Day in the Life of an Idiot

 ...I'm going to blow a gasket.

I realize that when people talk about Bush Senior as a decent guy, what they mean is that, in comparison to the inhuman trash fire that currently holds the highest office in the nation, he looks pretty good.  I'll give them that.

But don't tell me he wasn't a racist. Have we forgotten Willie Horton? 

Don't tell me that he was some kind of unifier, unless you mean that he unified straight, cis people in their hatred of GLBTQ+ folks and their willingness to turn a blind eye on all the people dying of AIDs. Let me remind us all that that real people died. Lots of MY FRIENDS did not "survive" this particular terrible presidency.  Don't forget that some of us dumped our dead on George H. W. Bush's lawn to try to get him to acknowledge our right to exist.

Bush Senior was not a man of peace. Have we forgotten "Operation: Desert Storm"? The civilians killed--targeted intentionally?

I haven't.

And hearing his voice again is f*cking triggering. And I'm not even kidding.

I have to admit that I had a small meltdown about this in my coffee shop this morning. My radio station, which is normally far enough left that I don't have to deal with people saying nice things about a horrible politician, was all "but, the civility!"  And then, on top of that, I heard that tomorrow was going to be a national day of mourning  for this... person... and I wouldn't be able to get my mail because all of a sudden Bush Senior is some kind of saint....  AND I LOST MY FLIPPING MIND.

I ended my little rant with: "Americans have the collective memory of a... SQUIRREL." One of the other regular patrons there pulled down a 3-D printed 'Trump as squirrel' model and slammed it on the counter playfully. it broke the mood, thank gods, and I was able to laugh, because OMG. This is like when Reagan died and it was all that 'great orator' bull crap. Next, there will be airports named after this person and we're all going to have to act like HISTORY ISN'T A THING.

The problem is that Trump is such a nightmare that if Dick Cheney or Henry Kissinger died tomorrow, people will be like, "Remember when the opposition was SMART???" And, I'll be in the corner screaming: SURE SMART, BUT ALSO EVIL AF!!!!

So, that's been my morning.

How are you?

On the other hand, one of the baristas at Claddaugh took an amazing picture of the coffee shop right after the snow on Sunday:



The Xcel Enegy Homesmart repair guys just left my house. Our drier decided to stop drying. This happens every so often and it's the kind of repair that doesn't necessarily make me think it's time for a new drier, if only because I think that fuses just generally have a lifespan, you know? The thing we have to save up for is our furnace. That thing is going to go one of these years and the folks that we have come out and inspect it are starting to mutter things like, "Mmmm, maybe consider a future replacement" and, the last guy, "OH MY GOD."  I mean, it's possible he was talking about the state of the basement in general, but I think he was commenting on the age of most of the fixtures.

On Sunday, we spent the day making our "small" batch of flieschkueckle. 



We always feel pretty good around 1 pm when we're mostly done rolling out the dough and filling up the little crescent pies, but I was still frying these babies until 6 pm.  I got a lot of reading in, which is good, but... well, now we have food in the freezer. There's something in my lizard brain that still feels deep satisfaction putting away stores at this time of year. I mean, sure I could pop down to the grocery store at any point, but my LARDER IS STOCKED. *chest thumping!*

Plus, these things are so delicious and they really do make great little lunch treats to send along with Mason or Shawn. In the complete perversion of ethnicities/cultural appropriation, I pack a flieschkuechkle in Shawn' bento.

Anyway, hope you all have a lower blood pressure (and cholesterol) than I do!

I had one panel today, at 8:30 at night, which may not seem like a "late night panel" to you folks, but 8:30 PM skirts the edges of my bedtime. I'm an unrepentant lark, my friends. I'm often in bed by 8:00 pm. Thus, perhaps, needless to say, this was not my best panel of the con so far. It was called, "They Came from Fandom..." and it was ostensibly about how some of us professional writers started out as fans (or, as in my case, re-embraced fandom AFTER going pro.)

What it sort of became was Fandom 101, aka "Back in the late Jurassic, before the Internet, when the word 'fandom' meant community, not genre...."

That was a fine topic, but I didn't feel I had a lot to contribute to the discussion. In all honesty, even if we had stayed on topic, I'm not sure what I would have had to say about the subject. I mean, in some ways, it seems like it ought to be a gimme, as in: if you don't love SF, what the f*ck makes you think you can write it? What is strange to me is that, apparently, there are SF/F writers out there who are somehow NOT fans.

I guess the thing is that "fan" is described differently these days. But, back in the late Jurassic, it kind of just meant you read the stuff and liked it. I didn't really become active in the con scene until I was starting to pursue a career as a writer, so in some ways I didn't come from the kind of FANDOM that some of the panelist were talking about. I did write fanfic, but, back in the late Jurassic, there wasn't an internet for me to post it to, so all my Anne McCaffery and Katherine Kurtz fanfic stayed in the notebooks they were handwritten into. I also really remember being counseled not to act too fannish on panels (specifically, I got the whole "dress for the job you want" lecture, with the implication that if you showed up to con cosplaying, you weren't serious about being a writer.)

I tried to talk about this a little on the panel, because even though the Minneapolis/St. Paul fan community is very accepting of fannish pros, I'm not sure it's honest to say that you get taken as seriously sitting on a panel at Anime Detour in your shinigami costume as you do dressed in corporate drag. In fact, I felt a wave of 'and you are...?' from my fellow panelist when I came and sat down next to him at Detour, because I was full-on cosplaying. Despite 15 books in print, the book (panelist) really is still judged by the cover (costume).

Which was why, for the most part, Detour was a much more freeing, fun experience for me. I'm not in costume at all this weekend, nor will I be. Because at this con, I'm a pro, not a fan.

This was also one of those panels that suffered from CONvergence's policy of not always naming a moderator. We ended up letting the person who volunteered for the job have it, and so far, in my experience, that's often the LAST PERSON WHO SHOULD HAVE THE JOB. The volunteer moderator did a pretty good job of asking questions, but she was willing to let the topic meander and I was just not up to the task of herding cats (which I might have been if I had something to say, but I really didn't feel like I did.)

So, it was kind of meh.

At one point, one of the panelists brought up the idea of the permeability of the membrane... as in, how easy is it to pass between pro and fan? I thought this was an interesting concept, but we never really explored it.

I'm bummed because it was another all-star cast. I almost always love being on panels with Emma Bull. Catherine Lundoff is a bright, interesting woman who is always a pleasure to talk to. Patrick Neilson Hayden is, of course, a giant in the field, being, as he is, a senior editor at Tor Books, but also a long time fan. Joan Marie Verba likewise is often a great panelist, but for whatever reason, none of us entirely clicked.

For myself, I blame the hour. If the panel had happened when I arrived at the con at 1:00 pm, it would have been smashing, because I would have been at my peak.

Probably the best panel was the accidental Marvel Movie panel that happened when I had dinner with naomikritzer, Will Alexander, and seanmmurphy, which wasn't a panel at all, but a bunch of us getting wound up and fannish about all the latest films and comparing them to the comic book canon.

I attended a lot of panels, but I probably should have gone to Theatre Nippon. I'm probably not going to catch any anime movies this con because I'm planning to skip tomorrow. I'll try to do a write up of the panels I attended because I did actually take a few notes on thoughts I had, but it's like 1:30 in the morning and my brain has stopped "braining" as the kids might say....