The Elf Half

Notes from Escapade 33.5, the virtual convention about halfway between regular Escapades.

1. The structure of the Discord was a great hit. (Thanks, Nev!) The biggest problem was documentation - people not used to Discord didn't know how to use the reactions to select channel views, and there were enough weird options that some people who did know Discord, didn't find those features.

In addition to various discussion panels and 3 voice channels, we had 1 channel per scheduled convention panel. To keep them from cluttering up everyone's Discord, there was a channel for choosing them - basically it worked like roles: click the react buttons you like, and you get access to the channel. Unclick, and that channel goes away.

The panel-channels worked GREAT. People talked in Zoom and threw links in Discord for later.

( Convention Yay; In-person Still going; FAPA; I have recs (which I am not sharing here) )

There are six candidates for the OTW board. The second set of Q&As (there will be two more) are posted at the OTW Elections site; there will probably be a post announcing them later.

Questions: Candidates were allowed 300 words each to answer; some questions contain sections sent in by multiple users.There are 9 questions in this set.

( Questions )

Answer posts (which also include the questions) posted here, in chrono order as they appear on the Elections site:

• Jennifer H.'s 2023 Q&A Set 3, Recent Discussions

• Audrey R.'s 2023 Q&A Set 3, Recent Discussions

• Anh P.'s 2023 Q&A Set 3, Recent Discussions

• Qiao C.'s 2023 Q&A Set 3, Recent Discussions

• Zixin Z.'s 2023 Q&A Set 3, Recent Discussions

• Kathryn S.'s 2023 Q&A Set 3, Recent Discussions

Link to Elf's Spreadsheet o' Data

There are currently six candidates for the OTW board. The first set of Q&As (there will be three more) are posted at the OTW Elections site - but not the main news feed or AO3. (Maybe there'll be a post later?)

( Questions )

Answer posts (which also include the questions) posted here, in chrono order as they appear on the Elections site:

• Qiao C’s 2023 Q&A, set 1

• Kathryn S's 2023 Q&A, set 1

• Jennifer H's 2023 Q&A, set 1

• Audrey R's 2023 Q&A, set 1

• Anh P's 2023 Q&A, set 1

• Zixin Z's 2023 Q&A, set 1

Link to Elf's Spreadsheet o' Data

I made another solo TTRPG: Quill Untamed, a hack of the Quill system. Quill Untamed is currently at AO3 only; I'll put it on itch.io when I figure out what to do about art. (The game page should have art. That wouldn't have to be Untamed art, although that'd be nice, but it's been hard finding Chinese calligraphy art that's not very modern.) (Or ancient enough to not fit the tone of Untamed.)

And I tried it out, starting with Nie Huaisang. Going to post the final "fic" version of the letter at AO3 (as a WIP, to push myself into doing the other 5 scenarios), but I'm posting the actual-play version, with notes about when I rolled dice etc, here.

In Quill Untamed, Nie Huasiang is a poet:
• Penmanship Poor ⚅
• Language Good ⚅⚅⚅
• Heart Average ⚅⚅
• Skill: Illumination (+1 die to a Penmanship roll)

Scenario 1: Meishan’s Artifact
Write a letter to the head of the Meishan Yu to get her to hand over a cursed artifact.
Rules: Using both options – On a failed language roll, can reroll using heart; -2 to final score if you don’t explain a connection to their clan.

( Not copied here: 600 words of background and why Nie Huaisang is getting involved. )

Letters from Nie Huaisang - chapter 1 is up.

I have attended two days of Worldcon business meetings. I have notes, which I will deal with later. Observations:

1) The cutesy titles for proposals work to make things harder to understand and therefor more exclusionary; people who don't have the time to fully study all 20-ish pages of proposals have no way of sorting out which measures are important to them and which they can skip.

2) Wow there are so many ways to bog down a system based on Roberts Rules of Order. I dunno if I could get useful changes made at a meeting but I bet a team of three could make sure absolutely nothing useful got accomplished.

3) Worldcon, unlike AO3, was not designed with "how do we prevent a hostile takeover?" The main prevention tool is "must be at the meetings - 10am-12:30 pm-ish every day of the convention, must be able to afford attending in person; substantial changes require attending two years in a row," and those two years will not be in easy transit distance for any one person.

4) While I understood (pretty much) every argument and information request and proposed amendment... I also understand why Biz Mtg chairpeople all have that edge in their voice that says "I work with idiots."

5) I so want to write a Roberts Rules for Worldcon thing.

6) The whole process is horrifically ableist in ways that it would be very, very hard to get "the regulars" to admit. It all moves very quickly. If you can't think quickly in response to changing input, you can't be involved in the debate. Technically they allow input from people who can't walk to the front of the room; practically, they discourage it. Support for anyone who's not fluent in English is pretty much non-existent. I'm sure there are several more issues I'm not thinking of immediately.

OTOH, the close captioning system is good.

7) The process of the meeting itself is not only not explained, the agenda-ish paper they handed out does not explain what order things will happen in, nor how the debate times allotted are decided, nor which items are Roberts Rules standard and which are WSFS constitution issues, and so on.

Newcomers are apparently expected to flounder until they have attended several meetings. There is no welcoming of people who would like to participate; it seems like it's deliberately kept at "must be this experienced in parliamentary procedure to ride." I am 100% certain that many people would insist that no, none of that is deliberate. It just happens. It has just happened that way for the last 75+ years and nobody has complained yet so why are you grumbling about it now? This is the way it works.

...the way it works is that 46 people have decided that, in the future, the split will not be between "supporting memberships" and "attending membership," but "WSFS membership," which will include Hugo voting rights, and an "Attending Supplement," which allows attendance & access to the business meeting. The big change? WSFS membership is non-transferable; if you realize you can't attend the convention, you can't sell that part off, and they'll still have to buy a WSFS membership from the Worldcon in question.

This is, for the most part, confined to the Worldcon-fandom community; it's not WSFS-vs-ficfandom or anything like that. And as drama goes, it's fairly dry. But it's interesting to me, so you get to hear about it.

So. Hugo Awards. Longstanding tradition in the scifi fandom community. Voting process has a few exploitable loopholes, as we discovered in Puppygate. Ostensibly a pack of fans get together to vote for Best Of Scifi of the last year, in several categories; in reality, it's more like Favorite Scifi Of This Convention's Membership. Fifty-plus years ago, Our Favorite Scifi was reasonably representative of the scifi community at large - there weren't entire media categories of scifi that the awards were ignoring, weren't literally thousands of books and movies coming out every year that no member of Worldcon had seen.

So. A bit broken, perhaps. But! A few years ago, a Hugo Awards Study Committee got started, in the wake of Puppygate, to sort out a few odds & ends in the category descriptions. (Original focus: Update the "Best Fan Artist" and "Best Pro Artist" categories to match modern artist realities, because "published in fanzines & shown at conventions" is, um, not how most current fan artists display their works.) It was decided to review any or all of the Hugo categories, including the proposal for Best Game or Interactive Work (which I strongly support).

It had an email list. I know nothing about the email list. It now has a Discord.

( Not as much drama as you'd expect from that )

Challenge 13.

In your own space, share a favorite memory about fandom: the first time you got into fandom, the last time a fanwork touched your heart, wild times with fellow fans (whether on-line or off-line), a lovely comment you’ve received or have left for someone. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

This has taken a long time because I'm trying to come up with a fandom memory that's not about dead people.

It's not that most of my fandom memories are about dead people. But those are the memories I hold on to hardest, the ones I want to share because I can't make more of them.

...But there's plenty of morbidity going around, these last few years, so I've been trying to find something interesting or meaningful to share that's not, sigh, all tangled up with a person or people who aren't around anymore.

Think I'll go with the "lovely comment you received" idea. Several years ago at Yuletide, I wrote a story about The Martian. That's not the fandom I matched on - I wanted to offer The Martian, but you can't offer less than two characters, and Mark's the only one I felt comfortable enough to be sure of writing.

Their request in the fandom we matched on was very nice, and I poked at it a bit, almost had a fic idea... but their request about Mark just snapped into my head as a story-thing. (And then I realized that I'd only seen the movie, not read the book, and the request was technically for the book fandom, so I had to go track that down and see if it had any details that clashed with what I wanted to write, which was "Mark has been very very traumatized by potatoes and he hates them but also some very deep part of him knows he can't survive without them."

Anyway, here's the fic: Hunger Strikes, G-rated, 3200 words, no warnings. I'm very happy with it. It is my most-kudosed work and was hauled into a collection called "If you only read one fic in this fandom" (Originally it my fic showed up right next to some Papyrus smut by Maximum Overboner; I was SO PROUD. ...I think MO removed their fic from the collection.)

The recipient was even happier; I got an absolutely wonderful comment that quoted favorite parts, praised me for my character voice skills, and found Deep Insights in my fic that I didn't deliberately put there (but I am totally going to take credit for).

I go back & reread the comment when I'm wrestling with a writing project and fretting about "am I any good at any of this?"

Comments like that are what keep me participating in Yuletide after the couple of years when the recipient didn't comment on their fic at all. (Other people did. I get nice comments every year. But I think twice, I haven't gotten a comment from my recip.)

A while ago, I went looking for info on FAPA. I've known it existed basically forever, and had some vague awareness that APA means "Amateur Press Association" and that it involved a newsletter-ish thing that has copies mailed to all the members. That's not inaccurate, but it's very incomplete.

The Wikipedia page talks about its role in history but not what it actually does, which is:

1) Members create (sci-fi-fandom-related) newsletters, minimum of 8 pages a year or 2 pages/quarter. (FAPA is quarterly. I don't know if it's always been quarterly, but it is now.) There's no maximum.

2) Members mail copies of their newsletter - as many as there are current members, plus a few extras - to the OE ("Official Editor").

3) OE mails out copies of everything in a bundle to all members.

4) There's a nominal membership fee to cover mail costs etc.

5) There's a bunch of ancillary rules that have nothing to do with the above. (How to deal with late content, penalties for getting behind on payments, new member rules, etc.)

FAPA has a max membership of 65 people (or rather, 65 newsletter-ish fanzines), which is a holdover from the pre-internet days. It used to have waiting lists. It no longer has waiting lists. It has 14 members. They submit 20 copies to the OE. (Which is why he had enough extras to send me last year's batch, so I can get a sense of how it works and what it covers.)

...I think I want in.

( Now I just have to figure out content & logistics )

...do I not have a generic fantasy/renfair-something icon? Huh. Apparently not. Should fix that.

Anyway. Finally got around to watching the beginning of the Wheel of Time series at Amazon. It's been years since I read the series; I keep meaning to re-read it and keep... not. (I got up to book 7? 8? Maybe more?)

I think I remember seeing bits of the casting announcements, but not much. But so far, it's delightfully cast.

1) Moiraine looks exactly as I imagined her.
2) Lan does not, but is cool anyway; another couple episodes and the vague "european warrior dude" image I had in my head will vanish and be replaced by the one in the series.
3) I thought Nynaeve was blonde in the books. (This could be entirely wrong; my mental image of most "long hair with braid" characters was blonde at the time I first read these books.) This does not matter, because I recognized her on sight before anyone said her name. All mental imagery I had of Nynaeve being blonde has vanished.
4) Recognized Rand on sight too, but that's less because he looks like my mental image of Rand (although he more-or-less does) and more because he looks like Young Chosen One.
5) Mat was another "Oh, that's him" moment, like Moiraine. Yep, that's pretty much exactly as I imagined him.
6) Perrin took longer because he looked right but (a) couldn't remember his name and (b) his starting details are so different from the rest of what goes on in the books that I couldn't match the parts I was seeing to what I remembered.
7) Egwene, like Nynaeve, did not match my original mental image, which has now been nicely erased by the series version.

( Mild spoilers and a screencap behind cut )

Been talking with Kid the Elder about how to get more video game content on Fanlore. We've come up with a video game infobox. (She helped come up with the topics that should be listed; I did the formatting and then got help because my first version didn't work right.) Also came up with a page template with instructions.

Currently working on brainstorming categories - like, what categories will we need for good video-game-fandoms coverage? So far, we've come up with the following:

( Long lists go after a cut, right? )