Engage the update firehose: Balticon!
May. 31st, 2010 02:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
usernamenumberSpent the weekend at Balticon and had an absolutely lovely time. Fan cons are generally not my thing, but I think there were three unusual things about this one that made a real difference for me.
First off, the community that's developed around podcasting, podiobooks, and audio theater is just amazing. So many friendly, interesting and supporting people! Thanks to each and every one of you for making me feel like a part of that community right away. At most cons the main thing I have in common with people I don't already know is a shared self-association with this vague thing we call "fandom". At Balticon, thanks to its strong New Media track, I was interacting with people from a much more specific scene, which made for relatively easy conversation. Plus, a lot of the people there knew Second Shift, which was cool, and the admiration of peoples' work went both ways. At a party on Saturday night, the hostess (who was also one of the people behind us getting invited to the con) was being flatteringly squeeish as she told me how much she enjoyed Second Shift, when a friend of her's approached. She introduced him, saying, "This is Patrick McLean. He does a podcast called The Seanachie". Now, The Seanachie happens to be one of my favorite 'casts from back in the day. Several years back he did a story called "How to Succeed in Evil" (the original, un-finished version, for those familiar with it, which for the record is not what I've just linked to, though I'm told that the re-vamp is also excellent), which I absolutely loved, so I then got to turn around and fanboy at him, even earning a hug when I told him that I actually had the comic book version of How to Succeed, which he'd sold once upon a time as a fundraiser.
Over the course of the con, I ended up having a lot of great conversations like that, plus a very nice lunch with McClean and Nobilis Reed, another well-known podcaster/author and Second Shift forum-goer from way back (note that he specializes in erotica, so link may be nsfw).
I think I enjoy hanging out with podcasters for the same reason I enjoy hanging out with larpers. Aside from having something in common with them, it's a subset of geekdom that self-selects for people with some modicum of social skill, which makes interfacing significantly easier.
The second factor is simply that of distance. I enjoy, for example, Arisia, but because I'm not as tight with the communities represented there, most of the people I see are local friends. Now, I love my friends, but Arisia is basically a big, expensive house-party largely populated by the people I usually see at smaller, less ambitious parties. I probably won't have the opportunity to see the people I met at Balticon again until next year, which means there's something different to be excited about for next year, and while I'm not guaranteed to go next year, I'm seriously considering it for that reason, especially if I can be involved in events again, which brings me to the third thing...
Actually being on panels and whatnot (my first time doing so) made a huge difference in my con experience. People who know me will be shocked to learn that the presence of an audience really put me in my element, and made for a much more engaging time than I usually have at (non-larp) cons.
I was on four panels, each of which I was nervous about for different reasons, and each of which ended up going really, really well if I do say so myself. Even the "Open Source for Everyday Use" panel with ESR and Thomas Gideon of The Command-Line podcast went really well. I was nervous about this one both because I feared being out-classed in terms of technical know-how, and because I'd heard from others who had had "personality conflicts" with ESR. I'm glad to report that I left the panel feeling like I'd contributed pretty well, that I'd gotten along well with both of the other panellists, and most importantly that I'd had fun. ESR was very friendly and a great co-panelist. He digressed on a few topics, but they were by way of some pretty undeniably cool stories, so that was easy to overlook, and while there snark, it was clearly all in good fun. And yes, I said hi to him for you,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tpau. ;) The panel is going to be podcast on an upcoming episode of The Command Line, and I'll link to it when that happens.
The subjects of the podcasting-related panels ranged from things about which I felt pretty qualified to talk, like "Herding cats: Producing large-cast audio theater" and "Audio Theater Today", which turned out to be mostly a Q/A about how to get started in audio theater, to ones where I wasn't even entirely sure why I'd been put there, like "Storytelling". The reason I was worried about that last one is that the one thing I didn't ever do on Second Shift was write, and I'd read the panel as being primarily about that. As it happened,though, the panel ended up evolving into a really cool conversation about storytelling in general, the difference between an author and a storyteller, the role a voice actor plays in telling an author's story, and the effect of the Internet, podcasting, etc on storytelling, I'm rather proud of one of my lines, "We're all around one big campfire now, and that's awesome". Another great comment, though I sadly forget from whom it came, was the suggestion that if recordable audio media had existed since time immemorial, maybe we never would have bothered conveying non-fiction with the written word alone. An interesting thought indeed. I also got to plug my idea for storytelling parties, which was well-recieved, and in fact someone approached me afterward and told me about the National Storytellers' Network, about which I'm excited to learn more.
Other highlights of the con included a "master class" panel/demo being run by some professional audio engineers on how the technical side of things worked. I think I only took in about 30% of what was said, but it was good stuff. I also got some great networking done and might, juuuuust might have some help lined up to get the remainder of Second Shift actually done. Stay tuned.
So yeah, anyway, I could go on with nifty things and people encountered, but you get the idea. Had a fine time, and a big thanks to all the lovely folks involved with the New Media track for being so friendly and nice. I'll do some pimpage of specific media things in a separate post. (ETA ...and here it is!)
First off, the community that's developed around podcasting, podiobooks, and audio theater is just amazing. So many friendly, interesting and supporting people! Thanks to each and every one of you for making me feel like a part of that community right away. At most cons the main thing I have in common with people I don't already know is a shared self-association with this vague thing we call "fandom". At Balticon, thanks to its strong New Media track, I was interacting with people from a much more specific scene, which made for relatively easy conversation. Plus, a lot of the people there knew Second Shift, which was cool, and the admiration of peoples' work went both ways. At a party on Saturday night, the hostess (who was also one of the people behind us getting invited to the con) was being flatteringly squeeish as she told me how much she enjoyed Second Shift, when a friend of her's approached. She introduced him, saying, "This is Patrick McLean. He does a podcast called The Seanachie". Now, The Seanachie happens to be one of my favorite 'casts from back in the day. Several years back he did a story called "How to Succeed in Evil" (the original, un-finished version, for those familiar with it, which for the record is not what I've just linked to, though I'm told that the re-vamp is also excellent), which I absolutely loved, so I then got to turn around and fanboy at him, even earning a hug when I told him that I actually had the comic book version of How to Succeed, which he'd sold once upon a time as a fundraiser.
Over the course of the con, I ended up having a lot of great conversations like that, plus a very nice lunch with McClean and Nobilis Reed, another well-known podcaster/author and Second Shift forum-goer from way back (note that he specializes in erotica, so link may be nsfw).
I think I enjoy hanging out with podcasters for the same reason I enjoy hanging out with larpers. Aside from having something in common with them, it's a subset of geekdom that self-selects for people with some modicum of social skill, which makes interfacing significantly easier.
The second factor is simply that of distance. I enjoy, for example, Arisia, but because I'm not as tight with the communities represented there, most of the people I see are local friends. Now, I love my friends, but Arisia is basically a big, expensive house-party largely populated by the people I usually see at smaller, less ambitious parties. I probably won't have the opportunity to see the people I met at Balticon again until next year, which means there's something different to be excited about for next year, and while I'm not guaranteed to go next year, I'm seriously considering it for that reason, especially if I can be involved in events again, which brings me to the third thing...
Actually being on panels and whatnot (my first time doing so) made a huge difference in my con experience. People who know me will be shocked to learn that the presence of an audience really put me in my element, and made for a much more engaging time than I usually have at (non-larp) cons.
I was on four panels, each of which I was nervous about for different reasons, and each of which ended up going really, really well if I do say so myself. Even the "Open Source for Everyday Use" panel with ESR and Thomas Gideon of The Command-Line podcast went really well. I was nervous about this one both because I feared being out-classed in terms of technical know-how, and because I'd heard from others who had had "personality conflicts" with ESR. I'm glad to report that I left the panel feeling like I'd contributed pretty well, that I'd gotten along well with both of the other panellists, and most importantly that I'd had fun. ESR was very friendly and a great co-panelist. He digressed on a few topics, but they were by way of some pretty undeniably cool stories, so that was easy to overlook, and while there snark, it was clearly all in good fun. And yes, I said hi to him for you,
tpau. ;) The panel is going to be podcast on an upcoming episode of The Command Line, and I'll link to it when that happens. The subjects of the podcasting-related panels ranged from things about which I felt pretty qualified to talk, like "Herding cats: Producing large-cast audio theater" and "Audio Theater Today", which turned out to be mostly a Q/A about how to get started in audio theater, to ones where I wasn't even entirely sure why I'd been put there, like "Storytelling". The reason I was worried about that last one is that the one thing I didn't ever do on Second Shift was write, and I'd read the panel as being primarily about that. As it happened,though, the panel ended up evolving into a really cool conversation about storytelling in general, the difference between an author and a storyteller, the role a voice actor plays in telling an author's story, and the effect of the Internet, podcasting, etc on storytelling, I'm rather proud of one of my lines, "We're all around one big campfire now, and that's awesome". Another great comment, though I sadly forget from whom it came, was the suggestion that if recordable audio media had existed since time immemorial, maybe we never would have bothered conveying non-fiction with the written word alone. An interesting thought indeed. I also got to plug my idea for storytelling parties, which was well-recieved, and in fact someone approached me afterward and told me about the National Storytellers' Network, about which I'm excited to learn more.
Other highlights of the con included a "master class" panel/demo being run by some professional audio engineers on how the technical side of things worked. I think I only took in about 30% of what was said, but it was good stuff. I also got some great networking done and might, juuuuust might have some help lined up to get the remainder of Second Shift actually done. Stay tuned.
So yeah, anyway, I could go on with nifty things and people encountered, but you get the idea. Had a fine time, and a big thanks to all the lovely folks involved with the New Media track for being so friendly and nice. I'll do some pimpage of specific media things in a separate post. (ETA ...and here it is!)
