Day in the Life of an Idiot

 
Image: Abeno Harukas, tallest skyscraper in Osaka (arguably in Japan.)

I'm not normally a fan of tours of buildings. With the obvious exception of things like museums, I will almost always prefer to walk a neighborhood than to go inside a capitol building or the top floor of the world's tallest whatever. However, I spotted this tour of Osaka's tallest skyscraper on HeyGo and thought, why not?  The tour guide for this one was Timea Yamamoto, a Romanian woman who is living in Japan (and from the looks of her last name, likely married or related to someone Japanese.) 

We started the tour at the train station, which was probably my favorite part?


Image: The Kintetsu Osaka Abenobashi Station in Osaka


Image: Another view of the pedestrian bridges of the station.

Someone on the tour remarked that the city of Osaka is not normally on a lot of people's tour itinerary. It is the third largest city in Japan, and the things I know about it are kind of vague. Comedy? Industry??  A unique dialect? Frankly, I would love more tours of Osaka just to see if it's the sort of place I might add to my list of places to see. 

But, back to the tour. Once inside the building, I lost a lot of interest. There are some nifty things inside. There's a museum and one of the largest department stores in Japan and several observation decks, etc., but it's a building? With stuff in it? The tour was specifically to take us to Harukas 300 (so named because it is 300 meters tall.) The trippiest part was the elevator ride, in which they have you look up at the glass ceiling and the elevator shaft has a light show as you travel upwards at great speed. Timea was a little dizzy once she stepped off the elevator.

We had a lot of connectivity problems at the top to the tower, which didn't frustrate me as much as you might think, because once you've seen the city scape once, the shine wears off quickly (at least for me)


Osaka from 300 meters up. (Note of interest, that big square section on the lower right is a cemetery.)

I also got a little sea sick near the end because Timea took us down into the gift shop and there was something about how the camera swung from one shelf to the next that made me a little nauseous. I'm normally okay with this stuff, but, for whatever reason, I couldn't cope this time, so I bailed out. 

This tour was still fun. Someone else on the tour was from Minnesota, someone named Lisa R., so that was cool? (Waving if you're an internet friend of mine!) But, I knew this one would be less interesting for me because of its subject matter. I'm just NOT a building person. I have done those things you're supposed to do in cities, like go to the top of the tall buildings, etc., (like in Paris, we did go to the top of the Eiffel Tower) but it never really does all that much for me.  

Otherwise, I had a quiet weekend. We did a bunch of errands and I worked on a new quilt. 

 
Image: Sensou-ji, a Buddhist temple in Asakusa

So... I wasn't going to do another one of these so soon, but I MIGHT be a little addicted. 

A friend of mine in Canada alerted me this morning that a company called Ebisuya was doing a walking tour of Asakusa, a district in Taito City, Tokyo. I signed up and let rachelmanija know, in case she wanted to join us. 

Our guide this time was an amazingly charming young Economics major named Nae-Nae (I'm not sure of the spelling, but Nae is a Japanese girl's name, so I am guessing it's just hyphenated?? Could be Naenae, or Maemae, too.)  She was very forthcoming that this is a part time job for her, and that previous to the pandemic she used to be a tour guide for this company, Ebisuya, in-person. 

It was apparently very cold in Japan today (tomorrow,) though I can't remember what Nae-Nae said the temperature was. In the 20s F?

Like most of the guides, she started us at the train station. Rachel asked to see a 7-11 or a Lawsons, (a combi, aka a convenience store, the type of which Japan is famous for) and by chance there was a Lawsons just there at the corner. She took us inside... only to be promptly shooed out by the owner for filming inside the store! It was pretty hilarious, honestly.

We also saw a huge line for melon pan at one of the restaurants in the covered ally she took us down on the way to Sensou-ji (Tokyo's oldest Buddhist temple.) We were all briefly confused by how long the line was until I remembered that it was noon in Tokyo. (Nae-Nae apparently lost track of time too.) It was just a long lunch line!

Most of the tour was on the temple grounds.



Image: Entrance to Sensou-ji.

Nae-Nae had to have been the most chatty of all the tour guides so far. She was really amazing at keeping up with all the chatter in the comments stream. Though, I don't think there were as many people on this tour as there was Yusuke's Fuji tour, for instance, so maybe it was a bit easier. I kept my own chatter going both with my friend in Canada in WhatsApp and on text with Rachel. 

I have to admit that I sometimes forget what it's like to be absolutely new to Japanese culture. I mean, I laughed out loud when NaeNae asked us if we'd "heard of samurai," because I sometimes live in my own head in a version of the geek relationship fallacy, except it's an otaku fallacy, where I just assume of course we're all Japan nerds here. This is why I am totally 'that guy' in the chats, who is trying to drop in helpful wikipedia links to things that NaeNae discussed in passing, like wabi-sabi, but probably coming off like a raging a$$hole. 


Image: If you squint you can see the koi.

Like, there was this one person in chat who did not get what Nae-Nae was saying about koi. To be fair to this commenter, I was them once, long ago, and I need to remember that because I really, really wanted to jump into the comment stream and explain it all. I held back, but it went like this: our guide was trying to explain that koi has a double meaning in Japanese. The Kanji for the the fish (鯉) and 'love' (恋) are homonyms and so are pronounced the same but are different words, right? So it is considered lucky to see a koi fish with your koi, as it were, your love.  I managed to explain it pretty concisely, but, like, getting into Kanji is a whole thing? I had not known the words were homonyms until today, but, having studied the language long enough, I was totally primed for the idea that Japan is rife with homonyms. Rife. Like overly abundant in them. 

Anyway, my point is, I need to remember to practice patience in the chats on these tours. I mean, the joy of having a couple of friends on other chat lines means I can snark to them. 

It was fun, as always to see the people on the street. We saw a lot of people very dressed up in yukata, including one amazing woman who also had cat ears. She was hiding her face from Nae-Nae's camera, however, so even though I wish I'd taken a picture, I'm glad I didn't. 

You will probably be seeing more of these? I will try not to flood my journal with nothing but HeyGo tours, but, MAN, these are addictive. I'm going to go broke bleeding out all these tips, a few bucks at a time.


More temple grounds

 
Meiji Shrine near Harajuku Station

YOU GUYS, I WAS LITERALLY JUST HERE. (Well, I mean, at least virtually.)



I did the coolest thing just now. I joined a livestream on "Heygo" and walked around the Harajuku neighborhood of Tokyo with a woman named Eriko. She strapped her phone on a selfie stick and walked us around. What was amazing is that because it was live, we could chat with her and say things like, "Hey, what's to your left, Eriko?" and she would tell us. It was very literally like walking around Tokyo with a friend. 

I was not particularly interested at first in the idea of the 'cute culture" of Harajuku. But, it was decidedly delightful to walk down streets filled with small clothing shops, cosplay, etc.


A clothing shop.

Heygo allows you to "take postcards," but that also rather depends on Eriko's willingness to stand still. So I caught this one in motion. What is cool, of course, is that because this is live, we were seeing Japan as people were walking down the street going about their days. I asked her about the weather there and it was a balmy 11 C / 53 F there. No snow, bright blue sky. Other people also popped into chat, there was a long discussion about some punk band? Shounen Knife? Apparently someone wanted to know if they were still playing in Japan. Eriko was very confused (apparently not a punk fan) and wondered if this person was referring to Shounen Jump, which made me happy of course, as Jump is a major manga magazine.

Oh, speaking of, Eriko started us in the most adorable cat cafe that is just off Harajuku Station. We probably spent a good ten minutes of the walk just looking at the cats they had there. The connection is that apparently the cat cafe is like an internet cafe in that there is a library of manga for you to read, we saw that when Eriko went off to show us where the cats had their boxes (apparently, they have a private pass through to a special room for doing their business--but along that wall was the manga library.)

She ended the tour at Tokyo Plaza Omotesando (designed by Hiroshi Nakamura).


The center circle is the actual street view. Very confusing, but cool AF.

Anyway, I ADORED this. This is exactly what I wanted the future to be like when I thought about having to be stuck indoors with the pandemic. (Tagged this entry with "cyberpunk future is not as advertised,: but really, this is getting pretty darned close.)  If I had a better phone, I would totally see if Heygo would hire me to walk around Minneapolis/St. Paul with people. 

I'm so doing this again. On Christmas day, I'll be walking around Mount Fuji. See you later, friends! I'm on a real world tour now!!

Image: A piece of tie-dyed fabric hanging on a clothesline. It is a classic rainbow striped number.

Yesterday, it was lovely outside so I decided to tackle a project that I'd been meaning to do for awhile. After the whole medical craziness of Monday, arts and crafts were just what I needed to de-stress.

Several weeks ago, Shawn picked up some sheets on the "buy nothing" Facebook group for our neighborhood. They had looked decently blue in the photo, but when we bought them home they were a very washed out barely-there color. Shawn had been planning to use the fabric as an accent for some of her rugs and was vaguely disappointed. On the drive home, I asked, "What if I tie-dyed them?" Shawn got suddenly very excited by the idea of trying a rug made out of tie-dyed material, and so we got serious about finding a tie dye kit that was easy and color-fast. Shawn found a kit for kids on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Tulip-One-step-Tie-Dye-Party-Kit/dp/B01FV60TAS/

I will say, this could not have been easier.


Image: a bunch of fun patterns of tie-dye on a clothesline.

I will admit to having had WAY too much fun. In fact, my hands are still purple because I blew off the instructions to wear gloves (in the Before Times, I would be mortified. Right now? I'm still very much, "by the time people see me, these will be back to normal." Not actually considering that, you know, I might go off to buy coffee this morning.)


Image: Purple and blue close up, kind of spiral?

It totally worked to de-stress me.

Some medical updatery under the cut. 

( Read more... the short of it: we got the appointment for Thursday )
Will keep those who want to know posted on those developments.



Image: more fabrics on the line (in shadow, apparently, but hopefully you can see the general patterns.)

The other thing I did last night was attend the Lammy's, the Lambda Award Ceremony. They had a Discord and so I actually connected with some folks in the SF/F community, which was nice. I am just going to continue to say that I am often surprised by how much I truly enjoy online events. This one was very "bare-bones," in that they broadcast the actual awards on YouTube and hosted a short-lived Discord. The cool thing was that people came in from all over the world. I hung out in the lobby for a long time watching people come in and there were people from India, Botswana, the UK, and... dozens and dozens of places all across North America. This is the thing, I don't know that the Lammys is usually such an international event? I certainly never bothered to go when I would have had to travel and pay for hotel. 

The Nebulas are also this weekend and I'll be attending that... as is something called Cymera, which you may recall, I added a reading to? I have no idea if they accepted it in their Open Mic, but hopefully so. Fun times!

 Last night was the last night of my Zoom class at the Loft!  Whoo!   Even if my Next Class goes, I don't have to go back to work until the end of January.  

Hooray!

My experience teaching this class has certainly been... something else, as we say here in Minnesota. Even if you don't know a teacher or have a student in your life, I'm sure you've heard the complaints. Thing is? It is really true that teaching on Zoom is weird. Why that is, is kind of  mystery.

It's ALWAYS difficult to get adult students to participate in discussion in class, but several times I felt like my students were using class as a substitute for a TV show. I'm not sure that's fair?  Students often give teachers blank stares? Part of the difficulty with Zoom is that it's nearly impossible read the depth of that blankness, if that makes sense.  Active, silent listening is much easier to tell in a classroom for some reason. Maybe it's full body language? Maybe it's simply the flatness of the screen somehow? I'm not sure, but people are harder to read when not physically present. 

The extent to which I rely on those cues in the classroom to direct my teaching style was really driven home to me by this experience.

Weirdly, I think I connected better with my asynchronous class? Which is the OPPOSITE of what I would have expected. On the other hand, I feel like I worked way too hard to make that class as good as it was? So, I mean maybe the connection simply takes a lot of work?

Anyway, I'm looking forward to being more present here and in the rest of my life. With luck, I can get back to writing the lesbian space opera novella I'd started.....

You guys, you guys! Remember my complaints about WorldCON? Well, someone was apparently planning something like this all along, check out FutureCON!

Check out their teaser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_u8MZvZ-fI&t=3s



I'm so excited for this! I supported them and signed up for their free YouTube channel right away! This is LITERALLY the thing I wanted.

So happy.

I've been writing to various friends about how I would have run a virtual WorldCon enough that I want to distill my ideas here, in one place.

By now, we all know how disastrous the Hugo Ceremony was, but I have a much bigger and much more... mundane complaint.

I was telling naomikritzer via email this morning that it's clear that the same problem that GRRM has: being hidebound, enamored of the good,old days, etc., affected ALL of ConZealand this year. I suspect it's because they approached the idea of a virtual con the wrong way. They said to themselves, "These are what my favorite things about WorldCON are, so how do I translate that to virtual," INSTEAD of "How do I take the virtual world and import what I love about cons into the way people experience the internet??"

It's a subtle difference, but critical.

Like, what BAFFLED me was that ConZealand, THE WORLD SCIENCE FICTION CON, wasn't 24-hours.

Sure, okay, everything is on New Zealand time, because the main organizers live there, cool, cool, but why the hell not get volunteers in every time zone so that the people in Europe and the African continent could attend at their convenience, instead of having to get up at midnight and attend readings at 2 or 3 am. I mean, yes, there are night owls everywhere, but for fuck's stake, there are also FANS IN EVERY TIME ZONE.

I don't understand why World Con, this year didn't take advantage of that?

Like, also, for much of the world New Zealand is already tomorrow. Make that a theme? "Come to the Future, ConZealand, where is already tomorrow!" and then do a 24-hour con, where in the middle of NZ's night, fans in Germany or Lithuania or Croatia (or all at once) carry the torch by running English-lanugage (or subtitled, because fans could DO this,) panels with their country's biggest SF writers and fans, and then the torch is passed to Zimbabwe and India and Russia, and on and on across the globe until New Zealand wakes up again and can take back the reins?

How fucking cool would that have been?

We could have harnessed the global power of fandom and done something newsworthy for its AWESOME, rather than being called out for transphobic racist bullshit AGAIN.

It just pissed me off that when I woke up at my ungodly hour of 8 am, there was nothing at all to do, officially, at WorldCON. Sure, sure, the Discord was 24 hours, but that's not the same as getting to see a panel in... (let me see who might share a decent time zone with my 8 am with a quick Google) Okay, if I am awake at 8 am in St. Paul, it's a nice decent afternoon 2 pm in Spain, the UK, the Republic of Ireland, Portugal, Morocco, Sierra Leone, Western Sahara, Mauritania, and Algeria, just to name a few.

THINK ABOUT THIS.

I wake up at 6 am and hop over to the WorldCON schedule and see that people are deep into their afternoon over in the Republic of Ireland, so I watch a panel with Irish authors talking about the state of their fandom/pro-dom, and, then, I see that Ethiopia is having a watch party for its famous post-apocalyptic film Crumbs. Mmm, but I can't decide between that and watching the film Afronauts (set in Zambia, directed by a Ghanaian American woman.) After that, I decide to check out science fiction from the Indian sub-continent organized by the Indian Association for Science Fiction Studies®, Bangalore (IASFS), Indian Science Fiction Writers Association. 

You could have issued a downloadable and printable passport that people could have stamped if they attended a panel held in another country/by another country's fandom and encouraged people to try to "catch them all."

Think about how cool this could have been,.

It would have been easy, because it could have been crowdsourced into one of the most active and brilliant group of nerds in the world: FANS.

And it could have been done with just a little forethought and some organization. Put the world out early and ask for volunteers. Tell people, "offer up your SF/F content: movies, fannish clubs, authors" and say, "we will worry about translations once we get some excitement rolling," because you know that if somebody wanted to run an obscure Thai horror film that needed dubs, we could have found someone to do that shit ASAP, and make it available in dozens of languages. We could have contacted folks in Japan about running cosplay or debuting new anime that already has a huge international followers.  

There is stuff out there. It just might not be in English, but that's such a tiny hurtle, if you think big enough.

Also, WorldCon is often a destination con. Where were our local folks running around doing virtual tours of New Zealand natural wonders--stuff New Zealanders are uniquely able to show us, because THEY ARE NEARLY COVID FREE. They could have even showed up people, doing things, together, like going into a bookstore, and live-streaming videos from there. 

For con that invites the world in, it is a shame we didn't think to crowdshare it with the world.

Yesterday was my first "full" day at WorldCON/ConZealand. I attended a few programming events on Tuesday night, but not enough to really get a sense of how WorldCON was working for me.  

Now I have a bit more of an idea, and I have to say that I'm not finding WorldCon to be as fun for me as a regular member as Virtual WisCON was.

At least, SO FAR.

I should lay out a few caveats for those of you who maybe don't know much about me outside of my blogs about food and gardening. I am a published science fiction/fantasy author, who had her heyday in the early aughts. My first professionally published novel came out from Roc/Peguin USA in 2001. I won a few awards, was moderately well reviewed, yada yada. I also had a stint in Romanclandia when I switched to writing paranormal romances for Berkley (also a Penguin imprint) in the middle of that decade, (to be precise: 2006,) under the pen name Tate Hallaway. I have a bit over a baker's dozen of books traditionally New York publishing house published and a few that have come out from smaller presses. So, when I say "as a regular attendee," I mean not as a program participant, which is how I experience cons for the most part, even now. The last WorldCON I attended, which was when it was the 2016 MidAmerica Con in Kansas City, MO, I participated as a panelist... and, as it happened, the con wingman of naomikritzer who was up for a Hugo Award... which makes for a VERY DIFFERENT WorldCon experience than most people get.

 As an old cyberpunk writer, I have to say that I'm deeply fascinated by how online communities are built and how things like Virtual WisCON work/don't work.  

So far? I'd say that it's working for me, on the whole. 

Yesterday, I interacted with the con in a number of different ways. I hung out on a couple of different channels on Discord, I 'went' to the You Tube stream of Rebecca Roanhorse's reading and Q&A, and joined a spontaneous jitsi meeting for writers.  I will detail my experience with each, below.

Discord:  I should preference any discussion about my interactions here by saying that I am an experienced Discord user. I have been on it for a couple of years already, having shifted to Discord to chat with a friend when Skype started acting up for her. I've created my own servers and joined existing ones. My profile on Discord is fannish, because that's exclusively what I use Discord for. My son uses Discord even more than I do, using the voice channel option to talk to friends, etc. So, even if I didn't know how to use a Discord function, I have another expert in the house.

So, my experience might be a little different from others, because I'm extremely comfortable reading and participating in conversations on Discord.

When you click on the WisCON link, it automatically dumps you into the "new arrivals" channel.  From there you can navigate out to other channels. I did what I always do when I'm new to a Discord server, which is I immediately went to read their rules or code of conduct channel, because some servers are very strict about keeping channels on-topic and I want to know what the culture is, obviously. 

WisCON seems pretty chill about the channels being on-topic. Administrators and moderators show up on your feed in a different color and I didn't notice one monitoring any of the chats I checked into, with the exception of # lobby-con.  Interestingly, I had my best experience in the lobby. I actually did that thing that happens at cons, where I happened to be in the channel when a couple of people I know dropped in an said hello.  So, I actually chatted with them (and a few other people I didn't know) about the Madison farmer's market, cheese curds, and life.  So, that felt very much like Con, honestly. 

The other channel I lurked on was # books-and-reading and read/"listened" to a conversation about the anti- culture of fan writing fandom. That one ended up feeling a bit cliquish, honestly? One of the users broke into the conversation to write something like, "If this were real life, I'd introduce [name 1] to [name 2]..." which is good socialization in real life, but on-line had the weird effect of making me, as a lurker, suddenly feel like I was intruding on a conversation between friends? The conversation then very much devolved into people they had in common, the places they lived, etc., and so I left the channel.  I mean, this is the sort of thing that happens at a con? But, it's different on-line because Discord does not let you know that people are 'in the channel' and not active. The only way you know someone is part of the "conversation" is if they post something.  So, this person couldn't have known that I was lurking and that I suddenly felt a little awkward when it was clear they were all real-life friends?  In other servers, this is where an active mod would come on and ask people to either stay on topic or move to a socialization channel. But, WisCON seems to be going for a very organic, make-your-own con on the fly vibe, which is perfectly okay. Like I say, things like this happen in real-life cons and I don't expect there to be someone on hand there to make sure conversations stay on topic. The # birds-of-a-feather area is clearly supposed to be informal. So, I'm not criticizing, just explaining my experience. Real life cons are like this, too.

YouTube:  So, one thing I really do love about the virtual con is that I have my phone set to beep me when WisCON sends out a notification of an event. I was in the middle of a late dinner when Rebecca Roanhorse started her reading, but I was able to jump in online about fifteen minutes in. I went to the Discord and went to # links-to-streams and clicked through to the reading there.  

Watching that reminded me that I'm not actually a giant fan of readings, in general.  But, I LOVED the Q&A session, so that was worth it.  Tempest did an excellent job as interviewer/moderator, IMHO.

I honestly thought the YouTube thing would be weird/distancing, but it was fine.  

Jitsi:  There is a section of the Discord for meet-ups spontaneously generated by anyone. It is in the # spontaneous programming channel. A con-goer named 'W' posted that they were hosting a jitsi for writing, and I asked if it was a hang-out for writers or if we would be hanging out and writing. Since it was at 10 pm CST, I did not feel like I could stay up to silently writie, so I was happy to discover that W was planning on conversation unless people really wanted to write together. I had a little trouble joining it because I wanted to switch over to my new iPad and for some weird reason clicking through from Discord didn't launch my app and so it never properly connected my microphone? But, when I opened my app and plugged in the jitsi address it worked perfectly, so whatever.

I should also note that I'm also extremely comfortable on jitsi as it is the video-conferencing option of choice for my regular RPG group. So, it was weird for me to have so many problems connecting.  I blame my own unfamiliarity with my new tech, the new iPad. 

Jitsi is just like zooming or Google hanging out so I had a lovely time chatting with my fellow writers in the meet-up.  We all used the chat function to exchange Twitter handles so now I'm Twitter friends with a half-dozen new people, which is wonderful.  By CHANCE I ended up in a room full of people who either loved cyberpunk or quirky religious stuff and so I did a thing I never normally do when not on panels, which is I pitched my own writing. I had the very weird experience of people saying, "Oh, I've heard people talking about Archangel Protocol before," which... only at WisCON, because, seriously, no one else has ever heard of me.

I have really discovered that I have no problem whatsoever connecting with virtual strangers on the internet any more than I do in real life. This is where being an uber-extrovert comes in handy. 

So, I ended the evening feeling like WisCON was a really fun con to be at virtually. It will be interesting to see how today progresses.

I wonder, however, how other people are doing with it?