calimac

At the LACon panel on "Memories of Worldcons Past," I asked each panelist to begin by identifying their first Worldcon, and by telling an anecdote about it, preferably something funny and that reveals something about how worldcons past were different than they are now. Here, somewhat expanded, is mine:

It turns out I've been around longer than any of the other panelists. My first Worldcon was 1976 in Kansas City, MidAmeriCon - "Big MAC" it was called, mostly out of fears that it would be uncontrollably large.

For most of their existence, Worldcons had been under a thousand people. But lately they'd been getting larger, and in the last few years increasing rapidly: 1972 had 2000 people, 1973 had 3000, 1974 had 3500. The 1975 Worldcon was the first one in Australia, so nobody expected that to be very large, but what would happen in 1976? Would it be 4000, 6000, or what?

In the end it turned out to be not much more than 3000, but the convention went into a frenzy of planning for a really large turnout. Instead of the traditional banquet to present the Hugos, they rented a local theater. That was the first time that was done. Another innovation of MidAmeriCon's was the invention of escalating membership fees: if you bought early, your fee was less expensive than if you bought later. This is now so normal that many may not be aware it was once an innovation, but at the time many people were furious at this.

But the biggest innovation of all had to do with security. MidAmeriCon decided that using name badges as authorization to enter convention areas wouldn't work: they were too easily lost, and people would wear them in various spots, some hard to see or hard for security to spot quickly when trying to clear large numbers of people.

So they came up with something new and never done before, and oh how they chortled in the progress reports when they told the members about it. But they wouldn't say what the security device was, and you didn't find out until you checked in for the convention and found that it was:

A hospital I.D. bracelet. Plastic, with the MAC logo printed on it.

You were supposed to wear these for the entire five days of the convention. In theory, at least, they were unremovable without being cut off. But wearing an I.D. bracelet in the hospital is one thing, during a convention was another. They became a nuisance, sliding around your wrist, as you tried to use your hands; and they got clammy and grotty if you tried to shower with the bracelet on.

So, unlike the escalating membership fees, as far as I know no other fannish convention has tried something like that, though other types of conventions have.

Sunday I was feeling poorly most of the day, so I skipped out on logging in to any program items. Had I been scheduled for a panel I could have made it, but anything I didn't have to do seemed a bit much.

But by evening I was a little better, so I watched the Hugo Awards ceremony - almost the whole thing - even though I had no horses in this race. I'm really out of it as contemporary SF and fandom go, and few of the finalists in any category had I even heard of. (Official statistics)

When I signed up for programming, I had to join the convention, and this made me eligible to vote for the Hugos. So I downloaded the finalist packet, but I didn't have time before the deadline to do very much with it, and I didn't vote. I read a few of the short fiction nominees, but, as it happens, none of the ones I read were among the award-winners.

The only Dramatic Presentation finalist I saw, in either category, was KPop Demon Hunters. I rather doubt I've had put it in first place, but on the other hand the other movies in that category were on my not-see list, so maybe I would have.

Only three or four people buried down amid the credits in the fan categories had I heard of at all. Once upon a time I'd have known everybody in those categories personally.

But I enjoyed the ceremony, even if it was a parade of people I hadn't heard of except for some of the presenters (and a few winners: Picacio, Clarke, Scalzi). I appreciated the acknowledgements that many of the sf community weren't there because of difficulties in travel to the US, I enjoyed the unusual animal facts from emcee T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon).

Now I want to read the Related Work winner (Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer) and the Graphic Story winner (Fred Fordham's adaptation of A Wizard of Earthsea).

I had two online panels in the early wee hours this morning, at just about the time when I normally would finally fall into actual sleep. I didn't do that; instead, it looks as if I'm going to be tired, but without actual sleep, all day. At least I stayed awake and alert for both panels. But my camera wouldn't turn on for either panel, and nothing the tech staff did would fix it.

"Fandom as a Found Family": We all agreed that fandom is, or has been, a refuge for friendless children on the autism spectrum, and that the biggest obstacle is the lack of introductory social skills by many fans. Formal introductory material - panels explaining cons to new attendees, guidebooks to lingo and customs - are filling in the gap.

"Memories of the Worldcons Past": Mostly wound up as a comparison between Worldcons of the 1980s and today. Fewer opportunities to run into big names casually, but more caffeeklatches to meet them in small groups. (Again, formal introductory material filling in the gaps.) More dazzle. A feeling that Worldcons, although they haven't shrunk in size, are now the smaller siblings of the likes of DragonCon and Comic-Con.

So it's the first day of the Worldcon, and I watched an all-Zoom virtual panel, on the topic of "Can We Enjoy the Art of Unethical People?" The Zoom worked very well, everybody was clearly visible as well as audible. The Discord comment channel sucked, though. I couldn't figure out how to submit a post; no instructions I found online worked, and the con's e-mail help line was worse than useless.

In another universe, I'd haven taken notes and submitted a summary, but I think it's been recorded and you can watch it later. What I have instead is some of my own thoughts in response.

First I should say, that we in classical music have faced this dilemma for centuries. Richard Wagner and Ludwig van Beethoven are unquestionably two of the greatest composers there ever were; we could not do without their music; yet they were both thoroughly unsatisfactory human beings.

Our answer has been yes, we listen to their music, while acknowledging their personal failings. The only exception is in Israel, which maintains an unofficial boycott against Wagner.

Of course, the fact that they're both long dead makes it easier; they're not making any money off our purchases, and this distinction was made at the panel; one panelist mentioned that the estate of Roald Dahl is trying to make amends or at least apologies for his failings.

Yet I'm a little uncomfortable with the dead v. alive distinction. If they're not in prison, a person needs to be able to make a living; is it right to withhold money you would otherwise spend on their work because of their past misdeeds? On the other hand, continuing unapologetic offenders like Rowling - the idea of giving them money is repulsive, and there's probably enough cretins who agree with them that they won't starve.

The panel also talked a lot about the difference between misdeeds in life and as depicted in fiction. Stories being as they are, you have to expect repulsive things to happen often enough. How does the author convey that they don't approve? General opinion was, don't worry about it; you can't control what people think. Nobody mentioned Resnick's Kirinyaga, but that would have been a good example. Koriba gets his comeuppance, but not until the last story; the first one seemed to a lot of readers as if he had authorial approval.

Sometimes you have to depict misbehavior to convey the point. Someone brought up the n-word in Huck Finn. It would have been false to the setting of the story to leave that out; that's the way people talked then, and we need to know it. That the word didn't have the encoding then that it does now was one important point.

On the difference between life and fiction in general, I remember an old comment: "Murder is illegal. Writing about murder is not. Sex is not illegal. Writing about sex is." Of course restrictions on writing about sex have loosened over the years, but it's still a good distinction.

The question was asked, should we write about authors we disfavor? Yes, we should; people need to know. One panelist recounted having been, in her youth, a big David Eddings fan, only much later learning of his unethical behavior and being taken aback. I was taken aback by that, as I hadn't heard anything about Eddings. So I looked him up and found he'd been imprisoned for child abuse before he became an author. This was on the public record but was not generally known until after he died - or by me until just now.

Tim Curry, who just died, got a mention. His original fame was for Rocky Horror, which surprises some people today, though it's where I first heard of him. He recently wrote: Is Rocky Horror problematic today? Yes it is. But remember it was written just a few years after being actively gay ceased being illegal in England, and it was daring and necessarily transgressive at the time.

There was much more to the panel, but that's enough for a post.

There is one additional thing I'm using AI for, besides asking it to find words that I know but have slipped my mind. And that is, finding commands or fixing glitches in programs and apps. This occurs constantly.

For instance, the upcoming Worldcon is using Discord for its chat function, and while I've used Discord before when Mythcon employed it for the same purpose, I didn't much like it and it's been a long tiem since then. But as a panel moderator, I'd best use it, so I followed the con's advice to try it out and get used to it.

And then I had to ask Google AI, "How do you log off Discord?", a question I remember having to ask some help function on a previous occasion. The answer is that the log off command is hidden at the bottom of a non-obvious menu.

Sometimes the answer doesn't work, or it refers you to a command that I can't find where it's supposed to be, so I resubmit the question with "I've done X" or "There is no Y" added in. The following is an actual example from today of my adding no fewer than five "I've done X" to my original question because none of the previous answers worked.

in Excel, I've highlighted the cells I want to print, and I've cleared the print area, and I've re-selected the data range, and I've selected Set Print Area, and I've changed the print setting to Print Active Sheets, and the cells are not empty or hidden, but when I go to print them, I get an error message that says "we didn't find anything to print"

The actual solution turned out to be "close the program and start over," which hadn't occurred to me because I'd already tried that and it didn't work the first time.

If software makers had access to AI question logs concerning their products, they could learn a lot about what users can't figure out. In the meantime, these glitchy programs and their stupid user interfaces are as bad as AI.

I came upon a list of lesser-known Cumberbatch film performances, and decided to watch a few, mostly late at night in between fitfully trying to get to sleep. So my evaluations may not be totally reliable.

Starter for 10 (2006)
As in "starter question, ten points." James McAvoy plays a whiz kid student at the University of Bristol who aims at winning at a varsity tv trivia quiz show. He barely makes the Bristol team, and then both his quizzing and his academic work, as well as the movie, are derailed by his attempts at beginning a love life. Benedict Cumberbatch plays the prissy team captain, who chokes under pressure. Intermittently and modestly amusing.

Amazing Grace (2006)
I actually saw this when it came out. I didn't get very far on a rewatching. Recounts the political campaign by haughtily moral William Wilberforce (Ioan Gruffudd) to outlaw the slave trade in the British Empire around 1800. Benedict Cumberbatch plays his semi-reliable ally William Pitt. Pitt, as you'll recall from The Madness of King George, where he was played by Julian Wadham, was a rigid and rather characterless fellow, so Cumberbatch doesn't have much to do. Like many political history movies, it's written mostly as pontifications based on the screenwriters' reading of the history books. I quit after Pitt outlines his secret plan to become Prime Minister, which relies both on a surety of future knowledge and an oversimplification of those events that stretches credibility.

Four Lions (2010)
Whackabout comedy about a group of incompetent radicalized British Muslims who want to become suicide bombers. Comedy on such a subject is a risky business, and to enjoy this movie you have to overlook that (spoiler alert, sort of) they do all manage to blow themselves up, and a lot of people get killed, not all by the terrorists. The movie tries to brush that aside as incidental or insignificant. It's the erratic pacing, rather than the content, which makes this film duller than it could be. Benedict Cumberbatch has a cameo role as a police negotiator.

Black Mass (2015)
An unrecognizable Johnny Depp plays real-life Boston mob boss "Whitey" Bulger, who throughout this film is more usually called Jimmy. Focuses on his subsidiary career as an informant for the FBI on the competing mobs and whether the FBI gets anything worthwhile out of this. (Mostly they don't.) Kevin Bacon plays the FBI supervisor who's disgusted by the whole thing. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Jimmy's respectable and politically successful brother Billy, who maintains a distant but friendly relationship with Jimmy but utterly refuses to do any favors solicited by third parties or otherwise get involved on Jimmy's behalf. (Jimmy, who is utterly ruthless, especially in his way of assuring minions that they haven't screwed up just before he has them whacked, isn't foolish enough to ask Billy for anything.) Quite a powerful true-crime thriller.

Brexit: The Uncivil War (2019)
British tv movie about the Brexit referendum campaign. Benedict Cumberbatch stars as Dominic Cummings, the campaign director for Vote Leave, and the focus is entirely on Cummings and his unorthodox methods of running the campaign. He succeeds by targeting non-voters and by appealing entirely to their emotions rather than making intellectual arguments. It's only after he wins that he begins to realize what an uncontrolled id he has unleashed. This, unlike Amazing Grace, is how you make a movie about politics, and Cumberbatch is set loose to give an impressive performance. First-rate, if the subject interests you.

So here's another one. A few days ago I lost my datebook, a little paper-and-pencil calendar in which I write all my appointments. (I don't like electronics for this purpose.) It occasionally disappears and usually turns up again within a few days, but this time I wasn't so sure: a lot of things have vanished from obvious spots lately and never turned up again, like a bill on the kitchen table.

So I set out to find a substitute and re-create the calendar. Instead of mail-ordering another, my usual source, because I didn't want to wait, I checked the few remaining office supply stores. I found the ideal substitute in the office section of Walmart, of all things.

At this time, my upcoming appointme3nts are mostly medical and concerts, the latter not starting till next month. I sorted through my tickets, and checked websites of vendors I subscribe to that haven't sent their tickets yet. My main medical provider lists all my upcoming appointments online, but others, such as dentists, don't. The ones I couldn't reach by phone were very local, so I just went in and asked at the counter.

I know I got everything this way, because a day or two ago the original datebook turned up. In a place I had already looked through thoroughly. Elven intervention, both positive and negative, is not out of the question.

Having returned from my trip with a week yet to run on the Menlo Festival, I was able to attend a few more events. I didn't have tickets to any of the mainstage events, long since sold out and I hadn't wanted to plan far enough in advance to get tickets.

But the concerts by the young professionals in their 20s, and by the teenage students, are free and tickets aren't available until 9 AM on the morning of the event, at which point they vanish rapidly. So I got to a few of those.

The highlights of these events were the Saint-Saëns Piano Trio No. 1 in F, Op. 18, one of the first attempts to make chamber music that sounded distinctively French, full of unusual and striking effects; and Mozart's Divertimento for string trio in Eb, K. 563. The pre-concert remarks warned that this was an unusually long work, but I'd never heard it before, despite its size and importance and the fact that it's fully mature Mozart. I had the rare experience during this performance of falling into a state of perfect contentment. The music could have gone on indefinitely as far as I cared. Even my daily aches and pains vanished for the length of the work. I got to speak to violinist Julia Schilz afterwards to thank her for a performance that really touched the soul.

This is the last year the founding artistic directors are in office, but I expect Menlo will continue on its wonted path of emphasizing the classics. Even incoming co-artistic director Dmitri Atapine, who's been known to play Ligeti's Cello Sonata at the Festival, explained why the student concerts stick to the heart of the repertoire. Sometimes the students come in eager to play new and modern works, he says, but then he asks, "How many Haydn quartets have you played?" When the answer is "none," he says they need more grounding in the classics first.

Also in the music biz, Lyric Theatre did another "Gilbert and Sullivan Sing-Off." Following the same format though with different content than last year's, it took the form of a supposed competition between three G&S companies, one which plays the works straight, one which tinkers with them - especially gender-swapping - and one which is just goofy. A lot of unusually Loud singers this time, the most effective of which was Leslie Oesterich in the gender-swapped role of Sir Roderic singing "When the Night Wind Howls." The theme of the show's script was that community theater groups, even of contradicting artistic principles, support each other's endeavors.

We order groceries weekly online via the website of the chain our local store belongs to. We set it for pickup the next morning: I drive in, park in the designated pickup spot, and phone the automated system which informs the staff that I'm there.

When this service first started up, during the pandemic, there were a lot of problems at the pickup level, but they've gotten sorted out, and save for an occasional glitch - fixed promptly and cheerfully on inquiry - that part works fine.

The new problem is with the store's website. If you type a product into the search box, instead of getting a list of matching items, you're getting a blank. The framing is there, but there's no items in the box. This now is happening for category search as well. Of course I've reported this, but who knows if anyone reads that. (The problem is not limited to one browser either.)

This would happen occasionally in the past, but then get fixed within an hour. But while I was gone on my trip, B. reported it had become consistent. The only things she could order were from the past-shopping list in our account, which gives product entries for most (strangely, not all) of what we've bought lately, and since that's most of what we want, it manages.

I just placed the weekly order for the first time since I came back. Sure enough, both item search and category search are broken, and unlikely to fix themselves.

However, I found a workaround. Anyone with a humanistic soul is going to hate this, but it's the store's own fault for not getting the regular search working.

They have an A.I. search. I'm not doing anything fancy; I just type the name of a product into the A.I. search box, and that brings it up so I can order it. I hate A.I., but I feel forced into this, and at least it's not making me have sophisticated intellectual interactions with it.

Since Mythcon was being held in a slice of territory entirely new to me, I decided to spend a little post-Mythcon time exploring that territory further. What most interested me was the Oklahoma Panhandle. Center of the Dust Bowl long ago (I found Ken Burns's documentary on that subject one of his more successful efforts), it interests me as a geography buff as one of the few places in the US where as many as five states are so close together. It would be fun, I thought, to tag all five of them.

So that's what I did. Monday after the con, I drove northwest through Oklahoma, visited the Washita Battlefield NHS, where Custer massacred the Indians instead of the other way around (captions in the site museum are very sorrowful about the whole thing), cut through a corner of Texas, back into Oklahoma, and finally into Kansas, where I stayed for the night in the improbably-named border town of Liberal.

Tuesday was the real action day. I was in KS-OK-TX-OK-KS-CO-OK-NM-OK-TX-NM. Colorado was the most challenging of these: thirty miles of unpaved road. Generally, though, it was pleasant. The temperature was hot, but the fields of grain - mostly cattle feed - were green and the aspect pleasant. People I stopped and chatted with, at museums and gas station convenience stores, were friendly and agreeable. Only in the very farthest extent of the panhandle did the gently rolling land turn jagged, with buttes and arroyo canyons. It would have been a good spot to take a photo for one of those "what state is this?" competitions; few would have been likely to guess Oklahoma.

In the Oklahoma town of Goodwell, home of the local college, is a museum on the history of the panhandle. This slab of territory has a curious jurisdictional history. Before it was attached to Oklahoma Territory in 1890, it wasn't part of anything, the victim of political machinations and accidental omission back in the 1850s. For forty years it had no US civil authority whatever, and settlers came in at their own risk (not usually staying long, more because of the brutal climate than the lack of any legal right to buy their lands.) Because of this absence, it was known as No Man's Land, and the museum in Goodwell is the No Man's Land Museum.

Nobody was at the museum when I arrived at the 10 am opening time except me and the curator. She asked me, what did I know about No Man's Land, and I answered with a brief version of my understanding of the jurisdictional history. "That's good," she said. "A lot of people come in here expecting a museum about World War I."

Venturing further into New Mexico, I explored two further NPS sites: the Capulin Mountain NM, an extinct cinder cone where you can drive a road that twists up the mountainside as far as the crater; and next day to Salinas Pueblo Missions NM, three abandoned spots in the desert which all have the same thing: fragments of the buildings of a once-thriving pueblo, and the better-preserved remains of a Spanish church built in the 17th century and which flourished for a few years until, partly due to Spanish interference, the pueblo began to collapse.

DT would not be happy with the historical interpretation either here or at Washita, so nobody tell him about it.