Rich and Strange Aeons

As the person who did much of the programming planning, I knew that Saturday was our action-packed day. This was intentional. If people buy day passes, it's usually for Saturday only. I wanted it to be worth it for those folks. 

Having ended my night around 11:00 pm, I had a 10:00 am panel the next morning. Last weekend was also the Twin Cities Marathon. It used to be that the marathon only screwed up traffic on Sunday, but now there are a bunch of other half-marathons and such like on Saturday as well. So, I got up extra early in order to drive around all of that and still pick up coffee for myself on the way into the con. I normally am somewhat unhappy to live as close as I do to a highway, but I was grateful for it both Saturday and Sunday because I could just swing around into downtown really easily. 

Was this the morning that I spotted Kyell Gold (https://www.kyellgold.com/news.html) headed off to coffee before the convention started? I think it had to be because Friday nothing started until after noon. Yeah, this makes sense because I had budgeted so much extra time to get around the marathon that I actually ended up at the hotel far earlier than I intended. I saw him leaving the hotel and, of course, tried to shout his name from the car. But that rarely works. So, before trying to text him, I parked--in by the way, the scariest most under construction parking ramp that I've been in, in a long while. Like, it is never a safe feeling to be driving under temporary load-bearing scaffolding. Anyway, Kyell was up for some company and so I agreed to meet him at Backstory Coffee. The coffee shop was about a block and a half from the hotel and--for future ConFABulous reference--is EXTREMELY queer friendly. The signs on their door remind patrons not to use gendered language when speaking to the staff!!  Love this! Also, the coffeeshop had cheap, hot breakfast options. I got myself a bean burrito wrap which, while messy to eat, was extremely good (and way cheaper than anything at the hotel restaurant.)

Kyell and I hung out together and chatted on their outdoor patio, something we could only do this year because who would have expected 80-90+ degrees in October?

Kyell and I walked back to the hotel together and I must have stopped in at the hotel restaurant (I think when Anton waved at me or because I saw Eleanor Arnason or both) because that's when I first discovered that KD Edwards had recruited so many of his own fans to show up for the convention.

My first panel was fantastic. It was one where I'd smooshed together two ideas that were similar. "Writing Queer/Different Stories in Times Like These: Hope A Little Bit Every Day." I mean, it's 2025, y'all. I don't know if you've looked outside, but it's rough out there, especially for trans folks. So the panel basically tackled how we continue to hope, despite what's going on. Dax, our moderator, asked us in our introduction to note where on the hope scale we were, with ten being the most hope. I was the only one who confessed to be hardcore hanging out around 2 most days. I'm not without ANY hope, but this presidential election, for me, felt like an extinction level event. I don't talk about that much because it brings down the room and the human mind needs more hope than I feel on a daily basis. But this panel was about how we go on despite a lack of hope and there were some real solutions that weren't just "go get involved" from the panelists. One of the more fascinating connections that got made was by Kelly Barnhill (and supported by naomikritzer ) which is that anger is just as important a tool as hope. Naomi referenced a recent Locus Award ceremony speech on the same idea: https://stone-soup.ghost.io/hammer-speech/

When I came out of the panel, there was a line for registration. Eventbrite clocked our total paid tickets as just over 200, but I believe that does not include all of our attending professionals (20+), performers (Ms. Shannan Paul, +3), a whole slew of community tables, a few other random badges that were comped for reasons of ad swaps, etc., and five guests of honor. With all those added back in our badge numbers were close to 260, which should probably still be adjusted downward a bit, due to some duplications, but IS STILL F*CKING AMAZING.

The largest Gaylaxicon has been according to its wikipedia page is 350 (in 1994 in Rockville, MD.) So, I feel pretty good about even just the raw number of 200.

 Anyway, at this point I stood around chatting with passing people in the halls and ended up being gangpressed on a lunch outing. If I have any complaint about Gaylaxicon, it would be about the hotel. I love the location and set-up of this particular hotel, I always have. It's been the site of many of my fondest memories, including getting to know jiawen for the first time during, IIRC, a Marscon. But, since becoming an Aire apartment complex as well as a hotel, something has changed. For one, there was a weird amount of fruit flies--that might have been due to the heat, but I had to wonder if it had to do with the fact that more people were LIVING at the hotel and thus creating more garbage and other opportunities for fruit flies. Eleanor told me on Sunday that when she called Patrick to tell him how things were going at the con, she started with "Calling from fruit fly central." I mean, they're harmless? But it was noticeable. Second, as happens at a lot of cons (always to my bafflement), the hotel seemed wholly unprepared for people to want to use their on site restaurant. I think due to its proximity to both the airport and the Mall of America, the Crowne Plaza's management just presumed that people would eat elsewhere and that's probably even true for other mundane conventions. Fans like to stick close to home. I think there's a number of reasons for this, but the most obvious one is that there's fantastic programming and games and dealer's rooms to get back to!  So, you just want to be able to grab a quick bite and get back to the con.

So, the lunch outing became a sort of comedy of WHY ARE CON HOTELS LIKE THIS? Someone had checked in with the front desk to see what was good within walking distance and we were directed to a Mexican restaurant in the office building across the parking lot. Fantastic, cheap and close. It was a little weird to get to as it turned out to be in the basement and, for reasons of weekend, I guess, the front doors which faced the hotel were locked. But we figure it out and... lo, and behold, the Mexican restaurant has a handwritten sign on it that says "Sorry, closed October 3-5"--like, literally the exact days of the convention. Okay, fine. Let's just go back to the Crowne Plaza. We arrived in time to find that they're closing--the hotel restaurant was only open until 1 pm. After that they didn't open again until dinner time. Naomi's blood sugar is dropping precipitously at this point and everyone has a panel at 2:30 pm. So people are arguing things like should we doordash? What do we do? What can arrive in time? Someone has found a pizza place nearby, but they're not answering the phone. Someone--Dax, maybe?--notes there is another hotel, a Hilton just across the street. We all march over there expecting a disaster (or high prices) but, other than aggressive misgendering from the waiter, we finally manage to eat. Luckily Emma has worked in food service before and cleverly told the server to bring our bills out before we even started eating. That way people could leave as a soon as food was consumed.

Everyone finally relaxed and we had this tremendous conversation about life, the universe, and everything.

Then, just as people were starting to talk about what else they had on for the day, haddayr discovered that she's actually supposed to have been moderating a panel that started at 1:00 pm. It's now 2:00. There were panicked tears. I felt bad, too, because I automatically said "don't cry" and, you know what? You can always cry. What is so weird about that impulse is that my son, who is 22, literally never heard me say "don't cry" in his entire life because I never wanted him to feel like emotions were unwelcome. I don't know what came over me, honestly--I think, and I told Haddayr this later, that what I meant to say was "if what you're feeling is shame for having failed a responsibility to the convention, then please don't. The convention will survive beyond what is, ultimately, a small mistake." But, of course, what she was really feeling was responsibility to her idol Eleanor Arnason, because the panel she missed was "Honoring Eleanor."

So that sucked, but we all hurried back to the hotel and I left Haddayr in deep apology to Eleanor. 

Next up for me was "Murderbot: Sec Units and Gender and Sexuality" and that started on topic but ended up being all about the Murderbot Diaries generally. I was the moderator so the off-topicness was entirely my fault, but the room was standing-room only and people just really wanted to squee (or, in some cases, complain or further examine some of the differences between the Apple TV series and the novellas/novels.) That was super high energy and, what was fun (? though somewhat annoying for the audience) is that we could hear the chatter in the hallway, which gave the impression (accurate or not) of a lively, busy con.

I didn't go right away to the Chocolate Symposium, but I did head up there eventually. 

My next big thing was running my Thirsty Sword Lesbians cyberpunk one shot which started at 4:00 and ran until 7:00 pm (with a half hour dinner break, as the con had a free buffet dinner in the banquet hall room.) I was overbooked with 8 players, but one of them couldn't make it, so we had a full table. That was a lot of fun, actually. I was a little worried that we'd be too loud in the shared game room, but I tucked us into the far corner so I think it was fine. I was smart and figured out how to pause the action before the dinner break with a cliffhanger (so people would come back!) Once again, even with only 2 and a half hours, I was able to come to a decently satisfying conclusion by the end. We only ran overtime by about fifteen minutes. My players were fantastic. Once again, however, the plot I thought we'd follow wasn't what the players latched on to--but as I've said a million times now, that's the game and the fun for the GM. Especially a system like TSL. It's 99.9% improv.

But, with an RPG to run, I missed out on seeing a lot of the really cool programming, but so I was able to stick my head in and watch a bit of Jim Johnson's presentation on Star Trek: Adventures and the end of Nghi Vo's North Country Gaylaxians reader discussion group.

So then came the comedy show at 8:30 pm...

As previously discussed, this was apparently past bedtime for a lot of our con go-ers. I wouldn't say that the mainstage room was empty, but neither was it packed. I felt really badly for the performers. We were a seriously TOUGH crowd. First, Miss Shannon wanted us to log into some site to answer some silly multiple choice questions and that took WAY TOO long. For a bunch of nerds, we all struggled much more than we should have. I, in fact, missed getting into the site in time to answer the survey, but, like it wasn't even all that funny of a bit and Miss Shannan clearly decided to just drop it after that, because I never got another chance to participate.

And, then...

There were several times in the first set where the performer was like, "Whelp, that died," like OUT LOUD. I wanted to say, "You don't know that for sure, we're just really bad at this!" but, I think that there were a couple of problems with this comedy show in general. First of all, unlike most cons by this hour, no one was drunk. This is the most sober convention I've ever been to in my life. I personally love it, as I don't drink, but there is not a lot of, shall we say, social lubrication going on. Secondly, the audience--probably for the first time for a lot of these performers-- was 100% queer. So, the "look how funny queer people are" jokes all fell a little flat because, "yeah, we know." There was one moment where the final performer made a joke involving, shall we say, the lady nether lips and it landed to a silent room. She said, "That usually kills in Edina," and I told her afterwards that, yeah, no, it was funny, it's just that your audience is actually sitting there quietly trying to decide if we'd be into that particular kink. People in Edina never think about labial folds. The whole idea that they exist is kind of shocking.

Third, sometimes humor works because we've all bought into what's supposedly "normal" behavior and so many fans, neurodivergent folks, and queers have already rejected that. Like, we know we're weird. So when people say "LOOK, THIS BEHAVIOR IS SO STRANGE! ISN'T IT FUNNY???" we're, like, yeah, I do that, so...?  A surprising amount of comedy depends on people being willing to find weird people weird, you know? And that can be fine if it's done with love and respect and these performers mostly treaded that line, but I do think that a lot of their jokes ended with so much silence because fandom is a special place where weird is wonderful.

Also, sensing the low energy in the room, the final performer tried to get everyone to sing-along, which, again, should work for a queer audience (musicals! ex-theater kids! whoo!) was also really excruciating because a good 75% of us are introverts who really barely wanted to be at the show to begin with because it might be crowded and there might be audience participation just like this. 

On the positive side, the middle performer lit up the room. First, she's a former marine corporal and you could see every lesbian (and bisexual, et al.,) woman in the room sit up and pay attention when she started telling stories about being in the military in what she called "the 1900s." She was sexy and funny in a way that really matched the general vibe of the room. Because her stuff was mostly personal stories, we were not expected to find any humor in a specific punchline. We could be delighted or horrified and when the funny stuff came, it could land bittersweet or out-loud guffaws without note because it wasn't "ba-dum, ba-dum, BUMP!" (cue laughter) kind of stuff. You could laugh when you wanted to. Her style reminded me of my favorite comedian Josh Johnson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Johnson_(comedian)) You might know him as "the Klan ribs" guy. 

I love her, and there were funny stories that got told by the other two, but... we were a very tough audience. I felt so badly for them!

Then I went to Kyell's reading at 10 pm because I needed to be there for the midnight slash slam. After the attendance at the comedy show, I thought, "Oh crap. The place is going to be a ghost town!" Kyell's reading was great. Kyell doesn't only write furry stuff, and so the first piece he read was from a fantasy novel. It was really good and I found out from him later that he sold out of the copies he'd brought of that one. So, that's a win.

The slash panel surprised me by being, for the hour, decently well attended. It is still always just me and Kyell bravely holding forth. One of these years I'm going to get an actual slam where people jump up to an open mike, but I mean, maybe this is just all part of my continued misconception of what conventions are like these days in terms of both attendance and "what the kids are into." 

Kyell started us off and read a very sweet (also rare pair) fic from the Zootopia fandom. I waffled about what to read, almost deciding on some of my original character Star Trek:Adventures fic. But, thanks to a random recitation of tags (and consequential audience curiosity about the tag "weird biology," I ended up reading a Bleach smut fic rare pair (Renji/Urahara) called "The Perverted Shopkeeper and the Beast" which you can find here (https://archiveofourown.org/works/55608391) if you want and at your own risk. 

A surprisingly lively ending to a very long day. I wasn't home and in bed until 1:30 AM.

This gay still parties!