how many miles to Babylon (notes on BP):
Apr. 15th, 2014 07:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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bitchinparty 2014:
-I started writing this in the departure gate in the Seattle airport, looking out over the tarmac. (Seattle-Tacoma international airport is a teeny tiny perfectly-formed little airport. If it hadn't been for the incipient weeping I would have got through security just fine.) I don't propose to tell you about it all: about everything that happened in a long weekend that was, at last assessment, at least eight weeks long. Here are some notes.
-I need to stop watching air crash documentaries as soothing background noise the week before two transatlantic trans-continental flights. It's a bad idea. Given that, I dozed off somewhere over Canada for a couple of hours, and woke to the disquieting realisation of how much Canada there was to go. There is a ton of Canada. I spent all my time in Seattle kind of always aware, peripherally, that it was a long way from home. (On Saturday afternoon, in between con panels, I went for a walk, kind of a leisurely amble, across sweeping intersections below rising hills, and felt, you know, pretty okay; the Pacific Northwest is billed to me always as just like home in terms of weather, which it is, but right now taking a loan against June. I guess what I'm saying really ineptly is that my world is small: it's human-sized. I shuttle from my little two-bed flat through Cambridge streets to the train and the Tube and Camden Market, up through the little stalls and alleyways and into my office and back again, and what I like about America is that things take up grand space. Everything seems bigger. But I lived there, too, and it was nice to be back.)
-I enjoyed the panels at BP! My favourites were![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
troyswann's worldbuilding panel, which was actually more of a worldbuilding workshop, a lovely textured substantive look at making up places (I had fun putting together an on-the-spot setting and backstory based on two fragments of information: a finger bone and a mineshaft), and the rec-your-fandom-in-five-minutes session (I did a breathless feelings dump of how much I love Parks and Recreation! I love it so much, you guys, so much so much. Imagine five minutes of that.) But I do not go to cons for the panels, really, I go for the company. So I have known brynnmck forever and this is her con, and the whole thing was just an extension of her wonderful hospitality and kindness. I had the best time hanging out with her and troyswann and catwalksalone. I had fun hanging out with them at panels but also going to get coffee with them, drinking spiced rum with them, dancing with them, getting through my terrible jet-lag and falling asleep listening to them. It was so good for my soul. I also got to meet pearwaldorf, which was great fun, and ran into a half-dozen other people I know.
-Spiced rum is pretty good, you know. Tastes like sugar smoke, feels like a slice of lemon wrapped around a gold brick.
-So we did the dance party on Saturday night (and I wore a pink and purple chiffon dress that for some reason I hadn't worn since the St John's Ball in second year - I just found a picture of myself wearing it outside Balliol's back quad looking like my feet are killing me; apparently I've learned to walk in heels since then) and it was pretty great, and then on Sunday the post-con movie was Newsies. Brynn sold it to me as a slashy Disney movie about trade unionism. Which to be fair are all my favourite things but I was unprepared for how EMOTIONALLY INVESTED I became in this movie! Christian Bale's terrible accent (but beautiful lips)! Bill Pullman! Collective action! DANCING! All the fangirls who had seen it before were announcing all the dialogue before the characters and singing all the songs and I was just going "ooh!" and "aah!" and "darling!" like I was at a firework display and hiding my head in Brynn's shoulder and at the back of the room there were maybe some people watching a movie like adults who even knows.
-We spent a lot of the con talking about Amy Poehler's face. And then Cat introduced me to Drunk History, which is ridiculous and beautiful and wacky. Adam Scott, your beautiful ridiculous wackyface. And I met Brynn's dog, who is an adorable puppy with a face. Actually he is a big dog with big sad eyes and he gets all the girls. And then we went to the airport, which sucked basically (sic semper tyrannis! basically). It was a lot of fun to pile into the car and go to the airport with an entourage of dear friends, and pretty awful to leave them behind.
-The flight from Seattle to London was 10 hours long. It was also AMAZINGLY EMPTY. Oh my god, it was the best. There were about 15 people in the economy cabin. I had the entirety of row 27 to myself. It was like transatlantic chauffeur service. And now I am on the ground feeling like I have been away for months (you all have new jobs! and new babies!) and as lucky as always that it's possible for me to travel as much as I do, never a stranger. Never a stranger anywhere I go. I am back in my flat, which is now my flat; we completed on Friday morning. It's an eerie, nice feeling. So is the fact I just pinged my own out-of-office reply. Still on holiday, still, just.
Generally, this is the year of cons (and, actually, the year of doing fandom and writing a little differently from how I've been doing them the last ten years or so; maybe more on that when I've quite figured it out). Vidukon is a couple of months away, alarmingly - that's Cardiff at the end of June - and I am allegedly doing the Race and Culture track at Nine Worlds in August. (If you are a non-white fan who's interested in participating on a panel (particularly a fannish panel) for goodness' sake tell me. Comment here, email race@nineworlds.co.uk!) Nine Worlds, by the way, has by far been my best con experience (con qua con, that is, not the company I kept there, because the ladies I go to Nine Worlds with sometimes put up with my face at other times of year) because it basically combines the best parts of cons like BP with the big commercial cons. Each individual track is a small, 100-attendee con, maybe? But there are so many tracks it's like you can go to several simultaneously, while running into everyone you've ever met, or so it seems. (It makes me feel like a rockstar, anyway!) I need to think about it some more.
Next up, maybe a review of The Oversight, and definitely one about Seanan McGuire's October Daye series, but first, sleep.
bitchinparty 2014:-I started writing this in the departure gate in the Seattle airport, looking out over the tarmac. (Seattle-Tacoma international airport is a teeny tiny perfectly-formed little airport. If it hadn't been for the incipient weeping I would have got through security just fine.) I don't propose to tell you about it all: about everything that happened in a long weekend that was, at last assessment, at least eight weeks long. Here are some notes.
-I need to stop watching air crash documentaries as soothing background noise the week before two transatlantic trans-continental flights. It's a bad idea. Given that, I dozed off somewhere over Canada for a couple of hours, and woke to the disquieting realisation of how much Canada there was to go. There is a ton of Canada. I spent all my time in Seattle kind of always aware, peripherally, that it was a long way from home. (On Saturday afternoon, in between con panels, I went for a walk, kind of a leisurely amble, across sweeping intersections below rising hills, and felt, you know, pretty okay; the Pacific Northwest is billed to me always as just like home in terms of weather, which it is, but right now taking a loan against June. I guess what I'm saying really ineptly is that my world is small: it's human-sized. I shuttle from my little two-bed flat through Cambridge streets to the train and the Tube and Camden Market, up through the little stalls and alleyways and into my office and back again, and what I like about America is that things take up grand space. Everything seems bigger. But I lived there, too, and it was nice to be back.)
-I enjoyed the panels at BP! My favourites were
troyswann's worldbuilding panel, which was actually more of a worldbuilding workshop, a lovely textured substantive look at making up places (I had fun putting together an on-the-spot setting and backstory based on two fragments of information: a finger bone and a mineshaft), and the rec-your-fandom-in-five-minutes session (I did a breathless feelings dump of how much I love Parks and Recreation! I love it so much, you guys, so much so much. Imagine five minutes of that.) But I do not go to cons for the panels, really, I go for the company. So I have known brynnmck forever and this is her con, and the whole thing was just an extension of her wonderful hospitality and kindness. I had the best time hanging out with her and troyswann and catwalksalone. I had fun hanging out with them at panels but also going to get coffee with them, drinking spiced rum with them, dancing with them, getting through my terrible jet-lag and falling asleep listening to them. It was so good for my soul. I also got to meet pearwaldorf, which was great fun, and ran into a half-dozen other people I know. -Spiced rum is pretty good, you know. Tastes like sugar smoke, feels like a slice of lemon wrapped around a gold brick.
-So we did the dance party on Saturday night (and I wore a pink and purple chiffon dress that for some reason I hadn't worn since the St John's Ball in second year - I just found a picture of myself wearing it outside Balliol's back quad looking like my feet are killing me; apparently I've learned to walk in heels since then) and it was pretty great, and then on Sunday the post-con movie was Newsies. Brynn sold it to me as a slashy Disney movie about trade unionism. Which to be fair are all my favourite things but I was unprepared for how EMOTIONALLY INVESTED I became in this movie! Christian Bale's terrible accent (but beautiful lips)! Bill Pullman! Collective action! DANCING! All the fangirls who had seen it before were announcing all the dialogue before the characters and singing all the songs and I was just going "ooh!" and "aah!" and "darling!" like I was at a firework display and hiding my head in Brynn's shoulder and at the back of the room there were maybe some people watching a movie like adults who even knows.
-We spent a lot of the con talking about Amy Poehler's face. And then Cat introduced me to Drunk History, which is ridiculous and beautiful and wacky. Adam Scott, your beautiful ridiculous wackyface. And I met Brynn's dog, who is an adorable puppy with a face. Actually he is a big dog with big sad eyes and he gets all the girls. And then we went to the airport, which sucked basically (sic semper tyrannis! basically). It was a lot of fun to pile into the car and go to the airport with an entourage of dear friends, and pretty awful to leave them behind.
-The flight from Seattle to London was 10 hours long. It was also AMAZINGLY EMPTY. Oh my god, it was the best. There were about 15 people in the economy cabin. I had the entirety of row 27 to myself. It was like transatlantic chauffeur service. And now I am on the ground feeling like I have been away for months (you all have new jobs! and new babies!) and as lucky as always that it's possible for me to travel as much as I do, never a stranger. Never a stranger anywhere I go. I am back in my flat, which is now my flat; we completed on Friday morning. It's an eerie, nice feeling. So is the fact I just pinged my own out-of-office reply. Still on holiday, still, just.
Generally, this is the year of cons (and, actually, the year of doing fandom and writing a little differently from how I've been doing them the last ten years or so; maybe more on that when I've quite figured it out). Vidukon is a couple of months away, alarmingly - that's Cardiff at the end of June - and I am allegedly doing the Race and Culture track at Nine Worlds in August. (If you are a non-white fan who's interested in participating on a panel (particularly a fannish panel) for goodness' sake tell me. Comment here, email race@nineworlds.co.uk!) Nine Worlds, by the way, has by far been my best con experience (con qua con, that is, not the company I kept there, because the ladies I go to Nine Worlds with sometimes put up with my face at other times of year) because it basically combines the best parts of cons like BP with the big commercial cons. Each individual track is a small, 100-attendee con, maybe? But there are so many tracks it's like you can go to several simultaneously, while running into everyone you've ever met, or so it seems. (It makes me feel like a rockstar, anyway!) I need to think about it some more.
Next up, maybe a review of The Oversight, and definitely one about Seanan McGuire's October Daye series, but first, sleep.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
on 2014-04-16 12:26 am (UTC)no subject
on 2014-04-20 06:36 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2014-04-16 04:39 am (UTC)no subject
on 2014-04-20 06:34 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2014-04-17 09:58 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2014-04-20 06:35 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2014-04-15 06:38 pm (UTC)The night before flying home from Reykjavik, one of the TV channels we had access to in our holiday apartment showed a documentary about the Kegworth disaster. We watched it. Not the best plan in the world.
Enjoy sleep! I'm really glad you had a good time at the conference; you always make them sound so great.
no subject
on 2014-04-17 02:35 pm (UTC)I had a lovely time! Are you going to come to Nine Worlds this year (she asks, predictably)??
no subject
on 2014-04-17 03:05 pm (UTC)I hadn't thought about it, actually - maybe I should! It does sound like great fun, but I think part of me can't quite shake the belief that I am not cool enough for cons and will be turned away at the door.
no subject
on 2014-04-16 10:25 pm (UTC)Soooo, sic semper tyrannis. BASICALLY. <3333333333333333333333
no subject
on 2014-04-18 11:56 am (UTC)