Feeling not quite as terrible but still under the weather. (poor thermoregulation, poor appetite, some pain)
Not allowed to attempt to pick up strange men at conferences.
Not socially acceptable to inquire about polyamory (see above).
I got into the Lem section at Powell's. Oops.
Still need to unpack car.
Still need to do laundry.
Moderators comparing notes and a strong bunch of them having the same problem with the same person is important.
Slack has pros and cons.
I pointed someone to Crystal Singer at the bookstore.

Today I gave my Community Moderation: you can't always halt a flamewar with one raised eyebrow (but it rarely hurts to try) talk.

I have already identified things that I might do differently next time, but I think it went OK overall and I had a great chat with someone who is currently looking at the fact that one of her communities hasn't got any rules and right now it's an intentional community who all have the same general goals but if Things Happen they wouldn't know where to start.

I always recommend starting with rules or at least general concrete principles that you'd like the community to embody, for the record.

I had fun and I hope everyone else did too, and I sadly ran long enough that there wasn't much time for Q&A. My favorite under-discussed tool is hellbanning.

Things I will need to do this morning:

( This was um, several hours ago; have since arrived at conference. )

Update to youngwizards:

Diane and Peter have safely arrived at CopperCon, albeit sleep-deprived and no little loopy. Due in part to misplaced signage, the Thursday night pre-registered guests only signing was spottily attended. Word to the wise: any attempts to drive or eat in Tempe on the same weekend as a big ASU game will encounter inevitable delay. I am informed that Peter's sense of humor grows keener when he's not half-asleep. Bystanders sensitive to puns may tremble in fear!

The con will run through Monday afternoon.

Got there a bit after five. Traffic around the area was horrendous; I then learned there was an ASU game on. I went in the wrong entrance at first -- today I wasn't a hotel guest, just a con attendee. I turned around and looked for actual parking. I was in luck, and found one very close to the actual side entrance of the hotel close to the con area. East-dwellers (Mudd-East, not East Coast-East) would recognize the type of entrance, as it was like that little covered hallway thing that's right by the lounge on each side.

I came at five. That was when pre-reg fun & games were supposed to start. Of course, given that we are operating on Fandom Standard Time here, that meant that people with Con Business were starting to set up, not that it was All Set Up and Ready to Rock and Roll. I chilled.

At length, after much wandering between locations, testing the microphone, putting stuff back in the car, and jittering, there was programming. I wandered into the Movie Room, and instantly changed the gender ratio from 100% male. The male nearest my age struck up Conversation. ...Either that, or I struck it up. I'm not sure which. His Harlan Ellison story involves being in a vile mood, and nearly plowing down a guy who did not get out of his way. "Don't you know who I AM?" No, he did bloody not, and the guy was still in his way. ... He later learned that he was the toast of the con, and sheepishly apologized to the guy.

The movie room was way too cold. Air conditioning cranked up to arctic makes sense for cons, but does not make for comfort when there are four to fifteen people in a decent sized partition of the ballroom.

I wandered off after all that in search of the Diane Duane and Peter Morwood signing. The room it said it was going to be in on the .pdf had other people in it, and a notice on the room name plate saying that the 7pm signing had been delayed until 8pm. The older fella who (IIRC) had welcomed me to my first con and hadn't realized that it was my first con did some digging about, and turns out they'd been moved to another room.

The panel that wasn't the signing started mentioning the "greying of Fandom", and that while it's true that older forms of fan stuff aren't attracting the kids these days, that other forms are up and coming. Like anime! My hair color was pointed out as a counterexample to the greying. Yay blue hair!

There was another girl there who'd been looking for the same signing. And while our knight in shining sneakers was off looking for a Real Con Person, we sat and got to know each other a bit. She mentioned casually that she'd brought up dduane coming to this con on the forums, and only one person had responded and said they'd be there.

"What forums?" I asked.

"The livejournal community," she said.

"Hi, I'm azurelunatic," I returned. We'd already met, it seemed.

We eventually did get pointed to the right room, the one that was set up with a table and name tags and everything. Table, name tags, the works -- just no Guests of Honor. They'd been sent off for dinner, but no one in that party had a cellphone, so they were MIA, presumed fed. We socialized while waiting. And they did show up. I mentioned that Allegra had saved the sanity of the household, and that the battery life was just about right for hcolleen's waiting for work. petermorwood shared his run-in with the increased security (in a far more expanded form than at the link), to general hysteria.

Evidently they do not have a volunteer coordinator this year. Therefore, the con committee are going to be massively overworked. "Maybe someone will volunteer to do that," I said in jest. Evidently the likelihood of this happening is laughable. Little gears started turning in my head, in the way that meant I'd be getting some brilliant idea a few hours later.

One of the con-people had piles upon piles of books to be signed. People who couldn't make it had sent their collections to get autographed. (I was first up, and awked and eeped over my name. Am I really more Joan or Azz? In the end, I went for Joanie.) There was commentary about the cover art. Oh, was there commentary about the cover art. There was one with a person facing a dragon. Nice, except for the fact that there's no dragon in the book, and the protagonist's armor doesn't leave his butt bare like that. (Thong armor. Ow.) And then there was the one with the sword through the horse's head...

I was developing a headache. I went home. Once I got home, the headache faded. I deeply suspect that the wig was to blame. Dammit. So I'll be wearing my own hair for the con, not short blue hair.

Remember the Good Wife's Guide, that doctored piece of quasi-plausible 50s-themed household advice? Well, mom_almighty has updated it. Bonus points for cat.

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Have joined coppercon_goers, it being a hastily-thrown-together LJ community for organizational purposes. Must remember to get my pilgrim's ribbons down from the blue net canopy before con-time, pilgrim's ribbons being an essential part of con wear. (In the Bastard's colors, naturally.)

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trickofthedark has lovely sensible!Harry sillyfic from two years ago, and the sequel: Dudley's perspective. "What I did on my Summer Holiday", parts 1 and 2. ...I want a part 3, and I can't decide whether I'd prefer to hear from Hermione, Tonks, Lupin, or Snape. Any of those four would be a delight to hear from.

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tygerr, there's random good mojo coming your way. The strypey candle I got a while back was behaving badly, so I wound up slurping out the mojo and beaming it in your direction rather than having it burn out, because, candle behaving badly is no fun to babysit.

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Missed writing group last night. Generally exhausted. Not fun for the whole family, nope. hcolleen was out of commission, and I collapsed and read quite a bit, and then started in on the housework.

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In just a bit I'm headed Out. Hooray meetups for con-compatibility testing!

tygerr: I currently don't have any time set for my inevitable visit to Texas, but going during Con Season (whichever is most convenient for me and others) sounds like a great idea. Why didn't I think of that before? I don't think it'll be in 2005; it likely won't be within the first half of 2006. Everything depends on my vacation time, my budget, when I think I need the stress relief the most, and whatever visiting with relatives I'm going to be doing. But unless I suddenly decide on a spur-of-the-moment jaunt (which, again, would require time and budget) ... no plans, currently. But that could change.

wibbble: The US has a shortage of Scotsmen in kilts. A severe shortage.

I got a large packet with a con update newsletter current as of February. I was still going over it in general perkiness and looking at the list of planned attendees and wondering who I'm going to meet there who I've always wanted to meet, or who I'll recognize. I'm sure there's probably an LJ community for the con already, and it's probably been there since gods know when, at least for directory and planning purposes. Fen like to organize. At least, a certain subcategory of us do, like to have everything rather obsessively sorted out into categories and patterns both useful and whimsical.

I have roots in fandom. I grew up there in my teens. My Gaming Aunt is classic fen, as is her husband. Dad used to be at least on the outskirts, if not actually fannish...

Some elements of both modern and classic fandom have me running screaming. One of the things about both the Monkeys and about Fandom is that everyone who wants to be a member can be a member. Compared to other social groups, this is somewhat unique. There are very high barriers to entry to the popular crowds. There are reasonably rigorous barriers to entry to being a jock, a prep, and most of the recognized groups in high school settings who are liked, respected, or acknowledged as being well-thought-of by many if not all. But when the misfits band together, pretty much everyone who wants to hang with them gets to. It takes a hell of a lot of anti-talent to get chucked out of a group of misfits.

Fandom has a lot of members. Anyone can be a fan. This includes a lot of the people who would be stopped at the gates of other adult social groups with distinct barriers to entry. Every fandom group (indeed, every fringe group with low to no barriers to entry) has one or several of That Person You Don't Want To Talk To But You Really Don't Want To Hurt Their Feelings Or Upset Them Or They Will Make Everything Unlivable For Everyone. In a group with barriers to entry, they either wouldn't have made it in in the first place, would have found themselves edged out during their trial period, or would have been removed from the group once their unsuitability was discovered.

But in Fandom & like social structures, you can get ejected from a clique or a local group, but not from Fandom itself. Only you can remove you from Fandom, even if you are a Fan Alone because you've been ejected from all the major cons, pre-emptively banned from a dozen other ones, and no one else will even talk to you, not even your mom.

I suspect this is one of the reasons why Fandom has the reputation with non-fen for being a collection place for the assorted range of weirdoes and skeevy people.

I just went ahead and constructed the project that's been sitting in the bottom of my refrigerator for a while. Just on the sort of impulse that takes several days to premeditate.

Now that I have the steps down, the construction of cookie puffs is reasonably simple, and takes me quite a bit under an hour. Some of the steps made it a lot more swift: the chilled state of the cookie dough, the slicing instead of balling, the use of spoon and fork to handle the cream cheese, the mass stepwise assembly, the wide oil pan instead of a narrow one-at-a-time unit, and the specialized frying tongs.

I'm thinking that this is just evil and decadent enough to be a trademark con food of mine, actually. I also wonder how the uncooked things respond to freezing; in at least theory, they should do excellently well, and if I should mass-produce them before con-time, take them to (a local) con while frozen, then employ an accomplice with a portable electric fryer and an appropriate amount of cooking oil and a shaker of powdered sugar...

*giggle* I think I should make an equal number of friends and enemies. Friends, because the stuff is wicked good. Enemies, because the stuff is just plain wicked.

But yes, refrigerated slicing of cookie dough is in order. One could probably improve the recipe by making the dough personally rather than purchasing it premade...

Today turned into a day that was a whole lot of not-very-much. I decided against giving plasma, based on their holiday hours, how much sleep I'd had, the fact that I need a vacation, and the fact that my arm is at least mildly annoyed with the entire process.

I did do dishes, and I did string cable, move the wireless router to support having a wired portion of the network on or near my bed, and install a secondary phone by the bed.

I feel guilty that I didn't get hardly anything writing-related done, but I do need some time to let my brain rest. On the other hand, the comic is a full-time job waiting to get started.

I'm actually starting the process of serious planning for conventions. I want to see if blood money will get me to all the conventions I want to go to. Currently, I have approximately train fare to the 2006 WorldCon in my spare change jar. That's a start, at least. (Hey, I wonder if Fuzzy will be up for WorldCon 2006.) I have assorted Cunning Plans, if only Real Life doesn't get in the way. But then, fandom is real life, to some point.