personal narrative

Just a quick note to say ReaderCon was fantastic. I should be posting a video later in this week that includes short interviews I conducted with Barry Maltzberg, Samuel Delany, Junot Diaz, Ted Chaing, Charles Stross, Elizabeth Hand and many more...

Getting married tomorrow hence the lack of updates. May not be more updates for the next week, from me at least. Mr. Quackenbush I cannot speak for.

"When I moved here from the west coast," said Marlin May, a black, homosexual SF fan who I met first on Twitter, and who compared "coming out" as an SF fan to "coming out" as gay, "I didn't know a lot of people. But when I started going to con[vention]s here, I felt like I was home. I was back where I belong."

It was a sentiment I heard over and over again from people at Arisia, New England's Largest Science Fiction Convention (attendance: about 3,000). On one panel, the moderator opined that cons are “where we seem to fit. In other places is where we're playing roles,” with the deliberate irony that the convention was full of role playing games. One woman I talked to referred to Arisia specifically as a “lifestyle con”. This was a convention run by fans for fans to come and hang out and play and fuck. Which helped explain the lack of corporate presence that one finds at your average comic book convention. There were no booths for major publishers here, no b-grade sci-fi actors being paid for autographs, no developers giving advanced previews of their latest video game offering. A panel on the future of Doctor Who, which at New York or San Diego Comic-Con would have been made up of writers, producers, and/or stars of the TV show, was instead made up entirely of fans. The moderator began “Well, we've only got fifteen seconds of footage to go on, so I'm not sure what we're going to talk about,” and then the panelists started talking about their favorite episodes of the show instead. Most of the panels were simply manned by other fans, who didn't seem any more qualified to talk about a given subject then those in the audience, which was probably why the audience felt so entitled to give their own opinions at length whenever the mood arose, as if everyone was part of the panel.

I'm on a bus (with WiFi!) to Arisia, "New England's largest and most diverse science fiction and fantasy convention". I decided that after the wonderful time I had at ReaderCon, I should take a look at a more traditional SF con. I'm skeptical as to how interesting it will be for me; looking at the schedule, the literary portion of the sf world seems to take a side role to television, films, and role playing games, and there's far fewer names I recognize on the panels. But I'm willing to keep an open mind.

Also, sadly my cell phone is in the shop, which means I probably won't be able to twitter up the storm I normally do at conventions (we'll see if there's any wifi at the con). On the other hand, I now have a video camera, which means there may be some interviews to be had.

Stay tuned.

For Halloween this year we decided to march in the Greenwich Village Halloween parade Marina whipped up an awesome Dalek costume, and so in order to do battle with her, I became the Second Doctor. This picture is before the parade, when we invaded the American Museum of Natural History's annual Halloween celebration.

I've never been to Yosemite or Yellowstone, but I've been on quite a few hiking trails in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont, and been camping a few times. I even once hiked down and up the Grand Canyon. I realize now how well-maintained these trails were, wide and relatively smooth and well marked.

Little did we suspect the ordeal that was to follow when we ventured into El Yunque Rain Forest in Puerto Rico.

Today I started my new full-time job (my first as-such in years) at Hachette Filipacchi Media, publishers of many fine magazines and a division of Lagadère -- an enormous, multinational company based in France which also owns Hachette Livre which in turn owns Little, Brown (among other imprints), publishers of David Foster Wallace and Iain Banks and many other fine writers. So, good company anyway. (Ha, I made a pun. I am the funny.)

At first I was nervous during HR orientation when they told me that they didn't give root access to all computers to their users (so didn't let you install your own software) and didn't allow you to use your own computer (I'd brought my laptop in case they didn't have a computer set up for me yet). I was also nervous they would saddle me with a Windows box and make me use it. But then my superior showed me my desk, which had a PC AND an iMac, both of which I had root access to, and the PC was preloaded with VMWare with which I was able to easily install Linux. The PC has two monitors, so now I have Ubuntu Linux running on one monitor, Windows on the other, and then the iMac which setup looks something like this: