And now, the Post-Norwescon Report
Mar. 31st, 2002 07:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperSo here I am at home now, having gotten back from Norwescon finally with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
spazzkat (Paul) and mamishka (Mimi), and it's time for the writeup of the convention.
This year, armed with the mandolin I'm actually starting to get comfortable enough with that I can think about playing in public without getting too terribly nervous, I resolved to actually go to the filk for once and see if I could sing and play something. So I dropped by the filk on Thursday night and on Saturday as well, and both times I did in fact play, which turned out to be very gratifying. I did "Judas Cart" and more or less held it together; I lost some of the chords on "Old Black Rum", though.
But the biggest success as well as the biggest failure was doing an actual original filksong I wrote, which was "How Many Hugos?", which I wrote back in 1997 and for which I've only just now got around to figuring out a chord progression. It turns out this puppy is in D, and it seems to be your basic three-chorder, D, G, and A. So I thought I'd worked out where the chords for it go, and so I tried to sing it in the filk, but wound up losing it in the first verse because I was too nervous. Wound up singing the rest of the thing a capella, and the gratifying thing was that not only did I get some giggles, people tried to sing along with me on the chorus as well! Awwww gosh. I do kind of wonder now whether I shouldn't have had the choruses change each time through, but I guess we'll have to see if the song decides to evolve.
Other fun musical notes about the filk... there was a guy on Thursday night who did a version of "Mari-Mac" that was unfamiliar to me. He had some verses I didn't recognize, and he sang it in a much more slow and jaunty kind of tempo than the GBS version; I kept trying to figure out whether I could play the chords I knew along with him, and kept wanting to go "But, but, but, this thing isn't speeding up where it's supposed to!" On Saturday, the filk was much livelier than it had been on Thursday; people with guitars were actually there, and I was able to spend a bit more time trying to pluck out simple accompaniments on my mand while others were singing. What looked like a husband-and-wife duo were the ones who first invited me to sing as I was sitting there with the mand, which was very nice of them. Everyone was doing cartoon filks when I came in, and I pointed out that I didn't know any cartoon filk, but nobody minded when I did my Hugos ditty.
Everyone was still mostly doing stuff a capella, but that was pretty fine. A good deal of Tom Lehrer was done while I was there, as well as a very funny little filk of "Heather on the Moor" about South Park and Kenny, to which I'm simply going to have to get the words. I'm also going to have to acquire a copy of that Tom Lehrer songbook I saw somebody holding up, too.
This afternoon, as well, I had a bit of musical fun. There were some last-minute major programming changes for Sunday, assolarbird (Dar) found out when they handed him an entirely new programming grid to run in the con's daily zine for the issue worked on on Saturday night. Scheduled on the new grid was a "Celtic jam session", which sounded fun, so I decided not to pack the mandolin in Mimi's van until after that. There was some question as to whether it would actually happen, though. Dar said that the filk people had mailed him to say that the jam session would not happen, but on Saturday night the head of programming told him it would. So I thought I'd go check anyway.
It turned out to be sort of a "1/3 of Three Good Measures, plus a few other random people" impromptu thing. Dar, Cyn, and I did as many of our songs as we could with the ones of us who were present, which amounted to "Lukey", "Old Black Rum", "Judas Cart", and "You Woke Up My Neighborhood". After Dar left Cyn and I wound up also doing "General Taylor". All of them were pretty rough takes, but well hey. One other musician showed up, a redheaded chick named Krys who plays the bodhran and the guitar and who also sings, and she played bodhran with us; she also sang harmony on "General Taylor". That was fun. :) She exchanged contact information with me since she's local and is interested in finding a group that plays Celtic music, so we may have a new body showing up for our jam sessions.
Because of my musical endeavors over the weekend I got to put in a plug or two for Great Big Sea, and Cyn even put in a plug for 30 Odd Foot of Grunts after we were asked about "Judas Cart". Whee. :)
From a non-musical perspective the con was pretty laid back overall. I never go to panels pretty much, but even my cursory glance at the pocket program to make absolutely sure there was nothing even remotely interesting in it yielded up nothing. The only panel I wound up attending was the Pictionary panel, on which Paul and Mimi wound up helping out since Donna Barr came down with strep throat and had to back out of helping Roberta Gregory on it. Dar and I met that night (Friday) for dinner and were looking around for Paul and Mimi, and that's where we wound up finding them. Dar pretty much took over our side of the room and as a result we won. Muahahaha.
I also wound up attending one party, which was the 35th anniversary party being held for the Speed Racer cartoon by a Speed Racer fan club. (Could be the official Speed Racer fan club; dunno. They looked pretty official to me.) They took over the room next door to the con suite and showed a lot of the old episodes, and handed out birthday cake, too. In between episodes they yakked about trivia related to the various episodes, and various and sundry bits of amusing lewd commentary were shouted at the screen by everybody in the room, mostly about Speed and his mechanic Sparky. This was also on Friday night, and the next day I stopped at their table and told them that thanks to them, I not only had had the Speed Racer theme stuck in my head, I'd also managed to songvirus two other people with it. This got me an enthusiastic YES!
They were also having a drawing to hand out a free boxed set of all 52 episodes of the show on DVD, which I signed up for for giggles, but which I did not win.
Paul and Mimi and Dar all attended the dances, though I did not this year. I was having enough of a time trying to muster the courage to head to the filk and do something interesting, as opposed to hanging out in the hotel room playing Nethack on my computer. I did play a lot of Nethack on my computer, mind you, but I made a point of doing it in the fanzine lounge, where at least I could be out in public and have a chance at talking to people if anyone interesting wandered by. ;)
There was the usual assortment of toys, videos, CDs, shiny things, sparkly things, pointy things, velvet things, leather things, and books in the dealers' room. I wound up buying myself a couple of werewolf novels by an author I didn't know; the second one actually sounded more interesting to me than the first, but I was advised that the second one would make a lot more sense to me than the first. More on this after I actually read them. I also wound up buying myself a silver claddagh ring just because I wanted one, and even though buying one yourself isn't nearly as cool as having someone give one to you, well, having one that's made of silver is much cooler than having one that's made out of cheap molded plastic that came with the Angel action figure that your housemate gave you. ;)
I also wound up buying a Norwescon sweatshirt, because 1) this was the 25th Norwescon, and the theme was The Emerald City (as in, The Wizard of Oz), so the sweatshirts had this lovely green-motif sort of Emerald City picture on them, and 2) I'm tired of wearing my Attachmate sweatshirts, especially since they laid me off, so screw them! Now I have a pretty new sweatshirt to wear.
Dar bought some very nummy green silk pants, and I am getting amused that Dar is rapidly becoming more femme than I am. I saw a guy wandering around in an Indiana Jones costume, and seeing him, I thought to myself that a measure of personal butchness might be, "Do you want to do a guy in a leather jacket and a fedora, or do you want to be a guy in a leather jacket and fedora?" Dar asked me if this meant I wanted to be a boy now, to which I said no, but I do think I'd look pretty darned cool in a fedora.
Speaking of costumes, I also saw a guy wandering around in a Maximus costume, while I was hanging out in the fanzine lounge playing with my computer. It was from the first big arena scene in the movie, the one that is supposed to recreate the Battle of Carthage and which ends with the big "Maximus reveals himself and makes Commodus Go Oh Shit" speech, so this guy had the helmet and face mask and everything. He certainly wasn't as big or as built as Russell Crowe from what I could see across the room, but he had a very nicely trimmed beard that made him look pretty dead on at least from a side view. His breastplate was pretty well done as well, and it in fact was the first thing that caught my eye when he walked into the room. Considering that I was in fact playing with my computer, and, well, Maximus has lived on my desktop pretty much non-stop ever since I saw Gladiator, I had to be amused by this. Mimi and Paul reported to me later that they saw the same guy, thought of me, and were also amused.
Joe andlyricae (Cheryl) both attended the convention, and between Cheryl and Mimi, both of whom did a lot of wearing of very lovely corsets, I came to the realization that corsets just basically baffle me. Not for any particular reason that I'm able to lay my finger on, aside perhaps from "this is an article of clothing that people wear when they inhabit an entirely different universe than I do". Don't get me wrong, Meems and Cheryl both look great in their corsets and I admire them on them, but I can't see myself actually going to the bother of ever wearing one of the things. I do well to roll into clean and not too terribly wrinkly T-shirts and shorts when I get up in the morning.
I bumped into Elf Sternberg and his spouse Omaha a couple of times, as well as their very cute child whose name I have not yet managed to learn. Bumped into one of the Telgar folk and chatted briefly about the upcoming "informal" closeup issue that Cathleen wants to put out. And had a couple of random encounters with complete strangers, to wit, 1) one guy who went past me and told me I had a nice outfit and nice legs (which was bemusing even if pleasing, because all I was wearing was my usual sweatshirt and T-shirt and shorts), and 2) a redheaded guy who came up and peered at my badge and then told me I was not the person he thought I was. Whoops.
I read a bit of Dragon and Phoenix by Joanne Bertin, though I'm not liking this book as much as the first one she's written; the various characters in it are doing things that annoy me. So the reading was slow going. I'm still trying to give the book a shot in the hopes that it'll pick up as I get further in, but it's a disappointing experience so far. Also edited several logs both old and new from Two Moons MUSH, and worked on the overdue Jam Report from last session. So even though I did a lot of computer time, not all of it was playing Nethack! I also even tried to play some with another original thing I've written, the song I wrote for Faanshi on AetherMUSH, which was "Ride Upon the Wyvern". I have a chord progression in progress for this thing, and it seems to be a bit more complicated than just a three-chorder; all I know about it right now is that I think it's in C and 4/4 time, and seems to have a lot of C (two different octaves of C, too), F, G, Dm, and Em in it.
Helped Dar proofread the daily zine as per usual, though this year's wasn't nearly so giggly as last year's, Inevitability. I'm still giggling over the Cylon Joke Squad, and Dar is still giggling over "Keith Johnson's beeper is pretty smart. Maybe we should recruit it!" Dar also brought back Bender for a brief cameo in this year's 'zine, even though it did annoying things to his layout.
Paul bought a little game from Cheapass Games, called "Kill Dr. Lucky", and he and Joe and Cheryl and Meems played it in the fanzine lounge while I alternated between watching them and playing with the computer. That was entertaining to observe; apparently the whole point of the game was to compete to off this old guy Dr. Lucky. Sort of "Clue" in reverse. You follow him all over the house and try to get weapons cards and an opportunity to do the old guy in with no one else the wiser.
Mimi,ssha (Cyn), and I went to an ice cream social this afternoon, too, though that turned out to be held by the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future people. One of them came up to us while we were there and asked us if any of us were aspiring writers or illustrators, so I told him in my own case "not at the moment". Only when Mimi and I were out in the elevator on our way back down to the rest of the con did I tell Meems that while I am an aspiring writer, I didn't want to be aspiring in connection with anything with L. Ron's name on it. She looked at me blankly until I helped her realize that he was the Dianetics/Scientology guy, at which point she went OH RIGHT and thanked me for rescuing her from her temporary moment of insanity for having taken one of the cards the guy was handing out. But well hey. They had ice cream.
The only down note is that I think I've caught the cold that Dar caught just before the con; apparently, something was going around in general. As I write this I'm feeling vaguely oogy. And hungry, too, so off to Chinese food!
spazzkat (Paul) and mamishka (Mimi), and it's time for the writeup of the convention. This year, armed with the mandolin I'm actually starting to get comfortable enough with that I can think about playing in public without getting too terribly nervous, I resolved to actually go to the filk for once and see if I could sing and play something. So I dropped by the filk on Thursday night and on Saturday as well, and both times I did in fact play, which turned out to be very gratifying. I did "Judas Cart" and more or less held it together; I lost some of the chords on "Old Black Rum", though.
But the biggest success as well as the biggest failure was doing an actual original filksong I wrote, which was "How Many Hugos?", which I wrote back in 1997 and for which I've only just now got around to figuring out a chord progression. It turns out this puppy is in D, and it seems to be your basic three-chorder, D, G, and A. So I thought I'd worked out where the chords for it go, and so I tried to sing it in the filk, but wound up losing it in the first verse because I was too nervous. Wound up singing the rest of the thing a capella, and the gratifying thing was that not only did I get some giggles, people tried to sing along with me on the chorus as well! Awwww gosh. I do kind of wonder now whether I shouldn't have had the choruses change each time through, but I guess we'll have to see if the song decides to evolve.
Other fun musical notes about the filk... there was a guy on Thursday night who did a version of "Mari-Mac" that was unfamiliar to me. He had some verses I didn't recognize, and he sang it in a much more slow and jaunty kind of tempo than the GBS version; I kept trying to figure out whether I could play the chords I knew along with him, and kept wanting to go "But, but, but, this thing isn't speeding up where it's supposed to!" On Saturday, the filk was much livelier than it had been on Thursday; people with guitars were actually there, and I was able to spend a bit more time trying to pluck out simple accompaniments on my mand while others were singing. What looked like a husband-and-wife duo were the ones who first invited me to sing as I was sitting there with the mand, which was very nice of them. Everyone was doing cartoon filks when I came in, and I pointed out that I didn't know any cartoon filk, but nobody minded when I did my Hugos ditty.
Everyone was still mostly doing stuff a capella, but that was pretty fine. A good deal of Tom Lehrer was done while I was there, as well as a very funny little filk of "Heather on the Moor" about South Park and Kenny, to which I'm simply going to have to get the words. I'm also going to have to acquire a copy of that Tom Lehrer songbook I saw somebody holding up, too.
This afternoon, as well, I had a bit of musical fun. There were some last-minute major programming changes for Sunday, as
solarbird (Dar) found out when they handed him an entirely new programming grid to run in the con's daily zine for the issue worked on on Saturday night. Scheduled on the new grid was a "Celtic jam session", which sounded fun, so I decided not to pack the mandolin in Mimi's van until after that. There was some question as to whether it would actually happen, though. Dar said that the filk people had mailed him to say that the jam session would not happen, but on Saturday night the head of programming told him it would. So I thought I'd go check anyway.It turned out to be sort of a "1/3 of Three Good Measures, plus a few other random people" impromptu thing. Dar, Cyn, and I did as many of our songs as we could with the ones of us who were present, which amounted to "Lukey", "Old Black Rum", "Judas Cart", and "You Woke Up My Neighborhood". After Dar left Cyn and I wound up also doing "General Taylor". All of them were pretty rough takes, but well hey. One other musician showed up, a redheaded chick named Krys who plays the bodhran and the guitar and who also sings, and she played bodhran with us; she also sang harmony on "General Taylor". That was fun. :) She exchanged contact information with me since she's local and is interested in finding a group that plays Celtic music, so we may have a new body showing up for our jam sessions.
Because of my musical endeavors over the weekend I got to put in a plug or two for Great Big Sea, and Cyn even put in a plug for 30 Odd Foot of Grunts after we were asked about "Judas Cart". Whee. :)
From a non-musical perspective the con was pretty laid back overall. I never go to panels pretty much, but even my cursory glance at the pocket program to make absolutely sure there was nothing even remotely interesting in it yielded up nothing. The only panel I wound up attending was the Pictionary panel, on which Paul and Mimi wound up helping out since Donna Barr came down with strep throat and had to back out of helping Roberta Gregory on it. Dar and I met that night (Friday) for dinner and were looking around for Paul and Mimi, and that's where we wound up finding them. Dar pretty much took over our side of the room and as a result we won. Muahahaha.
I also wound up attending one party, which was the 35th anniversary party being held for the Speed Racer cartoon by a Speed Racer fan club. (Could be the official Speed Racer fan club; dunno. They looked pretty official to me.) They took over the room next door to the con suite and showed a lot of the old episodes, and handed out birthday cake, too. In between episodes they yakked about trivia related to the various episodes, and various and sundry bits of amusing lewd commentary were shouted at the screen by everybody in the room, mostly about Speed and his mechanic Sparky. This was also on Friday night, and the next day I stopped at their table and told them that thanks to them, I not only had had the Speed Racer theme stuck in my head, I'd also managed to songvirus two other people with it. This got me an enthusiastic YES!
They were also having a drawing to hand out a free boxed set of all 52 episodes of the show on DVD, which I signed up for for giggles, but which I did not win.
Paul and Mimi and Dar all attended the dances, though I did not this year. I was having enough of a time trying to muster the courage to head to the filk and do something interesting, as opposed to hanging out in the hotel room playing Nethack on my computer. I did play a lot of Nethack on my computer, mind you, but I made a point of doing it in the fanzine lounge, where at least I could be out in public and have a chance at talking to people if anyone interesting wandered by. ;)
There was the usual assortment of toys, videos, CDs, shiny things, sparkly things, pointy things, velvet things, leather things, and books in the dealers' room. I wound up buying myself a couple of werewolf novels by an author I didn't know; the second one actually sounded more interesting to me than the first, but I was advised that the second one would make a lot more sense to me than the first. More on this after I actually read them. I also wound up buying myself a silver claddagh ring just because I wanted one, and even though buying one yourself isn't nearly as cool as having someone give one to you, well, having one that's made of silver is much cooler than having one that's made out of cheap molded plastic that came with the Angel action figure that your housemate gave you. ;)
I also wound up buying a Norwescon sweatshirt, because 1) this was the 25th Norwescon, and the theme was The Emerald City (as in, The Wizard of Oz), so the sweatshirts had this lovely green-motif sort of Emerald City picture on them, and 2) I'm tired of wearing my Attachmate sweatshirts, especially since they laid me off, so screw them! Now I have a pretty new sweatshirt to wear.
Dar bought some very nummy green silk pants, and I am getting amused that Dar is rapidly becoming more femme than I am. I saw a guy wandering around in an Indiana Jones costume, and seeing him, I thought to myself that a measure of personal butchness might be, "Do you want to do a guy in a leather jacket and a fedora, or do you want to be a guy in a leather jacket and fedora?" Dar asked me if this meant I wanted to be a boy now, to which I said no, but I do think I'd look pretty darned cool in a fedora.
Speaking of costumes, I also saw a guy wandering around in a Maximus costume, while I was hanging out in the fanzine lounge playing with my computer. It was from the first big arena scene in the movie, the one that is supposed to recreate the Battle of Carthage and which ends with the big "Maximus reveals himself and makes Commodus Go Oh Shit" speech, so this guy had the helmet and face mask and everything. He certainly wasn't as big or as built as Russell Crowe from what I could see across the room, but he had a very nicely trimmed beard that made him look pretty dead on at least from a side view. His breastplate was pretty well done as well, and it in fact was the first thing that caught my eye when he walked into the room. Considering that I was in fact playing with my computer, and, well, Maximus has lived on my desktop pretty much non-stop ever since I saw Gladiator, I had to be amused by this. Mimi and Paul reported to me later that they saw the same guy, thought of me, and were also amused.
Joe and
lyricae (Cheryl) both attended the convention, and between Cheryl and Mimi, both of whom did a lot of wearing of very lovely corsets, I came to the realization that corsets just basically baffle me. Not for any particular reason that I'm able to lay my finger on, aside perhaps from "this is an article of clothing that people wear when they inhabit an entirely different universe than I do". Don't get me wrong, Meems and Cheryl both look great in their corsets and I admire them on them, but I can't see myself actually going to the bother of ever wearing one of the things. I do well to roll into clean and not too terribly wrinkly T-shirts and shorts when I get up in the morning.I bumped into Elf Sternberg and his spouse Omaha a couple of times, as well as their very cute child whose name I have not yet managed to learn. Bumped into one of the Telgar folk and chatted briefly about the upcoming "informal" closeup issue that Cathleen wants to put out. And had a couple of random encounters with complete strangers, to wit, 1) one guy who went past me and told me I had a nice outfit and nice legs (which was bemusing even if pleasing, because all I was wearing was my usual sweatshirt and T-shirt and shorts), and 2) a redheaded guy who came up and peered at my badge and then told me I was not the person he thought I was. Whoops.
I read a bit of Dragon and Phoenix by Joanne Bertin, though I'm not liking this book as much as the first one she's written; the various characters in it are doing things that annoy me. So the reading was slow going. I'm still trying to give the book a shot in the hopes that it'll pick up as I get further in, but it's a disappointing experience so far. Also edited several logs both old and new from Two Moons MUSH, and worked on the overdue Jam Report from last session. So even though I did a lot of computer time, not all of it was playing Nethack! I also even tried to play some with another original thing I've written, the song I wrote for Faanshi on AetherMUSH, which was "Ride Upon the Wyvern". I have a chord progression in progress for this thing, and it seems to be a bit more complicated than just a three-chorder; all I know about it right now is that I think it's in C and 4/4 time, and seems to have a lot of C (two different octaves of C, too), F, G, Dm, and Em in it.
Helped Dar proofread the daily zine as per usual, though this year's wasn't nearly so giggly as last year's, Inevitability. I'm still giggling over the Cylon Joke Squad, and Dar is still giggling over "Keith Johnson's beeper is pretty smart. Maybe we should recruit it!" Dar also brought back Bender for a brief cameo in this year's 'zine, even though it did annoying things to his layout.
Paul bought a little game from Cheapass Games, called "Kill Dr. Lucky", and he and Joe and Cheryl and Meems played it in the fanzine lounge while I alternated between watching them and playing with the computer. That was entertaining to observe; apparently the whole point of the game was to compete to off this old guy Dr. Lucky. Sort of "Clue" in reverse. You follow him all over the house and try to get weapons cards and an opportunity to do the old guy in with no one else the wiser.
Mimi,
ssha (Cyn), and I went to an ice cream social this afternoon, too, though that turned out to be held by the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future people. One of them came up to us while we were there and asked us if any of us were aspiring writers or illustrators, so I told him in my own case "not at the moment". Only when Mimi and I were out in the elevator on our way back down to the rest of the con did I tell Meems that while I am an aspiring writer, I didn't want to be aspiring in connection with anything with L. Ron's name on it. She looked at me blankly until I helped her realize that he was the Dianetics/Scientology guy, at which point she went OH RIGHT and thanked me for rescuing her from her temporary moment of insanity for having taken one of the cards the guy was handing out. But well hey. They had ice cream.The only down note is that I think I've caught the cold that Dar caught just before the con; apparently, something was going around in general. As I write this I'm feeling vaguely oogy. And hungry, too, so off to Chinese food!