Having attended the previous two Mythcons, and taken chorale along to give her the experience, I'm afraid I can understand why a lot of people might not come back again. I had planned to attend the 2012 one, and see my sister, who lives in the area; now we're thinking about not attending.
The trouble, for us, is that we feel very isolated at Mythcon. We're surrounded by people who have been going to a lot of them, and who are talking to each other, and very few of them seem interested in talking to us. I don't address this to you specifically; our conversation with you in 2009, over lunch, was probably the longest conversation we had with anyone but each other—until a young woman we knew from her playing in one of my campaigns, and from livejournal, and who wasn't even at the con, arranged to have lunch with us and took us to the train station. We had a lot of social interaction in 2010 with people who weren't Mythcon regulars.
Certainly, the two of us are not very good at that social interaction stuff; both of us are fairly introverted and find it hard to break through the glass wall. But I suspect a whole lot of people who show up at Mythcon are introverted. I think it was Schopenhauer who compare humanity to porcupines huddling together for warmth; that may not be true of human beings in general, but it's true of a lot of introverts. And I think you may be seeing introverts who come in from the cold, encounter more prickles than warmth, and go away disappointed.
Now, sartorias does an admirable job of encouraging people to come back on her lj, and I'm glad to interact with her there. I just wish more fannish events would figure out ways to achieve this effect face to face. Organizations that do so have a prospect of growing; organizations that don't become insular and eventually die off. I remember being much more favorably impressed by Mythcon 13, long, long ago now; I wonder if it was just because both I and Mythcon were a lot younger then?
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Date: 2011-07-21 03:48 am (UTC)The trouble, for us, is that we feel very isolated at Mythcon. We're surrounded by people who have been going to a lot of them, and who are talking to each other, and very few of them seem interested in talking to us. I don't address this to you specifically; our conversation with you in 2009, over lunch, was probably the longest conversation we had with anyone but each other—until a young woman we knew from her playing in one of my campaigns, and from livejournal, and who wasn't even at the con, arranged to have lunch with us and took us to the train station. We had a lot of social interaction in 2010 with people who weren't Mythcon regulars.
Certainly, the two of us are not very good at that social interaction stuff; both of us are fairly introverted and find it hard to break through the glass wall. But I suspect a whole lot of people who show up at Mythcon are introverted. I think it was Schopenhauer who compare humanity to porcupines huddling together for warmth; that may not be true of human beings in general, but it's true of a lot of introverts. And I think you may be seeing introverts who come in from the cold, encounter more prickles than warmth, and go away disappointed.
Now,