair! How do you follow THAT?"
I've said it before and I'll say it again: I love this fandom.
I followed neotoma and someone whose name I didn't get to a nice upscale wine bar/restuarant for lunch, and got back in time for Gender and Sexuality Across Cultures, which discussed mandated gender behavior, social mores as reactionary movements against emerging trends and the general tidal feeling of restrictions and freedoms, the power and vocabulary of clothing and dress, social class impacting a person's given behaviors, and how there have always been queer people. There was a nice bit in the middle where people got to talk about how observations can be clouded by preconceived judgments, such as archaeologists gendering skeletons based on grave artifacts...and gendering grave artifacts based on skeletons. A much more somber discussion than most of the other panels, and a discussion well worth having.
Size Doesn't Matter spent more time on what constitutes a longfic than how to make them, which was the point of several people's visit to that panel. Sometimes it's hard to stay on topic when there's no clear-cut definition for what the topic ought to be about. We still had a reasonable time talking about the notion of time investments with stories given the format of fic as opposed to original fiction which went through the traditional publishing process. There's the universal need to grab someone in the first couple of paragraphs, and there's reading on a screen instead of paper and ink.
I took an hour to check e-mail and coordinate meeting someone for dinner, and made it downstairs in time for Community 201. Much, much love for the source and hope for the fourth season. And much, much love for the characters. There was an astute comment that out of everyone at Greendale, Chang is the only malicious one: others might cause hurt, but he's the only one who actively seeks out opportunities to do so and antagonize. As a whole, it's a remarkably affirmational and positive environment. There's no shaming of Britta or Dean for their sexual appetites, whatever those might be, there's the acceptance of Abed and Troy and their strange inner worlds, there's the acceptance of being a geek and having a place for that - all lovely things of that nature. Pretty much everyone expected there to actually be a crossover with the alternate timeline for real, not just in Abed's head, even though this is a show which ostensibly takes place in the real world. It's just crazy enough for that to have worked. And kudos to referencing the obscure part of 2001, not just the bits everyone knows.
We brainstormed potential ideas for future episodes, as well as why there isn't more fic for that show, and someone else was smart enough to write those lists down:
Love Boat
Upstairs, Downstairs
Groundhog Day
"Lower decks" ep
Three's Company
Amnesia
Future ep, or time-traveling study group from the future
Bizarro version of study group - hopefully genderswapped! Or - Sliders! Or Quantum Leap
Silent ep or all voiceover
Tristram Shandy
-
Hard to match tone
Hard to write comedy, esp for a show that's already funny
Not enough broken parts/gaps
Very visual
It's so much of its medium
Need deep knowledge of the canon and of popular culture
Very distinct character voices, and many characters
Dinner was pho with a friend, and was followed by the Disco Duck, where I brought my older brother to give him a greater idea of what fans do when they get together. Mostly he came to see what happened when I got drunk. Also, to introduce him to the female gaze and show off the good look of a cape over a tuxedo. Once I finally settled down to talk to someone instead of floating around hoping to do so, I had a much better time discussing the housing market in San Francisco and tag-wrangling on the AOOO. We bonded over "bullshit Tumblr tags" and moved from there. I was two drinks into the night when the wrangler growled at me, "You Team Fortress 2 people, and your generic Spy and Sniper and your -!" I slammed my fist against the table and shouted right back, "I'm right here, motherfucker! Come and get me!" So good.
deelaundry and I shared the suite for the night, and looked over the farmers' market before it opened. I headed to Avengers Fans Assemble! which was just a "let's sit around and talk about our fandom feelings" thing, which are always better in real life when you can hear everyone laugh than hanging around online. It took up two full rooms and covered the costuming department, Coulson theories, why people do and don't go for Loki, what made the movie work, Norton versus Ruffalo and how Thor and the Hulk interacted in a very brotherly manner. We need a Black Widow movie soon much more than we need another Hulk movie - the Everest of Marvel movies, it's claimed so many lives already - and we need to get the director's cut on DVD already.
Five-Minute Fandoms and Oneshot Deals was my first time moderating anything, and that was helped by the panel never getting more than eleven people at its largest. I'm still calling it a success because we managed to talk about the topic at hand. Without modern technology we wouldn't be talking about these little things, because they'd just be lost in the void. Vividness was important, as is having just enough to go from. Humor's important too, to get into these little things - it's a great way to grab someone right away, and now with ad campaigns running for quite some time, like the Mac/PC ads, it's possible to see development and change within the small-format works as well.
I skipped going out for lunch and the next couple of panels to find a streaming link for the morning's episode of Legend of Korra, and didn't mind in the least.
Old Fandoms Never Die considered what makes an older fandom keep on going. Stuff like The Professionals, due South, The Sentinel, The Magnificent Seven, Blake's Seven, Highlander, and Starsky and Hutch have been going strong for decades without anything new, and it's interesting to see why, as well as what happens to bring in new people. TV stations broadcasting these for new generations of viewers helps, like when the Sci-Fi channel used to live up to its name. DVDs help, too, as does just having a few people to talk to and keep the energy levels consistent throughout the months and years, even if it's not at a high setting - if the canon is inspirational enough, in good and bad ways, there's enough to keep someone going for years. Sometimes new parallel canon comes, like the Star Trek reboot, and sometimes there's an actor doing another film or TV show, that gets people back into the older fandom. Vids are good, too, as is changing online platforms and bringing old stuff over to show to new people, like someone uploading their old work to a big archive and getting a new audience.
Now, it is possible for fandoms to die - especially small fandoms can go if there's something which makes it too unpleasant to continue, like the original creators taking legal action or the canon going much farther than just too far. Real life can impact fandom too: Sports Night had to take a two-year break after September 11. But as long as there's someone making something, and there's enough energy to keep going with a good critical mass to build from, the fandom won't ever really leave us. Which is nice.
I spent a little time in Going Pro, which was about getting published, then followed the laughter to the next room over for The Phylogeny of Speculative Erotica. A decision well made. With cons like this, you need to follow the laughter. Everyone suggested kinks from speculative fiction and fantasy, what their appeal is, how to work them into a story. The listing of kinks went on for almost twenty minutes, from tentacles and sex pollen to dom/sub universes and soulbonding to animalistic genitalia and clones to cyborgs and non-human sex to robots and magic toys and even dendrophilia. There are all sorts of reasons we like these, too. Sometimes we need something to spice up a sex scene. Sometimes they're a way to explore a character trait within a larger framework. Sometimes it's a shame/comfort trope to allow an individual to explore something in the safe zone of fantasy and reclaim something of their body in a roundabout way. I suggested that it can be an opportunity to explore a very alien point of view, like how someone with tentacles instead of legs would try to maneuver in three-dimensional space. Sometimes a kink is just a kink, and sometimes it can be used to communicate something deeper, and knowing which one is which can be difficult. I prefer the ones that take the worldbuilding into account, but I've come to accept sometimes things are just overlaid to see how the characters would work with these new parameters. Still. Tentacles!
Doctor Who: Moffat's Long Game was half-squee, half-meta, with a good dose of criticism and nitpicking. Wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey, with the answer to every question about Doctor Who canon being "yes." We'd like to see a companion who isn't a white female from the contemporary era, and the Doctor's past to catch up to him. Also old villains given a good budget would be fun. The changes in the Doctor's personalities are almost even enough it can look like the BBC did a lot of things intentionally, and the showrunners sometimes need people to say "no" to them. We agreed Moffat is very good at small contained plots, or when working with his own characters, and is probably over-stretching himself right now. The moderator suggested they change showrunners every season, and that got murmurs of approval.
Dinner was a salad from the Whole Foods buffet and possibly the most satisfying food I'd had since the scrambled eggs I'd made Wednesday morning. It was closest to what I usually eat when I'm cooking: just a giant plate of plant matter. I and a few other fans hung out around the place for a while, talking about Captain America vodka - I maintain he's Swedish by descent - and potential AUs and vintage clothing.
Then came the vid show. No sing-alongs this year, which was a minor disappointment - maybe next time - but plenty to laugh at just the same. I'm going to need to get a copy of Big Eden now, and see what else I can get my hands on.
The following morning I found a table with people talking, and sat for almost an hour discussing GPS, Canadian French, technology of the future, ready reference sources, the boring parts of intelligence work, and how great it is to be in a place where intense conversation is the norm, not the exception. My tribe! My people! Cons are where they speak your language.
After the auction, of which I only saw enough of for someone to set a new record for single-item bid, I went to Avatar: Not The One With The Blue People. We're all excited for what will come next, and we all want to see more of what the world has to offer us. It's a children's show and Legend of Korra only has 12 episodes a season so there's only so much they can do. Which is where fandom comes in. AUs, exploration, meta, regular fic, all that good stuff. (Oh, I checked: it's 'swatkat' on Tumblr and swatkat24 on Livejournal.) I still want more combat airbending and Air Nomad anthropology, and everyone loves Lin and wants to see Korra get to the Avatar state and kick serious ass.
Shifting Genre was all just a blur of good fandom talk. What's a pairing? What does a M/M/F threesome count as? Where do you put fic with a pairing within it that doesn't have the pairing emphasized as part of the major action? These aren't things which get definitive answers, just more discussion, which is best served face-to-face.
I cleaned up my room and napped, and hit up Bring Back That Loving Feeling as my last panel of the day. How to accept the loss of love with a fandom and move on, and how to bring that love back. There was a lot of overlap with Old Fandoms Never Die for how to maintain action and what brings people back. Other suggestions were to commit to a challenge or activity, giving up commitments to challenges and activities, take a break, try to find something new to rekindle fandom love in general, find more people to talk to, look for something to bring about external inspiration from non-fandom sources, pick up a new fandom. It was as close to therapy as the con got, to the point where it ended in a group hug. Which someone suggested we follow with a group grope, because this is fandom we're talking about.
The Dead Duck was a chance to clap for the con committee, and I left before it ended to catch a train back to the city, wherein I just went to bed. And now that this is as done as I think I can get it, bed looms once again.
Two years ought to be enough time to recharge for the next one. In the meantime, anyone in the area want to meet for coffee and meta? My treat.