Geek Girl Con Goes Fo(u)rth!

So, I made it to Geek Girl Con again this year - a four-peat! (is that even a thing?) I was intrigued by the inaugural event in 2011, gushed over it some more in 2012,  and gave a late report on it last year, and herewith is this year's installment.

Let me say again the GGC is the most inclusive, accepting, laid-back con I have attended; the contrast with the PAX event a few weeks ago couldn't be more striking. In addition to the Usual Suspects, I used an extra pass to pull in my colleague and office-neighbor, a biology instructor. She brought along her son and daughter and was not only thrilled to find so much pro-STEM content aimed at girls, but found herself having a great time right along with her kids, even though she is almost totally non-geek. It's just that kind of event.

This might have been the best year yet for me; here are three highlights before the usual parade of pictures.

Wonder Wife

As I predicted last year, the addition of Introvert Alley (a quiet-only zone where people can go to de-stress) was enough to get Wonder Wife to attend along with me, and she did so in style: we went as a cosplay team, Artie Nielsen and Claudia Donovan from Warehouse 13, the steampunkish Syfy series.

I think I did a pretty good job.

But I think Wonder Wife was spectacular!

Wonder Woman

Before yesterday, I would have told you that the last time I had sought an autograph was from Isaac Asimov at a Sci-Fi Convention in New York in 1978 (and that's a story for another time). I have never considered autographs important or even sensical.  Well, at this GGC I broke that longstanding streak: one of the guests was Susan Eisenberg, the talented voice actress who portrayed Wonder Woman in the Justice League animated series and several other projects, along with her other geeky and non-geeky work. That show, and her interpretation of Diana, has given me so much enjoyment that I just got swept up. I'm going to display the autograph proudly in my office.

Wonderful to Say (mirabile dictu)

As great as my costume was and as natural as that wig looked, I discovered after attending my first panel that the hairpiece did need some adjustment, so I went into the men's room and trimmed it with the scissors on my Swiss Army Knife (Officers' Model). A little while later, I discovered I was without my knife, apparently having left it in the restroom. I looked fruitlessly and then checked Lost & Found with little hope. They didn't have it, but took my name and number and said they'd let me know if it turned up.

I didn't expect anything, but a couple of hours later I got a text telling me the knife had been turned in. When I picked it up, the Agents (that's what they call con staff) said that even though it had been found elsewhere than I described, when it was turned in they connected it to me right away.

Tell me at what other convention of 5,000 or so people would an easily transportable, untraceable, hundred-dollar item be turned into Lost & Found and proactively returned to its owner? GGC is just that kind of event.

The Photos!

Pride of first photo goes to my partner in crime Margaret, who this year came as Ianto from Torchwood. The coffee cups turned out to be the critical part of the cosplay!

After all the reboots and re-interpretations, it was cool to see Classic Sherlock.

A totally adorable Korra; we didn't get to see it, but she was faux-waterbending with foil ribbons.

Groot meets the Dalek!

Jeanie showed up, just for Super Sissy (who is a big fan).

Agent Hill of SHIELD has a burgeoning fan following:

I am not familiar with Kill la Kill, the anime these characters are from, but these girls were rocking it awesome:

Sunday's con was at the same time as a Seahawks game, and this cosplayer covered both with SeaHawkgirl, complete with Shayera's name on the uniform and a spiked football for a mace.

After Captain Marvel won her round, I played on this giant Tsuro game. And lost.

So, listen to Wi-Fi the Robotic Squirrel: come to Geek Girl Con!

See y'all next year!

w00t! Loot!

So, this rock has made another trip around the sun and I am officially one year older today than I was before. Some folks were kind enough to want to mark my natal anniversary, so we held a little "Sputnik Soiree," a start-of-the-space-age themed masquerade party, with folks coming in late-50s vintage get-ups. And a swell time was had by all.

Wonder Wife as Alla Masevich, head of Tracking Systems for the Sputnik Project

I suggested donations to the food bank in lieu of gifts, but some folks wanted to express their esteem materially, and who am I to say no? Herewith, the loot:

A great treat of the day was receiving a package from my sisters back East. Slightly-older Sister had just returned from a Budapest to Amsterdam river cruise which apparently called at Nuremberg, Germany, since that's where Ultra Comix is located, and she got me some stuff from there. But really, the gift is hearing from her, and from Much-older Sister, whom I see all too infrequently.

 Not "Die neue zweiundfünfzig"?

Wonder Wife continues to fill in my comics library with these important works that I should be embarrassed to say I didn't own before yesterday, except that I ran out of embarrassment in the late 80s.

No capes?!

Brah Phil brought his internet A-game with these two great finds. First, a magazine that is almost precisely as old as I am. Despite its "Fine" condition, I am going to open it, read it, and stick it in my back pocket, as was intended.

I think I have read the Asimov and Sheckley stories already...

And in the same theme, he brought another I-had-one-of-those! goodies:

It actually belonged to a cousin, 

and I surrounded it with green army men, since it was a flying saucer.

That's just the way we rolled back then.

There were actually a lot of non-geeky elements to the celebration, but that's for another blog, right?

5x5 Movie Review: X-Men: Days of Future Past

1. There are still over a million hits on Google for "Days of Future Past" when excluding X-Men, Marvel, or Wolverine, and only a few are misspellings of the Moody Blues album title: most use the expression in connection with articles about either about nostalgia or predictions. Was the 1981 comic book story arc the real source of this phrase, and has it really become that ubiquitous just since then? I never actually read the Marvel series, but I knew enough about the story going in that the movie didn't surprise me.

2. The seventies ambience was not quite as wonderful as the sixties ambience on display in First Class, but it may have been even more authentic. And it proved that even Peter Dinklage can't make seventies fashions look good, and that did surprise me.

3. The best thing in the movie was the Xavier-Magneto relationship, both in the past and in the future. Everyone else, even Wolverine and Mystique, seemed to be there just for window dressing, without any internal life at all.

4. I am pretty sure I am done with Wolverine movies, even if he is one of Wonder Wife's favorites to watch; Hugh can hang up the claws any time, as far as I am concerned. Not bloody likely: he's still in like every third Marvel comic, isn't he?

5. I am also getting close to being over superhero movies in general. After so long wishing somebody could do one right, it now almost seems that there are too many being done all the time. Maybe I am just waiting for someone to do one really well.


And was I the only one who thought Quicksilver was too fast?

Do you believe in Magic?

So, I went back to PAX for a second day.

Sunday seemed a little less crazy than Saturday, but it was still an exhausting mess. I try to allow as little waiting-in-line into my life as possible, but it seems that cons are all about lining up. I know that there are some really popular events, but speaking as someone who has had to do more than a little crowd control in my time, it sometimes felt that the queuing was somewhat over-managed, which created a sense of  anxiety in many attendees, resulting in a bit of "queue-creep," when people line up earlier and earlier even for events that may not even fill.

I might not have minded it as much if the sessions I was lining up for had been more productive or enjoyable. The first was under-moderated and, like yesterday's session, devolved into a series of anecdotes vaguely related to the topic, late-career entry in game design. The second was supposed to be about gaming in higher ed, but was actually about higher ed for gaming; that is, it didn't focus on how to incorporate gaming into the classroom, but described a program for learning how to do game development. The last session I attended was at least actually about gamification of the classroom, but all of the panelists were from K-12. I did glean some recommendations for games that work in a classroom setting:

Um, okay.

While people are waiting to enter sessions, staff come by, engage line-standers in impromptu games, and hand out prizes; or to put it more accurately, they hand out many instances of the same prize, to wit:

I had gotten one yesterday, too... 

Yes, I'm such a good gamer at things like D20 Challenge, Win, Lose, or Banana, Cowboy-Ninja-Bear, and some kind of match game that I won eight Magic the Gathering decks: two red, two black, two green, one white, and one blue. I don't even play Magic!

I spent part of the day that I wasn't on line wandering with buddy Sahar, who had snagged a free ticket late in the game, and some of her luck rubbed off on me. We were at a vendor table with Liz Spain, who was demonstrating her steampunk find-Atlantis board game, Quest for Atlantis (part of a projected Incredible Expeditions series). After the spiel, she invited us to draw a ball from a gum-ball machine.

The prior visitor had drawn a clear ball (we could see the balls were mostly clear, with just a few blue ones) and had gotten an art print, so I told Sahar to hope for a blue one. In fact she drew one and won a USB drive with a kraken on it.

It was my turn, so I clicked the little handle around and out popped a beautiful marble. Our eyerows went up and Liz's eyes got wide, and she said that I had won a free copy of the game!

Autographed, no less!

I was pleased beyond just getting lucky for a change, because it actually looks like a really cool game. Its art design is just fantastic, the theme is awesome, and the gameplay looks creative and workable. We'll set up a playdate and I'll report on it later. Thanks, Liz!

Well, that was about it, besides a little more hunting for cool tabletop games. I'm not sure I'll go back to PAX next year, but it did make me eager for Geek Girl Con in month or so.

I wonder how long the lines will be there...

PAX be with you

So, thanks to the good offices of buddy Karmin, today I attended PAX Prime, the Penny Arcade-sponsored game-centric expo right here in the Emerald City. Karm is going all four days of the long weekend; I just signed on for Saturday and Sunday.

I must admit, a lot of the stuff went right past me: I have never been a console gamer, so the platform wars, hardware, and all that stuff isn't even on my radar. There was a whole slug of tabletop stuff, much more my speed, but it was a slog to try to get through it and actually watch a demo. We attended one panel on player-developed narrative in gaming, which sounded promising but failed for lack of a strong moderator.

Overall, it was an exhausting day that felt like a lot of wheel-spinning, but I'll try it again tomorrow.

Here's a little video impression of today:

5x5 Graphic Novel: Ali Baba

1. So, the actual title of this graphic novel is Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves Reloaded, written by Poulami Mukherjee and illustrated by Amit Taya, and produced by Campfire, a New Delhi publishing house whose mission statement is to entertain and educate young minds by creating unique illustrated books to recount stories of human values, to arouse curiosity in the world around us, and to inspire by tales of great deeds of unforgettable people. Yeah, I can get behind that. They have lots of other great-looking titles I am hoping to check out, based on how good this book was.



2. Mukherjee has taken the traditional story of Ali Baba and updated it totally while staying faithful to the story structure and keeping all the character beats. The story is usually set somewhere in Persia (although the tale may have originated in Cyprus), but Mukherjee places it in Mumbai with no trouble at all. Modernizing the story turns woodcutter Ali Baba into a minicab driver, magic incantation "open sesame" into a security password, and slave girl Morgiana into part-time housekeeper Marjeena. It all works, because the characters and their motivations and conflicts ring true to the original: Ali is still blandly earnest, the leader of the thieves still dangerous and revenge-obsessed, and Marjeena still the clever one who repeatedly saves the day. Mukherjee's writing gives us an action story that is both contemporary and accessible and yet which will deliver the same emotional experience as the original folktale (with the gore dial turned down just a bit).

3. Amit Tayal's art is the perfect vehicle for the story: realistic enough to capture the feel of a teeming urban environment and yet cartoonish enough to retain the sense of whimsy and wonder that comes with a fairytale, the illustrations can strongly convey action or menace when necessary. Kudos also to the letterer and especially the colorist.

4. Only one misstep from my perspective: Mukherjee and Tayal rely a bit overmuch on narrator caption boxes. Take these two panels, for instance - Ali Baba is picking up one of the thieves for the cab ride in which he will overhear the password:

It seems to me that this panel would have been much more effective had it been drawn so that we could see the bank robbery headline on Ali's newspaper - no captions would have been necessary, since we could have figured out the connection, given that we just saw the passenger hiding from a police car. It's a small nitpick, since the traditional structure of fairy tales calls for a very intrusive narrator, and the target market for the book could be considered young adult, but I think more experienced creators might have handled this balance more deftly throughout the work.

5. On of the most appealing aspects of the story was its multiculturalism. We see characters wearing Sikh turbans, Muslim skullcaps, and Arab headscarves, western dress and traditional garb. The sometimes confounding multi-faceted society of modern India is on view in very matter-of-fact way, and it is a refreshing change from the homogeneity of most American pop culture.

Pick this book up if you run across it; you'll be glad of it.

Really magical

So, I just finished reading Terry Pratchett's Making Money, the further adventures of Moist von Lipwig, Ankh-Morpork's erstwhile Postmaster, as he becomes Director of the Mint. I was going to write a review, but it just boils down to this: it's a Discworld book, go read it.

However, after I read the book, I went to look up any current information on Pratchett, who in 2007 announced that he had been diagnosed with early-onset Altzheimer's. His disease is progressing, of course, but he has remained active up until quite recently. As I was reading, I stumbled across a quote from Pratchett in which he says the label magical realism is "a polite way of saying you write fantasy and is more acceptable to certain people."

Never having met a taxonomy I didn't like, I played with this idea for a bit.

Our friend the Wikipedia provides this: Magic realism or magical realism is a genre where magic elements are a natural part in an otherwise mundane, realistic environment.

A source at Princeton says Magic realism or magical realism is an aesthetic style or genre of fiction in which magical elements are blended into a realistic atmosphere in order to access a deeper understanding of reality. These magical elements are explained like normal occurrences that are presented in a straightforward manner which allows the "real" and the "fantastic" to be accepted in the same stream of thought.

Emory University describes magical realism thus: A literary mode rather than a distinguishable genre, magical realism is characterized by two conflicting perspectives, one based on a so-called rational view of reality and the other on the acceptance of the supernatural as prosaic reality. Magical realism differs from pure fantasy primarily because it is set in a normal, modern world with authentic descriptions of humans and society.

My literary colleague, Super Sissy, agreed in principle, although she approached it by saying that fantasy stories were set in created worlds and magical realism was set in this world. This is one way to interpret "mundane, realistic" and "normal, modern," I suppose.

The upshot of all of it is that magical realism is somehow literature while fantasy is just plain fiction, and Pratchett writes fiction.

The funny thing is, Pratchett's stories may be set in an imaginary, faux-medieval world, but it is a mundane, realistic, normal and deceptively modern one; the quotidian and the banal walk side by side with the supernatural. The Discworld stories usually do provide tweaked but authentic descriptions of humans and society and often access a deeper understanding of reality or at least punctuate the hidden meaning of mundane realities.

But Pratchett doesn't get to be in the magic realism club with Borges and Marquez because he made up Ankh-Morpork and didn't set his stories in Columbus, Ohio.

On the other hand, Ron Goulart's Please Stand By, a short story about an ad man who turns into a small grey elephant on national holidays, is certainly based on the acceptance of the supernatural as prosaic reality, but I don't think anyone would call it magical realism. (It is a pretty funny story, though.)

I guess it matters little. Most lists of fantasy sub-genres include Magical Realism as a divison on the same tier as High Fantasy, Sword & Sorcery, Ghost Story, and Weird Western, so maybe it's not so high and mighty a literary mode as all that. It just seems that some labeling seeks to impart status rather than to describe characteristics. I recall all the times that Vonnegut and Bradbury were declared by the literati to be writing fiction instead of science-fiction, because their stuff was good, so obviously it couldn't be sci-fi. (Even Bradbury was subject to this ideological hegemony at the end and railed against being called a sci-fi writer.)

Whatever. Read good books, however they are categorized, and Making Money is one of them.

I'll put revising the genre taxonomy on my do-list and let you know when I'm finished.