ase

I checked my email and found a message about the imminent read/rate deadline for the WSFA Small Press Award nominees shunted into a "to do" folder. So I read, and rated, on a two-day deadline. If I'm in a tearing hurry to read a set of short fiction nominees, I get mean. Really:

1.) I grade on a curve favoring shorter stories.
2.) No-caps titles: pretentious, or really pretentious?
3.) I've been in media fandom. I have seen zanier and more clever premises: story prompts by way of they fight crime will not carry the day. Or your story.

( How I graded. )

Warning: these are not kind reviews. I would go so far as to say these aren't reviews: they're my idiosyncratic reactions to a set of short stories I read in a compressed time-frame. On a sugar high. Anyone getting here by google alerts: this is your only warning.

On to the alphabetical-by-title op-ed!

( What I read. )

1.) Tonight, Kahlua is awesome.

1a.) Don't try to outlast the west coast crew when standing in Madison.

1b.) Beer is not innocent in this post.

1c.) If I try to take a shower without getting this pearl string off norabombay will kill me with good reason.

1c.a.) Success!

1d.) Ow, I think I bit my tongue while not sober.

1e.) I missed keg stands? What?

1f.) I foresee a fight for the back seat - not the driver's seat - tomorrow PM.

2.) Trying to attend four panels in three slots is awesome.

2a.) Cherryh "going native" panel morphed into entertaining Ari Emory panel. Mod had awesome thinky brain, poor grasp of modly powers.

2b.) Panels awesome, will write up later.

2c.) I got to meet ann_leckie! It was awesome! We geeked out!

3.) I am posting without reading my reading lists, because Wiscon is awesome. No, I am not reading you either.

3a.) I have talked more sports at this convention than I had suspected. Nats as Switzerland (because they are that awful)?

3b.) I think I am going hoarse. Or possibly have been for days.

4.) My computer clock is still set to EDT, not CDT. This is very distracting.

4a.) 3 AM conversations invoking heteronormative queerness? Priceless.

4b.) norabombay says, "heteronormative: the new queer." Or something like that.

I think I am ready to go home and not have three awesome things happening at once, even if I'm not ready to resume my adult responsibilities.

I saw the new ST reboot! I went with both roommates and one of M's girl-friends and WSFA!S. (She needs a cooler nickname for the purposes of internet chatter.) Because we were poorly organized, we got to the theater ten minutes before the movie started. We found three seats together in the front, and WSFA!S and I made about half of a row shuffle their legs so that we could sit dead center, and it was awesome, because we could giggle together like giddy fools. Roommate M. thinks Kirk (as played by Chris Pine) is totally and unironically hot, her friend says and H. said she liked Spock, and I looked at them like they were from another planet, because I have a type: smart, and self-aware, or at least funnily un-aware of how they present themselves. ST buried its self-aware in sets, costumes, and loving recreation of '60s schmaltz with '00s movie aesthetics, and didn't put any of it into the characters, except maybe for Leonard Nimoy's Spock.

It's worth noting that I think I last went to the movies sometime last summer, which should tell you how I value Hollywood movies. If it doesn't have epic huge explosions (which can be seen at matinee prices), I'm waiting for Redbox to get the DVD. But watching ST while hyped up on Raisinettes? Priceless.

( That's about all I can say without spoilers. )

WSFA!S and I stayed to watch the credits, lost our other three, and eventually summoned them back through the powers of the cell phone. We eventually lost S to the hour, got dessert and sat around for another hour, and I got home after midnight, hyped on sugar, and wrote two-thirds of this until two in the morning.

Oh - trailers! Sometimes the best part of the moviegoing experience. I leaned over to S and we giggled our way through Transformers 2, G. I. Joe, and 9 spots. (I could not figure out what franchise the G. I. Joe movie was from until the reveal rolled.) These are mostly not movies I will be rushing to see. But the new ST movie totally gets my vote for Popcorn Summer Flick 2009.

I went to SMOFcon. (Other people are responsible for this. I think I've become WSFA's undergrad intern. Ack.) "SMOFcon" is a convention where people talk about how to run a science fiction convention,* almost a meta-con. I did not have a blow-out fabulous time, but I had a really informative time, so I was humming on an information high for a lot of the convention. It gave me lots to think about.

*SMoFs are the "Secret Masters of Fandom." They're secret mostly because they're too busy running conventions to be found at their cons. Once flushed from hiding they can be identified by their plethora of communication devices, the riot of staff ribbons adorning their badges, their distracted, harried air and the clot of people surrounding them, asking who negotiated what and why does the hotel say there isn't a corkage waiver for the consuite and what happened to the backup radios and... SMoFs would do well to stay secret, or more people might bring them more problems.

I got to the con at about 12:30 Saturday: I had fraternity events in the morning and then got caught in the usual Red Line chaos. So I missed everything that happened before that, but I did get to four or five panels on Saturday and Sunday.

( The first panel I made it to was Promoting Your Convention. )

( I crossed the hall to attend the Strategies for Handling Difficult Situations panel... )

( The next panel I hit was about Guests of Honor. )

I spent part of Saturday night picking hotel liason people's brains with samthereaderman. He thought of really good questions; I tried to help him get really good answers. The feeling I got from what I heard is that hotel liasons tend to be in a fair amount of demand, because it takes specialized knowledge that takes a while to acquire if you come in cold. Also, many conventions have some sort of committee or board that has oversight over the con chair.

( Sunday morning I hit the Regional SMOF Groups and Conventions panel... )

( The last panel I went to was the Care and Feeding of Volunteers panel. )

That was my Capclave. Eventually I'll get around to the "Applying SMOFcon" post. No, really.