Blackmoor Vituperative

Happy Easter.

What does Easter mean to me? To me, it means that the azaleas are blooming, and that the weather is turning warm. Winter is over, and life has returned to the Earth once again. Some people want to celebrate this with chocolate bunnies and colored eggs. I think those are great symbols; in fact, the egg thing harkens back to the goddess Oestre, from which the holiday gets its name. Some people celebrate it by retelling old myths, where gods and goddesses return from the underworld, like Persephone and Jesus. Those are great stories. But I think the real story, the real reason to celebrate, is the world outside my window, green and blooming and alive.

I had the strangest dream last night. I was teaching French at a Catholic school, but I was neither French nor Catholic. The students were nuns, and they weren’t paying any attention to me, just taking turns sitting on the desks and pushing each other around around the room.

RavenCon is over. Sunday is generally slow at cons, and today was no exception. Even so, I enjoyed the panels I sat in on. I don’t have any final thoughts, really. I think it went pretty well.

Favorite thing at RavenCon 2011 that had nothing to do with me: pretty young women in corsets. (Yeah, so sue me.)

End of the day Saturday, and I think it’s gone pretty well. I was able to sit in on a few panels, and that was fun, because they were panels I thought up and I wanted to hear people talk about them. Superheroes and the law, for example. There was only one serious hiccup today, when an equipment delay caused a filk to run late, which caused the next filk to run late, which caused the next panel to run late…

This actually wasn’t a big deal, due to some quick thinking by the affected panelists, who came up with a feasible solution. I mean, yes, we had people hanging out in the hallway for 30 minutes, and the delays in the panels almost certainly made someone miss a panel or performance they wanted to see, but it could have been considerably worse.

Now, I made a point of putting nearly all of the presentations in one room, and all of the filk in another, hopefully to prevent this kind of situation. I think next year I will make an even greater effort to restrict all audiovisual programming to one room. The time it takes to break down and move the equipment is just too long. I’ll also move the filk related programming to a larger room next year. The room I was told to put the filk in was too small for the audiences.

Other than that, there were no major issues. People got to where they needed to be, when they needed to be there, and for the most part the equipment got there as well.

I am a trifle disappointed in the parties. That’s kind of a mean thing to say, because the parties I was able to find were held by very nice people and had a great selection of drinks and goodies. But still, there were only maybe 2.5 parties total this evening, and 1.5 of those shut down before midnight. RavenCon is just not a party con.

I had a weird experience when I decided to call it a night and head back to my room. The doorway to the hallway our room is on was blocked by eight or so teenage girls, sitting around playing cards. When I walked up, intended to step gingerly through them and on my way, one of them informed me that this area was off limits, and “girls only”.

“Well, my room is down that hall,” I said. “Do you mind if I go to it?”

“No, it’s not,” the girl assured me. I was not sure whether to be annoyed or amused. I had never encountered a situation quite like this, and wasn’t quite sure how to deal with it. I was just baffled.

“This is the fourth floor,” another girl added in a haughty tone. I looked at the numbers on the nearby door, and son of a gun if she wasn’t right. Whoops.

“Oh, wow. I’m on the wrong floor,” I said. “Sorry, sorry.” And I sheepishly headed back to the elevator, wondering how I’d ended up on the fourth floor, despite my being almost completely sober.

Which just goes to show, teenage girls still have the ability to make me feel like an idiot. Some things never change.

Friday night’s programming is complete, and I think it went pretty well. For those who came in late, I scheduled programming for RavenCon 2011. This included coming up with panel ideas, contacting guests to ask them to volunteer for panels or suggest new ones, and scheduling the panels so that the whole schedule would be full for people who pay to come to the con.

It’s only Friday, but so far it’s gone really well. Nearly all of our guests responding to my emails in a timely manner, and all but one eventually responded with the names of panels they would like to participate in. As far as guest response goes, it’s gone better than I expected.

As a lark, I participated in a riff of Star Crash, Mystery Science Theater style, with Rob Floyd of Team Fantasmo. I had fun doing it, we had a pretty good crowd, and they seemed to have fun, too. That pleased me.

There has really only been one blemish on the weekend so far, and that’s the aforementioned guest who never replied to any of the nine or so emails I sent them. I still have not heard from this person, but two other people have come to me all aflutter asking why that person is not on more panels. Well, the fact is that person is on four panels (suggested by other guests who said they would be sharing the panel with this noncommunicative guest: the artist who did his book covers, for example). They are also featured in an interview (which was my idea), making five.

So: five panels, which is 20% more than the minimum I aimed for. If this guest wanted to be on more panels, they would have said so. Frankly, I have little sympathy for anyone who complains to me about it. If they want to complain, they should go complain to the person who never responded to their email.

Other than this extremely minor hiccup, Friday went really well. One or two panels had an excessive number of panelists, and one panel had no one in the audience, but this sort of thing is bound to happen. I learned a lot from this year, and next year will have fewer occurrences like this.

I consider Friday a success.

Another beautiful Richmond day. The weather was cool and nice, and the dogwoods are blooming in pink and white. Several birds, including a bright red cardinal, were at our bird feeder today. I love living here.

“It is not written that you must detest everyone who disagrees with you.”

— Chocolate Pickle

The US director of national intelligence, a retired Air Force general with 47 years in the intelligence business, with access to the $80-billion American spying bureaucracy, made more than a few politicians upset today. What did he do? He answered their questions, and didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear.

Watching the video of the exchange gave me flashbacks. I am glad that I no longer work in the government arena. I may not have as much responsibility, but what I do now is a lot less stressful, and a hell of a lot more honest.

Anyone who has taken an English class in the last fifty years knows how ridiculous the rules are for capitalizing titles in English. First word, sure. Proper nouns, sure. Pronouns? Why would a pronoun be capitalized? “In” when it is functioning as an adverb, but not when it is functioning as a preposition. Uh… yeah. Prepositions aren’t capitalized, but sometimes they are if they are longer than four letters, depending on whom you ask. And it gets worse; this is just the tip of the iceberg.

So here is my rule for capitalizing titles:

A title is capitalized as though it were a sentence.

Either capitalize every word in a title, or capitalize it as though it were a sentence… whichever you think looks better.

That’s the best I can do.

This is not urban fantasy

We are home, safe and sound, from MystiCon 2011. We had a good time, and we are glad we went. Here are some thoughts in no particular order.

I liked Brinke Stevens. I can’t recall (offhand) ever enjoying a guest of honor as much at a con. I wish her luck with her writing.

It annoys me that “horror” is apparently no longer a genre, and that all of these vampire romance novels are called “urban fantasy”. WTF. I have an easy test for anyone wondering if a book is “urban fantasy”: if the protagonist or antagonist in your novel is one of the Universal Studios classic movie monsters, it’s not fantasy, much less “urban fantasy”. Storm Front is urban fantasy. Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter is not. War For The Oaks is urban fantasy. Dead Until Dark is not. This is not rocket science.

We really enjoyed hanging out with Carla and Brian. Fun folks. I hope they come to RavenCon some day (although they won’t this year). We met several other fun people, as well, but I am terrible with names, so I can’t tell you theirs.

The character sheet for Greg Porter’s new Verne game is simply amazing. Also, CORPS has been replaced with EABA… as of eight years or so ago, which shows you how out of touch I am.

The podcast thing worked out pretty well, I think, but I have learned something in the process: I am painfully tedious. There are some people who are so tedious that I can barely stand to be in the same room with them when they are talking. I am one of those people. I don’t know how anyone else stands me. Aside from my annoying nasal voice, I combine the worst aspects of someone who can’t string together two coherent thoughts and someone who appears convinced of their own brilliance. If I was in the audience for a panel I was on, I would probably just leave. No accounting for taste, I guess.

I need to find a way to tether my phone to my laptop, so that I won’t be dependent on a malfunctioning hotel internet connection. I know that there are Android tethering apps; I am just not sure if my phone can do it.

I would like to play in a superhero LARP some time. We were too busy for me to participate in one this time.

Having pizza in the con suite Friday night was awesome. Having a hotel room across the hall and one door down from the con suite was doubly awesome.

In general, I am glad we went.

Note to self: Don’t write blogs at four in the morning when you are so drunk you can barely stand.