The smell of print comics gives me flashbacks now

Tabletop Gaming has a White Male Terrorism Problem (but don’t think your nerd hobby is any better):

White male terrorism is the white underbelly of the gaming community, meant to terrify and disrupt the lives of those who threaten the status quo by race, gender, or sexuality. It succeeds because the majority of men in the community are too cowardly to stand against the bullies and the terrorists. At best, these cowards ignore the problem. At worst, they join the terrorists in blaming their victims for the abuse. The point of online terrorism is that it is endless, omnipresent, and anonymous.

This is an absolutely disgusting story and sadly all too typical for many women/POC within fandom and nerd circles. I want to believe that this is an American problem and that we’re better here in Europe, but I fear that’s a lie.

How to run an accessible con: some notes

Did you know that hotel carpet can be a pretty big burden on wheelchair users? That it can take up to three times as much energy to move your wheelchair over carpet than over a hard floor and therefore wheelchair users are tired more quickly than normal? When you think about it, it seems obvious, but the trick is to think about it when you’re not somebody with actual experience in riding a wheelchair around a con…

Just one of the things we learned in Vanessa May’s “how to run an accessible con” workshop/demo at Mancunicon. An one hour panel is of course nowhere near enough to begin to understand the subject, but it did provide a good overview of the mindset you have to have to be able to make a con accessible.

And the first question you have to ask as a con is how you define accessibility. Vanessa May urged people to take the broad view, to take into account both physical access needs (for wheelchair users, visually impaired, auditory impaired, etc) and psychological needs (quiet spaces for people with social anxieties to be able to decompress frex) as well as folding in things like religious or ethics based dietary choices under the access umbrella.

That was the theme that ran through most of her discussion about access needs. It’s relatively easy to get the 101 stuff right, to make sure that the hotel can be entered by wheelchair users, but harder to take the broader picture into context of what is really needed to make a hotel con accessible for them. Not just entrances, but baths, toilets, rooms, accessibility of hotel bar & restaurant, capability to get on the panel stage unaided, etc. There are a lot of things you can only discover with the aid of somebody with practical experience of being in a wheelchair trying the hotel out; the same goes for other kinds of access needs.

The other thing May stressed throughout the panel was to keep in mind the big picture. Access should be central to the con, but the ideal convention does not exist. Improving access has costs, both monetary and opportunity wise and they have to be balanced against the other needs of the con. One example being the carpet mentioned above: hard floors everywhere would be better for wheelchair users, but much harder on those walking. Some people argue that access needs should be the first to taken into consideration, but May is wary of that as it can be its own form of privilege. Related to that is the requirement to make the con’s accesibilty known early: what is and isn’t there so people can make decision to come or not before they waste money on memberships and hotel rooms.

Some of the points made by May as well as the audience when talking about concrete examples of deciding accesibility:

  • The venue is the highest priority as infrastructure limits what you can do
  • Assess hotels not just a year before, but also shortly before the con as things may have changed. See not just the rooms picked out by the hotel, but one or two more so you don’t just get the very best of the hotel.
  • Beds: height, type of mattress.
  • Toilets should be higher in accessible bathroom
  • Mobility – Looking for things like doors, level access, lifts (back of house/freight lifts) and CARPETS as riding carpets takes more energy than hard floors
  • Visual: look for things hard to notice (overhanging plants) patterns & colours
  • Echoing spaces for people with hearing issues, hearing loops, alarms that have alternate modes for visual and hearing impaired people
  • Function space: quiet rooms for people to chill out other than your hotel room
  • Does the hotel reset the function rooms each night, because then you have to set them for access again in the morning.
  • Escape seats at the back of the rooms for people with anxiety
  • Mobility spaces in the back or middle so people in wheelchairs/scooters don’t block people behind them
  • Reserved spot next to mobility space for partners.
  • Reserve 1 spot at the front for people with combined issues
  • Involve the concom early to make sure both they and everybody else know access is important.
  • Brief the gophers and note that many abled bodied people do not quite understand disabled needs
  • Listeners: need to be trained, known and trusted because it’s the ideal position for a predatory person to abuse.
  • Audience: Tech team is almost always in the front line because they’re in the room as reps of the con and get the issues first hand
  • Audience: The whole team has to think access.
  • Ribbons as visible clues, rather than as requirement to get help.
  • Social media needs to emphasise access
  • Website: alternative website with big print, screen reading, big easy buttons

My schedule at Mancunicon

What with it being barely a week before Mancunicon kicks off and the programme having been published, what better time to lists the panels I’ll be appearing on? N-not that I expect people to go to them just of course.

The Year Just Gone and The Year Ahead in Books — Saturday 11:30 – 12:30, Room 8&9 (Hilton Deansgate)

What kind of year was 2015 for the speculative genres? What were the patterns, the trends, the themes? Do the awards shortlists announced so far reflect the year as we read it? And — for a change of pace — what are we looking forward to in 2016?

Johan Anglemark (M), Martin Wisse, Niall Harrison, Nina Allan, E.G. Cosh.

Book Reviews in the Age of Amazon — Sunday 13:00 – 14:00, Deansgate 3 (Hilton Deansgate)

It has become a cliché to say that reviewing has changed in the digital era. In place of relatively few “gatekeeper” reviewers in relatively few venues, we have a commons where anyone can review if they choose – and where, increasingly, simple volume of reviews is a determinant of a book’s success. In a world where reaching the magic number of 50 Amazon reviews can have a significant impact on an author’s career, is reviewing moving from something that anyone can do to something that everyone should do, if they can? What are the implications of such a shift, for the nature of reviews, and for the relationships between readers, authors, and publishers? And who wants to be the party-pooper who brings a favourite author’s star average down?

Chris Kammerud (M), Glyn Morgan, Sarah Pinborough, Martin Wisse.

A Future Europe — Sunday 17:30 – 18:30, Room 6 (Hilton Deansgate)

By the time the Helsinki Worldcon arrives the UK may no longer be a part of Europe in a political sense, but in an artistic sense the two will no doubt continue to mingle. What European characteristics and strands can be identified in British SF? How have European ideas shaped British futures, and vice versa?

Martin Wisse (M), Anna Feruglio Dal Dan, Karo Leikomaa, Christopher Priest, Ivaylo Shmilev.

Note that little “m” after my name? That means I’ll be moderating the panel, which will be a first for me.

KonoSuba: how is anime fandom like a succubus dream?

KonoSuba #9: for a small fee, a succubus will visit your dreams and give you relief

Episode nine of KonoSuba raises the question: what if you could pay a succubus to give you a wet dream, featuring the person(s), settings and deeds of your choice, with no worries about legality or morality, because after all it’s “only a dream”?

KonoSuba #1: How does it feel to get dragged away with the guy you treated like a total idiot?

Backtracking slightly: Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Shukufuku wo!, KonoSuba for short, is another entry in the ever popular “nerd gets trapped in a RPGesque fantasy world” anime genre and, like Grimgar, it’s a bit of a deconstruction. Unlike Grimgar though it does it not by amping up the reality of what it would be like to be dropped in a fantasy world where you have to kill to survive, but rather by taking the piss of the genre and RPGs in general. So our hero Kasuma is not all that likeable, mainly out for himself and stuck with the goddess that reincarnated him into this world, who he dragged down with him out of pure spite when she was slightly too amused about the dumb way he died. They’re joined by Megumin and Darknes, respectively a mage with a fantasy complex specialising in explosion magic who only has the stamina for one explosion a day and a masochistic paladin who sexually harasses her opponents by imagining the lewd and embarassing things they’ll do to her once they defeat her. KonoSuba has done very well in creating humour out of the characters’ own flaws: they get what they deserve, with everybody treated equally (un)fair. Nobody is perfect, nobody is the designated chewtoy and ultimately they’re stuck with and deserve each other.

KonoSuba #9: no worries about legality or morality in dreams

Most episodes are loosely dedicated to mocking one aspect or another of this subgenre and episode nine takes aim at the venerable element of fanservice and sexual wishfulfillment — not just common in this particular anime subgenre of course, but found everywhere. It does so in a typical KonoSuba way, by taking the idea of the succubus to its logical extreme and have them set up a business providing nice dreams to male adventurers to relief stress, for a small fee and some of their vitality. Kasuma being who he is, carefully examines the bait held before him for its legal and moral implications, all of which the succubus counters with that it doesn’t matter, it’s just a dream. Now is this just me or does this hint at some of the more questionable defenses of dodgy anime or manga? “It doesn’t matter, it’s not real”?

KonoSuba #9: of course Kazuma chooses dreams over reality

But if you thought that was a bit too on the nose, the next scene is worse. Kasuma returns home to find out the parents of one of his team mates have sent over a lot of high grade crabs and booze and the team’s having a party. He wants to join in, but comes to his senses when he remembers the warning the succubus had given him: don’t drink too much booze that you sleep too deep to dream. Yey as he looks at the happy faces of his friends, he considers giving up and join them — not. In the end, he rejects physical pleasure and companionship for the dubious comforts of a wet dream. If that isn’t direct commentary on a part of anime fandom that rejects the physical “3D” world in favour of “2D” fantasies, I don’t know what is.

KonoSuba #9: having your cake and eating it

But does it work? the problem with making fun of immature sexual fantasies is that the end product could look a lot like an immature sexual fantasy itself, the same way most anti-war movies can’t help but glamourise war at least a bit. And with all the jiggling butts and tits on display — ugly though the art is this episode — you can’t help but think KonoSuba wants to have its cake and eat it too. Once the plot moves to the inevitable confusion between dream and reality when Darkness walks in on Kazuma in the bath, any pretense at satire is lost in favour of bog standard fanservice. Especially since the series had a fair bit of fanservice in it already, if only by teasing about how Aqua doesn’t seem to favour wearing panties. In the end therefore this mocking doesn’t quite work, the show undermining its own argument. Yet being even willing to try and have this argument wins it points from me. KonoSuba is a show that caught me by surprise from the start and even this flawed attempt at social commentary confirms it’s one of the best shows this season.

The fannish fallacy is alive and well

*Sigh*:

Multiple board members responded by saying that if we made the harassment policy any more concrete, we’d be tying the hands of any future chair of RainFurrest who wanted to work things out informally between the people involved, and we would enforce bans on socially awkward individuals who just didn’t know the rules. I heard from multiple people that making our harassment policy any more specific would cost us members, and they refused to consider that people who refused to show up because of our harassment policy were probably not the kinds of attendees we wanted.

Taken from a post-mortem on how furry con Rainfurrest got scuppered, this paragraph explains so much about how cons get bad. It’s the full on fannish fallacy in action: we can’t exclude people because exclusion is inherently bad, no matter what they do. In this case it went worse than usual as apparantly it empowered some part of the con to run rampant over multiple years, something the con seemed to condone as the cost of business, until the hotels it depended on had had enough. Whoops.

Of course the other side of the coin is that while it’s a sin to exclude people we know, people we don’t know or who are not quite like us, we’re happy to exclude, either deliberately or as a consequence of not dealing with harassers and other problem fans. Mark Oshiro found that out last year at ConQuest, where as a guest of honour he not only was all but ignored by the concom, but was harassed too.

It’s all so depressing to see the same problems crop up in con after con, when it isn’t rocket science to solve them. Plenty of conventions have managed to not only get a proper code of conduct assembled, but also provide the resources to deliver on its promises. All it requires is a mindset change, to understand that harassment is not a victimless crime or prank, but something that stops people from coming to your con, that will get your con into trouble sooner or later the same way it did Rainfurrest.