Wombat Rampant

I'm sure I've brought up before (possibly not in the LJ, though) the notion that fandom has become part of the cultural mainstream, or perhaps vice versa. Turns out I'm not the first fellow to come up with that notion; it was actually popularized by the late Thomas Disch. As Jim Henley wrote:

Years later, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of was one of the first, if not the first, nonfiction works to declare what gunshy geeks had mostly been too self-conscious to notice: science fiction won. The world was ours. We had become mainstream culture. It’s a commonplace truth now, but Dreams came out before truck companies based commercials on Worlds of Warcraft and the NFL used Lord of the Rings motifs to promote playoff games. The book was by no means triumphalist, because Disch knew that we were Slans with feet of clay.

Never cared much for Disch's work, myself; most of it (with the exception of "The Brave Little Toaster") struck me as pretty annoying epater les bourgeois iconoclasm, fairly typical of the New Wave. YMMV. Still, it's comforting to know that somebody else had the same take on the culture as I did.

Or, THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS
This is (to some extent) an expansion on yesterday's post about leaving fandom (or not).
It focuses on one of the aspects of SF fandom that was pretty much inherent in its founding and later expanded into areas that I doubt anyone in First Fandom ever considered back in the long-lost Golden Age of 1937-41.
( It's where, when you go there, they *have* to take you in. )

I'm probably not going to go to Otakon next month, if only because expensive hotels are expensive and cheap hotels are too far away...I'd considered staying at the Laurel Days Inn Suites and commuting via BWI and the light rail system, but this program was clearly full of fail and almost certainly would have led to losing my hat. Bad plan. Still mulling over Capclave, the successor to Disclave; while some acquaintances of mine will be there, I have less than no interest in the GoH and the vibe I get from it is Minicon right after the HRMP Wars ended. Sod that for a game of "trufen". So most likely the next con I'll go to will either be Katsucon next February or Detour. (Because I pretty much HAVE to go to Detour.) Whether I'll do anything at these conventions is another matter, as far as volunteering or being on staff goes.
( Why? Why not? )

Left work today after getting the bulk of the important payroll stuff done; the rest can wait until Monday after I see the lymphedema consultant who will hopefully take one look at my legs and go "OMFG you need new stockings three months ago!" and dispense with unnecessary dietary/exercise lectures. There's lab work on the schedule for tomorrow morning before I head out to Chantilly for a long-overdue clearing of the mailbox.

Finished Neal Stephenson's The Confusion last night but am withholding judgment until I finish The System of the World, because there are too many dangling plot threads. Am currently enmeshed in Max Hastings' Warriors, which is a nice collection of biographical essays on soldiers, sailors and airmen who were heroes in their time, including Joshua Chamberlain, Eddie Rickenbacker, Frederick Burnaby, John Masters and Jim Gavin. Not all of them pleasant, not all of them boon companions, even, but hard fighters one and all.

deathquaker may have convinced me to go to Otakon after all. We'll see how the budget looks in August when it comes to deciding whether I want to go up for a day or get a hotel room for a couple of nights.

Fought with my new pants this morning and lost; clearly the pants were not with me, and so I went to work wearing the old cargo pants again. This afternoon I found out exactly why they didn't fit: I have tacked on 15 pounds in the last few months since my departure from PCM, which makes pants that would have been snug then unwearable now. Shit. I knew I'd gained weight, but fifteen pounds?* It's time and past time to get rolling on the diet and exercise thing that I'd told everyone I'd be able to do now that I wasn't trying to do seven impossible things before breakfast any more. Going to start small this evening by taking a post-prandial walk up the block and back, after which I shall assemble and load a bookcase.

And speaking of fat, the whole Rachel Moss/Wiscon/Something Awful mess makes me wonder (as I so often do) if the notion of respect and common courtesy is something that's mostly dead in American society. Don't get me wrong, I've flamed a few people that I thought had it coming in my time, but I never went out of my way to intentionally embarrass and humiliate a bunch of random strangers like that. It would never cross my mind to do that to Wiscon (or Minicon, or [insert convention here]) however much I might not agree with what goes on there, mainly because it's none of my damn business. People want to go to Madison every year and talk about feminism and SF/fantasy in a semi-academic environment? Fine. More power to them. They're not coming up to me at Detour or Convergence or Balticon and getting in my face about it, so what do I care? So I have to wonder WTF is wrong with Rachel Moss that she'd consider doing what she did just for the lulz. Sure, I'm a Goon, and we do hassle people in EVE and other games, BUT THEY'RE FUCKING GAMES, PEOPLE. Messing with people IRL like this is just...juvenile and shitty really doesn't begin to describe this. I can totally understand some of the rage that's been expressed over this; it's hard enough to be fat or a minority or LGBT in most places without having one of the places you've come to consider safe violated like this. I don't have any useful suggestions for people on how to deal with the aftermath of this crap, and I wish I did. badger2305 is right, though: a thoughtful, measured response is going to be a lot better in the long term than just flying off the handle.

In other news, I'm permanent at Wilbar Truck Equipment as of today, or maybe next Thursday depending on how the length of assignment/severance fee situation works out.

*For those of you scoring at home, I now weigh 440 pounds and some inconsequential ounces. Oy gevalt.

UPDATE: Hey, we've attracted some anonymous cowards from SA or /b/, not that I really care which. Bored now, so comments locked.

Managed to crank out four pages of comments on the last three StippleAPAs. I should be able to get two pages of natter done tomorrow night and then do the copying and mailing tomorrow so that my zine will arrive at Judie & David's on Saturday in time for the collation. Right now, though, it's time for bed.

Welcome to my world, Bill. BTW, the polemic doesn't taste any better in the conservative flavor. (Professor Death)

Read the whole thing.
I agree that people like Buckley are fewer these days only because the so-called "great universities" of America have turned their backs on the kind of classical education they once believed in; people with his command of the classics and the language now come to us from other venues. I think of David Drake, in particular; as much as I like Iowa, I would never rank its university with Harvard or Yale, but in these debased times, the chance of someone getting a solid grounding in the classics at Iowa is probably better than their chance of getting one at Harvard or Yale. Considering all the PC nonsense rampant in the Ivy League these days, yahmeen? (The Corner)

Unrelated: michaellee has a thoughtful post on day passes. Detour actually put the kibosh on day passes long before we ever dreamed of filling the T-Bird to bursting, but the rest of his points are well-taken.

Also, an interesting solution to the subprime mortgage mess and a worthwhile comparison of Michelle Obama to Lincoln.

To be honest, I didn't see all that much of Katsucon. I stayed out of artists' alley and the dealers' room (didn't want to spend money) only sat in on one panel, and mostly sat in one of the main corridors watching the crowd go by as Mr. B talked to various of his friends among the staff and membership. Still, having shooped a few whoops run/staffed a few conventions in my time, I did notice a few things that made me think about coming back next year.
( Cut for people who, frankly, DGAS about anime conventions )

It was a pretty good time; got to talk briefly to bam2 who was very surprised to see me there.

Well, it took the lads from Two Guys and a Truck (not to be confused with Two Men and a Truck, which isn't around here) three and a half hours -including travel time- to empty out my storage locker and move it all into the apartment. Holy crap, I have a lot of stuff...and some of it is going to the dumpster, since it's broken. So far I've resigned myself to the necessity of buying at least one floor lamp since its base is broken and the threading on the top has gotten stripped; the less said about the old microwave the better. Most of my coffee mugs seem to have survived, and I see that I packed a bunch of bowls & storage containers along with some very necessary utensils and flatware. Anyway, first priority for tonight after dinner will be getting enough boxes unpacked and flattened so that I can take the computer desk off the table, which will then move over by the thermostat by the kitchen. Hopefully I'll find the bedroom lamp in decent shape, otherwise I'll be making a little trip to Home Depot (or Walmart) tonight for some new floor lamps and appropriate bulbs. Can't unpack in the dark, after all.

Unpacking will be suspended tomorrow while I serve as chauffeur to Mr. B, who has asked me to do him the favor of driving him to Katsucon. It's a measure of how little I've had to do with local fandom that I was completely ignorant of when Katsucon was, and at that I doubt I would have agreed to drive except that Greg Ayres is one of the GoH, and it would be good to see him before Detour. Whether that's actually going to happen is questionable; while Katsucon isn't exactly Otakon or the SDCC, it's a damn sight bigger than Detour, and with all the otaku clogging the halls I figure my chances of actually spending any time with Greg are slim and none, but if I didn't make the effort they would be zero, period. Besides, if things get boring at Katsucon, I can always go across the street to the Marriott Wardman Towers and see what they've done with the place since it stopped being the Sheraton Park of fond memory.

So, yeah...booked my flight for Minneapolis this morning after making sure I could come early and stay late. Whether I'll be staff or not is up to tatsmaru, redmartel and of course stuckintraffik; I wouldn't mind helping as best I can (holding down desks & chairs, mostly) but won't be offended if they say no. I'm doing a couple of panels for marainsanity, and if that's all I do that's fine with me. We'll see.

Via John Scalzi, another amusing attempt by a newspaper writer nobody ever heard of to make themselves big by trashing Heinlein. That trick never works! :D RTWT, including the many and amusing comments.

Stayed late at the office tonight, but not because I was working - had to bash out the latest contribution to StippleAPA, which is being collated this Saturday. Got it composed and printed and will stop by a post office on the way to work in the morning...ah, who am I kidding? It'll probably get dumped in a USPS robot tomorrow night. Speaking of things fannish, I finally remembered to follow up with marainsanity and geekboyonline about some Detour stuff.

Doing the APA at work reminded me of why I don't like writing on Cowzilla. I'm too used to the normal 101-key keyboard (with a Y key that functions consistently to boot) and the laptop's kibo is laid out "wrong". It's okay for doing short pieces for LJ, but anything longer is a pain in the butt. Yeah, it's an excuse, not a reason, but any distraction from writing will keep you from it. This is why Jerry Pournelle has a "monk's cell" that contains a computer with nothing on it but word processing software and a printer; otherwise it's too easy to let your mind wander off down the Intertubes on a random walk or get stuck into playing Civ IV or EVE-Online or some damn thing. I suspect this is why most of Blood Red Skies was done during slack time at the Evil Banking Neighbor.

So the Tres Hombres of the accounting section went out to happy hour after work tonight, where we were joined by the Marketing Chick and the woman from estimating. Much griping about the staffing problem ensued - management seems to understand the idea that when you get more work you need to hire more project managers and more subcontractors, but they don't quite get the need for more bodies on the admin side as well. So right now we're in a situation very familiar to me from the Cold War days, except that now I'm the one in the outfit with way more teeth than tail. Sucks to be in the overworked tail. The griping about management reminded me of similar happy hours with folks at the Evil Banking Neighbor....oh, well. At least nobody at the construction company is trying to sell us any bullshit labeled as "empowerment", and we can still call each other faggots without worrying about creating a Hostile Working Environment. It's not the Goonfleet Construction Company, but it'll do.

The gossip promised earlier this week is actually pretty thin gruel, and more than likely no surprise to anyone who's been keeping an eye on KakkoiCon. My source commented that they were expecting an attendance of about 2000 (quite possible) and while they have plenty of experienced con-goers, seemed a little light on leadership. Well, they have Elizabeth Sloan advising them, which won't hurt, and it's amazing how under pressure somebody usually winds up stepping forward to take charge. Good luck, guys.

It's supposed to be cloudy and wet most of the weekend. Just as well; I wasn't planning on going anywhere anyway.

...mostly because I haven't been chairman of anything for a while and the SSuiseiseki icon seemed more appropriate for my role in conventions since AD 2006. However, I'm going to put the Douglas MacArthur metamask on again for this post, because it seems appropriate for all the elephant shit I'm about to ladle out. Anyway, this seems a good time to note (apropos of yesterday's post about gossip) that whatever other anime fans in Minnesota might think, the official policy of ATC and Anime Detour was that other local conventions were a Good Thing, and we wished them all the best. Not that we were going to provide seed money or membership lists or anything like that, but if they asked for advice we'd be happy to set a spell and talk.

So if I have anything to say about KakkoiCon or Otaku Takeover or Not AnokA-Kon*, keep two things in mind. First, I'm not speaking for anybody but myself any more. I happily passed the ATC Secretary torch to willow_one this year**, am not currently on the staff of AD 2008, and my status as Wombat Without Portfolio is an inside joke that in no way reflects any relationship I might have with Detour, Convergence, or any other convention out there in the Great Plains. Second, as the Russians say, I sell it to you for what I bought it. I can't guarantee the truth or falsity of anything going on out there in Minneapolis or St. Paul***, and suggest that if you really want to know, you should call around/fire off an e-mail and find out when the next meeting is.

No, no gossip today.

*Stop looking. That one's not for real.
**As soon as I get moved into an apartment of my own next month and get unpacked, I swear I'll find that ZIP disk and send it to you. No, really!
***Much less the suburbs and exurbs.

I haven't checked Steven Den Beste's anime site in a while (partially because I'm still in the middle of watching the Ai Yori Aoshi boxset and don't need any more shojo anime to lust after) but he got a link from Ed Driscoll for this piece, which is actually more of an extended comment on another post elsewhere which explains why you and I and several thousand other anime fans will never fit in in Japan. Very much worth reading.

For that matter, the rest of Driscoll's post, which features an extended quote from a Mark Steyn essay for The New Criterion about Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind and why the death of any but popular culture in America is serious business (RTWT!), is worth reading as well.

On a related topic, Orrin Judd notes how not all rockers were into filling the world with silly love songs, and provides the lyrics to "Fourth of July" (which I didn't realize was not original to X) as well as "Train In Vain", to mention but two of the depressing playlist.

I've spent most of the afternoon bashing out my zine for StippleAPA while waiting for one of Mom's friends to drop by; we're all going out to Red Lobster, which seems odd to me since you'd think there'd be better seafood joints around here, but it gets Mom out of the house and that's good. She doesn't get out much these days for various health-related reasons - even catches Mass on the tube instead of going out for it, but since she doesn't get around very well it's understandable.

Later I'll go out to Wal-Mart for some more bandages and some lunch stuff. The right leg has almost cleared up again and I'd like to keep it that way.

Well, that could have gone better. My phone is apparently dead again, I have no rental car, and as a result I'm holed up in my room at the Ramada bashing this out instead of congratulating danae and her new husband at their wedding reception. One must have the functional credit to rent a car, which I do not, so unless one of my friends with better credit than I can step forward to vouch for me, I'm liable to be chilling here tomorrow and Monday until the Kia is repaired.

I did make it to the StippleAPA collation.There had been plans to meet jolest and Jeanne for lunch before the collation, but the second death of the Katana shot those plans in the butt. So I caught the hotel shuttle to the Sprawl, the light rail to 46th Street, and the 84 bus to the Kinko's at Snelling & Grand. There I finished my apazine and printed it, after which I went back out to Snelling and sat my butt down to wait for an 84 back to Highland Park...when lo and behold, who pulls into the parking lot but jolest and Jeanne? They gave me a ride to the collation, where in addition to the new APA I also got more TX software from jolest and a couple of games from David Cargo. w00t! After the collation, J&J and I went to dinner at the Highland Cafe & Bakery, where Jeanne and I split a plate of samosas before digging into a Monte Cristo with onion rings (me) and an egg salad sandwich (Jeanne). Everything was most excellent, and I recommend it highly.

We then headed to Richfield, where I had hoped to rent a car from Advantage until the Sportage was ready, but this was doomed and full of fail. My credit card is maxed, rental agencies no longer accept debit cards from locals, and they wouldn't take Jeanne's Discover since she doesn't drive. So here I am. Think I'll read some more of Niven & Pournelle's Burning Tower and go to bed early.

Thanks to everyone who made it to Chez stuckintraffik for my goodbye party tonight. Lauren made an assload of excellent Mexican food and artichoke dip, stuckintraffik made an awesome guacamole, and many other folks brought cool stuff too. I wish it hadn't taken me two decades to find most of you, but we'll always have LJ. ;_;

jamestrainor has done yeoman work helping me get my stuff out of my apartment, and for this Murphy rewarded him by having him present when the Kia failed this afternoon. Well, as soon as it's running again he'll inherit most of my pots, pans, dishes and silverware. I'm keeping a few forks and spoons.

I have a few boxes of stuff still at the apartment but I don't expect anyone to mess with it until I have the truck and can deal with it next week. We'll see how that plan goes...thanks to the Evil Banking Neighbor taking forever to free up my distribution and insistence on sending me the check via USPS instead of just wiring it into my account with them, I may well be here until next Friday. Interesting times.

Silicon.com interviews the founder of cyberpunk regarding his new novel Spook Country and how Neuromancer has aged.
Apparently things are changing too fast for Mr. Gibson to write SF any more. WTF?

Sort of related: Frank Tipler bitches out Professor Death for living in the past when it comes to interstellar travel. Quoth Tipler:

Human will NEVER engage in interstellar travel. Only human downloads and artificial intelligences. Carrying full size human bodies, active or frozen, is too inefficient.

Fine, Frank, you stay here and send your starwisp to Alpha Centauri; the rest of us have a rendezvous with destiny out beyond the Hinder Stars. Guys like you used to say Goddard's rockets wouldn't work and Oppenheimer's bomb wouldn't go off, so I'm not too worried about your defeatist attitude on star travel.

The test this morning went okay in spite of no breakfast, no coffee, and no water until about halfway through the test when I went down to the MCTC cafeteria and spent $1.50 on a bottle of Dasani. There weren't too many questions I didn't feel good about, and most of the listening portion was a slam-dunk. We'll see if all this overconfidence is warranted when the results come in next month. It was pretty weird being the only one taking the test, though; between that and a rookie proctor I got out half an hour early after burning through the last two parts of the test.

I'm really tempted to go back to bed, but I think what I really need to do is wash up, do a real breakfast, and then head over to Diversicon.
So tired, though.

UPDATE: Diversicon's not happening for me today. Too damn tired. Sorry, materia_indigo; I really was looking forward to the panels, but I really have to crash.