LonCon3 – Page 2 – Wis[s]e Words

LonCon3: Fanshaming

Published on August 24, 2014Leave a comment

Julie Hofmann, Michele Howe, Gavin Smith, Melissa Taylor, Leo Adams

Everyone has done it as some point, made a passing comment differentiating ourselves from “those” fans, you know the ones who like My Little Pony or fanfiction or dressing up like a Klingon or being a furry or a fake geek girl or not knowing the name of the director of the 3rd episode of Doctor Who …. Whenever we set ourselves apart from another fan as being somehow better, because what we like or how we practice being a fan are deemed more acceptable, we are engaging in an act of fan shaming. In this session we take a closer look at fan shaming what it is, how to recognise it, how to stop ourselves from doing it, and how to stop others doing it.

This is a panel I ended up going to by mistake, as I thought it was the previous panel held in that room, not realising it had been on at the same time as the panel I just came from. I debated leaving early, but stayed in the end and was glad I did. The focus lay very much on the difference between fanshaming and constructive criticism of the more problematic aspects of a fandom, as well as some discussion about the differences between shaming and light ribbing. Good panel with some outspoken but polite people on it, good questioning from the audience.

LonCon3: Codes of Conduct

Published on August 23, 2014Leave a comment

Crystal Huff, Michael Lee, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, B. Diane Martin, Patrick McMurray

“Cosplay is not Consent,” “Creeper Cards,” and colour co-ordinated lanyards indicating levels of approval for photography are all examples of responses to harassment experienced by convention attendees. In this session we assume the position that conventions need to have some kind of Code of Conduct and a procedure for implementing it, but that this is hard to get right. We explore examples from recent conventions, including Loncon’s Code of Conduct and Listener programme, to discuss best, flawed, and failed practices and how to move ever further towards the “best of the best”.

The last panel I went to on Monday, this was interesting getting the perspectives of people at the coalface of conrunning, with B. Diane Martin and Crystal Huff involved with Readercon and Wiscon, while Pat McMurray was part of LonCon itself, Teresa of course being a long time moderator of various online spaces. What struck me personally was hearing about the insecurity others felt about undergoing or witnessing harassment and whether it was actually something serious or not. That coalesced something about an incident on another panel I witnessed on Friday which I didn’t do anything with then, but now felt I had to report. I talked to Pat, he took it seriously and took me to the listeners who wrote down a report. As expected nothing could be done right then, not that I wanted it to, but it would be taken into consideration for the post mortem.

LonCon3: Hugo Awards

Published on August 23, 2014Leave a comment

So it was fun being at my very first Hugo Awards evening and great to see so many people who I wanted to win, actually win (and where they didn’t, people I liked just as much did). Especially since none of the wingnut brigade did. The detailed breakdown of the votes (PDF) only confirmed this.

Awards I got right: the Campbell, Fan Artist, Fan Writer, Fanzine, Best Related Work, Best novel. Of the other awards, the only one I was really disappointed in was the Best Fancast award, as that just seemed to trade on familiarity rather than quality; personally I saw SF Signal Podcast as the worst of the nominees.

But apart from that it was a brilliant night, with the people winning firmly part of the future of science fiction, rather than the dead past dragging us down.

Your Happening World (August 22nd)

Published on August 22, 2014Leave a comment

the cosplay of loncon3: saturday & sunday – We are book punks.We are book punks. –
the cosplay of loncon3: friday – We are book punks.We are book punks. –
the t-shirts of loncon3 – We are book punks.We are book punks. – Featuring yours truly
Video impression of LonCon3 – Saturday –
Video impression of LonCon3 – Friday –
LONCON3 | The Anjelican Universe –
My Day Out at LonCon3 | Me and My Books –
kate_nepveu | Entries tagged with cons: worldcon: 2014 (loncon 3) –
Mental Illness Primer for Speculative Fiction Creators: Contents page | Long Time After Midnight – This is for creators of speculative fiction. The idea is to improve depiction of the mentally ill in narratives like film, books, music videos etc. It is just a primer, therefore it will not go into too much detail.
Summer Cons and All the Awesome! | Suzanne van Rooyen – This summer I had the privilege of attending two amazing science fiction and fantasy conventions, not only as a fan, but as a panelist. The first was FinnCon held in June in my university town of Jyväskylä. The second was WorldCon held in London just last week. Both cons were great in different ways and here’s why…
#Loncon3 – THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE PANEL ABOUT INDIE PUBLISHING, WITHOUT AN INDIE PUBLISHER ON THE PANEL | deborahjay –
– I Went To Loncon 3 On My Own, And Left It With Myself – For conventions are, for one thing, places of understanding. I suppose I feared that I would not understand this world, or it would not understand me, or something equally high-minded. But there’s something wonderful about people brought together by common passion. We sat through the opening ceremony, stuffed full of in-jokes and genre references. I didn’t get half of them, but even that was fun. A sense of being welcomed into a 72-year-old family with its own customs. A dinner table with one extra place waiting.
kaberett | Entries tagged with loncon3 –
The Wanderground | Just Higher-Ed- jobs.ac.uk career blog – Why am I telling you about what was effectively my summer holiday? Because this Convention-Conference taught me a lot, about how academic conferences are run, what academic conferences could be, and how more intellectual credibility should be given to people outside academia than it often is.
Conventions, hierarchies and forced diversity | The 13th Colony – And this was something that appears to be continually driven through over the weekend, or at the very least the panels that I’ve sat and spoken in: the ageism, sexism, racism, anti-academic-ism, hierarchism and various other -isms. I have no doubt Worldcon means a lot to the people who have been going to the convention throughout the decades it has been running and has forged a community there. I even understand the protectionism that they feel when hordes of media fans invade, because yes, sometimes we haven’t read the book or appreciate the fight to be legitimised back in the day but does that make our experience less valid, and therefore devalued?
On LonCon3, Diversity and Hierarchies | bethanvjones – And that wasn’t the only dismissive attitude I saw in relation to LGBTQIA people. Another panellist used the offhand ‘gender-whatever’ in discussing diversity. I tweeted about these instances, as did others, and from what I’ve heard they weren’t the only ones. But on the flip side I also saw how quickly the con organisers were to deal with racism and how supported one of my fellow panellists felt by them.
6 Impossible Things: LonCon 3 – After being in my new job for a week and a half I took some leave (starting on the busiest day of the year) for 6 days in order to attend LonCon 3, the 72nd WorldCon. Of course I 'd booked to go to WorldCon a year before I knew about the job, so it was really just lucky timing.

LonCon: Captain Marvel

Published on August 22, 2014Leave a comment

I’ve always had a fondness for Ms Marvel/Carol Danvers, one of those also ran characters you encounter as a kid and feel kindly towards. She was of course a distaff spinoff of Marvel’s first Captain Marvel character, from the same time as Spider-Woman and She-Hulk, created to defend a trademark. Her first series was so-so, though Chris Claremont did his best to make something from it, in its later issues linking it indirectly to his X-Men and Iron Fist series, to little avail. She also had a brief stint in the Avengers, leading to the infamous mindrape in issue 200, later resolved by Claremont in Avengers Annual 10. After that she’s taken to the X-Men as a supporting character, Claremont always loyal to his characters…

Captain Marvel cosplay at Loncon3

Her costume during most of her run was godawful, as you can see from the first picture, a bad knockoff of Mar-vell’s one with added skin. Why the exposed stomach and legs? God knows. Over time they at least closed up the stomach gap, but it remained a dull costume. When Dave Cockrum came aboard for a few issues late in her run, the first thing he did was change it for a much better one, though as you can see there was still the focus on t&a, but at least Cockrum was a good enough artist to use a mirror rather than have her be one of those broken spine girls to show off both. I always liked this costume, even if, yes, it was designed to tittilate. It’s such a seventies Cockrum design what with the mid riff shawl and all that. Cockrum would be back to design Carol’s next costume, Binary in Uncanny X-Men #164

That’s how things stood for Ms Marvel for a while, until she got brought back in the late nineties as part of Busiek’s Avengers and took the name Warbird, then inevitably went back to her old codename and costume. Busiek also gave her alcoholism, which I hated at the time, yet again crippling what could’ve been the strongest person on the team; Ms Marvel just couldn’t get a break. That is until she got a new, longer lasting series as sort of a Marvel counterpart to Wonder Woman or Power Girl in the early noughties, Bendis nostalgia driven New Avengers series finally accomplishing something worthwhile. Not long ago she got yet another relaunch as the new Captain Marvel, severely pissing off Monica Rambeau once again. With that came a new, more respectable costume that I never liked until I saw it on a Ms Marvel cosplayer at LonCon. For once there’s a superhero costume that actually looks better in real life than in the comics. Suddenly the various elements came together in a way they didn’t on the page and looked good. A good cosplayer can of course make any costume work, no matter how ridiculous, but many female costumes do look a bit …uncomfortable? This didn’t.