Blackmoor Vituperative

This is not urban fantasy

We are home, safe and sound, from MystiCon 2011. We had a good time, and we are glad we went. Here are some thoughts in no particular order.

I liked Brinke Stevens. I can’t recall (offhand) ever enjoying a guest of honor as much at a con. I wish her luck with her writing.

It annoys me that “horror” is apparently no longer a genre, and that all of these vampire romance novels are called “urban fantasy”. WTF. I have an easy test for anyone wondering if a book is “urban fantasy”: if the protagonist or antagonist in your novel is one of the Universal Studios classic movie monsters, it’s not fantasy, much less “urban fantasy”. Storm Front is urban fantasy. Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter is not. War For The Oaks is urban fantasy. Dead Until Dark is not. This is not rocket science.

We really enjoyed hanging out with Carla and Brian. Fun folks. I hope they come to RavenCon some day (although they won’t this year). We met several other fun people, as well, but I am terrible with names, so I can’t tell you theirs.

The character sheet for Greg Porter’s new Verne game is simply amazing. Also, CORPS has been replaced with EABA… as of eight years or so ago, which shows you how out of touch I am.

The podcast thing worked out pretty well, I think, but I have learned something in the process: I am painfully tedious. There are some people who are so tedious that I can barely stand to be in the same room with them when they are talking. I am one of those people. I don’t know how anyone else stands me. Aside from my annoying nasal voice, I combine the worst aspects of someone who can’t string together two coherent thoughts and someone who appears convinced of their own brilliance. If I was in the audience for a panel I was on, I would probably just leave. No accounting for taste, I guess.

I need to find a way to tether my phone to my laptop, so that I won’t be dependent on a malfunctioning hotel internet connection. I know that there are Android tethering apps; I am just not sure if my phone can do it.

I would like to play in a superhero LARP some time. We were too busy for me to participate in one this time.

Having pizza in the con suite Friday night was awesome. Having a hotel room across the hall and one door down from the con suite was doubly awesome.

In general, I am glad we went.

Something I overheard in a chat room recently:

Harrigan: Hmmm… I need to find out how to go through airport security these days. The last time I flew, I got stopped and was asked what was in the small pouch on my belt. The security guard waved me on when I said it was a Swiss army knife and told me he just wanted to make sure it wasn’t Mace. I think things have changed since then.
Berrianna: Yeah, knives are right out.
Berrianna: As are liquids and gels over five ounces, firearms, jackhammers, hacksaws, dental implants, transplanted kidneys, a sense of personal privacy, any bag over 10 pounds, jackets, underwear with natural fibers, broken glass, scarves, dental floss, dignity, the first and fourth Amendments, and dogs over fifteen pounds.

Heh. Heh heh.

This is pretty huge news. The Egyptian government has shut off the Internet there, in response to civil unrest which may be reach civil war proportions. And Egypt isn’t the only Middle Eastern country having problems.

I am not going to make any pronouncements or try to draw any conclusions from any of this. I will point out a couple of things, though. First, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak has been in power for 30 years. I am probably typical (among Amercians, anyway) in thinking that this is too long for one person to hold that much power. Second, although the average Egyptian is poor, the Egyptian economy is in better shape now, and is less centralized, than it was 30 years ago. So would an Egyptian civil war make that better, or worse?

A revolution is a dangerous thing. The revolution which resulted in the creation of the United States of America is almost unique in how little it cost us and in how well it turned out (and it certainly wasn’t bloodless). People in the USA who call for overthrowing or even substantially changing our form of government should keep that in mind.

Be careful what you wish for.

This is proof that Americans have become weak and stupid.

A CBS News poll found that 81 percent of Americans approved of full-body scanners, 15 percent were opposed and 4 percent were undecided.

Sari Koshetz, spokeswoman for TSA, said Monday that “98 percent of passengers directed to go through … scanners have been happy to do so. If I’ve seen or heard any misconceptions here, it’s that this is a major controversy nationwide. And we haven’t experienced that from passengers.”

(from Travelers try to see through the scans, Miami Herald)

Disgusting. Simply disgusting. I am embarrassed for people so meek, brain-dead, and lacking even a basic sense of human dignity that they accept this abuse. The TSA “security theatre” crossed the line from inconvenient to unacceptable a few years ago, when they started demanding that people take off their shoes. This… offense… is so far over the line that anyone who chooses to go along with it for any but the most compelling reasons (work, family illness, etc.) doesn’t even deserve to be called “human” anymore. And the people who impose this nightmare on The Land Of The Free? I won’t call them what they deserve to be called: minors sometimes read this blog.

Yesterday, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) rolled out new nationwide rules for traveler pat-downs. Want to keep your genitalia private by avoiding the new backscatter security scanners? You can request a pat-down instead, but the TSA is intent on making sure you won’t enjoy it. The new rules require agents to pay renewed attention to your crotch, and their hands won’t stop until they meet testicular resistance. (No word on quite how far they’ll go should you lack said testicles.)

[…]

But the new rules may not really be about “thoroughness” anyway, because “the obvious goal of the TSA is to make the pat-down embarrassing enough for the average passenger that the vast majority of people will choose high-tech humiliation over the low-tech ball check.”

(from Assume the position: TSA begins new nut-busting pat-downs, ArsTechnica)

This means that if you wish to take a commercial flight, you must submit to a search which is more invasive than that which is performed on a suspected murderer at the time of arrest. If you think I am exaggerating, call your local police and ask them.

I recall where I was when the World Trade Center buildings were destroyed. Someone in a cubicle next to mine received an email that a plane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center Buildings. I thought it was yet another ridiculous email chain-letter forwarded by the same sort of gullible people who pass on dire warnings of syringes in telephone booths and rat urine on soda cans, and I told them so with a sneer (I am sometimes not as kind as I would like to be: I was even less so back then).

But more and more people heard this news, and then someone said that it was on the television in the break room. Still skeptical, I went and watched with everyone else.

I was flabbergasted when it was on the news in the break room, live — and then a second plane slammed into the other World Trade Center building, right in front of me. Even then, I thought it had to be a hoax or publicity stunt of some kind. I mean, how could two planes possibly hit skyscrapers in the same city on the same day? It’s inconceivable.

But it was true, of course, as we all learned over the following days and weeks.

The worst was yet to come, of course: the massive, brutal insult to American travelers known as the TSA, and the various violations of our basic human rights in the name of keeping us “safe”. Buildings can be rebuilt, and while the death toll from the airplane crashes was tragic, that many people die on our highways every month. The plane crashes may have been the work of psychotic foreigners, but the real damage to the USA happened afterward, and was perpetrated by Americans. I will probably not live long enough to see that damage undone.

We recently attended DragonCon 2010 (my portion of the trip paid for by my favorite client and soon to be employer, OneBookShelf). We had fun and we are glad we went. Here are some of my observations and reflections, in no particular order.

Trader Vic’s

We had dinner Thursday night at Trader Vic’s, a restaurant that claims to have invented the Mai Tai. They certainly do serve a good Mai Tai — no argument there. It’s also a very neat place to eat. I rather wish I had taken some time to wander around and look it over, but I was in the company of a number of OneBookShelf folks and their dates, so this did not occur to me at the time.

Dinner went well. I had some kind of mixed seafood soup, which was quite good. I also somehow managed not to do or say anything irreversibly offensive to the OneBookShelf folks, although I don’t know how I managed it with two Mai Tais in me. I spent most of the time talking about role-playing games with a pleasant fellow named Luke.

The best advice for DragonCon

This was the first (and possibly the last) time we attended DragonCon, so we read up on it to see what sort of advice veterans of the convention had to offer. The best and most useful advice we found was to carry a messenger bag: for snacks, the con schedule, etc. As it happens, I picked up two black leather messenger bags for super cheap a few years ago: this was the first time we had ever used them, and they were invaluable.

Costumes

My camera sucks. It’s fine for outdoor photos in bright daylight (it’s quite good at that, really), but in anything less than bright light, it’s abysmal. It takes several seconds to focus, and anything more than a few meters away in other than bright light will come out dark and murky. Even so, I took a couple of hundred photographs.

There were some amazing costumes. I probably only photographed a quarter of those I saw, and I am sure that I only saw a quarter of those at the convention (if that). The most confusing costumes, I think, were the Dalek women: women dressed not in Dalek costumes, but in Dalek inspired costumes. I saw several over the course of the weekend: each different, but recognizably of the same theme. I still do not understand it.

My favorite costumes were typically very small and worn by slim young women. In my younger, single, sexually frustrated days, I probably would have tried hitting on nearly all of them. I will be forever grateful that those days are behind me, and I can admire young women in costume without wanting any attention from them.

Lines are for suckers

I spent about five hours standing in line on Friday. I got really tired of standing in line, and decided that I would not stand in line (for more than a few minutes, anyway) for the rest of the convention. This actually worked out much better. For the rest of the convention, I showed up a few minutes late, and was immediately seated almost every time. There were two or three panels that were full when I got there, so I had to go find something else, but in some cases the “something else” wound up being really interesting. For example, I saw cool short films such as Heartless and Treevenge.

The one time I did stand in line (after deciding not to do so anymore) was for a horror movie panel. I got in line 15 minutes before the panel was scheduled to start, and stood in line for 45 minutes (this is not a typo). Thirty minutes after the panel was supposed to start, the person at the door told us that the room had filled up an hour ago, and that we were all standing in line for nothing.

Thank you so very much, mister con staff person.

The best panels

The most entertaining panel was the one with Dana Snyder (and some other folks from Adult Swim). Dana Snyder is the voice for Master Shake on Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and the voice of The Alchemist on Venture Bros. I laughed almost continuously. He is a funny, funny guy.

The most unexpectedly interesting panel was the one with Luke Perry (best known for 90210, although he is or was apparently in a post-apocalyptic television series that I have never seen). He told stories about movies he’d worked on and directors he’d worked with.

And of course the aforementioned short films were (mostly) very entertaining.

Friends make a con worthwhile

I am very glad that my spouse went with me to the convention. We were able to keep each other company. I can’t imagine how dull it would have been, had I been alone. I knew no one else there, and frankly, attending a con alone is depressing.

Celebrities are not your friends

I had an odd realization on Friday night, after waiting in line for over an hour to get into the MST3K / Cinematic Titanic panel (which wound up just being a Cinematic Titanic panel, despite what the program schedule stated — and one fan who asked about that was mocked by the panel moderator, which was pretty damned childish, in my opinion). After waiting for over an hour in line, outside, a block away, I finally got in and got a seat which was not too bad. When the panel started soliciting questions, I got in line, but they stopped taking questions after the person in front of me asked his. Eh: it happens. Then they showed a Cinematic Titanic film that I own and had seen a few times already. The aspect ratio was wrong (it was 4:3, and was supposed to be 16:9). I informed the projectionist, but he could not figure out how to fix it, so he didn’t. The movie thus being unwatchable, I left and found something else to do (a very entertaining panel on steampunk in film: one of the panelists being Hunter Cressall of “the Mac killed my inner child” fame).

Earlier that day, I had spent over an hour waiting in line on the sixth floor for a pair panels (one after the other) on the eighth floor (I do not know how many floors down the line went) featuring Bill Corbett and Trace Beaulieu (both formerly of MST3K: Corbett is now part of RiffTrax, while Beaulieu is part of Cinematic Titanic). The panels were both very entertaining. Corbett read a short stage play he’d written, while Beaulieu had some of his friends (MST3K alumni, mostly) read verses from his book, Silly Rhymes For Belligerent Children. I enjoyed both panels a great deal, and bought the book by Beaulieu (illustrated by the talented Len Peralta). But here’s the thing: practically the whole cast of MST3K was there in the front row, and I spoke to them. I asked Frank Conniff (TV’s Frank) when they would be available for autographs (I had brought my Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie DVD to the convention for that purpose), and I spoke briefly to Beaulieu when he signed my copy of the book (I said something inane; he said something polite).

But something was off somehow. I realized, later, after they stopped taking questions right when it was my turn, what it was:

These people are not my friends.

This may seem obvious to you, and yes, it is, really. I never thought they were my friends. But I felt that they were, and so I was, for reasons that were not immediately obvious to me, disappointed and a bit hurt when they did not seem as happy to see me as I was to see them. This was an emotional, not intellectual reaction, and it took a bit of reflection for me to realize the source of these feelings.

I am not one who is a “fan”, of shows or celebrities. I do not write them letters. I do not join fan clubs. I do not follow their real life exploits and send them congratulations when they have a baby or win an award. I do not defend or attack them in chat rooms.

But you have to understand: I have been going to sleep while Mystery Science Theater 3000 plays (originally on Comedy Central, and later on DVD after I discovered the Digital Archive Project) for nearly 20 years. Every night for between ten minutes and ninety minutes, Joel, Mike, Josh, Frank, Dr. Forrester, etc. have been entertaining me and helping me calm down from a stressful day and fall asleep. Naturally, I also watch it in the daytime, from time to time (but less frequently as the years go by). There is probably no one on earth in whose company I have spent more time, other than my spouse, than the cast of Mystery Science Theater 3000. So while I know that these are just television shows, and that the people on screen are not real people, but simply characters played by actors, twenty years of familiarity with them had built up this emotional expectation. The realization that this emotional expectation was not realistic was … disappointing.

To be clear, I do not blame any of the MST3K alumni for treating me as a stranger. To them, that’s what I am. They weren’t rude or unkind.

But they are not my friends (although the real Trace Beaulieu seems like an interesting guy).

I never did get my DVD signed. I could have: it just did not seem worth the effort.

Oh, and my question would have been: “What projects are you working on, or have you worked on, that you wish more people knew about and paid attention to?”

Final thoughts

I am glad that we went to DragonCon, and I am grateful to OneBookShelf for picking up the tab for the trip. However, I feel no great desire to return. I dislike crowds, and as I said, I am not generally one to fawn over celebrities. Other than the celebrities and the short films, the rest of panels were essentially the same as one can find at any science fiction convention (such as RavenCon, where I am now the Programing Director). Add to that the fact that we had no one to hang out with, and would probably have no one were we to return, and there really isn’t any reason for us to attend DragonCon again.

Heh-heh. I just found a note I wrote myself the other day in between the Bill Corbett and Trace Beaulieu panels at DragonCon.

I am such a nerd. I just saw most of the MST3K luminaries. Paul Chapin, Kevin Murphy, and Mike Nelson were really the only ones missing. I shook Beaulieu’s hand three times. I overheard Bill Corbett and Joel Hodgson talking about last night’s steak dinner, and thought that was cool.

These are just people doing a job.  They aren’t superheroes. I need to take my starstruck-ness down a few notches.

I hope I get to talk to Josh Weinstein.

All of us are like excited children when turned loose for a fun-filled day at an amusement park. The commotion of the enthusiastic crowd combines with mouthwatering scents of delicious snacks waiting to be gobbled up, and then mingles with flashing lights and pounding music from rides and attractions. Yet when an amusement park becomes abandoned and an eerie silence descends to blanket the decay, the atmosphere seems to twist and takes on a nightmarish vibe. Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, leaving Six Flags as another of its victims. Here are 69 uber-creepy urban exploration photographs as we tour the abandoned amusement park Six Flags New Orleans.

(from Uber Creepy Tour: Abandoned Six Flags New Orleans, Web Urbanist)

As reported in It was no joke at security gate, passenger Rebecca Solomon had a terrifying 20 seconds while passing through airport security:

After pulling her laptop out of her carry-on bag, sliding the items through the scanning machines, and walking through a detector, she went to collect her things.

A TSA worker was staring at her. He motioned her toward him.

Then he pulled a small, clear plastic bag from her carry-on – the sort of baggie that a pair of earrings might come in. Inside the bag was fine, white powder.

Of course, the bag was not hers, and neither was the white powder. She had never seen it before, and the TSA screener knew it:

Put yourself in her place and count out 20 seconds. Her heart pounded. She started to sweat. She panicked at having to explain something she couldn’t.

Now picture her expression as the TSA employee started to smile.

Just kidding, he said. He waved the baggie. It was his.

It really does not get much worse than this for the image of a government agency whose image was already among the worst in the country.

(from Are TSA policies a bad joke?, TechRepublic)

It is time to abolish the TSA. Well past time, in fact.