handslive | Belated WorldCon [fri, 29 aug]

For the 10am panel, I went to the Shotokan Karate panel. I haven't done any karate in 9 years and I was curious to see what if anything they would do. It was listed as for "Beginner to Intermediate", so I thought I was okay. As it turns out, there were people with a variety of different levels of experience in a variety of arts. I was one of only two people with more than 4 years experience in a striking art. It was interesting and reinforced for me why I don't think I can go back to karate. Many things about the approach to blocking and body mechanics just feel wrong to me right now, at least in solo work.

Strangely, we did something very similar to nikyo from a cross-hand grab. My partner (who is close to getting his brown belt, or 1st kyu, in Shito Ryu) spent a fair bit of time explaining to me the complexities of this technique. To my embarrassment I almost knocked him over when it was my turn. His ability to apply the technique was quite good and I forgot that in many striking arts the ability to receive isn't going to be comparable to the ability to actually do the technique. I was afraid for a second that I had actually injured him but fortunately he was okay.

I went to the "Imbibing Engrams" panel which was supposedly about smart drinks. The panel contained very knowledgeable people who all seemed to disagree with the panel's stated purpose, its name, and the assumptions of whoever wrote it up. With that out of the way there was some very interesting discussion about the state of neuro-pharmacology, the difficulty of reporting results that conflict with policy, cultural influences on behaviour while on the influence of perception or mood altering substances, and finally a real romping sideways step through the minefield of MDMA (Ecstasy) prompted by anecdotally reported experiences by one of the audience members.

The Year in Review: Computer Technology panel was not particularly enlightening, but there was some interesting discussion about whether there will really be a convergence of multiuse devices (PDA/cellphone/MP3 player/digital camera) given the barrier of user interface design. Oh, and one of the panel members was Charles Cohen, one of the designers responsible for the gesture system used in Minority Report, who said that his system was in the works for several news broadcasting centers for their weather reports to allow easy cutting and zooming between satellite images during reporting.

I also went to If This Goes On: A Look at USA 2008, which wasn't informative and only passingly amusing and didn't really go into some of the more serious questions raised at the beginning of the panel. Not surprising, I guess, but most of the discussion was around whether the Internet was a positive or negative feature around campaigning in the upcoming election.

Then I think I must have had lunch.

Then we went to a China Miéville reading. China is a good speaker, a good reader, and handles questions very well. Even the one from the audience that went, "Have you intentionally gone on a program to expand your vocabulary?" and went on to ask whether he was maybe trying to use words his audience wouldn't understand. His answer in part was, "No." and "There is such a thing as a dictionary." And pjt and I both felt an overwhelming urge to stand up and say, "We're not all like him!" but we didn't.

I followed this up with Fantasy Economics. This was interesting because the panel included some writers who seem to think seriously about this, some people with a certain amount of Econ background, one guy who doesn't take much very seriously and has done some game design for T$R, and another guy who's done game design for some online MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games). What was interesting here was a comment by one writer that, since economics is about scarcity, you have to find ways in which things will be scarce and think about how that affects trade and the value of things. This was followed by several anecdotes by the MMORPG guy about how you can design a game system and the players will work out what's scarce and trade between themselves in that regardless of what "economic system" you put in place. In other words, scarcity might be the result of the repetitive tasks involved (if no one invents a macro for it), or the difficulty of finding an item, or the skill involved in making an item, but almost never around the money involved because computer games just use money to keep score, like points. I found myself wondering if anyone has thought of setting up an MMORPG to simulate changes to, say, SEC regulations or for international trade. See what loopholes players will find if you make it engaging enough.

Then there was an Astronomy Year in Review that was completely over my head (and purplecthulhu provided some interesting technical stuff from the audience) and also very short, followed by an Esther Friesner reading (not a humorous piece) that was also short with no time for questions afterwards.

I then went with pc to Live Thog's Masterclass. This is kind of like a bloopers reel for novels done by Dave Langford. I was practically on the floor (with most of the room) by the end and went out later and bought a collection of his articles which I'm going to have to share around here. The man is insanely funny and must have many blood enemies in the writing community.

At this point we met up with some friends of pc's from the UK and went for supper. We finished just in time to hurry back to the Royal York for Junkyard Poets.

This panel consisted of three teams (there were supposed to be two, but we had enough interested participants to form three teams of three). The panel moderator spread a variety of magazines and items on the table. Each team was to gather items and lines or phrases from the pile and construct a 30 line poem (not more than 3 lines from any given work or item). All three of the teams produced very good poems, and the team I was on actually won (which surprised me no end). You can find a copy of the poem printed in this PDF of the Dam Write Daily for Sunday afternoon.

The really interesting things about this panel were:

My team was headed by Timothy J. Anderson, a local Edmonton poet, playwright, novelist, editor, and publisher.
Who asked me why they never see me out at things in Edmonton. (!?!)
Who told me that he was working on a new Tesseracts collection and was looking for poetry (deadline in early December?).
Who was joined part way through the panel by Candas Jane Dorsey, but I didn't recognize her right away (and then wanted to make like, "Oh, of course.")

That was weird. They're publishing some, um, mundane stuff, too, through a different name, so I might have to take that seriously.

Belated WorldCon [fri, 29 aug]

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