Thorns

Draft program presentation

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So:
Any thoughts?
Anyone want to run the panel with me? (I'd prefer someone who identifies as disabled or at least has a moderate amount of experience with disability/chronic illness, but I'm somewhat open)

(nb I deleted the original lj version so I could use the "comments on dreamwidth" counter)

EDIT: But it didn't work! Clearly I need to play around with the crossposter. Anyway here is the lj post and here is the dw one (cross posted since lj is more swancon-ish and dw more disability-ish)

Because I'm an idiot I didn't get my camera until the last full day of the con so have almost not photos. But what I did get was Rob and Lise's awesome Molecular Gastronomy Hour. It reminded me a bit of Kitchen Chemistry.

The main star was Sodium Alginate. That post has the main gist, so briefly:
Sodium alginate is a flavourless gelling agent which forms a harder gel in contact with calcium.
We put a mix of cream and yogurt into unflavoured sodium alginate gel and got, well...a mushy mess. But in theory the gel covered milk balls sound cool :)

We then got a syringe of coke gel and dripped it into calcium chloride and made teeny little salty sweet balls. They needed more rinsing than we could manage so looked better than they tasted but again, the idea is cool :)

(The panel also included a comparison of banana smoothies with and without xanthum gum, but since I can't eat any of the ingredients but the banana and it just looked like banana smoothies didn't record that bit)

Very sleepy, though I actually don't feel much worse than I did on Thursday, I'm waiting for the crash to hit. Had an amazing time.

Anyway, am skimming flist, replying when I can think of something quick, my tabs are getting ridiculous. Let me know if I missed anything major, and I still have barely looked at my email.

Now to attack the filters that are just communities...

Swancon starts tomorrow!

-I will be all quiet-like internet-wise for a few days. I know, how will you cope?

-Both my panels are on Friday ("Casual Anime" and "Hard sf with soft sciences"), and it's only $20 entry for that day, so youse should all come. Yes, even the ones on other continents!

-My cfs means I am going to be keeping my standing/walking to a minimum, so if you want to catch up it'll have to be somewhere nearby with chairs and I may have to bail to go nap (as fashionable as standing in hallways is and all :))

What is hard sf? What are the soft sciences?
THESE DEFINITIONS ARE ARBITRARY, not the "one true meaning". We just need to delimit the discussion so we know what we're talking about.

Hard sf: I have somewhat arbitrarily defined it as "science fiction which extrapolates from science ideas in a way that wouldn't make an expert in that field want to hit their head against a wall"

Soft sciences: Natural and social sciences, like biology, psychology etc.

Give some examples of "hard soft science fiction".

-The Sparrow (properly worked out languages, clever relationship between two species)
-Mars trilogy (terraforming)

Is there less hard soft sf than hard hard sf? If so, why? If not, why do people think there is?

Do authors feel more comfortable ignorantly making up soft science (eg psychology) than they would be hard sciences? If so, why? Do they get it very wrong?

Idea: People feel more comfortable with "pop psychology" than "pop physics". We all need a basic model of psychology to deal with the people around us but can happily not think about physics or maths at all.

What are some good hard soft sf books?

Depends if you mean good books or good science.

Here is my list.

What soft sciences seem to suit it best? What soft sciences seem to never get written about?

Linguistics is very popular, for some reason!

What are some cool soft science ideas that would make cool books?

Yesterday afternoon I decided to take a break from the big pile o' library books to read "Altered Carbon" by Richard Morgan, one of the Swancon guests.
Last night at midnight, I finished it (and then had insomnia for unrelated reasons). As a result I am So Sleepy so this is just rambly thoughts.

Like "Devil in a Blue Dress" it's quite good noir, but more of the cyberpunk end (without the shallow flashyness of a lot of cyberpunk), which is more my genre. I really liked it, though as warned it's quite violent, has some somewhat skeevy attitudes towards women, and amazingly bad sex scenes. Someone needs to tell him the word "globes" is not sexy.

As with Iain M Banks I was not convinced by the attempts to undercut the intense straight-guy-ness in this seemingly gender-equal far future with stuff like vague references to gay/male prostitutes we never meet. For example, every single woman is hot, and a disproportionate number want to sleep with the main character. On the plus side he actually gets put in a female body for a while and seems less upset at it (in principle) than he was earlier at being put in a caucasian one(*), but then there were some creepy comments about the way women "feel touch differently to men". I guess if you're going to write all your female characters kind of the same you could do worse than making them all sensible, competent, and driven.

The world building was great, not mind bogglingly inventive but not in-your-face-expositiony either, just there as a believable and effective backdrop. Good mystery too, thus the up-till-midnight reading :)

I find myself interested in more of this world and this character, I'll have to go hunt some down and then horribly torture them and torch off their heads.

(*)The main character is ethnically japanese/eastern european, something which I felt was dealt with pretty well

I used to think I didn't like anime and refused to watch any, but then realised I was just watching the wrong stuff and found lots I adore, and in general think there's something in anime for pretty much everyone: "Anime" just means "animated films made in japan" after all, and covers a huge range of styles and genres. So I decided to put together a Swancon panel about anime series/movies I think would appeal to people at the con who don't consider themselves anime fans, and being me am making a post about it first. The aim is not to convert people into becoming anime fans, just to give them a chance to watch some stuff they might like even if anime in general is not for them. The panel may not end up happening but hey, chances are more people will read this than would have come anyway :)
( Read more... )( The recs )

So. I really, really don't like racism. I get very upset when people around me say or do (to my mind) racist things. I've recently decided that I'm sick of feeling vague and powerless about the whole thing and am going to see what I can do to fight against racism in the society around me, specifically local fandom since that's my real social home. I decided about a year ago to start the ball rolling by doing a panel on depictions of race in sff (since it's a really interesting and important topic, and not something I'd seen much discussed), this post is a vague meander on how that turned out, and is a follow on from my previous post about the general way certain POVs get under-represented at Swancons. I've kind of discussed it with stephiepenguin but she and dabear (my co-panelists) may still have very different perspectives on the whole thing.
( Read more... )

Here are some posts I made of my notes from various swancon panels (many of which you may recognise from me going "OMG what should I say? Can any of you run this with me??" :))

Online SFF:
http://community.livejournal.com/swancon/83079.html

Race and the Other in SFF:
http://community.livejournal.com/swancon/83528.html

Harry Potter the Final Analysis:
http://community.livejournal.com/swancon/84315.html

Homework Panel:
http://community.livejournal.com/swancon/83338.html


Right! Now I have one more Swancon related post to make and I can move on. And that one requires some pondering rather than just mindless typing out of notes, so I shall leave it til later. Time for lunch!

Here is the final list from the Online SFF panel, edited to add all the suggestions I got from my wonderful co-panelist Zara Baxter and the ten or so people who turned up (well, everything I wrote down, anyway) Have added to my big page of panel synopses etc.

Thanks to deathwombat, here is a photo of the whiteboard with everyone ideas on it (though things got overwritten a bit)

Sorry it's this huge mass of largely undifferentiated information, I've about reached the limit of how much more effort I can be bothered expending on this now the con is over. There really is some good stuff in here!

People are encouraged to add anything they like in the comments, but since I'm feeling lazy I'm probably not going to add them to the page so you'll have to read the comments to see them :)

( Read more... )