This is my 3rd year attending WonderCon, for me the first Con of the season at the end of March, and somehow it just wasn’t as much fun this year. Not necessarily the Con’s fault, but that of my own attitude.
One remarkable thing about this year’s Con was the simultaneous presence in the hotel of what I thought of as a Pink Latina convention. Dozens and dozens of middle-aged Latinas in their pink sweaters commingled with Boba Fets, Thors, and Daredevils. Turned out it was a MaryKay conclave. Even though it seemed surreal, I caught a few of the Pink Latinas taking selfies with costumed monsters.
Simply getting back and forth to one’s room turned out to be a nuisance. A 1500+ guest, 14-story hotel with only three operational elevators made logistics challenging. The hotel was undergoing renovations and even some of their stairwells were hidden out of the way. Fortunately I was only on the 6th floor, so I could use the stairs when necessary.
As to the Con itself, I had two main problems. As in almost all social gatherings these days, most of the panelists (and many of the panels) were smugly anti-Trump, anti-Musk, anti anything not leftwing, and considered themselves terribly ill-used by our current administration. At least most of the references were more of the sly, wink-wink, nudge-nudge variety rather than polemical denunciations. Perhaps they’re seriously rather than performatively scared this time, or maybe they realize they’ve lost but don’t want to admit it aloud.
My second problem is that I found I would rather be one of those on the panel, passing out ideas and received wisdom from the greats among the field rather than just listening to others. Not that listening to others isn’t usually enlightening, just that, as a story teller, I felt the urge to tell my stories. Well, not always my stories but some mine and some I’ve learned from wise elder story tellers. That was the problem I found with the panel on Pop Culture as a Sociocultural Predictor. It seemed each of the author’s stories was about telling their story. Nothing wrong with that, but their conception of their own story seemed to be only about the color of their skin or their sex or perhaps their sexual orientation. I hope their novels are about more than that, but that seemed to be the only part they were interested in selling. Probably they have been deluded by the decaying traditional publishing industry into believing that’s the only thing that an audience cares about since that seems the only thing publishers care about in choosing whom to publish.
On the last day I enjoyed the Mixer of Science-Minded Geeks, where I got to have conversations with several very bright and accomplished young women. I seemed to impress them as an enlightened male who had been married to a truly liberated woman scientist. They scoffed at my parting remark about being a crotchety old conservative, but it reminded me of Sharon’s remark to a couple who had been long time friends. She mentioned that we were Republicans, and they exclaimed, “But you’re so nice!”
As I once said to our site manager when I was awarded the Quality Award for the site, “You know everybody who’s won this award won it for doing exactly what their immediate supervisor told them not to do. We should think about that.”
Musings of a Restless Mind 