green_amber

I'm off to an IT law conference in Glasgow tomorrow (sigh!) so it looks like I'll never remember anything by Saturday, so i'll just flip down a few highlights. This was a really great con and I'm very glad we're going back there in 2 years (tho I do hope we can have slightly nicer food options next time - buffet Friday night was really not good - but I gather they're fixing the aircon problem??) All we need then is the swimming pool back :) Thanks to all the comittee and esp despotliz for lit prog and fishlifter (both of) for fannish programme.

( Fun, fanhistory (not) and fornication (well, maybe} )

is this, I think (unless things have moved..)

Be careful what you wish for - the new Dr Who Friday 17:00
The past year’s SF films in review Saturday 18:00
Fan history: why bother? panellist Winchester Sunday 18:00

Interstingly quite a good cross section of my fannish interests - all it lacks is something on Internet law!!
estimate_lad the middle one is the film panel I was talking about..

Eastercon was, by general consensus, rather serious, with Lots of Programme, but it seemed to work pretty well - all the panels I went to were busy, and some, mostly in the Board Room, even steam-room like. There was, no doubt, lots of non-serious stuff out there, but it seemed to be mostly to do with corsets, Cyberdrome or Ian Sorensen, so I didn't make too much effort to find it. (I did see about 20 minutes of Ian's Greatest Hits on the Sunday - which was odd, as they only last five :-) I also missed a lot of Saturday night while being force-fed at my Mum's for Pasech (Jewish chicken dinner with the works - chopped liver, chicken soup, matzoh balls, and salmon patties, raspbery pavlova, mmmm - worth missing communal viewing of Dr Who and most of a fan fund party for, honest, even one where Flick was wearing, or nearly wearing, her new corset .. :-)

Sunday night I'd organised a sentimental pilgrimage back to the Ashoka, the canonical Glasgow Indian restaurant of my youth, with a charming entourage of Geoff Ryman (BSFA Award Winner for Air, huzzah!), Anne Wilson, andrewducker, hfnuala and thishardenedarm, who wasn't at the con but whom I just felt really ought to meet Geoff sometime (and vice versa.) Miraculously, although everyone but me didn't know at least some of the others, a fab time was had (including haggis pakora). Then we swanned back to the Year of the Teledu party, where we drank raspberry vodka and took pictures of ourselves in the dark adorned with glow tubes which make us all look like animated Simon Templars, admired the living dead zombies, and I discovered I'd not lost my mobile after all but only left it at the Ashoka - phew.

So to today, which I spent, it felt like, mostly either moderating or being on panels (what did I do to someone to be on nothing till the Monday of a four day con, and then on two and a half hours of them at a go!!?) leaving me rather knackered. Still, it's wondrous to go to a con that's only an hour's drive from your own home, even if that hour comeing back did include a tortuous encounter with the Glasgow one-way system and a perilous moment on Bath Street when I suddenly realised this road wasn't one-way after all, and yes, cars were coming AT ME.. oops. Maybe I was very knackered, indeed.

Meanwhile, someone offered to write me Tenth Doctor/Spike slash at the con - who was it?!

Quotes worth recalling:

1) Me, on seeing a bevy of beauties bedecked in corsets emerging from a lift : "Where did they come from?"

swisstone (entranced): "Heaven!"

2) Me describing how my brother is marrying this American women he met on the Internet, and how she recently actually arrived in the UK.

andrewducker (reading the Independent): "There's an article here on how IKEA originally started as a mail order business."

Me : "Well, at least when she arrived, he didn't have to assemble her."

3) At the Philosophy in SF panel (which was very good indeed, and managed to get in everything from Kant's theory of Pure Reason to superstring theory, and made me determined to buy something (readable, not wearable) by both Justina Robson and Liz Williams) someone opined that it was difficult for us ordinary mortals to imagine things like 4-dimensional objects in 18-dimensional space, and this might similarly make it difficult for us to apprehend the presence of aliens even if we had the technology to detect them. To which, A N Other told the engineer and mathematician joke. (Stop if you've heard this one.)

The engineer complains that he can't visualise the shape of an object in 11-dimensional space.

The mathematician says "Oh that's easy. I just imagine what it would be like in n-dimensional space and then let n=11".

I liked it. I guess this proves, if e're there waa doubt that I really am a geek..



The V for Vendetta panel I moderated seemed to to go well, and I learned an awful lot, mostly from Mike Abbott and various parts of the audience. We expected to diversify fairly quickly into talking about other graphic novels which had dealt with politics, but in fact there was plenty in the text, and particularly the divergence in endings between the graphic novel and the film, to keep a complete panel going. Mike's theory that Evie's torture is not in fact a brainwashing scene (dodgy) but a magical initiation rite (based on Moore's later obsession with magicks) had me really thinking - I hope he does, as suggested, write it up for a fanzine.

Sleeeeepy - will I have a bath next, or just watch Dr Who on vid? I guess I better go ask the cats..