Apollocon Part The Second: Cleaning Up
Jun. 27th, 2005 01:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
omorkaSo, there really wasn't much left after that, after all.
I did get the second piece from the art auction, a print of a color sketch of Sean Astin as Sam Gamgee. It's quite faithful, except that somehow the artist has drawn him with Elijah Wood's lips. The effect is . . . startlingly bishi given that Sam was supposed to be the buff hobbit. I quite like it. :) I also finally ran into![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lolleeroberts and ziactrice, which was pleasant, although we all seemed to be too tired to make much in the way of conversation.
I then went to two and a half roundtables. The first was "Why do they get it wrong?," about the numerous science errors horrendously committed by SF movies, and to a lesser degree SF literature. It was quite fun. It also pointed out to me something I knew but hasn't actually been conscious of: that all space fighter battles I've ever seen on film were scripted and visualized by someone who had airplane dogfights in mind, and all the fighters invariably move as if they're in atmosphere and generating lift with the wings somehow. (This despite the fact that a TIE fighter's wings are clearly not capable of generating lift!) Anyway, this was largely a bitch session, and a quite enjoyable and well-informed one, too.
The second was on fanfic. There were two panelists, one probably five years younger than my mother and one probably five years younger than me. Naturally enough, "fanfic" means something a little different for each of them. Again, I was vaguely aware that fanfic used to be the stuff of hastily photocopied fanzines stuffed in four dozen envelopes, and that the Internet has changed the world forever, but I hadn't really put that smore together, as it were. Around 1994, fanfic changed from something that was by definition very limited in audience and largely unknown (unless you got your Star Trek fanfic published as a novel, which obviously happened, but not to very many people) to something that every fifteen-year-old in a given fandom could find and read. In particular, publishing one's fanfic - literally, making it public - became trivially easy. And this has, in turn, changed how fandoms work in some fairly fundamental ways. It has also made slash /yaoi - well, not mainstream, but one of the flavors expected to be on the shelf. (More musings on this topic are likely to follow in a separate post.) Thanks, LiveJournal!
Speaking of LJ, the number of times it was mentioned at the con was astonishingly high - even excluding the fanfic discussion. Clearly this little diary service is onto something here. :)
Finally, I sat in on part of the "complaints and suggestions to the con board" panel. However, since they'd included a comment form as part of the registration package, I'd already filled that out, and didn't really have much to say. So when the Spouse arrived in the middle (my fault - I thought he'd take longer to get there than he did), I just ducked out. The point that gaming was . . . less than promised, by no fault of the ConCom . . . had already been made, and I had no other complaints.
A random note:
CMA attendees can be basically divided into two groups: those who treat it as a party, and those who treat it as a con. I have always intuitively treated it as a con, and I tend to get along better with those who also at least acknowledge its con-like aspects. I "cosplay" at CMA, albeit as an aspect of myself. (A different aspect than the aspect of myself I cosplay as when I go to a con dressed as Borealis.) Interestingly, the concert works in both the party mindset and the con mindset.
I did get the second piece from the art auction, a print of a color sketch of Sean Astin as Sam Gamgee. It's quite faithful, except that somehow the artist has drawn him with Elijah Wood's lips. The effect is . . . startlingly bishi given that Sam was supposed to be the buff hobbit. I quite like it. :) I also finally ran into
lolleeroberts and ziactrice, which was pleasant, although we all seemed to be too tired to make much in the way of conversation.I then went to two and a half roundtables. The first was "Why do they get it wrong?," about the numerous science errors horrendously committed by SF movies, and to a lesser degree SF literature. It was quite fun. It also pointed out to me something I knew but hasn't actually been conscious of: that all space fighter battles I've ever seen on film were scripted and visualized by someone who had airplane dogfights in mind, and all the fighters invariably move as if they're in atmosphere and generating lift with the wings somehow. (This despite the fact that a TIE fighter's wings are clearly not capable of generating lift!) Anyway, this was largely a bitch session, and a quite enjoyable and well-informed one, too.
The second was on fanfic. There were two panelists, one probably five years younger than my mother and one probably five years younger than me. Naturally enough, "fanfic" means something a little different for each of them. Again, I was vaguely aware that fanfic used to be the stuff of hastily photocopied fanzines stuffed in four dozen envelopes, and that the Internet has changed the world forever, but I hadn't really put that smore together, as it were. Around 1994, fanfic changed from something that was by definition very limited in audience and largely unknown (unless you got your Star Trek fanfic published as a novel, which obviously happened, but not to very many people) to something that every fifteen-year-old in a given fandom could find and read. In particular, publishing one's fanfic - literally, making it public - became trivially easy. And this has, in turn, changed how fandoms work in some fairly fundamental ways. It has also made slash /yaoi - well, not mainstream, but one of the flavors expected to be on the shelf. (More musings on this topic are likely to follow in a separate post.) Thanks, LiveJournal!
Speaking of LJ, the number of times it was mentioned at the con was astonishingly high - even excluding the fanfic discussion. Clearly this little diary service is onto something here. :)
Finally, I sat in on part of the "complaints and suggestions to the con board" panel. However, since they'd included a comment form as part of the registration package, I'd already filled that out, and didn't really have much to say. So when the Spouse arrived in the middle (my fault - I thought he'd take longer to get there than he did), I just ducked out. The point that gaming was . . . less than promised, by no fault of the ConCom . . . had already been made, and I had no other complaints.
A random note:
CMA attendees can be basically divided into two groups: those who treat it as a party, and those who treat it as a con. I have always intuitively treated it as a con, and I tend to get along better with those who also at least acknowledge its con-like aspects. I "cosplay" at CMA, albeit as an aspect of myself. (A different aspect than the aspect of myself I cosplay as when I go to a con dressed as Borealis.) Interestingly, the concert works in both the party mindset and the con mindset.
