{"id":260,"date":"2013-09-05T12:27:00","date_gmt":"2013-09-05T16:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/45.79.82.122\/blogs\/natterings\/?p=260"},"modified":"2013-10-06T20:14:16","modified_gmt":"2013-10-07T00:14:16","slug":"worldcon-lesson-the-third","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/natterings.com\/?p=260","title":{"rendered":"Worldcon Lesson the Third"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Well, not so much lesson as observations:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The first day (Thursday), everyone looked just like me:\u00a0 plump, 40+, white.\u00a0 That lessened slightly over the weekend, and I was glad to see a gender balance after so many gaming cons of being one of like three women in the room.\u00a0 Of course not everyone was plump, but &#8230;yeah.\u00a0 The overwhelming whiteness never lessened. <\/li>\n<li>Speaking of whiteness:\u00a0 in one panel, a panelist stated that he couldn&#8217;t handle a media project at all because it featured an African-American character in a historically incongruous setting.\u00a0 In that same panel, we mentioned zeppelins, Frankenstein, future neo-Victorianism and <i>motorcycles that ride between stars<\/i>.\u00a0 Seriously, the PoC as an authority figure is what&#8217;s going to break your suspension of disbelief?\u00a0 Good god.\u00a0 I halfway raised my hand to ask the panelist to clarify, but then put it down again &#8211; I was surprised, and then embarrassed that no one else seemed freaked, and I missed out on a chance to be a good ally.\u00a0 Shame on me.<\/li>\n<li>There was still a point on Saturday afternoon in which I burst into tears and said I didn&#8217;t want to go home.\u00a0 My husband smiled at me indulgently; I guess finding a con &#8216;tribe&#8217; brings that out in a person, that revelation?\u00a0 But &#8211; and this is awful, but trufax &#8211; it wasn&#8217;t about the people.\u00a0 I&#8217;m shy as hell; I didn&#8217;t actually speak with many people, let alone new ones.\u00a0 It was about an<i> atmosphere of creativity<\/i>.\u00a0 At one point I sat in a panel with about three hundred other people who want to write.\u00a0 Eager, up-turned faces, all with a story they want to tell.\u00a0 That sense of &#8230;gosh, creative acceptance, made me want to give up our fast-paced Bay area lives and get a little house back in Austin and fill it with cats and books and &#8230;yeah.\u00a0 Live the dream.\u00a0 Someday.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well, not so much lesson as observations: The first day (Thursday), everyone looked just like me:\u00a0 plump, 40+, white.\u00a0 That lessened slightly over the weekend, and I was glad to see a gender balance after so many gaming cons of being one of like three women in the room.\u00a0 Of course not everyone was plump, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/natterings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/natterings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/natterings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/natterings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/natterings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=260"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/natterings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":270,"href":"https:\/\/natterings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260\/revisions\/270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/natterings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/natterings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/natterings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}