Comments | mneme: Meanwhile, a con report: Rainbowcon

mneme

Meanwhile, a con report: Rainbowcon

May 07, 2016 15:45

So as long as I'm doing a touch of backed up blogging before doing the necessary things (which is to say, upgrading our cleaning supplies and other things hilight by the recent plumbing disaster; see the last post), I might as well do a short con report -- because Rainbowcon, last weekend, was -amazing ( Read more... )

seattle, con report, travel, filk

Comments 16

ext_3620337 May 7 2016, 21:37:03 UTC

Thank you for the conrep! OK if I link to it? We're collecting them.

By the way, while we do hope that it will get a little bigger over the next few years, we've decided that we, also, cherish the intimacy and relaxed sense of community we can get with a small con within the house. We'd originally planned RainbowCon to be a housecon only until it could gather enough members to reasonably make a jump to a hotel, but we've seen that we have something genuinely precious in this small setting that keeps everyone more or less in one place and interacting with each other all weekend.

So we've decided not to move it, even if we someday have to cap membership in order to fit the con into its current space. RainbowCon will stay put for as long as we're living at Rainbow's End; and if at all possible, we will bring it with us wherever we go after that.

In the meantime, I'm glad you had a good time. It was great to see you!

mneme May 7 2016, 21:56:21 UTC

Of course! It was one of the reasons I exherted myself to write it, after all; much of my life can happily go chronicled, but some things are best shared ( ... )

solarbird May 8 2016, 04:01:07 UTC

I've also added you to the postcon report list on Emerald Forest Filk's news page, here.

mneme May 8 2016, 04:45:56 UTC

Thanks -- and "in depth"! I thought it was a fairly shallow writeup--if one that took me around 45 minutes to write. :)

Thread 8

kalimac May 7 2016, 22:28:15 UTC

If I were still filking, this is the sort of thing I would love to do. And I remember Steve and Colleen from the way-wayback, before filking, even. I'm pleased you went and had a good time.

ext_3620337 May 8 2016, 04:59:20 UTC

Just FYI, we're not actually all filk. We're heavier on the music than any other aspect of programming, but we also have games, and crafts, and we're planning to do some writing and visual art stuff eventually. We're basically billed as a "Music & Creativity convention," and we cast a wide net, depending on what the participants want. I won't deny that music is the heart of it, but it isn't all of it by any means.

I don't expect this to change your mind especially, kalimac; it just occurred to me because of what you said, and I wanted to mention while I was thinking about it.

mneme May 8 2016, 05:40:55 UTC

Yeah, I left out the non-filk programming since the con mostly caters to filkers (with a tiny gaming track), but it's certainly there.

kalimac May 8 2016, 06:24:55 UTC

I'm curious as to whether the direction you didn't expect this to change my mind towards was "I should come anyway" or "I should stop thinking I'd like it if I were still filking."

mdlbear May 7 2016, 23:23:45 UTC

Thanks for the report! Yeah; it was pretty amazing.

Ball of Yarn? xenolee May 8 2016, 13:25:02 UTC

format; cats cradle
so we mostly never got a queue of more than 2 people (and that only by effort), and eventually stopped passing around the yarn ball

"Cats cradle" format? passing the ball of yarn?
Please tell me more.
I've never seen this used in San Diego, Los Angeles, or San Jose.

--Lee

Ball of Yarn? xenolee May 8 2016, 13:54:37 UTC

Okay, I've found https://www.fur.com/~jethric/consonance/2013/Consonance2013pgm.pdf and searched for "ball of yarn" and discovered that Merav took a ball of yarn to OVFF (which we only attended once) and started a "Cat's Cradle Bardic." Fascinating.

This hasn't shown up at any housefilks or filk conventions or other conventions I've attended so far.

--Lee

Re: Ball of Yarn? mneme May 8 2016, 20:20:07 UTC

*nod* It's not a common format, and I've never seen an attempt as successful as the one that created the term at OVFF. Part of the issue, I think, is that you need a sufficient density of people wanting to follow/perform that you get a dense web; in that situation the cats cradle mechanic can be a lot more pleasant than the more usual moderated chaos version where someone starts writing down (or just repeating from memory) the list on the queue; in that setup, often the circle will bounce back and forth between two or three topics for a while, as people following for topic 1 end up going after people following for topic 2, and so on ( ... )