Cory Doctorow has ten pages of photos from Torcon (and even a couple from the advance screening of the Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers DVD, which he briefly attended).
He’s also asking if anyone has photos of him in the suit that he wore to the Hugo awards. I caught him at the hotel lobby bar late Saturday night, and yes, his suit looked very sharp, but what I loved was his blue and white striped shirt. Cory, I’ll see if I snapped a photo of you, and hey, where’d you get that shirt?
Corrections to this entry appear at the end of this article in red, while the entry has been left as it was when it was written. Make sure you read ’em!
(I’m going to interrupt the sci-fi convention stories for this entry. Part 3 — Saturday night — will be the next entry.)
My friend and former coworker John Henson has described our house as “the best-fed bachelors I’ve ever seen”. The fridge is generally full, and it contains actual ingredients as opposed to frozen TV dinners, and the crisper actually has vegetables that have not liquefied into grey goo. As a result, I can usually take items from the fridge, confident in the knowledge that they are reasonably fresh.
With the exception of yesteday afternoon.
At around 4:30, I boiled a couple of eggs, sliced them up, and tossed them into a salad and cracked open a new bottle of Brianna’s honey mustard dressing that I’d taken from the cupboard.
At 5:00, I felt a little woozy and decided to lie down.
At 5:30, I was hugging the toilet bowl and retching effluently. As I regurgitated, it struck me that it’s been years since I’ve had to do this, and the last time involved drinking. I made a weak “rock and roll devil” sign with my right hand, even though there was nobody to see it.
At 6:00, I crawled into bed and passed out.
At 11:00, my phone rang. The display read “Meryle cell”.
“Muh?”
“Joey?”
“Sorry. Just pulling myself together.”
“Why aren’t you at Kickass Karaoke?”
“Argh. I ate some bad egg salad earlier, puked my guts out and the passed out.” I sat up in bed and noticed that aside from the inside-of-a-linebacker’s-shoe taste in my mouth, I was feeling much better.
“Get your ass over here. You’re not going to believe who’s here tonight: Milla Jovovich! Or she was here earlier, anyway. I suggest you get down here fast.”
I went to the bathroom and gave me teeth a very thorough brushing to eliminate all traces of pukey-breath, downed a glass of water, threw on a dressy shirt and one of my new pairs of shoes, and made tracks for The Rivoli.
I climbed up the stairs into one of the most busy Kickass Karaoke nights I’d ever seen. The place was packed solid with people. I worked my way to the bar to fill out a request sheet, saying “hi” to a lot of people on the way there.
Among the many birthday celebrants at Kickass Karaoke was host and karaoke impresario Carson’s brother Zack, whom you might remember from Almost Famous as “The Legendary Red Dog” and from the Fox sitcom Titus as Chris Titus’ adopted younger brother “Dave”. Zack brought Milla Jovovich along, presumably because they’re both in Resident Evil: Apocalypse which is filming somewhere in Accordion City right now.
After my number (Billy Joel’s It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me; I learned the how to play the solo on accordion by downloading it from Kazaa Lite), Carson and Zack did one, followed by a number with Zack, his girllfriend and Milla. Zack motioned for me to play backup during the verses and chorus and held the mic to the accordion for the instrumentals and solo.
Milla left shortly after the number and I didn’t have enough time to talk her into posing with the accordion. That would’ve been a keeper.
I’m going to go over to my checklist of “things to do before I die”. Ah, there it is: share karaoke stage with “Leeloo”. Check.
Don’t tell the fanboys at WorldCon, a mere five-minute cab ride away from The Rivoli. It’ll break their hearts.
Corrections
Carson informs me that:
a) The woman whom we were led to believe was Milla Jovovich was actuallyanother actress named Siena, who also is in Resident Evil: Apocalypse. Okay, she’s not as big a star, but she’s still gorgeous in that elfin way.
b) Zack doesn’t doesn’t have a girlfriend. Ladies, start your engines!
So “share karaoke stage with Leeloo” goes back on the “things to do before I die” list. Easy go, easy come back.
I still shared the karaoke stage with “Dave” from Titus, which was a hilarious if underappreciated comedy. That counts for something, doesn’t it?
Thanks for the heads-up, Carson!
On Friday night, after helping Eric Raymond score some peanut butter cookies, a guy who looked sort of familiar approached me.
“Hey Joey, when’d you take up the accordion?”
I looked at him a little more closely, trying to figure out who this guy was. There was something familiar about the eyes…
“It’s me, Tyler!”
I assumed he was Tyler from praytothemachine, but this Tyler said “I was at Mackerel.”
Mackerel was the first company I worked for after graduating from Crazy Go Nuts University. I realized who he was.
“Tyler Battle,” I said. “It’s been so long — I didn’t recognize you!”
When I last saw Tyler, about eight years ago, he was a high school student with an impressive collection of CodeWarrior T-shirts. He was sort of an intern at Mackerel. The company had a knack for taking on interns but then having no idea what to do with them. Being a responsible Chief Programmer, I took anyone with an interest in programming under my wing, because I didn’t want to see them wasting their time sitting in front of a computer with nothing to do.
“Hey,” said Tyler after a swig of Amsterdam Nut Brown Ale, “thanks for teaching me about arrays. It was useful.”
“No prob. You in programming now?”
“Yup. In fact, I go to Queen’s.” Ah, my alma mater, which I often refer to as “Crazy Go Nuts University”. It’s not just a name I lifted from Strong Bad’s Email at homestarrunner.com, it’s an apt description.
“Cool. Why’d you pick Queen’s?”
“For many reasons, including this,” he said, holding up the beer bottle.
(Queen’s is part of Canada’s ivy league, and in addition to snob value and academic excellence, it also has a reputation for being one of Canada’s biggest party schools. I enjoyed a rather extended stay at Crazy Go Nuts University.)
A guy walked up and asked me if I was the Accordion Guy.
“Yes. My name’s Joey,” I replied.
“I’m Phoenix,” he said, “and my girlfriend Deb was looking forward to meeting you, and she’s just left. Could you stay here — I think I can catch her.”
“Sure,” I said.
He ran off, and five minutes later returned with Deb, who along with Phoenix, ended up being my tour guides for the rest of the evening. Knowing that this was my first science fiction convention ever (which some of you will find very surprising), they were kind enough to explain just about everything — the differences between the various conventions, all sorts of acronyms and jargon that were unique to sci-fi cons, and the process by which a city gets selected for the World Science Fiction Convention.
At some point, we ended up in a small room where a guy was serving Purple Jesus and had a drink. A woman had just finished feeding her baby, and the cute little tyke was staring at all of us from her cradle with wide-awake eyes. Someone suggested that I play the kid a song, and I obliged with The Hokey Pokey.
At the end of the song, a guy sitting on a nearby couch wearing a police uniform from Demolition Man sat with his arm around a girl wearing a blue Starfleet uniform (blue is what science and medical officers wear, by the bye) from the 2366-2373 era of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
“Who let the mundane in?” he asked her, gesturing towards me with a motion of his head. I don’t think he meant me to hear it, but he was either drunk or perhaps one of those people who hadn’t mastered the difference between “inside voice” and “outside voice”.
Those of you who watched Babylon 5 will recognize the word “mundane” — it’s the derogatory term used by humans with psi-powers to refer to those who did not have the gift. However, the origin of the term goes farther back; all to way back to 1940, in A. E. Van Vogt’s book, Slan.
In Slan, Van Vogt created a literary archetype that lives on in various forms, from Revenge of the Nerds to the X-Men. Slans are a race of enhanced humans who have the gifts of greater intelligence and telepathy, who are feared and hated by “normal” humans for their superiority. While the book is your standard run-of-the-mill “Golden Age” sort of sci-fi, it resonated very will with science fiction fans, and no wonder: being smarter, very interested in things that other people don’t understand and shunned for those reasons, fans saw themselves in the slans. Hence the old sci-fi battle cry “Fans are slans!”
Just as black people have their fighting-back derogatory terms for white people (“ofay”, “honky” and “cracker”) and gays and lesbians have a similar sort of term for straight people (“breeder”), the slans had the term “mundane” for the “normal” humans. Fans, being slans, adopted the term for those who didn’t read or quite “get” science fiction.
I was wearing a dressy short-sleeve shirt, black tapered dress pants, kenneth Cole boots, gelled hair and cologne. Maybe I hadn’t adapted the proper speech patterns and kinesics for the venue (yes, the eye contact rules and speech patterns are different — which is why outsiders to fandom often cocktail-party-psycholoogy-diagnose them as “autistic” — you’re supposed to make as many parenthetical asides as possible, there’s a helluva lot more hand-waving, and changing your voice when mimic something else or making a point and making sound effects is strongly encouraged). I’d come in from catching up with some friends at a dance club. I had enough of the stink of mundane all over me to cause a disturbance in The Force, apparently.
At one point I jokingly remarked to Deb that “furries scared me,” using that quiet voice some people use when they admit that clowns frighten them.
“They’re good people,” said Deb, laughing.
“I keed, I keed,” I replied, using my Triumph the Insult Comic Dog voice.
“Furries scare him,” said my critic with a derisive snicker into the girl’s ear, still using the “outside voice”. Memo to girl: get your left ear checked for sound-pressure level damage on Tuesday.
The guy at the bar asked for a classic rock number and I obliged him with Steppenwolf’s Born to be Wild. The chorus is at the upper end of my vocal range, and if I don’t get a good breath in before certain notes, I fail to hit them. I almost missed one of those notes, but I got great applause and hanshakes from everyone in the room. Everyone, that is except for my newfound critic.
“I don’t know what’s worse,” he said into the girl’s ear “the accordion or his singing.”
Good thing I was in a jovial mood — hey, i usually am — otherwise I’d have introduced him to the works of Ike Turner. Not his music, but his bitch-slapping.
I let it go without confronting him or using a good comeback. It wasn’t worth it, and it seemed to be not so much any malice toward me than an attempt to impress the girl and seem clever-clever with witty put-downs (or a close approximation thereof). Mostly harmless dick-waving.
But really, a fan dissing an accordion player? That’s hot pot-on-kettle action, dont you think?
Next: The view from the mundane side, or: Enter the bridal party.
The Geek Hierarchy. There’s the abridged version and the “big massive GIF” unabridged version. Lucky Cory, at the top of the hierarchy, with the power to point to a fan and say “This one amuses me. Have a rug made out of him.” Poor furries, at the bottom of the pecking order in both versions.
Vanity Fair’s March 2001 article on furries. Includes a great photo of Katharine Gates, sex therapist and author of Deviant Desires: Incredibly Strange Sex, posing with an open shirt, but tastefully covered with a plush alsatian and a handgun. May or may not be safe for work, depending on your office environment. Well, I think she’s cute.
Transcript of the MTV Sex2K segment on furries. Unfortunately this transcript is in ALL CAPS.
A heavily-linked to essay called What is Fandom?
Not quite fandom, and more a portrait of Eric S. Raymond and his circle of friends, the Portrait of J. Random Hacker gives a glimpse into geekdom, whose Venn Diagram circle has some considerable overlap with fandom.
I decided to bike over to the Royal York last night (only non-locals refer to it as the Fairmont Royal York), and see what was going on at the various parties being held by attendees of the TorCon, 61st World Science Fiction Convention. I knew I was at the right place because the Royal York is a landmark with its name in illuminated latters near its top and because I saw a guy dressed up as a demon talking to another guy dressed up as Boba Fett hanging out outside the hotel.
The Royal York was once considered to be the hotel to go to (that crown now belongs to the King Eddie), and while it still maintains some of its prestige, so it’s very unusual to see its lobby bar packed with people in T-shirts with things like Red Dwarf or the character of Death from The Sandman silk-screened on them. The Fans have arrived!
It didn’t take long to find the party floors; a number of announcements and posters were posted on a board near the elevators. I went one flight up and arrived at a floor full of guys in glasses with Hawaiian shirts. I joked to myself that everyone looked like Larry Wall, creator of the Perl programming language.
Except for that guy, I thought, looking at a rather animated man in a black shirt, talking a handful of people in the hallway. He looks like Eric Raymond.
(For those of you who aren’t in computers, Eric S. Raymond, often referred to by his initials ESR, is one of the most outspoken spokespersons for open source software and current president of the Open Source Initiative.)
“…if McBride thinks he’s going to get a single penny from Linux, he’s terribly mistaken…”
Holy shit, it IS Eric Raymond.
Later that night, while nibbling on some cheese at the Kansas City “bid party” — a party where fans canvass people for votes to have a future WorldCon held in their city — Eric made inhumanly rapid epicycles around the snack table like a vulture on crystal meth. He was moving in Internet Time.
Since it is in my nature and also my job to be a goodwill ambassador and friend to programmers, especially open source ones, and most certainly the president of the Open Source Initiative, I decided to help.
“Hey, Eric,” I said, tapping on his shoulder. “What’cha lookin’ for?”
“Peanut Butter Cookies!” he said with manic glee, touching his fingertips together, mad-scientist style.
I understand and sympathize. “I saw some cookies over there,” I said, pointing to a coffee table on the other end of the room that had two plates of cookies. I’d seen it earlier and thought of having one, but cookies make the Baby Atkins cry.
“All right,” said Eric, and with a burst of speed that even The Flash would envy, he made a beeline for the cookies. Woe betide anyone who was in his direct path.
Hear that, SCO and Microsoft? You devils want your Linux headaches solved? Here are four words that will allow you to plunge the world into the darkness you crave so very much with slobbering lips (and perhaps engage in some hot Sauron-on-Saruman kink afterwards):
Explosive. Peanut. Butter. Cookies.
I had this exact same conversation with some Mormons just a couple of weeks back.
I think I also said “Pascal is my bookie.” I thought I was being clever-clever, but I think it went right over their heads.
Here are three videos from the DECONISM talk that I mentioned in this entry from a couple of weeks ago.
The original plan was to have Derrick de Kerckhove moderate as engineer/cyborg Steve Mann, VR artist Maurice Benayoun and philosopher Pierre Levy sat in a hot tub while discussing “fictitious truth, virtual fiction, realiction, and conjured reality” as the audience sat in a room made up to look like Plato’s Cave through the use of projections. Joi Ito was going to be present via telepresence through WiFi, Boris’ laptop and an Apple iSight.
It would’ve been pretty “cyber”, if we all hadn’t been plunged into darkness earlier that afternoon.
Troopers that they were, the gentlemen pressed on with their talk. Steve seems to have a bat-utility belt full of power cells with enough juice to power incandecsent lamps, and cyborg and artistes still sat in a tub; it just wasn’t very hot nor did it have jets.
I took some videos with my Coolpix while it was still light out. Luckily, the gallery room in which the talk took place had a large skylight, which provided enough ambient light for me to capture what the room looked like.
A view of the room, including a close-up of the hot tub. (494K QuickTime) “Arr! Here be cyborgs!”
Filling the tub, requests to conserve water be damned! (164K QuickTime) Forgive the sideways shot — I was thinking like a still camera guy (are there any cheap utilities for rotating video 90 degrees?). “We must preserve our precious bodily fluids.”
The cyborgs got me! (117K QuickTime) “He’p me, he’p me, he’p me p’ease, ah been hyp-mo-tized!”
While I’m writing up the story of the stag (and figuring out how the photo album feature in Blogware works — it seems pretty cool), here are some photos from Saturday’s highjinks…
Me and the groom, enjoying expensive but tasty martinis. Derek, being the groom-to be, is supposed to be the centre of attention, so I bequeathed to him my jester’s hat and flashing necklace. I love the expression on my face: I seem to be saying “Goodbye, Meester Bond.”
Welcome to Accordion City, Marius! Derek lives in Switzerland, and Marius is a friend of his from over there who’s come all this way to be at his friend’s wedding.
I love it when a plan comes together! The organizer of this boys’ night out takes a break to savour the fruits of his labour.
Trouble, Incorporated. Me and Dhimant. We look like two guys who just got their first VC money for an Internet start-up. “Pet food! On the Internet! H1-B visa, here we come!”
