PAX AU notes: Notes from the diversity lounge and the last few minutes of Play the Rainbow Diversit

I went saw the "gender creative cosplay" compeition which was pretty great. A mixture of Rule 63, crossdressing, and canonically gender divergent characters, plus some regular cosplayers who saw COSPLAY COMPEITION and hoped for the best.

And I hung out while my chair was recharging with the Bisexuality Victoria peeps who were really nice and James Dominguez taught us how to play the quick and fun card game Love Letter.

Play the Rainbow: Diversity in video games
James Dominguez [Games writer, Fairfax Media], Alice Clarke [Columnist, News Ltd.], Jade Starr [Musician, Independent performer], Lysander Wilkins [Designer and artist, Wonderworld Games]

(I only saw the very end of this panel)
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PAX AU notes: Let's get Serious: Games are changing, get involved!

Last panel of the con! I may post some photos but otherwise I am DONE.

Let's get Serious: Games are changing, get involved!
Jane Cocks [University of Sunshine Coast], Izzy Gramp [Independent], Dan Monceaux [Danimations Pty Ltd], Amani Naseem [Copenhagen Game Collective], Paul Stapelberg [Well Placed Cactus]
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Interstellaaaaaaaaar

Do you like space? Like, really like space? Do you have a soft spot for theoretical physics taken to imaginative extremes? Can you cope with yet another story about the future and fate of the world which centers entirely around white american dudes (and a light scattering of white american ladies and black american dudes) to the extent that the entire rest of the world might as well not exist? Do you really like space?

Then you might enjoy Interstellar.

I do really like space, as long as it walks that careful line of realistic enough not to make me roll my eyes but over the top scifi-ish enough to be fun (eg more Contact than Gravity) And this movie walks that line pretty well, getting some physics right that NOONE EVER GETS RIGHT but willing to sacrifice accuracy for rule of cool here and there (also The Power of Love. Like Contact with The Power of Faith, except Mathew Maconnahey is older and on the other side of the argument. And the main character :/)

It's like a live action version of the 90s hard sf I devoured enthusiastically all through my late teens, getting through the slightly hackneyed personal relationships and self indulgent dull sections through solid sensawunda. Definitely worth seeing on the big screen, you have a lot of long 2001-esque shots of slowly revolving space stations to sit through.

The world building has some interesting aspects if you don't think too hard, and the plot is ok if ponderous and unsurprising. The female characters aren't quite as useless as the trailer implies, and the black guy gets...some lines...and they're all competent, driven science nerds. But this is very much a Christopher Nolan movie, with all the incoherent morality, skeevy subtext and parochial blather that implies. ALSO NOTE: the start of the film is literally just about farming. For ages.

But, eventually...space!

(Also some background AIs. Predictably, I am both impressed at how well they were made to feel like a natural part of the background worldbuilding without the movie ever losing Space momentum and becoming About AI, and wanting an ENTIRE MOVIE about them. Set in space. Starring all the non white dude science nerds, and space)