Big posts don't always mean you got it all in.

[kyburg]

I didn't forget the awesome that is stormdragon's and muimi07's little girl - it just didn't seem right to wrap that up in the middle of a huge train geekfest.

She is wee, perfect and probably the prettiest baby girl I've seen in years. She also flirted with my husband. S'okay, they all do when they're that wee. As I am fond of saying, if you think I'm going to let that go to waste...ya gotta be kidding.

Now. To the bad.

Let's talk about con culture - or the lack of it, or the expectations One could legitimately have of it.

No convention is Safe Space. Drop that assumption right now.

Think about it a moment. Why would you ever consider a grouping of a large number of people, most of which you've never seen before, let alone had enough time to consider the content of their characters...safe?

Then add in that a convention has a theme, and if it has something to do with alternative thinking/lifestyles/fantasy/created cultures? WHAT ARE YOU EXPECTING? Someone's going to take a jab at the established. Count on it.

Some, it might be argued, live for this. Plan. Plot, scheme...wallow like the pigs they are in it.

I think my guard is actually HIGHER at a convention, not lowered. I caught myself a couple of times sizing up crowds, revising exit strategies and where is the nearest source of '----' was more than once or twice.

Guess I'm showing my age at this point, but holy merde. My first con was when I was fifteen. I've got Super 8 of it. Somewhere.

And I still have the costume somewhere in a box. Can still wear it too. Nyah.

So.

Fanime, you had to give the crowd the benefit of the doubt - because of the median age, which was clearly below the legal age to vote, let alone drink. Seriously. After that?

I saw plenty of pretty encouraging stuff, to be honest. Keep in mind, I'm going through crowds getting from one location to another - I'm not seeing people in panels or events, just folks hanging out between them.

They had a "Black and White Ball" on Sunday night, as I recall. Checking out the lines to get in, I was more than pleasantly surprised. Neat, tidy and ready to party - as asked. Expectations were posted on the website - and the line was long and well-behaved.

Now - condiment tables were trashed, but which ones would not be after the press of that many people over a whole day? Some bright penny decided that decorating the tables with glass slugs was a great idea...the attendees took those, and the small, shallow bowls that were put under spigots to catch the drips...put them together, then filled them with water. Instant jeweled ponds. REALLY out of place, not at all sanitary...and damn if it wasn't clever.

Foodservice at Baycon was mainly restricted to the lounge/coffee bar downstairs and Tresca, the restaurant that really is better than it should be. (Da best anywhere? Your mileage may vary.) If there were condiment tables to trash, I didn't see them.

Could be from experience that they didn't exist in the first place, neh?

Baycon is older, both in longevity and median age. In all honesty, if you were in your mid thirties, you might find yourself on the younger side of things.

They know what they're dealing with.

And frankly, if you're surprised at the "out there" stunts, consider the source. You expect it from teenagers. I guess when the "teenagers" are in their forties, it gets a bit hard to swallow.

Trust me on this. They've been "out there" as long as you can remember, and proud of it. Consider the source.

Balance that out with the vast majority of folks who are just there to relax, soak it up and enjoy the company of friends and creative thought - and you have Baycon.

I've heard about the photoshop "WHEE I'M AN ASSHOLE" stunt from Wiscon.

Guys, people take pictures all the time. Again - you are at a convention where people are pushing boundaries on all sides of you. Do not expect to be in safe space. Safe space is your own home with people you know well enough to allow within your own boundaries. The amount of Really Stupid available is just out there, waiting for you.

I just don't care. That, in and of itself, really tends to make all that effort Less Than The Fun It Should Have Been. Blondie don't play those games.

I understand that some folks, staying in the hotel for the con, noted that they were sharing space with *horrors* charismatic Catholics!

And made a big point of putting the Gideon Bibles found in the rooms out for the trash pickup. OH YOU'RE SO CUTTING EDGE. *eyeroll* I don't think you were what they were interested in. And freaking out the mundanes?

I seriously doubt they restrain themselves the rest of year, guys. Really really.

Bad behavior is bad behavior - and a convention does not have to allow it. The fact Baycon is so laid back, comfortable (and this really does vary depending on what part of the con you're in, mind) has a lot to do with its longevity. The staffing comes and goes, but the con goes on forever.

Fanime was frenetic, like too much caffeine. Baycon - could be best described as too much rum. If one was concerned at all.

---

I also might add, I'm free from any con crud.

And gerroff my lawn. Damn kids.

Comments

I must respectfully disagree...

[reannon.livejournal.com]

While I get that a public venue like a con is not necessarily "safe space," the conventions I attend here are not deemed as "public" because there is an admission fee and the space is sequestered. I can't speak for Wiscon, but back when I covered cons instead of participating in them, we had to have permission of both the convention personnel AND the subject before we could take a picture.

Newspapers aside, it is simple courtesy that you ask someone's permission before you take their picture. And certainly, taking someone's picture and then posting it with mockery is not defensible behavior. There is a reason we at the newspaper ask someone's permission before we take their picture, and if they say no, it doesn't matter if we're in a public space or not. We can take pictures of buildings from a public venue as much as we want. But if a human being says no photo, then there's no photo. And we don't even make fun of anyone.

Whether Ms. Wiscon violated a law, I doubt. But she certainly violated every ethic of the blogger and photographer that I know. The people she photographed and mocked were not doing anything dumb, or in any way asking to be mocked. They were daring to sit in chairs, work their booths, listen at panels. They were not at fault for her photographs - hell, in many of them she appears to have taken them by stealth. I personally would have been horrified to be one of her "subjects."

Re: I must respectfully disagree...

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

Oh hon, she did. Taking pictures without asking? Happens all the time. It's called 'you're being monitored on videotape, have a nice day' every time you enter a convenience store or whatnot. ATM machines. Name it.

What was done WITH the pictures? It struck me on the drive home.

It's slander. Libel, if there was print. VERY prosecuteable. Wish someone would.

Re: I must respectfully disagree...

[bigbigtruck.livejournal.com]

Having had someone sneak up behind me and do upskirt-cam at AWA... I gotta say, I do wish rules were enforced about photog people weren't assholes.

Re: I must respectfully disagree...

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

If you had assaulted them, I'd pay the lawyer to defend you. Bad behavior is bad behavior - WHY people think it's okay to drop it at a convention? Ya got me.

Re: I must respectfully disagree...

[jrittenhouse.livejournal.com]

I didn't go to Wiscon, but that's in the heart of my travelling-fandom area, I have gone in the past and a lot of the regulars are well known to me. Some of the people pictured in that mess were friends.

Gee, loopy people go to cons? Big news there. Gee, you can take semi-strange people and make fun and make them seem faaaar weirder than they are? Yep. Especially if the person is doing the HEY FATSO routine, and you find out that that person is a bulimic.

I found it in horrible taste, of course, and since the person's real name and whatnot got out, I think the-punishment-fits-the-crime in this case was that that person will now be really person non grata in fannish circles. Smooth move there, boy.

Re: I must respectfully disagree...

[betnoir.livejournal.com]

Which conventions are those>

Re: I must respectfully disagree...

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

Matter of fact, if you look at most of the membership applications these days, there's a clause about images of you being taken and used, blah blah where you sign your name.

Respectful - sure. When you can be held accountable. Random run-by assholishness? Not so much.

Re: I must respectfully disagree...

[foogod.livejournal.com]

In my opinion, for practical purposes, "public" versus "private" has nothing to do with what's required to get there, or where it is. It has to do with the sheer number of people, and the substantiveness of the relationship between them. Unless everybody's explicitly agreed (by contract, etc) beforehand, a space automatically becomes public whenever it contains either (a) more than 20 or so people or (b) more than a few people who have never met before. Assuming anything different is just asking for trouble.

The reason for this is because when either of those conditions are met, on a purely practical level, there are no adequate constraints (societal or procedural) available which can adequately guarantee any particular behavior by all people at all times. And in those sorts of situations, one must necessarily expect some of the worse aspects of public, semi-anonymous behavior to rear their heads. That is just the nature of things when you get that number of those sorts of people together in one place.

But here's the other point: Expectations are not the same as attitude. Whether a space is public or not should change your expectations (in other words, what you are prepared to potentially encounter from other people), but it should not change one's attitude (how you or other people behave and treat others, and understanding of how one's behavior reflects on onesself). Using "it's a public space" to justify doing things to strangers that you wouldn't do to friends is not good enough. If it's inappropriate in private with people you know, it's inappropriate in public with people you don't know too.

Just because I know that given the situation I'm more likely to have to deal with somebody being an asshole still does not mean that that person being an asshole is any more ok in that context.

[seamusd.livejournal.com]

Hey! Sorry it took me so long to comment about this, but your CDs bounced back to me--apparently I misaddressed them. Equally uncharacteristically, I can't find your e-mail address. Could you please resend me your contact info to jtdavis62@gmail.com, and I'll send you some great Rundgren music as soon as possible!

[foogod.livejournal.com]

I definitely agree about the "youngness" of Fanime, and how it results in substantially different behavior patterns than Baycon. To be honest, that's actually part of the reason I stopped going to Baycon, and why I like going to Fanime.

Any group of teenagers is going to have a bit of bad behavior, but frankly almost everybody I encountered at Fanime was remarkably accepting, inclusive, mature, and considerate of other people. Really the biggest problem folks I saw were just the usual "clueless geek" types who just didn't realize, for example, that they happened to be talking loudly in the middle of something that everybody else in the room was trying to pay attention to (until somebody told them to shut up, and then they did).

But contrary to what a lot of folks might assume, older quite often does not mean better behaved, in fact often it means the opposite. I don't know whether it's because as one gets older, life just begins to wear more, or whether it's because over time people get more entrenched in their own ruts and less accepting of other things, or maybe just because with age comes more experience in how to really put one's nasty skills to effective use, but many of my memories of previous Baycons were unfortunately speckled with many incidents of manipulative behavior, territories and turfs, entitlement complexes, arrogance, and just general rudeness the likes of which I've rarely, if ever, seen at Fanime.

I'm not trying to say Baycon is horrible and Fanime is wonderful.. Almost everybody I know and like was at Baycon, and that alone says there's a lot of good people there.. But I got burned out on Baycon a couple of years ago for exactly this reason, and I do just personally wish sometimes that the people there could act a little less their age, in some ways..

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

Baycon. Fanime attendees with more experience. Yeah, I can see that.