Swancon 2016: everything else!
Mar. 31st, 2016 11:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alias_sqbrThings I was recced:
The Swancon community is apparently 37% male, 50% female and 13% non binary. The registration table this year offered neat little pronoun stickers to put at the bottom of your badge and there were unisex toilets.
Stirfire Studios ran a demonstration of a game they're writing for the HTC Vive Virtual Reality headset/controller, I was one of a long line of people who got to play it for a few minutes. It was SUPER FUN, very immersive. They got me to stay in my wheelchair to see how well that could work, the answer being "not very well" (I couldn't reach anything high up) but that was fine just for playing around. Also I was longer at the front than the system expected so I banged my footplate into a wall before the "stop walking!" warning grid came on. I've had a few interesting conversations with them about accessibility, am curious to see where that goes.
I only stayed for the very beginning of the masquerade and had no costume but everyone else looked great.
I did a clay animal making activity in the family room which was HEAPS of fun, I was a sought after artisan of little eyes since the children had trouble making them neatly.
Non Violent Video Games
So You Want To Make A Video Game
Various Jane Espenson notes
I didn't actually make it to her guest of honour speech but we did bond briefly about![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bardiegrub's adorable tiny BB-8 robot which bardiegrub was moving around the hallway via remote control as we waited for a panel to start.
She was introduced as a "writer and producer" and said "producer" is an almost meaningless term which can mean anything from "actually organises things" to "senior writer" to "random person who we wanted to acknowledge".
She prefers writing in other people's universes, and compared it to the appeal of fanfic.
She did shadow puppets over the screen while the showing of Shindig was set up. And then she did live commentary with audience questions which was pretty cool! She was entirely positive about every specific show and showrunner she's worked with, and incredibly positive about Joss and Firefly, she seemed to look back on it as a very positive experience and if she had any regrets regarding the episode didn't mention them. I'm so used to people criticising Firefly it was a little surreal to see someone poking at it in depth in an entirely positive way, especially Mal and Inara's romance, which I personally found compelling but troublesome. But I guess if she'd had a problem with it she'd have written it differently!
The cast had recordings of the Chinese pronounciations, but only got to hear them at the start of a scene so got worse every take.
Suspense is better than surprise. Tell people what's going to happen. Or show the Checkov's gun and then don't shoot it, eg the building tension of the planned rescue of Mal...and then Mal shows up fine.
She shipped Mal and Inara like burning but it would have ruined it to have them kiss right then. Dangle the carrot, keep up the suspense, and let people write fanfic if they want kisses right away.
Kaylee was the character she most resembled but Jayne was the most fun to write.
Science Doesn't Work That Way
If the object is older than 10K years you're isotype dating not carbon dating.
Scale and cube law.
You can't be cross with Dr Who. If a work is clear about changing the rules as it goes along you just have to roll with it. But if it's pretending to be serious it needs to stick to the rules it's presented, whether those are the rules of the real world or something made up like magic.
Prometheus was the WORST.
Space is always innaccurate, faster than light and asteroids that don't kill you in a blink. Space is an insulator what are you doing with your heat?
Fireballs in the Sky, Curtin meteors temp profile (?)
Forensics: everything happens way too fast.
The CSI effect: judges and juries expect perfect reliable forensic evidence, dismiss other kinds of evidence. Equate "one in a million" genetic marker with "unique".
DNA gets all over the place, doesn't mean the person was actually there.
Luckily there's no democracy in astrophysics so the bad science just gets people excited and brings in funding.
Good examples: (long pause) Apollo 13, The Dish, The Abyss (sort of), Avatar the Last Airbender show for the rules of that universe, similarly The Practice Effect
Avatar: TERRIBLE
Writers are liberal arts majors revealing their ignorance and biases.
Trailer Park
This panel showed a bunch of movie trailers.
The mood of the room was very negative on the new ghostbusters.
There were supersonic squeals from certain sections of the audience during the Captain America trailer.
There was some discussion about the possibility of orc lady/human dude makeouts in the new Warcraft movie, and discussion of whether that would weird out regular audiences like the ape lady/human dude makeouts in Planet of the Apes.
Kevin Spacey must have lost a bet. (If you can't see the trailer: he plays a businessman who gets turned into a cat to learn to be a better person)
Queer characters: Tokenism, realism and support
This was pretty good, 3 queer panelists and moderator + Jane Espenson, who I think is straight but has the unique perspective of having written queer characters on tv for dedades including on Ellen etc.
Everyone gave their name, pronouns and perspective as an introduction.
Early representation the panelists discovered as young people: "What Are Ya", Soap, metaphorical transformations in scifi
Jane Espenson said she is glad she had a gay guy working with her on Husbands, no matter how well meaning an ally will miss stuff.
Positive representation: not just stereotypes, but not avoiding stereotypes so much you just show the "acceptably normal" queer people eg don't erase feminine gay men.
"One f/f kiss is ok, two is bad because it shows she liked it."
Ellen had positive and negative reactions from all sides. Doing f/f relationships suddenly opened the door to a whole new set of sitcom plots noone had ever done before, like "are we friends or dating?".
Things have changed. Even anti marriage equality people start by saying "Of course we realise gay people are people..." And now you can self publish more easily, even for TV. "Circle of Change" by Lainey Cairo has a trans protagonist, at first it was rejected, then only published because they really needed a book right then, now it's about to go from digital to print because it's been so successful.
Jane Espenson changes the gender of characters at the last minute and sees if her story still works or if a bunch of unconscious bias has been revealed.
There are advantages both to characters who are introduced as queer and those who aren't and only get revealed later. So you need both! Having seemingly straight characters turn out to be queer implies ANY character could be queer which is very powerful.
"Gay Affect" eg B.D. Wong is good visibility even if the character isn't explicitly queer (hmm).
Lots of queer characters means you can kill them or make them evil and it's not bury your gays because there's lots of others left. Like Shonda Rhymes does with black characters.
In Husbands it was hard to create interesting drama and keep the relationship happy.
SF gives the chance to speculate on different attitudes to sexuality in imaginary cultures. But in practice the SF publishing industry is resistant to queerness.
Recced works:
Threesome Linked because I know I felt nervous trying to google for a youtube show about polyamory called "threesome".
Defiance: brief poly
Girls with Slingshots: poly f/f relationship where one is asexual. Secondary characters so they get to stay happy.
Brooklyn 99: gay captain
Parks and Rec: m/m/f poly triad
Janet King: lesbian protagonist of crime drama
- Little Witch Story and it's creator's twitter
SnowMcNally.
- Vampire Saga hidden object game
- Space Team cooperative game.
- Daniel De Lorne Local author of m/m vampire romance
The Swancon community is apparently 37% male, 50% female and 13% non binary. The registration table this year offered neat little pronoun stickers to put at the bottom of your badge and there were unisex toilets.
Stirfire Studios ran a demonstration of a game they're writing for the HTC Vive Virtual Reality headset/controller, I was one of a long line of people who got to play it for a few minutes. It was SUPER FUN, very immersive. They got me to stay in my wheelchair to see how well that could work, the answer being "not very well" (I couldn't reach anything high up) but that was fine just for playing around. Also I was longer at the front than the system expected so I banged my footplate into a wall before the "stop walking!" warning grid came on. I've had a few interesting conversations with them about accessibility, am curious to see where that goes.
I only stayed for the very beginning of the masquerade and had no costume but everyone else looked great.
I did a clay animal making activity in the family room which was HEAPS of fun, I was a sought after artisan of little eyes since the children had trouble making them neatly.
Non Violent Video Games
So You Want To Make A Video Game
Various Jane Espenson notes
I didn't actually make it to her guest of honour speech but we did bond briefly about
bardiegrub's adorable tiny BB-8 robot which bardiegrub was moving around the hallway via remote control as we waited for a panel to start.She was introduced as a "writer and producer" and said "producer" is an almost meaningless term which can mean anything from "actually organises things" to "senior writer" to "random person who we wanted to acknowledge".
She prefers writing in other people's universes, and compared it to the appeal of fanfic.
She did shadow puppets over the screen while the showing of Shindig was set up. And then she did live commentary with audience questions which was pretty cool! She was entirely positive about every specific show and showrunner she's worked with, and incredibly positive about Joss and Firefly, she seemed to look back on it as a very positive experience and if she had any regrets regarding the episode didn't mention them. I'm so used to people criticising Firefly it was a little surreal to see someone poking at it in depth in an entirely positive way, especially Mal and Inara's romance, which I personally found compelling but troublesome. But I guess if she'd had a problem with it she'd have written it differently!
The cast had recordings of the Chinese pronounciations, but only got to hear them at the start of a scene so got worse every take.
Suspense is better than surprise. Tell people what's going to happen. Or show the Checkov's gun and then don't shoot it, eg the building tension of the planned rescue of Mal...and then Mal shows up fine.
She shipped Mal and Inara like burning but it would have ruined it to have them kiss right then. Dangle the carrot, keep up the suspense, and let people write fanfic if they want kisses right away.
Kaylee was the character she most resembled but Jayne was the most fun to write.
Science Doesn't Work That Way
If the object is older than 10K years you're isotype dating not carbon dating.
Scale and cube law.
You can't be cross with Dr Who. If a work is clear about changing the rules as it goes along you just have to roll with it. But if it's pretending to be serious it needs to stick to the rules it's presented, whether those are the rules of the real world or something made up like magic.
Prometheus was the WORST.
Space is always innaccurate, faster than light and asteroids that don't kill you in a blink. Space is an insulator what are you doing with your heat?
Fireballs in the Sky, Curtin meteors temp profile (?)
Forensics: everything happens way too fast.
The CSI effect: judges and juries expect perfect reliable forensic evidence, dismiss other kinds of evidence. Equate "one in a million" genetic marker with "unique".
DNA gets all over the place, doesn't mean the person was actually there.
Luckily there's no democracy in astrophysics so the bad science just gets people excited and brings in funding.
Good examples: (long pause) Apollo 13, The Dish, The Abyss (sort of), Avatar the Last Airbender show for the rules of that universe, similarly The Practice Effect
Avatar: TERRIBLE
Writers are liberal arts majors revealing their ignorance and biases.
Trailer Park
This panel showed a bunch of movie trailers.
The mood of the room was very negative on the new ghostbusters.
There were supersonic squeals from certain sections of the audience during the Captain America trailer.
There was some discussion about the possibility of orc lady/human dude makeouts in the new Warcraft movie, and discussion of whether that would weird out regular audiences like the ape lady/human dude makeouts in Planet of the Apes.
Kevin Spacey must have lost a bet. (If you can't see the trailer: he plays a businessman who gets turned into a cat to learn to be a better person)
Queer characters: Tokenism, realism and support
This was pretty good, 3 queer panelists and moderator + Jane Espenson, who I think is straight but has the unique perspective of having written queer characters on tv for dedades including on Ellen etc.
Everyone gave their name, pronouns and perspective as an introduction.
Early representation the panelists discovered as young people: "What Are Ya", Soap, metaphorical transformations in scifi
Jane Espenson said she is glad she had a gay guy working with her on Husbands, no matter how well meaning an ally will miss stuff.
Positive representation: not just stereotypes, but not avoiding stereotypes so much you just show the "acceptably normal" queer people eg don't erase feminine gay men.
"One f/f kiss is ok, two is bad because it shows she liked it."
Ellen had positive and negative reactions from all sides. Doing f/f relationships suddenly opened the door to a whole new set of sitcom plots noone had ever done before, like "are we friends or dating?".
Things have changed. Even anti marriage equality people start by saying "Of course we realise gay people are people..." And now you can self publish more easily, even for TV. "Circle of Change" by Lainey Cairo has a trans protagonist, at first it was rejected, then only published because they really needed a book right then, now it's about to go from digital to print because it's been so successful.
Jane Espenson changes the gender of characters at the last minute and sees if her story still works or if a bunch of unconscious bias has been revealed.
There are advantages both to characters who are introduced as queer and those who aren't and only get revealed later. So you need both! Having seemingly straight characters turn out to be queer implies ANY character could be queer which is very powerful.
"Gay Affect" eg B.D. Wong is good visibility even if the character isn't explicitly queer (hmm).
Lots of queer characters means you can kill them or make them evil and it's not bury your gays because there's lots of others left. Like Shonda Rhymes does with black characters.
In Husbands it was hard to create interesting drama and keep the relationship happy.
SF gives the chance to speculate on different attitudes to sexuality in imaginary cultures. But in practice the SF publishing industry is resistant to queerness.
Recced works:
Threesome Linked because I know I felt nervous trying to google for a youtube show about polyamory called "threesome".
Defiance: brief poly
Girls with Slingshots: poly f/f relationship where one is asexual. Secondary characters so they get to stay happy.
Brooklyn 99: gay captain
Parks and Rec: m/m/f poly triad
Janet King: lesbian protagonist of crime drama
no subject
Date: 2016-04-01 04:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-04-03 02:01 pm (UTC)She had a little rant about how not only were all the scientist characters terrible, they were each worst at their own speciality. I haven't seen the movie but I get the feeling it would annoy me.
no subject
Date: 2016-04-01 05:14 am (UTC)Took me a while to notice that myself, and it's so very easy to miss the difference if you hear people saying it.
They got me to stay in my wheelchair to see how well that could work, the answer being "not very well" (I couldn't reach anything high up) but that was fine just for playing around. Also I was longer at the front than the system expected so I banged my footplate into a wall before the "stop walking!" warning grid came on. I've had a few interesting conversations with them about accessibility, am curious to see where that goes.
Lisa in particular seemed really excited and interested in learning from and integrating the accessibility lessons they got with this display, most especially you and the young girl who was too short to reach the higher icons in their prototype.
The mood of the room was very negative on the new ghostbusters.
I know I really want to have the new Ghostbusters be at least as good as the original, but the teasers put out so far aren't encouraging me.
The character of Patty seems seriously problematic, and Abby looks to be someone that will irritate the hell out of me.
Erin looks good, apart from that *terrible* line about the slime getting everywhere. Holtzmann, on the other hand, looks great. if they've accurately portrayed her character in the trailers, I'm going to love her to bits.
Chris Hemsworth as Kevin could go any number of ways, will have to wait and see.
Here's hoping the trailers released so far are terrible depictions of Patty and Abby, a slight mis-step for Erin and spot on for Holtzmann.
As for the Shindig run-through, I found it interesting that pretty much the entire audience vocally reacted badly to the line where Mal explicitly calls Inara a whore, and yet Ms Espenson didn't visibly react at all.
Re: The Practice Effect: Would this be referring to the David Brin 80's novel? I don't think I've heard of more than a couple of people that are even aware of it. (Note that the wikipedia article is a) terrible, and b) somewhat inaccurate.)
said "producer" is an almost meaningless term which can mean anything from "actually organises things" to "senior writer" to "random person who we wanted to acknowledge".
That's an interesting little insight into the TV and Movie world we wouldn't have gotten without someone like Jane as a guest. I think she worked out really well.
no subject
Date: 2016-04-03 01:58 pm (UTC)Ah, thank you! I did know it was Stirfire, I have obviously just been playing too much Stardew Valley :)
Yep, the David Brin novel. I read it way back as an undergraduate in unisfa and found it quite interesting.
no subject
Date: 2016-04-10 05:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-04-12 03:49 pm (UTC)Let me know if it's any good, I haven't played it myself!