Anthrocon Info Meme

[rax]

This is mostly for the like three other people on my friendslist/readinglist/whatever who are going to Anthrocon, random furries webstalking me, and anyone else who is morbidly curious and reads all the content I put out even if it's irrelevant to them. If I have time before work I'll write something more general.


• Where are you staying?
The Doubletree.

• What day are you getting there and when are you leaving?
I'll arrive Thursday afternoon and leave Sunday afternoon. It's sort of dependent on the schedules of the Ridiculous Midwest Furry Caravan I appear to be driving. :)

• Who will you be rooming with?
Diane!

• What is your gender?
Awesome.

• How old are you?
We have always been at war with 27.

• Can I talk to you?
Unless I'm sleeping. Although last year someone did that anyway and we gave him cookies, so apparently even then. (There was someone in a room with a connecting door who really wanted some combination of conversation and/or sex? He was really drunk. Conveniently for making the situation hilarious and not super awkward, he was totally gay, and when we were of no use to him because we were tired and women, we gave him the not-vegan cookies that came with the hotel room and he decided we were awesome and let us sleep. Or something.) In general I'm a big fan of talking to people but not always sure how the social interactions work at Anthrocon. Just talk to me, it's fine.

• Can I touch you?
Ask first. The answer is usually yes, but I appreciate the chance to make sure. If I say no, it's probably weather in my head, not anything to do with you. Unless you asked to give me a dental exam or something, in which case that's creepy, and it was something to do with you. Namely, that you are creepy.

• Are you friendly?
I consider myself very friendly but coming from a very different set of social expectations, such that sometimes I can look less friendly. Postrodent insists I'm reserved; I can't tell if he's insightful or just screwing with me. ;)

• Can I hang out with you?
I mean technically speaking it depends who you are but I didn't meet anyone last year I wouldn't want to hang out with, so I would expect so, yes. And I encourage this.

• Are you taken?
What are you really trying to ask here? I'm a survey, I'm divorced from my original context, I don't know. Well, you're no help then. I have a beautiful and brilliant fiancee and am blessed with a number of wonderful people in my life in various ways. None of them have "taken" anything from me that I don't still have.

• Do you do free art?
I can't draw to save my life (never developed the skill & my hands shake). I can prove this if you really insist. If I'm intoxicated enough to forget I'm embarrassed about it, I'll probably improvise poetry on your shoes or something. (The last time this happened I was in New Orleans, so I've gotta warn you, that's pretty intoxicated.) If you want glittery catgirl face makeup, I'm happy to do that; I'm far from professional level but people tell me it looks cute. I already mentioned the hands shaking thing, right? Right.

• Do you do trades?
I'm comfortable in barter-based economies but Anthrocon is the sort of economy where probably the most valuable thing I have is money.

• Will you take commissions?
If you really wanted me to write you a short story I probably would. I will definitely accept commissions for academic papers! However no one has ever taken me up on one of those. :) I guess I also make cat ears, though there are really much better people to buy those from at Anthrocon and I'm not planning on bringing extras.

• How can I find you?
Tall broad white chick, pink and black hair, pink and black glasses, pretty much pink and black thematic everything, either russet fox or snow leopard accessories. Also, face makeup, which practically no one else did last year, and so I felt weird and stopped doing it, but this year I'm just gonna rock it because it's what I like to do. Unless you mean contact information, in which case rachel@akrasiac.org, 6178204954, AIM account on my phone raxmobile. I have a ridiculous phone of ridiculous and so I'll be very accessible unless I'm ignoring my phone, in which case try the board game room.

• Can I buy you drinks?
If you want, sure! Keep in mind I'm vegan. I will probably try to buy you drinks in return. If it ends up like the one time at the Burren with the Jaegerbombs, we may have to sign some sort of anti-aggression non-drink-buying pact lest I start feeling like a robot.

• Can I buy you food?
If you really want, I guess. Keep in mind I'm vegan. I will probably try to buy you food in return. Feeding people is a way I express that I like them, but I won't have access to a kitchen, so I may try to randomly foist trail mix or something off on you. If I have time beforehand I'll be making tons of food to bring around; especially as conventions wind down, people respond very positively to "You seem kinda down! Here, have a cookie."

• Can I give you money?
For the purposes of Anthrocon I am best considered a money source, not a money sink. (Unless I'm giving you a ride, in which case I'm asking for gas money, but at a very reasonable level; all the gas money's just going to go into buying art anyway, but it helps my budget a lot.) Give your money to one of the people making awesome art, or one of the people who still isn't sure how they're going to afford the ride home but this is just that important to them and they don't care that they are making questionable financial decisions because this is their chance to express themself in a supportive environment this year. Even if they buy a badge with it and not a Greyhound ticket, you'll still have made them really happy.

• Who else is going?
Other than Keyoki, who I stole this survey from? Well gee, I don't know! Maybe my comments section will tell me. <3

Comments

[damerell]

No _dental exams_? What a terrible let-down.

[darthbitsy.livejournal.com]

Well, your getting a stipend right? That's kind of like a commission for academic papers.

[rax.livejournal.com]

I guess so, though I think of it more as a commission for dealing with undergraduates. ;)

[doma.livejournal.com]

"There's a board game room?"

[rax.livejournal.com]

Of course there's a board game room! Why do you think I'm going? :P

[lhexa.livejournal.com]

I will definitely accept commissions for academic papers! However no one has ever taken me up on one of those. :)

*grins* How much?

[rax.livejournal.com]

As it turns out, I got a(nother?) serious inquiry about this and sort of have to start figuring that out now. :P It depends what sort of thing you're looking for --- the time it takes to do a journal article style paper on something that I don't already have sources annotated for is pretty huge and even though I'd charge under minimum wage it would probably take me at least 50 hours. Something shorter and less formal would take me much less time, as would "I want something else about gender in Dubliners" or some other topic where I already have an annotated bibliography and, heck, pages marked.

Blog post level of detail is probably pretty cheap! Unless you want journal article quality of prose, the real killer is the research.

[lhexa.livejournal.com]

I'd probably opt for an informal style, but let me know what the difference in styles is in your case. Anyway, the topic I had in mind is the gender subtext of Nintendo's Zelda games -- last time I brought them up, you more or less said, "Yeah it's there, but I don't know enough to say more," which seems like an appropriate opportunity for a commission. :>

[rax.livejournal.com]

Well, you said this: "They're all about an androgynous young boy who eternally pursues an ideal of femininity while combating an ideal of masculinity, not in order to seduce the feminine ideal but rather to restore its power in the world."

My experience is primarily with the NES games. But thinking about what I do know of the later games, in particular the N64 games where Zelda has agency and in fact is moving around on her own trying to enact change, maybe the thing I'd try to prove and discuss is that as time passes, and the games re-enact the same core story in various ways, the ways they have enacted it have had increasingly complex gender subtexts.

I don't think it's until Ocarina of Time that Ganon is actually a dude-looking dude using political and military power in order to take over Hyrule. Link also starts off the series using masculine tools in order to reclaim the kingdom: Swords, shields, bombs, bows. (Although even here there's a flute, and the non-violent solution to the "GRUMBLE, GRUMBLE" problem.) In later games, while the sword's still the way you dispatch most of the big bads, you spend a lot more time resolving domestic issues, playing with ocarinas, wearing masks and inhabiting the role of the Other... Isn't there a gardening puzzle in one of them? In general they seem to encourage a more collaborative style of leadership and heroism, rather than the lone wolf model you see in a lot of video games.

The real problem is that I haven't played anything after Ocarina of Time, and haven't watched more than parts of Majora's Mask and the first couple of hours of Twilight Princess. (I have seen Wind Waker I think once, and the Internet tells me there are like ten more of them oh god (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda).) To do it maximally right I would have to play many of these games; while I wouldn't charge you for that, because it would be fun, I don't have that much time. This doesn't mean I can't write a thing; it just means there are limitations on what the thing I could write might look like.

First, I could write something based on my limited experience, reading plot summaries and walkthroughs of each game, watching videos of key sequences, and sort of making it up as I go along. I'm pretty good at making it up as I go along, but because I wouldn't have a lot of experience with the primary texts, anything I wrote would really be a request for commentary and suggestion for avenues of further thought. I'd probably spend, I don't know, eight hours on this, publish it as a blog post, and want to get a nice dinner out of it.

Second, I could find someone to collaborate with (maybe you, maybe someone else) who had played all the Zelda games and had familiarity with the universe, and sit down and put together an outline, having them pull examples and doing the lion's share of pulling up references to other texts and theory. This could produce a more "serious" paper if that were what you were looking for, but I can't do it on my own. I'd expect this to take in the 20-30 hour range, and the estimate's a little hazy because I don't have a lot of experience collaborating on this kind of work. It would be fun, but I'd want a few dinners' worth from it.

Third, I could do a pretty strict compare and contrast on, say, Zelda I and Ocarina of Time. I'd still have to refresh my memory, but it would be refreshing versus getting new information, and the limited scope would let me zoom in closer. The biggest thing I feel would be missing from this is a seriously informed idea of how the changes in technology enabled some of the changes in gameplay; that said, I do actually have some understanding of how a NES works, and how an N64 works, and what the difference in cartridge size means, probably more than most people who would sit down to write a paper on this. :) This could take me anywhere from around four hours (basically taking the ideas in this comment, fleshing them out, and making a blog post out of them) to an upper bound of "oh god I've spent forty hours on this it's time to hand it in."

Are any of those of interest to you? We could also take this to email. :)

Spoliers

[eredien]

I hear from seishonagon (I talk with her about video games a lot) that stuff in Twilight Princess upends this dynamic somewhat, but I have to get the game and play it through in order to see if this is much a plot element as she made it sound--she's great about talking about video games and anime, and great about picking out the parts that her individual listeners will find fascinating (a rhetorical technique she's using on purpose, which I'm aware she's using on purpose, which we've meta-discussed in great conversations)--but sometimes the actual experience of watching or playing a thing is a letdown when the listener later gets a different first-hand impression of the game-text or the show-text.

Also, "you should watch Utena with seishonagon."

Also, what about an academic paper on the classical rhetorical tropes found in the Utena anime?

Also, do you want to watch Utena tonight? I promise I will hold all questions until the end of the series, making flowcharts of haircolor if necessary.

[rathdei.livejournal.com]

I want a cookie :c

[weirdquark]

What is your gender?
Awesome.

I went to a club with a drag show once where the bathrooms were marked "!" and "?"; that made me happy.

[weirdquark]

Also, you should check out this discussion about the term queer.

[rax.livejournal.com]

That is an excellent discussion, thank you. (And whoever it was who said "poly and kinky communities can be super homophobic and this is a big part of the reason that their using the term queer wigs me out" had it basically right as far as I am concerned.)

[postrodent.livejournal.com]

If I were a bad person, I would commission you to write a paper on some bad furry porn or pulpy'n'problematic SF. In fact that's kind of tempting, but I don't have any money. Art trade? :>

[rax.livejournal.com]

Let's put it this way: I'm sure you could make it worth my while. *evil grin*

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

It is so true you have always been at war with 27!

[halfelf.livejournal.com]

I will be there. I look forward to playing some Race for the Galaxy! And other games, too. :)

[rax.livejournal.com]

Excellent, it will be good to see you! I will be bringing a set with all three expansions, although I have not actually gotten to playit yet and may not until Anthrocon. :P I'll also have a set with just the first expansion for people without much experience.

I'm not currently planning to bring any other games, but there never seemed to be a lack of them last year...

[iankeith.livejournal.com]

Boozes may or may not require many consumptions should we have the fortune to meet. Especially considering what last year's DDR tourney was like, and the fact that I'lll have to do it all again this year. >_>

[rax.livejournal.com]

Oh jeez, good luck with that. If you're a port or dessert wine drinker, I've got a ton of those just sitting in the basement, I'd be happy to kick back a bottle with you sometime.

[ab3nd.livejournal.com]

"anyone else who is morbidly curious..."

Pox! She's on to me.

[krinndnz.livejournal.com]

I am jealous! On multiple axes. Have fun at AC!