Media West report

[hildy89]

I left for the airport Thursday afternoon, taking the Washington Flyer Coach shuttle from West Falls Church. After some last minute bag crunching, I was allowed on the one bus. Seeing the lines, I was a little afraid of the wait, but Northwest was pretty dead. I breezed through check-in. Security wasn't too bad. At least they were moderately organized.

The annoying part about Dulles is their renovations. They've proudly added all these walkways so you don't have to take the people movers to your terminals. For those of us who don't like walking a lot, I'll take the shuttle, if I can find it. They don't announce anywhere that you can still take one to Concourse B. I guess they assume you'd rather walk. And if you don't want to wait for a shuttle, you wind up walking anyway.

Neither of the flights was particularly memorable. The planes were those smaller Airlink ones, so any large baggage had to be checked at the gate. The overhead compartments simply weren't big enough to handle anything bigger than a duffel bag.

At the airport, I shared the shuttle back to hotel with several other fans and discovered we had a cute shuttle driver who'd never worked this con before. Poor dear. (I think we broke the pizza delivery guy too in one of the elevators staring at one of the LoTR flyers.) The hotel promptly lost my reservation. I couldn't find my confirmation number before I left, but I thought, "No problem, they can pull me up by my last name, right?" In all my years, I've heard many typos of my name. Many. The only place I don't have to spell it is Baltimore where they smile and say "The town in Maryland?" But how a name starting with LIN turns into NEN in their computers I have no earthly idea. That was more drama than I needed at 11pm at night before a con.

I was up far too early the next morning for registration. I actually like sitting in line. You meet people you wouldn't ordinarily hang out with. You learn stuff about fandoms you don't know or want to understand. At least they had chairs this year. As usual, they were running behind schedule, so the line wound its way all the way around and back. Not quite to the vid room but close enough. Fortunately they didn't misspell my name for the convention.

I signed up for five panels this year. Quite honestly I need to cut back next time around, even if the first impulse "Ooh, this looks neat!" I also need to say "no" to handling a panel on my own. It's gotten easier as I've been involved in fewer fandoms directly.

My first panel was somewhat depressing. No one showed up for the comic book panel. I met several comics fans throughout the weekend though, so we did exist out there. Several of us grumbled about X3 casting news in the registration line.

The second panel was on PBS' "Mystery!" Most of us agreed that we loved the older shows the best and wondered why they were redoing the Miss Marple and Sherlock Holmes' stories again. Maybe it fits into the "every generation must have their say…" thing. The frustrating thing is they're not releasing everything on DVD. How long have we had to wait for the Campion and Peter Wimsey dvds to pop up? And then there are other Mystery! programs they've never released or rerun. And now you have to dig for the shows on the schedule. The Biography channel is showing a lot of the A&E mysteries now. BBC America has some, but they cut them up.

For once, the vids actually started fairly early, so I missed about a half hour. This was also the first year DVDs could be submitted instead of VHS format. I never did quite figure out which ones I missed. I came in at the end of California Crew's introduction. There were a lot of older and more obscure stuff being vidded this year. Someone did a powerful vid to an obscure Christian Bale movie "The Equilibrium", which showed how he might handle fight scenes as Batman. No real fandom stood out as coming to the forefront, although the new "Battlestar Galatica" will be an interesting litmus test to watch, as even the slash fans could get behind basically a canon het couple, mostly because although the new Starbuck might be female, but she was still "one of the guys". BSG was hard to judge in the vids because everyone seemed to use the same four or five minutes of footage. They were quite a few "Lost" vids which went straight over my head. I adored the "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" tribute to the USO, done all in B&W footage. Muppet's Treasure Island provided several pirate oriented songs for vids. We heard at least three different versions of "Holding out for a Hero", mostly done tongue in cheek. And dear god, someone did a James Bond vid to the Inspector Gadget theme which was so so wrong, but so right. And the vid winners list is already up!

Saturday morning I was up far too early for the librarian panel. I think I met biichan ex-boss beforehand. We shared a lot of horror stories about working in libraries in general, especially how to deal with troublesome people who don't want to give the books back. Academia has its problems and god knows I saw that working in law firms especially when you needed to update something.

The Remember WENN panel added suzy_queue to our annual discussion. She also hosted an interesting holiday episodes panel. The "how fandom touched your lives" panel turned it a "how I got into fandom" and con horror stories. Conventions have a long tradition of being double booked with another group. The Trek convention that was booked with the psychiatrists' convention must have been amusing, if only for the research purposes.

The Livejournal panel turned out well. LJ is a lifesaver for those of us who want to be fannish but don't always want to deal with our fandoms. We can create our own territory where we can explore our fandoms and our interests without having to bow to everyone else's whims. I do think there's still a split between old and new approaches to fandom. I noticed it most glaringly in the gen panels. Certain writers wanted to try a gen story in a fandom that generally was slash oriented. But the print zines didn't want it. Or there wasn't enough interest. The writers got discouraged from actually writing it, rather than taking the chance that someone might read it. Or maybe I've assumed no one will be reading and am always pleasantly surprised when someone is!

I actually bought very little this year. Only one zine, a "Pirates of the Caribbean" gen zine that looked vaguely interesting. I found a lovely still of Rebecca Horne from "Highlander" I had never found elsewhere. I bought a used copy of Gregory Frost's "Fitcher's Brides", so I can actually finish the book. A dealer was getting rid of some of her cross stitch patterns, mostly medieval or fantasy oriented, so I caved and acquired a few. Two of them I used to have until they disappeared into my collected stuff, which was frustrating because I was almost finished! And a fannish gifty for one of my friends. And some loose beads and a Giles badge lanyard. And two Heather Dale cds. But it was not a year to come home laden with Stuff. Yet again it's probably as much the fault of my fandoms as anything else, but hey, at least I don't have to hit the ATM for awhile.

I was a little surprised at how popular the old time radio panel turned out to be. My other panelist was a big "Shadow" fan and also a lover of the pulps. She had a long commute from two parts of Texas, so she'd play her radio tapes. Only her back speakers were working, though, so she'd have "the Shadow" cackling fearsomely behind her. As she said, you'd be awake and then some. The main thing I noticed was the spread of ages and interests. OTR really isn't being created on a massive scale anymore, but it's still popular. We talked about possibly expanding the forum next year to include the pulps.

For once, jennetj's beading workshop was not scheduled opposite anything I was interested in, so I signed up for the beginning class. We put together lovely necklaces that can either be badge holders or eyeglasses holders depending on length and necessity. Everyone approached it a different way, so the colors and styles came out very different. I was rather pleased with my first project in all its teals and greens and black. One of the jump rings came loose from the attaching crimp, but I think I fixed it. It might need to be tightened at some point, so it doesn't do that again. I did some scans, since neither of my digital cameras work with Windows XP without effort. One shows it alone and the other with the badge attachment. My con badge would go in the slot on top.

After the beading, I found normadesmond and suzy_queue in the lobby for a very late night of watching/capping/nitpicking of "Remember WENN". We had way too much fun to be legal, but we really should have started it earlier in the weekend. It was interesting to watch the show with other people and see what we noticed this time around. Also amusing having the Blaster Battle going at the same time. Our Han Solo clone (and he really does look like him in profile – whoa) was having an encounter with some Imperial type and we heard "Bang…. You're too far away." Somehow that doesn't usually happen in real life.

For once I had a late flight, so I stayed around for part of Monday until I had to catch my flight home. ariadnesthread was nice enough to pick me up at the airport.