So there was this con, right...
It's weird how these things work. For years and years, I've heard stories of the Great Conventions. I know some people who go to plenty, and some who've actually flown across the entire Atlantic Ocean to visit them. They seemed to vary in their qualities: some were the mental melting-pots in which new ideas were smelted; others seemed to form echo chambers for devoted fandoms large or small; yet more seemed to blur at the edges into weekend-long all-but-music-festivals. All occupied positions on a scale which ran from the ridiculous to the ridiculous, and if there was one constant between them, it was the costuming and the fursuits. Not that I have a problem with dressing up as a cat.
Anyway.
From the start, Nine Worlds seemed bizarrely unsure of what it was. Publicity emails to those who Kickstarted the project had an almost surprised tone, as if the event organisers had just woken up to find the frost giant living in their wardrobe had left them another set of enthusiastic geeks on the doorstep, stunned but salivating at the prospects being offered to them. The core idea, to provide a decent-sized summer Con for the UK which offered a mixed experience - neither Expo nor Con, neither vast overstimulating multimedia event nor tightly-focused enthusiast-exclusive meetup - was absolutely solid, but the wide focus made the whole thing seem far too huge. The list they provided on the Kickstarter implied tasty morsels for fans of
(The list said even less about the terrifying possibility that you might be into most of it. That thought didn't bear thinking about, so I put on my blinkers and resolved myself to a weekend with the bronies, who would presumably be the best people to look after my poor choice-blind brain and feed its attendant meat-car muffins until it went cross-eyed).
I know what you're thinking. Poor little con virgin. At least I lacked the dodgy moustache I wore to my first Maelstrom.
"Tracks" were marked out by expert event-planners, with the intention of organising the herd (or rather, allowing it to organise itself) along conceptual lines; most of the items above had their own Track, with the blissful exceptions of "buying cool stuff" and "partying like a demon", which might well have killed anyone who tried actually doing them all weekend long. (A brilliant bit of shared-experience marketing was the stamp-sheet provided with the welcome pack, which allowed the curious to keep a record of where they'd been - if they didn't leave it at home on the Saturday, like certain stripy schmucks). For the most part, these stayed in the same rooms, but the mechanism allowed for the groups running a particular series of events to suddenly branch out into communal areas or larger spaces without their guests losing track of them on the incredibly overstuffed events log. I don't know if it's a new name on an old idea, as (I might have mentioned) I was new to this, and more than a little snowblind - but it worked. If I had one complaint about it, it was that the event handbook itself didn't use the Tracks as their event-listing format - but then it would have been harder to compare items by time, and that would have been just as bad.
All in all, I went to a whole bunch of stuff about writing and books in conference rooms with authors and writers of everything from fanfic to major novel series, including a handful of my recent favourites in all the world. I was a little disappointed by some of the smaller talks; on occasions, I found myself sitting in audience before authors who clearly had a lot to say but simply weren't sure how to say it. They seemed to have fallen prey to poor expectation management, genuinely unsure of what their audience knew or wanted from them, and so delivered GCSE-level talks to postgraduate audiences. One in particular was all going fine until-
-but I digress. I'll get to that sort of thing later.
The vendors' room was far from my expectations. A wide-eyed innocent, I'd expected a ballroom half the size of the NIA with hanging banners and professional representation from (at least) all the major print media companies. In its place, a sweet, cosy arrangement of mostly individual crafters, writers, artists and kit-makers, an Etsy room (albeit screened for quality) of the best SFF reads you've never heard of and a wide spectrum of cool shit you don't need but now want. Vastly preferable, the latter model; I very much hope it lasts.
The gaming-spaces at the Radisson were considerable and excellently comfortable, with large-scale boards for a number of favourites like Ticket to Ride and Pandemic (both of which I played, both of which I enjoyed immensely) and plenty of free spaces to set up and play whatever else you'd brought with you. The noise contributed to a real feeling of being a part of a community - I think I'd felt the slightly alienating silence around the average gaming table before, but never been able to put a name to it until now. More on that later.
A highlight from Saturday evening was Bifröst, the Queer Cabaret. Compered by an inestimable poet (whose name I need to look up, sorry), nervous but adventurous and really very funny, it displayed five acts of music and poetry either by queer people, about queerness, or both (including my lovely wife and her guitar-wielding partner). As always, Lashings of Ginger Beer Time were as hilarious as they were audacious, filking mercilessly for fun and profit (pronounce the phrase kinky andro-romantic transmasculine asexual fast and see what else it sounds like), and in case anyone's in Edinburgh, go see them at the Fringe.
By Sunday I was probably in more of a mood for chilling out, maxing, relaxing all cool, but the Con decided to punish me with more scholarship, and some of the best of it. Notes were taken, opinions had, famous authors observed - but I can barely remember much of Sunday, so I'll get back to that later(!). The lovely missus, ever full of vim and vigour, got a slot to go toe-to-toe with the First Blade of Braavos (threatening such a competent swordfighter with nothing but her forefinger; I'm so proud), but by and large, the day was one of comfortable listening. My greatest regret of the Con is missing Jack Cohen speak on designing other intelligent species, but I got my timeslots swapped; I guess I'll just have to buy the book.
I'm very glad I was at the first Nine Worlds. I have a feeling this is something I'm going to look back on and remember, probably when I'm old enough to be a proper greymane complaining that it's changed and now it's all about the holo-emitted [new forms of entertainment] and the commercialistic [new forms of economic exploitation]. I'm glad to have gone there with good people and met good people, including a lovely chap cosplaying the Seventh Doctor, the cool crew behind BUCK, a lovely couple who helped us try (and fail) to save the world in Pandemic, and a panoply of geeks of all stripes.
I look forward to next year. If you're a geek in the UK, you should be too.
It's weird how these things work. For years and years, I've heard stories of the Great Conventions. I know some people who go to plenty, and some who've actually flown across the entire Atlantic Ocean to visit them. They seemed to vary in their qualities: some were the mental melting-pots in which new ideas were smelted; others seemed to form echo chambers for devoted fandoms large or small; yet more seemed to blur at the edges into weekend-long all-but-music-festivals. All occupied positions on a scale which ran from the ridiculous to the ridiculous, and if there was one constant between them, it was the costuming and the fursuits. Not that I have a problem with dressing up as a cat.
Anyway.
From the start, Nine Worlds seemed bizarrely unsure of what it was. Publicity emails to those who Kickstarted the project had an almost surprised tone, as if the event organisers had just woken up to find the frost giant living in their wardrobe had left them another set of enthusiastic geeks on the doorstep, stunned but salivating at the prospects being offered to them. The core idea, to provide a decent-sized summer Con for the UK which offered a mixed experience - neither Expo nor Con, neither vast overstimulating multimedia event nor tightly-focused enthusiast-exclusive meetup - was absolutely solid, but the wide focus made the whole thing seem far too huge. The list they provided on the Kickstarter implied tasty morsels for fans of
board gaming, film and film-making, Doctor Who/Torchwood, science, feminism, Tolkien, SF&F academia, video games, partying like a dancefloor demon, role play gaming, Discworld, My Little Pony, social gaming, SF&F literature, knitting, Harry Potter, creative writing, Star Wars, queer fandom, buying cool stuff, steampunk, the occult, open culture, Star Trek, Whedon, skepticism, costuming, comics, anime and J-culture, or fanfic[.]That list made me nervous. It said nothing about what you might do if you're into two of those things. Perhaps you could miss something. The authors/crafters/actors/geeks behind it might forgive you, provided you returned in supplication to purchase a fresh action figure. That's what events like this are about, right?
(The list said even less about the terrifying possibility that you might be into most of it. That thought didn't bear thinking about, so I put on my blinkers and resolved myself to a weekend with the bronies, who would presumably be the best people to look after my poor choice-blind brain and feed its attendant meat-car muffins until it went cross-eyed).
I know what you're thinking. Poor little con virgin. At least I lacked the dodgy moustache I wore to my first Maelstrom.
"Tracks" were marked out by expert event-planners, with the intention of organising the herd (or rather, allowing it to organise itself) along conceptual lines; most of the items above had their own Track, with the blissful exceptions of "buying cool stuff" and "partying like a demon", which might well have killed anyone who tried actually doing them all weekend long. (A brilliant bit of shared-experience marketing was the stamp-sheet provided with the welcome pack, which allowed the curious to keep a record of where they'd been - if they didn't leave it at home on the Saturday, like certain stripy schmucks). For the most part, these stayed in the same rooms, but the mechanism allowed for the groups running a particular series of events to suddenly branch out into communal areas or larger spaces without their guests losing track of them on the incredibly overstuffed events log. I don't know if it's a new name on an old idea, as (I might have mentioned) I was new to this, and more than a little snowblind - but it worked. If I had one complaint about it, it was that the event handbook itself didn't use the Tracks as their event-listing format - but then it would have been harder to compare items by time, and that would have been just as bad.
All in all, I went to a whole bunch of stuff about writing and books in conference rooms with authors and writers of everything from fanfic to major novel series, including a handful of my recent favourites in all the world. I was a little disappointed by some of the smaller talks; on occasions, I found myself sitting in audience before authors who clearly had a lot to say but simply weren't sure how to say it. They seemed to have fallen prey to poor expectation management, genuinely unsure of what their audience knew or wanted from them, and so delivered GCSE-level talks to postgraduate audiences. One in particular was all going fine until-
-but I digress. I'll get to that sort of thing later.
The vendors' room was far from my expectations. A wide-eyed innocent, I'd expected a ballroom half the size of the NIA with hanging banners and professional representation from (at least) all the major print media companies. In its place, a sweet, cosy arrangement of mostly individual crafters, writers, artists and kit-makers, an Etsy room (albeit screened for quality) of the best SFF reads you've never heard of and a wide spectrum of cool shit you don't need but now want. Vastly preferable, the latter model; I very much hope it lasts.
The gaming-spaces at the Radisson were considerable and excellently comfortable, with large-scale boards for a number of favourites like Ticket to Ride and Pandemic (both of which I played, both of which I enjoyed immensely) and plenty of free spaces to set up and play whatever else you'd brought with you. The noise contributed to a real feeling of being a part of a community - I think I'd felt the slightly alienating silence around the average gaming table before, but never been able to put a name to it until now. More on that later.
A highlight from Saturday evening was Bifröst, the Queer Cabaret. Compered by an inestimable poet (whose name I need to look up, sorry), nervous but adventurous and really very funny, it displayed five acts of music and poetry either by queer people, about queerness, or both (including my lovely wife and her guitar-wielding partner). As always, Lashings of Ginger Beer Time were as hilarious as they were audacious, filking mercilessly for fun and profit (pronounce the phrase kinky andro-romantic transmasculine asexual fast and see what else it sounds like), and in case anyone's in Edinburgh, go see them at the Fringe.
By Sunday I was probably in more of a mood for chilling out, maxing, relaxing all cool, but the Con decided to punish me with more scholarship, and some of the best of it. Notes were taken, opinions had, famous authors observed - but I can barely remember much of Sunday, so I'll get back to that later(!). The lovely missus, ever full of vim and vigour, got a slot to go toe-to-toe with the First Blade of Braavos (threatening such a competent swordfighter with nothing but her forefinger; I'm so proud), but by and large, the day was one of comfortable listening. My greatest regret of the Con is missing Jack Cohen speak on designing other intelligent species, but I got my timeslots swapped; I guess I'll just have to buy the book.
I'm very glad I was at the first Nine Worlds. I have a feeling this is something I'm going to look back on and remember, probably when I'm old enough to be a proper greymane complaining that it's changed and now it's all about the holo-emitted [new forms of entertainment] and the commercialistic [new forms of economic exploitation]. I'm glad to have gone there with good people and met good people, including a lovely chap cosplaying the Seventh Doctor, the cool crew behind BUCK, a lovely couple who helped us try (and fail) to save the world in Pandemic, and a panoply of geeks of all stripes.
I look forward to next year. If you're a geek in the UK, you should be too.
Everything I read about this makes me want to go more. So gutted I missed this one. Next time!
ReplyDeleteI'm painfully aware of the conflict with Odyssey, but fortunately for me, that was never really my bag of severed heads. I anticipate much fraughtness and hand-wringing one way or another from much of my social network over the course of the next year.
DeleteP.S. See you there, man, see you there!