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Strictly Fandom (A Ramlbing Rant)
Aug. 28th, 2003 04:59 pmI'm travelling again. So, thanks to the miracle that is Wi-Fi I'm writing this in the Business Lounge at Copenhagen airport after a day in Sweden and waiting for a flight to... yeap... Sweden. I don't understand it either.
I watched Strictly Ballroom on Monday night. Nice film, a simple but pretty predictable comedy about Ballroom dancing in Oz. About halfway through I nudged M and said, "OMG they're fans."
And they were.
One of the plot points is that you can't make up your own steps and the hero protagonist keeps doing that because (a) he enjoys it and (b) so does everybody else except the "organisers".
I wrote a little piece in a departure lounge recently called "The Inclusive Fan" where I whinged about the fact that at the end of the day most fen are about as inclusive as a group of trappist monks. I was also going to moan about con organising but decided that would be churlish of me. I promised Randy Beyers I'd get around to this anyway.
Well, I've a 2 hour wait here and I'm feeling churlish. I'll freely admit that I'm being ever so slightly hypocritical with this. Why? Well, I've never organised a con, I've been on panels and run quizes but I've never done the serious stuff.
However, that's ok because at pretty much every UK con I've been to I've started to realise that its like The Field of Dreams, in other words, "If you hold it, they will come." And they do.
The Green Room, the gophers, security, book room and tech - same faces, some things. It is almost sureal sometimes. Sure, its a good thing somebody does that sort of thing and I'm jolly glad for it. I'm the one in the bar at 3am making Pat McMurray miserable, and the thought of getting up and doing some work the next morning after a late night and a hangover is just *too* much like real work for me.
However, I begin to wonder if anybody else does these things, and, if they do how does it work? Where do the young techs come from? Is there a techny apprenticeship? Some of the guys do look a little like the gang at school who do the lighting, so perhaps that is the route into tech. But what about security - I actively avoided the art room for years and I still try not to remind my wife about security at 2Kon.
Once in a while I wonder what it would be like if new people helped, or there was some other way... There probably isn't. Everybody else is like me, happy to freeload but with a slight concern that there might be a better way of doing things.
Maybe I'll try to help more at a future Con, I know people, I'm not afraid. Alternatively I might just be in the bar...
I watched Strictly Ballroom on Monday night. Nice film, a simple but pretty predictable comedy about Ballroom dancing in Oz. About halfway through I nudged M and said, "OMG they're fans."
And they were.
One of the plot points is that you can't make up your own steps and the hero protagonist keeps doing that because (a) he enjoys it and (b) so does everybody else except the "organisers".
I wrote a little piece in a departure lounge recently called "The Inclusive Fan" where I whinged about the fact that at the end of the day most fen are about as inclusive as a group of trappist monks. I was also going to moan about con organising but decided that would be churlish of me. I promised Randy Beyers I'd get around to this anyway.
Well, I've a 2 hour wait here and I'm feeling churlish. I'll freely admit that I'm being ever so slightly hypocritical with this. Why? Well, I've never organised a con, I've been on panels and run quizes but I've never done the serious stuff.
However, that's ok because at pretty much every UK con I've been to I've started to realise that its like The Field of Dreams, in other words, "If you hold it, they will come." And they do.
The Green Room, the gophers, security, book room and tech - same faces, some things. It is almost sureal sometimes. Sure, its a good thing somebody does that sort of thing and I'm jolly glad for it. I'm the one in the bar at 3am making Pat McMurray miserable, and the thought of getting up and doing some work the next morning after a late night and a hangover is just *too* much like real work for me.
However, I begin to wonder if anybody else does these things, and, if they do how does it work? Where do the young techs come from? Is there a techny apprenticeship? Some of the guys do look a little like the gang at school who do the lighting, so perhaps that is the route into tech. But what about security - I actively avoided the art room for years and I still try not to remind my wife about security at 2Kon.
Once in a while I wonder what it would be like if new people helped, or there was some other way... There probably isn't. Everybody else is like me, happy to freeload but with a slight concern that there might be a better way of doing things.
Maybe I'll try to help more at a future Con, I know people, I'm not afraid. Alternatively I might just be in the bar...
