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Panel Goodness!
18 years ago
BackBreaker had it's third annual "Coffee, Tea, and Memes" panel last night at Further Confusion. And I'd say it's the best one yet.
Of course, I was too sick to attend last year, so I'm not an entirely fair judge.
The idea of the panel, for those who don't know, is that we (me,
baroncoon, 
Smudge, 
Tom_Clowder, and Dr. Fox as moderator) have a panel where coffee, tea, and cookies are provided and we pass around a hat in which the audience puts in ideas for discussion topics. Every 15 minutes the moderator picks a topic out of the hat and checks that it is a valid topic (no current events, religion or sex), and then passes it to us. If we all think we can talk to the subject, we announce the topic and hold forth on it.
Smudge noted a couple years ago, that when we were sitting around the common area of a con, talking about random subjects, we would attract a small crowd of onlookers. And her idea was to formalize it as a con panel, and invite audience participation.
We had a very good audience last night. At peak, we had about 16 people, and they generally stayed the full hour and a half the panel was scheduled for, and many stayed later. We ran about about another hour and half over before things really broke up, and the room was needed for someone else (I'm sure the con scheduled the room to be empty after us with malice aforethought).
The selection of topics we got was very good. There were some where one or another of us didn't think they could talk to the subject, but there wasn't anything automatically out, and nothing where more than one of us was unsure.
We ended up covering "Your favorite furry anime" (different votes from everyone), "whimsical characters in a serious story", "will furries take over the world?" (narf), "which is better as a furry background, hard SF or soft SF?", "equines" (that was a bit freeform), "what would a culture look like if it never had representative art" (damn alien), and a few more I'm not remembering currently.
It was a very good crowd, and a really great panel--and left me far too jazzed too long into the night to get a good night's sleep. Always the sign of a good convention!
Of course, I was too sick to attend last year, so I'm not an entirely fair judge.
The idea of the panel, for those who don't know, is that we (me,
baroncoon, 
Smudge, 
Tom_Clowder, and Dr. Fox as moderator) have a panel where coffee, tea, and cookies are provided and we pass around a hat in which the audience puts in ideas for discussion topics. Every 15 minutes the moderator picks a topic out of the hat and checks that it is a valid topic (no current events, religion or sex), and then passes it to us. If we all think we can talk to the subject, we announce the topic and hold forth on it.Smudge noted a couple years ago, that when we were sitting around the common area of a con, talking about random subjects, we would attract a small crowd of onlookers. And her idea was to formalize it as a con panel, and invite audience participation.
We had a very good audience last night. At peak, we had about 16 people, and they generally stayed the full hour and a half the panel was scheduled for, and many stayed later. We ran about about another hour and half over before things really broke up, and the room was needed for someone else (I'm sure the con scheduled the room to be empty after us with malice aforethought).
The selection of topics we got was very good. There were some where one or another of us didn't think they could talk to the subject, but there wasn't anything automatically out, and nothing where more than one of us was unsure.
We ended up covering "Your favorite furry anime" (different votes from everyone), "whimsical characters in a serious story", "will furries take over the world?" (narf), "which is better as a furry background, hard SF or soft SF?", "equines" (that was a bit freeform), "what would a culture look like if it never had representative art" (damn alien), and a few more I'm not remembering currently.
It was a very good crowd, and a really great panel--and left me far too jazzed too long into the night to get a good night's sleep. Always the sign of a good convention!
