alt.polycon so far
Jan. 22nd, 2005 04:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
baratronThis is really a novel experience, typing up my alt.polycon as it's happening. On the basis my writeup of alt.polycon 11 is all on paper and I haven't managed to type it up so far, I should definitely do it as I go if it's going to get done :) alt.polycon concom of the future, please note - the sheep want free internet access in their hotel rooms. Baaa!
OK, so after spending some time with Umar yesterday, we went downstairs to get lunch, and promptly got collared by Ryk & Jeff, who were looking for help to set up the consuite. We carried a whole bunch'o' stuff upstairs, and I met![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
curiousangel, who looks exactly like his lj pictures. We somehow managed to get all the stuff unpacked and, more impressively, reach agreement on where to put everything (there was some debate about where exactly a mountain of tortilla chips should be placed, and how many bottles of Coke vs Diet Coke vs other stuff needed to be on display at any one time!). Clearly it is our Excellent Polyamorous Communication skills that sorted it out (!). I was just pleased that I was able to do something to help.
Introductory panel started at 4pm,rivka successfully named all the attendees as per tradition, then at 5pm the programming "proper" started. I went to the alt.poly Apples to Apples game design panel, and it will not surprise any current or former alt.poly posters that we wrote the following terms onto cards: NRE, more highly evolved, bipolykinkypagan, lurker ("They support me in email!") and t-shirt drawer. I imagine someone with more time on their hands and/or the full card deck in front of them will post a complete list to alt.poly :)
I went for dinner with the ever-cuteepi_lj and his cute women, okoshun, clawfoot and RA. RA & I managed to break the brain of our waitress with our combined dietary needs (heh heh heh - because there's nothing more amusing than two allergic people with almost polar opposite problems going out to dinner together). After dinner was the panel "Poly - A Good Thing or a Coping Strategy?", in which I got to say "Embrace the power of and" and wcg compared relationships to being able to program C++. It was The Geekiest Thing Ever (or at least, the geekiest thing I heard on Friday). Then I had a bit of an emotional meltdown, but various people including epi_lj and clawfoot cheered me up by playing games with me in the consuite. In case anyone cares, I greatly enjoyed Hex Hex and Tri-Versity (not sure about spelling), but found Chrononauts a bit disturbing (so I suppose I was pleased to find out that I didn't much like it before buying Chrononauts).
Today I got up late, but not too late to get to my panel, which was The Best Thing I Changed About the Way I Communicate Is...", withrivka. It was a good panel, because most people in the room managed to say something, some of the quiet people said quite a lot, and it wasn't just me and RJ talking ;) Lunch was a bit of a washout because we are currently in the middle of a snowstorm, so very few people wanted to venture outside the hotel, and the delivery places we tried didn't seem to be open, but fortunately Someone (I don't know who) had forseen this possibility and stocked the consuite with plenty of bagels and bagel toppings and stuff. There are also more tins of vegetarian chilli than anyone could eat in a lifetime (only slight exaggeration), so if the weather persists at least we won't starve. I talked to curlygrrl and Piglet (whose lj name i forget).
After lunch I went to the panel "Nominally Monogamous Partners of Poly People", which was ringmastered bykightp (and she did it admirably). Then "Out And About", about how to be out, in which interesting contributions were made by rmjwell, Ian H, trinker, australian_joe, and a bunch of other people (Joe's one needs to be done in his accent to work properly, but it consisted of saying "Oh, so you're monogamous, are you? I've heard of people who do that, it didn't work for me"!). We reached a vague conclusion that the best way of coming out for most people is to be completely matter of fact about it ("my partners and I like doing...", "one of the guys I'm seeing is..."), but this doesn't work for everyone, and that there are some positions where coming out is easier - like if you're a sysadmin and already the token geek/freak and some in which they're harder - like when non-white people are coming out to their own ethnic group where they're already seen as "not a good member of X ethnic group"...
Currently the panel "Overcoming Lesbian Sheepitude" is going on, but the programming rooms are hot, and I am SO not a lesbian sheep (the closest I've ever got to that was withalexa_robinson, and even then it only took us 2 months of getting to know each other before we confessed feelings), so I have come to decompress and have some non-people time. I expect I'll post more tomorrow.
Other comments:
lcohen so does not look like her lj pictures (she is much more lively irl)
Bernadette, Arthur & Kevin are the very epitome of Cute, and where I hope to be in 20 years time. Kevin in particular just looks like an older version of Richard. I stroked his beard because I could.
Lots of people are having a very emotional con for some reason, lots of unresolved tension in various people's relationships. Not mentioning any names because of privacy, and not actually knowing what the hell is going on in most cases. Just saying this may colour some people's writeups of the con.
Oh yeah, and if anyone's wondering - yes, I will post this to alt.poly - when I'm somewhere with a newsreader!!
OK, so after spending some time with Umar yesterday, we went downstairs to get lunch, and promptly got collared by Ryk & Jeff, who were looking for help to set up the consuite. We carried a whole bunch'o' stuff upstairs, and I met
curiousangel, who looks exactly like his lj pictures. We somehow managed to get all the stuff unpacked and, more impressively, reach agreement on where to put everything (there was some debate about where exactly a mountain of tortilla chips should be placed, and how many bottles of Coke vs Diet Coke vs other stuff needed to be on display at any one time!). Clearly it is our Excellent Polyamorous Communication skills that sorted it out (!). I was just pleased that I was able to do something to help. Introductory panel started at 4pm,
rivka successfully named all the attendees as per tradition, then at 5pm the programming "proper" started. I went to the alt.poly Apples to Apples game design panel, and it will not surprise any current or former alt.poly posters that we wrote the following terms onto cards: NRE, more highly evolved, bipolykinkypagan, lurker ("They support me in email!") and t-shirt drawer. I imagine someone with more time on their hands and/or the full card deck in front of them will post a complete list to alt.poly :)I went for dinner with the ever-cute
epi_lj and his cute women, okoshun, clawfoot and RA. RA & I managed to break the brain of our waitress with our combined dietary needs (heh heh heh - because there's nothing more amusing than two allergic people with almost polar opposite problems going out to dinner together). After dinner was the panel "Poly - A Good Thing or a Coping Strategy?", in which I got to say "Embrace the power of and" and wcg compared relationships to being able to program C++. It was The Geekiest Thing Ever (or at least, the geekiest thing I heard on Friday). Then I had a bit of an emotional meltdown, but various people including epi_lj and clawfoot cheered me up by playing games with me in the consuite. In case anyone cares, I greatly enjoyed Hex Hex and Tri-Versity (not sure about spelling), but found Chrononauts a bit disturbing (so I suppose I was pleased to find out that I didn't much like it before buying Chrononauts). Today I got up late, but not too late to get to my panel, which was The Best Thing I Changed About the Way I Communicate Is...", with
rivka. It was a good panel, because most people in the room managed to say something, some of the quiet people said quite a lot, and it wasn't just me and RJ talking ;) Lunch was a bit of a washout because we are currently in the middle of a snowstorm, so very few people wanted to venture outside the hotel, and the delivery places we tried didn't seem to be open, but fortunately Someone (I don't know who) had forseen this possibility and stocked the consuite with plenty of bagels and bagel toppings and stuff. There are also more tins of vegetarian chilli than anyone could eat in a lifetime (only slight exaggeration), so if the weather persists at least we won't starve. I talked to curlygrrl and Piglet (whose lj name i forget). After lunch I went to the panel "Nominally Monogamous Partners of Poly People", which was ringmastered by
kightp (and she did it admirably). Then "Out And About", about how to be out, in which interesting contributions were made by rmjwell, Ian H, trinker, australian_joe, and a bunch of other people (Joe's one needs to be done in his accent to work properly, but it consisted of saying "Oh, so you're monogamous, are you? I've heard of people who do that, it didn't work for me"!). We reached a vague conclusion that the best way of coming out for most people is to be completely matter of fact about it ("my partners and I like doing...", "one of the guys I'm seeing is..."), but this doesn't work for everyone, and that there are some positions where coming out is easier - like if you're a sysadmin and already the token geek/freak and some in which they're harder - like when non-white people are coming out to their own ethnic group where they're already seen as "not a good member of X ethnic group"...Currently the panel "Overcoming Lesbian Sheepitude" is going on, but the programming rooms are hot, and I am SO not a lesbian sheep (the closest I've ever got to that was with
alexa_robinson, and even then it only took us 2 months of getting to know each other before we confessed feelings), so I have come to decompress and have some non-people time. I expect I'll post more tomorrow.Other comments:
lcohen so does not look like her lj pictures (she is much more lively irl)Bernadette, Arthur & Kevin are the very epitome of Cute, and where I hope to be in 20 years time. Kevin in particular just looks like an older version of Richard. I stroked his beard because I could.
Lots of people are having a very emotional con for some reason, lots of unresolved tension in various people's relationships. Not mentioning any names because of privacy, and not actually knowing what the hell is going on in most cases. Just saying this may colour some people's writeups of the con.
Oh yeah, and if anyone's wondering - yes, I will post this to alt.poly - when I'm somewhere with a newsreader!!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-01-22 10:17 pm (UTC)Ah, sorry to hear you didn't get on with Chrononauts. I've found it quite a fun little game, but people who have already played it (and know both the inter-relations of the events and the likely missions and timelines) are at a real advantage over those who haven't.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-22 10:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-22 11:21 pm (UTC)Like it or not, those are the turning points in C20th history; a game based on counterfactuals would be a bit incomplete without them...
no subject
Date: 2005-01-23 12:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-23 05:34 am (UTC)I thought it was a brilliant comparison - looking around the room there were so many heads nodding in agreement. :) Although there was the parallel
And yes..probably one of the geekier things I've heard at the con.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-23 01:18 pm (UTC)Those things also exist in the game: the establishment of Israel in 1948, moon landings in 1969, the Manhattan project in 1943, and so on. The premise of the game is that each player is a time traveller from an alternate history, and is trying to make over the world in the image of their 'home' timeline.
The actions that the players take in the game are those which a single person could carry out (preventing assassinations, warning the Titanic, or foiling acts of sabotage), and the events are of a geopolitical scale. The US put a man on the moon as an trophy during the Cold War, which would not have happened without the settlement of WWII, which wouldn't have happened without the presence of the USSR, which wouldn't have happened without the October Revolution, which wouldn't have happened without WWI, which was triggered by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand.
I'm not arguing that events like female emancipation or the invention of antibiotics (two things which don't appear in the game) are not important, but that they are not singular events which could easily be changed by one person acting alone. If Fleming was not there to check the petri dish someone else have fulfilled his role, and female emancipation was the result of a popular movement involving tens of thousands of people.
(regardless, it's still a good game)
no subject
Date: 2005-01-23 03:14 pm (UTC)do i look more like this one?
so nice to actually meet you, btw!
no subject
Date: 2005-01-24 03:40 pm (UTC)