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Swancon 2011
14 years ago
General
Inane Rambling of a Demented Predator
Slightly delayed, since I spent the rest of the long weekend floored by a particularly nasty Con Crud. Anyway - Swancon 36/Natcon 50 - I *did* get to go to some of it, thanks to the awesome generosity of [info]anysia and [info]aikidomayland, and to whom I am very grateful
Thursday night was quite good as far as panels go - Original work to Film, good and bad ( i.e. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? To Blade Runner - Good. The Spirit comic to film - gaggingly awful. )
Then 'Cranking Up The Cliche' with Tom & Tina Eitelhuber, in which the audience try and come up with the most cliched epic fantasy possible. We ended up with the following
Village boy, in reality the rightful heir to the drought-stricken kingdom, sets out to rescue his family and love interest from slavery, after the weak king, acting from advice from his evil brother, obliterates the village to try and avert a prophesy. Instead - of course - this sets the prophesy in motion, and our hero sets off to locate the Crystal Sword of Knowledge, acquiring a full set of associates - a princess incognito who will become Hero's True Love, a halfling bard for comic relief, a barbarian, exiled court wizard, and a washed-up ex-hero.
Drama ensues in encounters with Amazon warriors who later become allies, and a variety of feeble mooks that the evil uncle sends instead of his best general, thus ensuring he has to try it again and again instead of getting it done right the first time.
Ex-hero dies heroically to buy the party time to escape overwhelming odds.
Eventually, the Hero storms the ancestral castle accompanied by an Amazon army and a slave revolt. The drought breaks, and the Hero has a climactic sword fight against his evil uncle amidst a violent thunderstorm. Uncle is duly dispatched, to the enjoyment of all, but is revealed in the epilogue to have been the puppet of the Greater Evil that will the antagonist in the sequels.
So, would you watch it?
Then there was an anime panel, but it's not a medium I'm very familiar with. After that, home for a few hours sleep, and back to the con.
[info]ratfan was on the first panel - Writing in a Gaming World. Can RPGs help an author nut out a plot, what are the hazards, etc. The answers was yes, they certainly help - even statting up your lead characters helps you keep their abilities straight in your mind. And a good quote from Paul Kidd - "Gamer's don't talk about the games where they *won*, they talk about the games where it all went wrong and they nearly doomed everybody"
Then panelists were quizzed on how their TV viewing as children informed their creative brains - interesting! To the point of transcribing dialogue so they could figure out how the writer pulled that trick off, etc.
Then 'Ready, Steady, Genesplice! : Building a better Unicorn' by [info]rdmasters & [info]leecetheartist, a event where three creative teams had to come up with ad campaigns for novel genetic chimeras. They were short an artist and I was roped in :D The first brief was a hand-bag sized guard animal, based on the Tasmanian Devil. Since I was representing the illegal back-alley genesplicer, and could ignore CITES, ethics, or basic empathy, I was quite pleased with my Economy-Sized Face-Eating Pocket Monster - Now With Extra-Contagious Facial Tumours! The bomb-disposal & hedgetrimming Star-nosed Pangoplatypus was well received as well, and at no risk of leprosy unlike the armadillo-based designs from the other teams.
Then after lunch we had Grant Watson's 'Walt's Twilight Kingdom' with the Disney films of 1951-77. Very interesting! Especially the gorgeous design work by ??? Who went on to do the early Little Golden Books.
Then Climbing Out of the Refrigerator - Great Women in Comics, with Kitty & Brin - also interesting. It occurred to me that Alan Moore has written a bunch of comics with strong female leads - The Ballad of Halo Jones being a good example, when the only male character of any significance was General Luiz Cannibal, and he doesn't appear until the last book.
I did manage to catch one of the academic papers - Lovecraft & the Apocalyptic Sublime, about 'The Shadow Out Of Time' - Interesting! The horror of what the Great Race were doing to other species hadn't really occurred to me before.
Then off to the second half of Nu Who 2, about Matt Smith's first 13 episodes. Fun :D
Then 'An Appreciation for the Abysmal' : Hilariously Bad Movies - On which there were many clips. Many many clips, each more horrendous than the last. The Turkish Star Wars, for example. The ludicrous SFX scene from Shark Attack 3 too, but not alas, *that* line.
After dinner a managed to run Call of Cthulhu, as described elsewhere, but I did manage to catch some of the Gentlemen's Entomological Club, with Dirk Flintheart. A competitive lying game, with wine. The speakers certainly seemed to be getting quite tipsy towards the end, what with the elaborate tales of Hwandan tribesmen who used their armpit hair as fish nets, and the way the explorer's orangutan companion was welcomed as a god.
Then home. Missed Saturday, alas, so no Lovecraft panel, Masquerade, or Fan Sing-a-long for me, alas. I do wonder how the Sing-a-long went, actually, given that when Swancon had one at the Hilton we got complaints from the fifth floor.
Sunday! Spent all morning playing a demo-game set up by the Napoleonics Wargaming Society - the English Aerial Navy, vs the Martian Indigenes. The Martians had sandworms and a giant flying squid :D A combination of Gaslight and Space 1889. Lots of Fun. Ended with a win for the British, barely, ready to tow the sacred flying island back to the British liftwood plantations. Can't let the natives keep them, what? Damned foriegners wouldn't know what to do with them.
After lunch - Season Four of Classic Who, and a tribute to the late Liz Sladen, which left most of the audience quite tearful. Much mockery of The Underwater Menace Ep. 3, the only one still in the archives, sad to say.
Then '2010 in Film' with Tom & Tina Eitelhuber, some of the quotes from which I posted earlier. Also amusing - Tom, after a series of stinkers, saying "This next one better make up for that" and the next one being Avatar : The Last Airbender to the howls of the audience.
Evening very slow - only things on the schedule that weren't cancelled were the 2012 Doomcon launch, the Awards Ceremony, and Damien Magee's Classic TV session - ITVs children's shows of the late Sixties, and Seventies. Catweazle, Timeslip, Ace of Wands, Arthur of The Britons and The Feathered Serpent. The later noteworthy for Patrick Troughton as an evil Aztec priest, and 'Britons' for Tom Baker with Hilariously mismatching hair and beard. Catweazle of course is a hoot, and I might well steal the Ace of Wands plot for Cthulhu. Timeslip, however... Bit too silly, or too reliant on earlier episodes we didn't see.
[info]cupidsbow did show some nice fanvids in the evening though - including one based on Thoroughly Modern Millie, that alas I can't seem to find on Youtube.
So, that was Swancon - a chance to meet up with friends, be involved in some interesting discussions, see some amusing video, and play some inriguing games. I'm glad I got to go, and just wish I could have afforded the whole thing.
Thursday night was quite good as far as panels go - Original work to Film, good and bad ( i.e. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? To Blade Runner - Good. The Spirit comic to film - gaggingly awful. )
Then 'Cranking Up The Cliche' with Tom & Tina Eitelhuber, in which the audience try and come up with the most cliched epic fantasy possible. We ended up with the following
Village boy, in reality the rightful heir to the drought-stricken kingdom, sets out to rescue his family and love interest from slavery, after the weak king, acting from advice from his evil brother, obliterates the village to try and avert a prophesy. Instead - of course - this sets the prophesy in motion, and our hero sets off to locate the Crystal Sword of Knowledge, acquiring a full set of associates - a princess incognito who will become Hero's True Love, a halfling bard for comic relief, a barbarian, exiled court wizard, and a washed-up ex-hero.
Drama ensues in encounters with Amazon warriors who later become allies, and a variety of feeble mooks that the evil uncle sends instead of his best general, thus ensuring he has to try it again and again instead of getting it done right the first time.
Ex-hero dies heroically to buy the party time to escape overwhelming odds.
Eventually, the Hero storms the ancestral castle accompanied by an Amazon army and a slave revolt. The drought breaks, and the Hero has a climactic sword fight against his evil uncle amidst a violent thunderstorm. Uncle is duly dispatched, to the enjoyment of all, but is revealed in the epilogue to have been the puppet of the Greater Evil that will the antagonist in the sequels.
So, would you watch it?
Then there was an anime panel, but it's not a medium I'm very familiar with. After that, home for a few hours sleep, and back to the con.
[info]ratfan was on the first panel - Writing in a Gaming World. Can RPGs help an author nut out a plot, what are the hazards, etc. The answers was yes, they certainly help - even statting up your lead characters helps you keep their abilities straight in your mind. And a good quote from Paul Kidd - "Gamer's don't talk about the games where they *won*, they talk about the games where it all went wrong and they nearly doomed everybody"
Then panelists were quizzed on how their TV viewing as children informed their creative brains - interesting! To the point of transcribing dialogue so they could figure out how the writer pulled that trick off, etc.
Then 'Ready, Steady, Genesplice! : Building a better Unicorn' by [info]rdmasters & [info]leecetheartist, a event where three creative teams had to come up with ad campaigns for novel genetic chimeras. They were short an artist and I was roped in :D The first brief was a hand-bag sized guard animal, based on the Tasmanian Devil. Since I was representing the illegal back-alley genesplicer, and could ignore CITES, ethics, or basic empathy, I was quite pleased with my Economy-Sized Face-Eating Pocket Monster - Now With Extra-Contagious Facial Tumours! The bomb-disposal & hedgetrimming Star-nosed Pangoplatypus was well received as well, and at no risk of leprosy unlike the armadillo-based designs from the other teams.
Then after lunch we had Grant Watson's 'Walt's Twilight Kingdom' with the Disney films of 1951-77. Very interesting! Especially the gorgeous design work by ??? Who went on to do the early Little Golden Books.
Then Climbing Out of the Refrigerator - Great Women in Comics, with Kitty & Brin - also interesting. It occurred to me that Alan Moore has written a bunch of comics with strong female leads - The Ballad of Halo Jones being a good example, when the only male character of any significance was General Luiz Cannibal, and he doesn't appear until the last book.
I did manage to catch one of the academic papers - Lovecraft & the Apocalyptic Sublime, about 'The Shadow Out Of Time' - Interesting! The horror of what the Great Race were doing to other species hadn't really occurred to me before.
Then off to the second half of Nu Who 2, about Matt Smith's first 13 episodes. Fun :D
Then 'An Appreciation for the Abysmal' : Hilariously Bad Movies - On which there were many clips. Many many clips, each more horrendous than the last. The Turkish Star Wars, for example. The ludicrous SFX scene from Shark Attack 3 too, but not alas, *that* line.
After dinner a managed to run Call of Cthulhu, as described elsewhere, but I did manage to catch some of the Gentlemen's Entomological Club, with Dirk Flintheart. A competitive lying game, with wine. The speakers certainly seemed to be getting quite tipsy towards the end, what with the elaborate tales of Hwandan tribesmen who used their armpit hair as fish nets, and the way the explorer's orangutan companion was welcomed as a god.
Then home. Missed Saturday, alas, so no Lovecraft panel, Masquerade, or Fan Sing-a-long for me, alas. I do wonder how the Sing-a-long went, actually, given that when Swancon had one at the Hilton we got complaints from the fifth floor.
Sunday! Spent all morning playing a demo-game set up by the Napoleonics Wargaming Society - the English Aerial Navy, vs the Martian Indigenes. The Martians had sandworms and a giant flying squid :D A combination of Gaslight and Space 1889. Lots of Fun. Ended with a win for the British, barely, ready to tow the sacred flying island back to the British liftwood plantations. Can't let the natives keep them, what? Damned foriegners wouldn't know what to do with them.
After lunch - Season Four of Classic Who, and a tribute to the late Liz Sladen, which left most of the audience quite tearful. Much mockery of The Underwater Menace Ep. 3, the only one still in the archives, sad to say.
Then '2010 in Film' with Tom & Tina Eitelhuber, some of the quotes from which I posted earlier. Also amusing - Tom, after a series of stinkers, saying "This next one better make up for that" and the next one being Avatar : The Last Airbender to the howls of the audience.
Evening very slow - only things on the schedule that weren't cancelled were the 2012 Doomcon launch, the Awards Ceremony, and Damien Magee's Classic TV session - ITVs children's shows of the late Sixties, and Seventies. Catweazle, Timeslip, Ace of Wands, Arthur of The Britons and The Feathered Serpent. The later noteworthy for Patrick Troughton as an evil Aztec priest, and 'Britons' for Tom Baker with Hilariously mismatching hair and beard. Catweazle of course is a hoot, and I might well steal the Ace of Wands plot for Cthulhu. Timeslip, however... Bit too silly, or too reliant on earlier episodes we didn't see.
[info]cupidsbow did show some nice fanvids in the evening though - including one based on Thoroughly Modern Millie, that alas I can't seem to find on Youtube.
So, that was Swancon - a chance to meet up with friends, be involved in some interesting discussions, see some amusing video, and play some inriguing games. I'm glad I got to go, and just wish I could have afforded the whole thing.
