some kind of snark faery (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
arcanetrivia) wrote2009-07-23 12:56 am
arcanetrivia) wrote2009-07-23 12:56 am
Azkatraz report
First, pictures of all the swag I hauled home. I don't really need to keep all of this (some I won't use, some I just have no place to put), so if anyone would like some random souvenirs, I'm going to be offering up a bunch of this for giveaway.
Severus/Lily meetup:
Clockwise from top left: Mix CD from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
irielle with label I printed, t-shirt iron-on from tjwritter (that's why the text is backwards), button I made, fuzzball owl from gichigami, sticker from someone whose name I didn't get (she wasn't at the assembly pre-meetup, but brought them to the the meet), bookmark from pennswoods.
I'm keeping most of this but I never wear t-shirt colours that such an iron-on would show up on, so if anyone would like it, let me know.
Snape meetup:
Clockwise from top left: Snape drabble very-mini-book byravenna_c_tan, quill, Snape nose soap "Because shampoo is for Gryffindors" (one below says "For dirty fangirls"), some candy in a plastic cauldron, pink "Love Potion" bottle that is supposedly Silly Putty or some kind of similar goo, small glass vial necklace with rolled parchment reading "Always", dog tag reading "Property of the Half-Blood Prince" (so awesome! I was wearing mine all weekend after this), bookmark featuring art by pennswoods, chocolate bar. Not pictured: Snapecast button and green ribbon pin saying "Snape Lives". And, this:
Made of black felt. It's a Snape-shaped hole, get it? (So of course I tacked it up on my window!)
If anyone would like the soaps or the "potion", let me know.
Snarry meetup:
There's a lot of stuff here so I'll just vaguely go from the top down: trivia quiz, postcard, mix CD, bookmark, pencil, green rubber bracelet reading "Severus loves him", green rosemary soap stamped "SS/HP", red golf tee reading "HP Vamp", another "Property of the Half-Blood Prince" dog tag, another bookmark, two stickers, ring with giant blue plastic jewel with flashy LEDs, somewhat inexplicable fluorescent necklace with tiny plastic pacifier, green button reading "Snarry: proof of the healing power of buttsex", Post-it pad reading "What Would Snape Do? ... To Harry", chocolate, two buttons, keychain, another sticker, small bottle of bubbles, manga book that I can't fathom how it's related to Snarry, more candy, square button with art in white lines on black, and highly inexplicable Post-it pad with promotion for a diazepam (Valium) rectal gel (perhaps this is a joke I'm not getting?).
I have duplicates of most of this becauseenotsola got his own swag bag. Since there's so much here I won't list specifically what I'd like to give away, just ask (but definitely the manga).
Also, I have some temporary tattoo sheets they were giving out at the movie and a couple of lightning bolt ones that were in the main con package. I also have husband's program if anyone would like to see how terribly hard it was to find any real information in the attempt to be so prettied up and "prisony".
So, what did I do all weekend?
Thursday
Was pretty much freaking out on arrival, partly because of suddenly plunging into "con vibe" and partly because of the physical and mental stress of working out how to get out of the BART station with all our crap when the elevator wasn't working and partly because of a sense that time was running short. Went down to the bar for drinks and metgichigami in an elevator; she kindly bought us a round. Eventually found most of the people I knew were bringing stuff to the gift bag assembly and went up to our room and did that. Went for sushi for dinner (Sushi Rika, good but a tad pricey, although $12 of it was sake). Dressed up a bit for the movie and sat in line FOR FREAKING EVER. Man. I gather that's supposed to be "fun" to hang around with a bunch of other freaks, but when I don't personally know any (many) of them it just gets tedious. Everyone out there has pretty much already said everything I could say about the movie, so the short of it is that I was surprised that I did not hate the romantic comedy slant like I thought I would, but was disappointed with a number of aspects even despite lowish expectations.
Friday
The Severus/Lily meetup was fair-to-middlin'. I liked the food, but despite the manager's assurance on Thursday afternoon that at Friday at 1:30 we wouldn't need to reserve a spot, lo and behold, the area I had been coveting in the back room was taken by "Reserved for private party" that wasn't us. So we commandeered a few other tables there, which would have been okay if only the expected 10-12 people had shown up, but my final head count was 36 (husband's was 40), so it meant that we were in semi-isolated islands, neither all facing one another nor really able to get up and mill about like at the Snapecast or Snarry meetups. Of course, we also ran out of swag bags because of that attendance. I didn't get everyone's names nor, I am sure, remember the presence of even some of those that I know, but there was at leasttjwritter, irielle and her brother, pennswoods, gichigami, lampblack, chaeche, cosmiccoz, lesyeuxverts00, droxy, Mr. Droxy, sinick, ac1d6urn, fiendish_thingy (?) among the people I have no idea who they were. Overall I feel bad for not managing to centralize people's attention a little more. The environment and the attendance meant we didn't get to do the "link exchange" as I'd planned -- it just wasn't feasible. So I'm not sure people got their Sev/Lily fix off the thing, overall, is what I'm saying.
The Snapecast meetup was much more awesome, but then also a much bigger production. The swag was very cool and the nibbles tasty, though the wine was quite steep in price after the one included glass (the cheapest were $5 per "taste", which was about 2 oz, so if you wanted a full glass, that was $10-15, and it went up from there). It was neat sitting in that sort of atmosphere with a bunch of other "believers".
We swung by to check out the vendors, but it was kind of lackluster, and in particular, I was very disappointed to see that Whirlwood was not there, despite Azkatraz being on their website's Faire schedule. The Whimsic Alley lady expressed some surprise at this as well, saying that usually they'd have been given some of the guy's stuff to bring and sell. I wound up buying a set of their robes because unfortunately the ones I'd had made for me bymoony_couture wound up being far too big around for me (they seem to be shorter, but hardly any narrower, than enotsola's, and the overall effect is "oh look, I got into Daddy's robe closet"). Therefore I'm thinking of selling these, if anyone is looking for Ravenclaw robes.
We had bought some liquor while we were out between dinner and things, so over the course of this night I got rather too drunk and remember starting to make an ass of myself at the Snarry bag stuffing, soenotsola and I absented ourselves from that after a while.
Saturday
The welcome lunch was pretty good. The food was nice and we didn't have to wait long in line, although I didn't understand why they had the badge checking point where they did and not, oh I don't know, at the door into the foyer. Then we went to workshops in the afternoon.
Fighting the Slytherin Stereotype Within the Gryffindor Schema
This was okay, but a little meh. The presenter basically read an essay aloud to us which was, erm, unengaging, even though I would have liked to read it on a screen or paper.
Dark Side of Fandom
This was a roundtable discussion. It was interesting enough, although the focus seemed to be on discussing the appeal and personal uses of writing or reading noncon and similar abuse kinds of themes than the horror/spooky/"perverse" kinds of stuff.
At this point we wandered off to the craft faire for a bit, which even though I didn't really see anything I wanted to buy, was still more interesting than the actual vendor room.
"Brilliant--but scary": the Problematic Portrayal of Hermione in the Harry Potter Books and Films
We arrived after the start of this, so I might have missed something that might have made it make more sense, but the bit we saw seemed to be about cultural meanings of various hair lengths and styles, and what it meant that Hermione's movie hair started off relatively wild but got progressively more tamed.
The Snarry meetup later that night was all well and good, and the snacks were v. tasty, but I dunno... I guess I'm just not the right kind of social? Through no one's particular fault I felt pretty left out, as truthfully I did of everything all weekend. As I mumbled in a comment to an earlier post, I did not arrive to this fandom early enough to have any presence simply through years of shared experience with others, and I don't have enough substance to make those connections faster by dint of being Just That Cool.
We totally forgot the "Fair Fortune" wrock opera was going on for half an hour in the middle of the Snarry meet and missed it entirely.
Sunday
I was mightily Un-Thrilled by being awakened by a (false, as it transpired) fire alarm at about 9:20 this morning. I suppose that beats 6:20 or 3:20, though, as has happened at other cons I've been to. Also, it beat being awakened at 8:00 by the construction going on across Mason street VERY LOUDLY on Friday and Monday and to a lesser degree on Saturday and I think a bit on Sunday. (At least on Tuesday they were only moving trucks and shouting, not fucking RIVETING or whatever it was they were doing some other days.)
With one thing and another,enotsola was pretty dead with a migraine, so I took the opportunity to get caught up on elethian's flist at least (never mind all the other bits of the internet I read) before going to a first workshop later that afternoon.
The Life of Severus Snape
This panel was kind of interesting, but since I am already obsessed, there was little I hadn't already thought of or heard in discussions on![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
snapedom, Loose Canon, or other places. I also got the funny sense that a few of the commentors in the audience were way more passionate about the subject than the presenters themselves. There was a feeling of detachment despite a general positive attitude. I know that my standards in this regard are peculiar bordering on bizarre, but I came away with a sense that they did not love Severus like I and others do, so it was odd listening to them discuss him in such cool and analytical ways even as they were ostensibly (mostly) defending him.
Fanart Past, Present, Post-Fandom, featuring Fanart Live
I must have blinked and missed the "past and present" part, unless the questionsglockgal (?) was asking the artists were supposed to be that. I'd been expecting a brief slideshow from each of them, or something like that. It was cool watching people draw, although the tragic Photoshop crash of 2009 was a bummer.
We had dinner this night at New Delhi, which had v. v. tasty nan bread and really good curry, even though (like the sushi, but again expected) the price was on the steep side by my standards.
We came in about halfway through the fashion show, which was cute I suppose. I liked the 70s "punk witch" (complete with Ramones t-shirt, lol) and some Irish-looking costume we came in too late to see (not the "Augurey" one, something plaid with a circlet on her head).
The "Prison Break" ball -- well, to be fair, I knew I wasn't going to enjoy this very much. It is just not my kind of event. I hardly dance anymore even if I go out to a goth club, which is more my thing, so "high school dance", not so much. And of course the drinks were ugly expensive for what they were, although the "Unicorn Blood" (umm... vodka, blue Curacao, lemonade?) was decent tasting. I didn't get to see the "Thriller" dance because hotel staff were chasing people off standing on chairs, and not already being in the press around the dance floor, at 5'4" I was not possibly going to see anything without climbing on the furniture. I was annoyed with the way the DJ would mute not entire phrases, but just a word or two, even sometimes parts of words, to let the crowd hear themselves singing along. It was a rather bumpy effect overall. Afterwords, we watched the "wrock unplugged" thing in the foyer for a little bit, then hung around with some people on the third floor who were just goofing around. Someone cosplaying a prison-dressed Snape was doing hilariously bizarre stick-figure drawbles. Here's mine, after I said something out loud about "Harry/Hogwarts Express":
The characters always introduce themselves in the first panel, so I remember a line from another one was "I am Salazar Slytherin and I'm doing stuff" and then there was Spock/Spock-Prime, which was something like "I am Leonard Nimoy... I mean Spock" and "I am super sexy [something] Zachary Quinto... I mean, also Spock" and he had little sparklies drawn around him.
Having failed to get more than a slight buzz this evening, we decided to retreat to the room and watch the Harry Potter movie channel for a while. They had the movies on loop on one of the closed-circuit channels, which unfortunately wasn't in the 1-5 sequence, but was Sorcerer's Stone on Thursday (I assume; we didn't watch), Chamber of Secrets on Friday, Prisoner of Azkaban on Saturday, Goblet of Fire on Sunday, and Order of the Phoenix on Monday, switching over at noon each day. I can understand how this would be easier for the hotel staff, who could just leave each DVD in the player for 24 hours on repeat, although I wish they'd had a 5-disc changer in the same position. I've seen bits of PoA more times this weekend than I ever have before. (Someone on a blog out there off LJ said similarly, "I've seen Cedric Diggory die so many times!")
Monday
Didn't manage to get up for 9 AM Fully Knowable Severus Snape, so I don't know whether I would have found it better than or similar to Life of Severus Snape from Saturday.
Writing Realistic Magic for HP
Roundtable discussion again. This was interesting as I heard quite a few opinions, differing from my own, on the importance of not making magic too easy (it certainly seems that way in canon in most cases, so unless one wishes to break consistency with Rowling's established precedent...) and on how people liked to write fairly complicated procedures for enchanting objects and things. While I can see the reasoning there, it's something we simply never see in the Potterverse (we don't know how the charmed objects that apparently make up a good part of the wizarding economy are made), so it's a place one should tread carefully, IMO, or it will come off feeling too different to how Potterverse magic tends to be written. OTOH I agreed wholly with the person who voiced annoyance at seeing other fandoms' or genres' magical rules and procedures put into Harry Potter fic (aside from sheer crossover) and I added that it similarly annoyed me when people randomly wrote in real-world pagan magic or religious bits, because we just don't have that kind of stuff in Potter as far as I can see. Obviously JKR knew or researched her folklore on things like herbs and wood meanings and omens, there is room for differing styles in exotic locations or remote history, and you might get away with stuff from medieval grimoires which are lurking below the surface of just what we think of as "wizards" anyway, but I mean things like when Potterverse wizards start invoking goddesses and the like, it just rubs me the wrong way.
Beedle the Bard
Roundtable discussing this latest piece of canon, although (besides it being too short, which was gonna happen no matter what) I was disappointed it wasn't really approached from a "canon analysis" perspective. It got touched on when the question of whether the commentary by Dumbledore (not to mention JKR) added or detracted was brought up, but I was puzzled when the main presenter said something to the effect of being sad there weren't more random wizarding-world bits of information, because I think there were quite a few.
HP and the Unforgivable Curses
Interesting presentation and discussion on just why these curses might be "unforgivable", and touching on some other rather awful or disturbing uses of magic (such as Obliviate, especially when used on Muggles) and talking about reasons why these do not carry the same stigma and are not outlawed.
The People vs. JK Rowling
This was rather droll, although I thought it dragged on a bit. This was presented as a mock hearing, with a prosecution and a defence attorney and a judge, wherein we (the "witnesses" as well as "jury") listened to statements from both sides on the charges of whether Rowling, re: Deathly Hallows, "did knowingly, deliberately, and with malice aforethought" commit fraud in the sense that she misled readers to believe she had a coherent plot planned out that would have a satisfying moral conclusion and caused financial and emotional damages because people committed resources to it, and whether she contributed to the delinquency of a minor in that she "knowingly, deliberately, and with malice aforethought" presented bad moral guidelines (basically; my paraphrase). Much interesting discussion ensued on whether there is any such responsbility, whether Harry Potter was the shared text of a global next generation (as opposed to older generations' shared texts like the Bible), the influence of literature on children's ethical ideas, whether such books are art and therefore have no duty to instruct in anything regardless of where they might usually be shelved at a bookstore, and such topics. I was v. amused to hear statements deriding "camping, endless camping" from both prosecution and defence. (But as they say: there's no law against bad art.) In the end I believe she was "convicted" on both counts, but only by one vote on the second charge.
We passed by the auction and looked vaguely at some of the stuff on offer. There were some very nice quilts, but overall we weren't interested in this. Later that evening we went to the Podcastpalooza. We missed the "panel" and came in around SpellCast so got to participate in making sound effects for the three short (10-minute) plays. (My personal favourite was the comedy one with the dementors Sam, Kim, Margie, etc. who were just normal office workers, in their way.) The Hog's Head Pubcast was up next, which was quite interesting in its unusual literacy and academic-ness. We only stuck around for the beginning of Hogwarts Radio, which unexpectedly had Chris Rankin (Percy) in it -- I'd thought he'd be dead tired by then (~11 PM Monday). It was interesting to hear his actual voice as opposed to his acting voice, but we weren't terribly interested in the topics they seemed to be discussing, so we skedaddled.
Tuesday
The only thing on this day's schedule was the leaving brunch, which was tasty, although I don't think I agree with having cilantro in a cranberry relish for turkey. I love cilantro, but it was not a flavour I liked with cranberries and orange peel bits and turkey gravy, yanno?
Lastly, a few people pictures from the Snapecast meetup. I have a couple from the Severus/Lily meetup and some of various folks in costume at other points, but indoor photography in dim lighting with flash means people tended to have horrible red-eye which I'd like to try to correct before posting (with one funny exception).
This gives you a better sense of what the Bottle Room and Press Club look like than it does any of the people.
People watching the vid of last year's Snapefest from Portus (?). For some reason I don't mind the motion blur in this. In the purple shirt I think ischaeche and on the right in Snape costume I think is stupid_drawings.
Husband apparently nicked the camera at some point. I'm in the middle,pennswoods on the left, and I feel bad for not remembering whether the woman on the right is good_witch (is it an LJ name? not sure) or cluegirl.
also:
Me and I believe the name isfiendish_thingy? (this one taken by venturous1, posted here)
Severus/Lily meetup:
Clockwise from top left: Mix CD from
irielle with label I printed, t-shirt iron-on from tjwritter (that's why the text is backwards), button I made, fuzzball owl from gichigami, sticker from someone whose name I didn't get (she wasn't at the assembly pre-meetup, but brought them to the the meet), bookmark from pennswoods.I'm keeping most of this but I never wear t-shirt colours that such an iron-on would show up on, so if anyone would like it, let me know.
Snape meetup:
Clockwise from top left: Snape drabble very-mini-book by
ravenna_c_tan, quill, Snape nose soap "Because shampoo is for Gryffindors" (one below says "For dirty fangirls"), some candy in a plastic cauldron, pink "Love Potion" bottle that is supposedly Silly Putty or some kind of similar goo, small glass vial necklace with rolled parchment reading "Always", dog tag reading "Property of the Half-Blood Prince" (so awesome! I was wearing mine all weekend after this), bookmark featuring art by pennswoods, chocolate bar. Not pictured: Snapecast button and green ribbon pin saying "Snape Lives". And, this:Made of black felt. It's a Snape-shaped hole, get it? (So of course I tacked it up on my window!)
If anyone would like the soaps or the "potion", let me know.
Snarry meetup:
There's a lot of stuff here so I'll just vaguely go from the top down: trivia quiz, postcard, mix CD, bookmark, pencil, green rubber bracelet reading "Severus loves him", green rosemary soap stamped "SS/HP", red golf tee reading "HP Vamp", another "Property of the Half-Blood Prince" dog tag, another bookmark, two stickers, ring with giant blue plastic jewel with flashy LEDs, somewhat inexplicable fluorescent necklace with tiny plastic pacifier, green button reading "Snarry: proof of the healing power of buttsex", Post-it pad reading "What Would Snape Do? ... To Harry", chocolate, two buttons, keychain, another sticker, small bottle of bubbles, manga book that I can't fathom how it's related to Snarry, more candy, square button with art in white lines on black, and highly inexplicable Post-it pad with promotion for a diazepam (Valium) rectal gel (perhaps this is a joke I'm not getting?).
I have duplicates of most of this because
enotsola got his own swag bag. Since there's so much here I won't list specifically what I'd like to give away, just ask (but definitely the manga). Also, I have some temporary tattoo sheets they were giving out at the movie and a couple of lightning bolt ones that were in the main con package. I also have husband's program if anyone would like to see how terribly hard it was to find any real information in the attempt to be so prettied up and "prisony".
So, what did I do all weekend?
Thursday
Was pretty much freaking out on arrival, partly because of suddenly plunging into "con vibe" and partly because of the physical and mental stress of working out how to get out of the BART station with all our crap when the elevator wasn't working and partly because of a sense that time was running short. Went down to the bar for drinks and met
gichigami in an elevator; she kindly bought us a round. Eventually found most of the people I knew were bringing stuff to the gift bag assembly and went up to our room and did that. Went for sushi for dinner (Sushi Rika, good but a tad pricey, although $12 of it was sake). Dressed up a bit for the movie and sat in line FOR FREAKING EVER. Man. I gather that's supposed to be "fun" to hang around with a bunch of other freaks, but when I don't personally know any (many) of them it just gets tedious. Everyone out there has pretty much already said everything I could say about the movie, so the short of it is that I was surprised that I did not hate the romantic comedy slant like I thought I would, but was disappointed with a number of aspects even despite lowish expectations.Friday
The Severus/Lily meetup was fair-to-middlin'. I liked the food, but despite the manager's assurance on Thursday afternoon that at Friday at 1:30 we wouldn't need to reserve a spot, lo and behold, the area I had been coveting in the back room was taken by "Reserved for private party" that wasn't us. So we commandeered a few other tables there, which would have been okay if only the expected 10-12 people had shown up, but my final head count was 36 (husband's was 40), so it meant that we were in semi-isolated islands, neither all facing one another nor really able to get up and mill about like at the Snapecast or Snarry meetups. Of course, we also ran out of swag bags because of that attendance. I didn't get everyone's names nor, I am sure, remember the presence of even some of those that I know, but there was at least
tjwritter, irielle and her brother, pennswoods, gichigami, lampblack, chaeche, cosmiccoz, lesyeuxverts00, droxy, Mr. Droxy, sinick, ac1d6urn, fiendish_thingy (?) among the people I have no idea who they were. Overall I feel bad for not managing to centralize people's attention a little more. The environment and the attendance meant we didn't get to do the "link exchange" as I'd planned -- it just wasn't feasible. So I'm not sure people got their Sev/Lily fix off the thing, overall, is what I'm saying.The Snapecast meetup was much more awesome, but then also a much bigger production. The swag was very cool and the nibbles tasty, though the wine was quite steep in price after the one included glass (the cheapest were $5 per "taste", which was about 2 oz, so if you wanted a full glass, that was $10-15, and it went up from there). It was neat sitting in that sort of atmosphere with a bunch of other "believers".
We swung by to check out the vendors, but it was kind of lackluster, and in particular, I was very disappointed to see that Whirlwood was not there, despite Azkatraz being on their website's Faire schedule. The Whimsic Alley lady expressed some surprise at this as well, saying that usually they'd have been given some of the guy's stuff to bring and sell. I wound up buying a set of their robes because unfortunately the ones I'd had made for me by
moony_couture wound up being far too big around for me (they seem to be shorter, but hardly any narrower, than enotsola's, and the overall effect is "oh look, I got into Daddy's robe closet"). Therefore I'm thinking of selling these, if anyone is looking for Ravenclaw robes.We had bought some liquor while we were out between dinner and things, so over the course of this night I got rather too drunk and remember starting to make an ass of myself at the Snarry bag stuffing, so
enotsola and I absented ourselves from that after a while.Saturday
The welcome lunch was pretty good. The food was nice and we didn't have to wait long in line, although I didn't understand why they had the badge checking point where they did and not, oh I don't know, at the door into the foyer. Then we went to workshops in the afternoon.
Fighting the Slytherin Stereotype Within the Gryffindor Schema
This was okay, but a little meh. The presenter basically read an essay aloud to us which was, erm, unengaging, even though I would have liked to read it on a screen or paper.
Dark Side of Fandom
This was a roundtable discussion. It was interesting enough, although the focus seemed to be on discussing the appeal and personal uses of writing or reading noncon and similar abuse kinds of themes than the horror/spooky/"perverse" kinds of stuff.
At this point we wandered off to the craft faire for a bit, which even though I didn't really see anything I wanted to buy, was still more interesting than the actual vendor room.
"Brilliant--but scary": the Problematic Portrayal of Hermione in the Harry Potter Books and Films
We arrived after the start of this, so I might have missed something that might have made it make more sense, but the bit we saw seemed to be about cultural meanings of various hair lengths and styles, and what it meant that Hermione's movie hair started off relatively wild but got progressively more tamed.
The Snarry meetup later that night was all well and good, and the snacks were v. tasty, but I dunno... I guess I'm just not the right kind of social? Through no one's particular fault I felt pretty left out, as truthfully I did of everything all weekend. As I mumbled in a comment to an earlier post, I did not arrive to this fandom early enough to have any presence simply through years of shared experience with others, and I don't have enough substance to make those connections faster by dint of being Just That Cool.
We totally forgot the "Fair Fortune" wrock opera was going on for half an hour in the middle of the Snarry meet and missed it entirely.
Sunday
I was mightily Un-Thrilled by being awakened by a (false, as it transpired) fire alarm at about 9:20 this morning. I suppose that beats 6:20 or 3:20, though, as has happened at other cons I've been to. Also, it beat being awakened at 8:00 by the construction going on across Mason street VERY LOUDLY on Friday and Monday and to a lesser degree on Saturday and I think a bit on Sunday. (At least on Tuesday they were only moving trucks and shouting, not fucking RIVETING or whatever it was they were doing some other days.)
With one thing and another,
enotsola was pretty dead with a migraine, so I took the opportunity to get caught up on elethian's flist at least (never mind all the other bits of the internet I read) before going to a first workshop later that afternoon.The Life of Severus Snape
This panel was kind of interesting, but since I am already obsessed, there was little I hadn't already thought of or heard in discussions on
snapedom, Loose Canon, or other places. I also got the funny sense that a few of the commentors in the audience were way more passionate about the subject than the presenters themselves. There was a feeling of detachment despite a general positive attitude. I know that my standards in this regard are peculiar bordering on bizarre, but I came away with a sense that they did not love Severus like I and others do, so it was odd listening to them discuss him in such cool and analytical ways even as they were ostensibly (mostly) defending him.Fanart Past, Present, Post-Fandom, featuring Fanart Live
I must have blinked and missed the "past and present" part, unless the questions
glockgal (?) was asking the artists were supposed to be that. I'd been expecting a brief slideshow from each of them, or something like that. It was cool watching people draw, although the tragic Photoshop crash of 2009 was a bummer. We had dinner this night at New Delhi, which had v. v. tasty nan bread and really good curry, even though (like the sushi, but again expected) the price was on the steep side by my standards.
We came in about halfway through the fashion show, which was cute I suppose. I liked the 70s "punk witch" (complete with Ramones t-shirt, lol) and some Irish-looking costume we came in too late to see (not the "Augurey" one, something plaid with a circlet on her head).
The "Prison Break" ball -- well, to be fair, I knew I wasn't going to enjoy this very much. It is just not my kind of event. I hardly dance anymore even if I go out to a goth club, which is more my thing, so "high school dance", not so much. And of course the drinks were ugly expensive for what they were, although the "Unicorn Blood" (umm... vodka, blue Curacao, lemonade?) was decent tasting. I didn't get to see the "Thriller" dance because hotel staff were chasing people off standing on chairs, and not already being in the press around the dance floor, at 5'4" I was not possibly going to see anything without climbing on the furniture. I was annoyed with the way the DJ would mute not entire phrases, but just a word or two, even sometimes parts of words, to let the crowd hear themselves singing along. It was a rather bumpy effect overall. Afterwords, we watched the "wrock unplugged" thing in the foyer for a little bit, then hung around with some people on the third floor who were just goofing around. Someone cosplaying a prison-dressed Snape was doing hilariously bizarre stick-figure drawbles. Here's mine, after I said something out loud about "Harry/Hogwarts Express":
The characters always introduce themselves in the first panel, so I remember a line from another one was "I am Salazar Slytherin and I'm doing stuff" and then there was Spock/Spock-Prime, which was something like "I am Leonard Nimoy... I mean Spock" and "I am super sexy [something] Zachary Quinto... I mean, also Spock" and he had little sparklies drawn around him.
Having failed to get more than a slight buzz this evening, we decided to retreat to the room and watch the Harry Potter movie channel for a while. They had the movies on loop on one of the closed-circuit channels, which unfortunately wasn't in the 1-5 sequence, but was Sorcerer's Stone on Thursday (I assume; we didn't watch), Chamber of Secrets on Friday, Prisoner of Azkaban on Saturday, Goblet of Fire on Sunday, and Order of the Phoenix on Monday, switching over at noon each day. I can understand how this would be easier for the hotel staff, who could just leave each DVD in the player for 24 hours on repeat, although I wish they'd had a 5-disc changer in the same position. I've seen bits of PoA more times this weekend than I ever have before. (Someone on a blog out there off LJ said similarly, "I've seen Cedric Diggory die so many times!")
Monday
Didn't manage to get up for 9 AM Fully Knowable Severus Snape, so I don't know whether I would have found it better than or similar to Life of Severus Snape from Saturday.
Writing Realistic Magic for HP
Roundtable discussion again. This was interesting as I heard quite a few opinions, differing from my own, on the importance of not making magic too easy (it certainly seems that way in canon in most cases, so unless one wishes to break consistency with Rowling's established precedent...) and on how people liked to write fairly complicated procedures for enchanting objects and things. While I can see the reasoning there, it's something we simply never see in the Potterverse (we don't know how the charmed objects that apparently make up a good part of the wizarding economy are made), so it's a place one should tread carefully, IMO, or it will come off feeling too different to how Potterverse magic tends to be written. OTOH I agreed wholly with the person who voiced annoyance at seeing other fandoms' or genres' magical rules and procedures put into Harry Potter fic (aside from sheer crossover) and I added that it similarly annoyed me when people randomly wrote in real-world pagan magic or religious bits, because we just don't have that kind of stuff in Potter as far as I can see. Obviously JKR knew or researched her folklore on things like herbs and wood meanings and omens, there is room for differing styles in exotic locations or remote history, and you might get away with stuff from medieval grimoires which are lurking below the surface of just what we think of as "wizards" anyway, but I mean things like when Potterverse wizards start invoking goddesses and the like, it just rubs me the wrong way.
Beedle the Bard
Roundtable discussing this latest piece of canon, although (besides it being too short, which was gonna happen no matter what) I was disappointed it wasn't really approached from a "canon analysis" perspective. It got touched on when the question of whether the commentary by Dumbledore (not to mention JKR) added or detracted was brought up, but I was puzzled when the main presenter said something to the effect of being sad there weren't more random wizarding-world bits of information, because I think there were quite a few.
HP and the Unforgivable Curses
Interesting presentation and discussion on just why these curses might be "unforgivable", and touching on some other rather awful or disturbing uses of magic (such as Obliviate, especially when used on Muggles) and talking about reasons why these do not carry the same stigma and are not outlawed.
The People vs. JK Rowling
This was rather droll, although I thought it dragged on a bit. This was presented as a mock hearing, with a prosecution and a defence attorney and a judge, wherein we (the "witnesses" as well as "jury") listened to statements from both sides on the charges of whether Rowling, re: Deathly Hallows, "did knowingly, deliberately, and with malice aforethought" commit fraud in the sense that she misled readers to believe she had a coherent plot planned out that would have a satisfying moral conclusion and caused financial and emotional damages because people committed resources to it, and whether she contributed to the delinquency of a minor in that she "knowingly, deliberately, and with malice aforethought" presented bad moral guidelines (basically; my paraphrase). Much interesting discussion ensued on whether there is any such responsbility, whether Harry Potter was the shared text of a global next generation (as opposed to older generations' shared texts like the Bible), the influence of literature on children's ethical ideas, whether such books are art and therefore have no duty to instruct in anything regardless of where they might usually be shelved at a bookstore, and such topics. I was v. amused to hear statements deriding "camping, endless camping" from both prosecution and defence. (But as they say: there's no law against bad art.) In the end I believe she was "convicted" on both counts, but only by one vote on the second charge.
We passed by the auction and looked vaguely at some of the stuff on offer. There were some very nice quilts, but overall we weren't interested in this. Later that evening we went to the Podcastpalooza. We missed the "panel" and came in around SpellCast so got to participate in making sound effects for the three short (10-minute) plays. (My personal favourite was the comedy one with the dementors Sam, Kim, Margie, etc. who were just normal office workers, in their way.) The Hog's Head Pubcast was up next, which was quite interesting in its unusual literacy and academic-ness. We only stuck around for the beginning of Hogwarts Radio, which unexpectedly had Chris Rankin (Percy) in it -- I'd thought he'd be dead tired by then (~11 PM Monday). It was interesting to hear his actual voice as opposed to his acting voice, but we weren't terribly interested in the topics they seemed to be discussing, so we skedaddled.
Tuesday
The only thing on this day's schedule was the leaving brunch, which was tasty, although I don't think I agree with having cilantro in a cranberry relish for turkey. I love cilantro, but it was not a flavour I liked with cranberries and orange peel bits and turkey gravy, yanno?
Lastly, a few people pictures from the Snapecast meetup. I have a couple from the Severus/Lily meetup and some of various folks in costume at other points, but indoor photography in dim lighting with flash means people tended to have horrible red-eye which I'd like to try to correct before posting (with one funny exception).
This gives you a better sense of what the Bottle Room and Press Club look like than it does any of the people.
People watching the vid of last year's Snapefest from Portus (?). For some reason I don't mind the motion blur in this. In the purple shirt I think is
chaeche and on the right in Snape costume I think is stupid_drawings.Husband apparently nicked the camera at some point. I'm in the middle,
pennswoods on the left, and I feel bad for not remembering whether the woman on the right is good_witch (is it an LJ name? not sure) or cluegirl. also:
Me and I believe the name is
fiendish_thingy? (this one taken by venturous1, posted here)
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