Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

I spent most of the afternoon looking at the laptop screen, because two different friends invited me to Zoom parties today, at mostly overlapping times.

To keep the conversations manageable, both friends were using breakout rooms. This worked, except that I barely got to talk to either of my hosts. But I had some fun conversations about topics including bits of history and politics, as well as catching up on each others' lives.

I like liv's parents, which isn't surprising, but is pleasing. I don't remember who said, in that conversation, that he thought peak Somerville was 7Ate9 bakery celebrating Shakespeare's birthday by giving free cheesecakes to people who could recite a sonnet, but I think he has a point. I do wish I'd managed to say more than hi to her, before she decided it was time to put everyone in smaller groups, so conversation would be possible.

At the second party, I'm particularly glad I got to talk to lydy and to alanro. I took a break between the parties because i wanted to get up, move around a bit, and give my eyes a break from looking at Zoom meeting rooms.

Tomorrow I'm talking to my mother. The plan is for her to call me 11ish; I was thinking of suggesting that we try Zoom, but maybe not after three hours or so on Zoom today.

I mentioned that I am self-isolating, and was worrying about running out of supplies, but I couldn't think of anyone to ask for help: my local friends don't have cars, or also shouldn't be shopping right now.

Jo, who is an extrovert and travels a lot (in normal times), said she could probably find someone to go shopping for us. Jo talked to Ada (who used to live in Cambridge), and I got an email from someone offering to help.

Emails were exchanged, I sent them our current shopping list, and now we have stuff. No toilet paper or paper towels, unsurprisingly--the person doing the shopping told me there were no paper goods in the store--but we have a five-pound bag of flour and a package of rice, as well as the produce, yogurt, canned beans, and other useful things. An extra box of Irish breakfast tea, just in case.

I won't say all is well, but things are looking less dire, very locally.

Question for other people who are going to Scintillation: how long are you planning to be in Montreal?

I'm thinking of arriving Thursday afternoon or evening, just so I don't fret about missing things on Friday (even though the many of the things are trips to places I've already seen), and staying over until either Monday morning or Tuesday morning.

Being there longer has the advantage of more social time, if other people also arrive early and/or stay late. The disadvantages are that it will probably cost more (although Airfares Are Weird) and might wear me out.

(I have addressed this to people who will be there, in terms of possibly coordinating schedules, but other relevant thoughts are also welcome.)

ETA: This having been asked in the comments, Scintillation will be a small science fiction convention in Montreal, in October. (For reasons to do with hotel space, Kickstarter, and the person who is organizing, there are no more memberships available.) I sometimes lose track of who has what context.

cattitude and I went to Arisia yesterday. We got there late in the morning, wandered a bit in the dealers room, and connected with ashnistrike and Nameseeker; they were in a hurry to a panel, but we agreed to have lunch together.

Lunch was nice, if a bit extravagant, in the hotel's restaurant, which is better than it has any right to be; Ashnistrike and Nameseeker remembered if fondly from last Arisia. We talked over food for an hour and a half, and then in a corner of the con suite for another two hours, until Ashnistrike had to go be on another panel.

I am pleased, and unsurprised, that my friendship with them still works as "see each other at occasional cons, and dive into lots of interesting conversation"; this is a pattern the three of us got into at Wiscon, before I stopped going to Wiscon. I didn't find other people I wanted to talk to in the hour or so after that, and my hip was bothering me, so we decided to go home, and have dinner here. I'd been planning to head back today, but didn't quite feel up to it as I was walking toward the T station. So, a quiet day at home, and I'll try again tomorrow morning.

What I got in the dealers room (so far) is an assortment of chocolate and a t-shirt with a picture of a red panda; red pandas get much less love and attention than the black-and-white giant pandas, but are if anything cuter. They're charismatic, but not megafauna.

cattitude, adrian_turtle, and I went to Boskone Friday and Saturday (commuting rather than getting a room at the hotel). Friday Cattitude and I got there before Adrian, and I felt vaguely out of sorts for a bit after we got there and picked up our badges, because I was having trouble finding people to talk to (a combination of not seeing people I recognized, and seeing people who either didn't see me/hear me say hello, or were on their way elsewhere). We indulged in some restorative hot chocolate, and then Adrian got there, and things started coming together.

( cut for length and disorganization )

Mostly things are going well: in particular, the cats have passed their pre-flight physicals, and we have the detailed plans for cat moving.

However, in looking at the latest email from the moving company, I noticed that the stated dates for when the moving truck will arrive didn't match what we had thought, and have been planning based on. We looked at the previous emails etc., and those are in fact the dates they gave us all along. There is one day overlap: either way, it's possible the truck will be getting there on the 19th. If it's not until the 20th or 21st, we will cope. We have the apartment in plenty of time (the landlord has already given the keys to adrian_turtle on our behalf, and she is talking about dropping off a tea kettle and other useful objects before we arrive).

This does have the advantage that cattitude and I can make plans involving Vericon. There are people I want to see (rysmiel and I had reached a state of "we'll squeeze in a bit of time once I hear from the moving company" that doesn't fit well with their dislike of last-minute arrangements), and some interesting-sounding programming. (The con dates are March 18-20, which is when we thought the moving truck was due.)

ETA: Vericon dates corrected, thank you Geri.

Right now I am grumpy and worried about where a few of my files have gone; it's one of those recursive things where I have to find something to tell me what piece of the Time Machine backups might contain the files I actually need. But that will blend into lots of other memories of minor computer issues, and I want to remember hanging out with people.

Prologue was a small pre-Worldcon relaxacon in Renton, Washington; conveniently, a bus that starts two blocks from my home stops near the con hotel, so cattitude and I decided to save money and enjoy sleeping in our own beds and such by commuting. Friday was, well, wet and messy (steady rain mixed with thunderstorms, leading to lots of traffic problems), and we got soaked walking from the bus to the hotel, but Mary Kay Kare lent me dry socks, which helped a lot.

We had dinner Friday with Mary Kay; Nina Horvath, the TAFF delegate; and Jeff and Liz Copeland, who it turns out also live in Bellevue (though not in our neighborhood). Both the conversation and the food was good; I wouldn't go out of my way for Lemongrass Grill, but it was better than the con program/local guide led me to expect. Since Nina is from Austria, I donated some euros that have been sitting in my dresser for a dozen years to TAFF, because at some point it feels silly to hang onto cash because "I might go back sometime." If I do visit the eurozone again, I'll almost certainly want more than 15 euros in cash.

Saturday I woke up early and worked out, and then we took it easy for a bit before going to the Farmers' Market. So we now have plenty of blueberries again, and some carrots and peaches. I also got a chocolate orange cupcake, because I'd thought about one buying two weeks earlier and then got pie instead. We took the bus to Renton after lunch, and got there around 2:00. Cattitude spotted a blackberry patch next to the sidewalk, once it wasn't pouring rain, so we could actually see, and stepping aside to gather a few berries didn't seem absurd.

We talked about a bunch of things, including the sort of catching up with old acquaintances that involves a few-sentence summary of the last n years of my and their lives; complications of working freelance; the role of odor in bee-flower coevolution; durian; and even a bit about the Hugos. I was wondering, today, whether the durian-flavored candy in the con suite was intended to be eaten, or only as a conversation starter. Cattitude went to one program item, Charlie Stross's reading, but the only programming that appealed to me was at 11 a.m. Sunday. The "old acquaintance" bit included a few variations on "I think we met at the Vegas Corflu" [more than two decades ago] and "I recognize your name from print [i.e., fanzines]."

On Saturday, Jane Hawkins was making fudge on a hotplate in the con suite, and wanted someone to guard it while she went outside "to smoke some tobacco." Welcome to Washington: I'm not sure whether that was admitting to her vices, or reassuring me that it would be fine for her to come back and deal with extremely hot liquid. (My task wasn't to stir, it was to make sure that nobody touched the fudge, for safety reasons.)

Cattitude and I had dinner with Sandra Bond and Aileen Foreman; Aileen has been living in the Seattle area for the last few months, but is moving [back] to Las Vegas right after Sasquan, and we hadn't touched base until now. that, again, was a good if not spectacular meal: a "roadhouse" with lots of pork and beef on the menu, but the crabcakes sounded good, and were. I was glad of the chance to eat with Sandra, on top of having her visit us for a bit on Thursday.

By the time we left to catch the next-to-last bus home, I was fading. On our way to the bus, I decided that it had been fun, but I'd had enough for one weekend. (I had hoped to get more useful things done today, but so it goes.)

Summary: a lot of time hanging out in the con suite chatting with people, some of whom I'd met before.

On Wednesday again, hooray!

Recent reading:

Nemesis, by Agatha Christie. This Miss Marple mystery is I think set later than usual in Miss Marple's life. The set-up is that she learns of the death of a rich man she met on holiday the previous year, and then discovers that he has left her a significant inheritance on condition that she investigates…something. The instructions are deliberately vague, but start with a letter saying he has paid for her to go on a coach tour of famous houses and gardens. Events unfold from there, and Marple in the end lives up to her deceased acquaintance's idea of her as "nemesis," one of the Kindly Ones. A couple of stereotypes are explicitly knocked down, and justice is eventually done. (Warning: there's a mostly-abstract discussion among some of the characters that is full of rape culture assumptions.)

The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison. This drew me in, in a way that relatively few books have in the last few years. (I don't know if that's becaues it's that good, or a hopeful sign about the future.) Maia is a lonely 18 year old who suddenly finds himself Emperor of the Elflands after his father and older half-brothers are murdered. He has a lot to learn, because it never occurred to his guardian that Maia would need to know much about politics, or much else. He has a realistic amount of trouble finding his footing, and a lot happens in a year. Part of what I liked about this book is that it's not a story about an obscure person who is the only hope for his people, or the world. He does want to be a good emperor, and not just because he's stuck with the job, and his definition of "good" isn't the same as the last few emperors', but it's one a lot of us could agree with, from concern for the well-being of his subjects to taking an interest in even dull-sounding legal issues. Also, there's a good scene with a steam-powered model bridge. (As a side note, if you find yourself lost in the sea of names and foreign terminology, there are glossaries and lists of characters at the back, which I wish I'd noticed before I finished the book.

This is on the Hugo ballot for best novel; if I don't vote straight "no award" in every category, I would be happy to vote for this, and think Monette deserved the award. (I need to give the Liu another try and see if I can get past the gory first chapter about the Cultural Revolution; I liked Leckie's Ancillary Sword but right now would rank this higher.) [If you have no idea what I'm talking about, don't worry about it: it has nothing to do with the quality of this novel.]


(Nothing in progress)

What I plan to read next:

Past Forgetting, by Jill Robinson, a memoir about amnesia.

There was a post on the Vanguard list yesterday afternoon saying that Rob Hansen was arriving from London on his way to Corflu (in Portland, Ore., this weekend), and if people wanted to see him, meet at a brewpub that evening. Then a follow-up mentioned that Sandra Bond was also likely to be there; I haven't seen either of them in years (it's been ages since I went to England, other than that brief visit to my mother when her husband died), and was particularly looking forward to a chance to talk to Sandra.

I ran the idea past cattitude, who agreed that it seemed like a good idea, and pointed out how little socializing we'd been doing. So we took a couple of buses out to Lake City, and spent a bit over an hour catching up with a few people. A few of the locals said things along the lines of "what are you doing here?" or "I didn't expect you"; apparently I hadn't done nearly as good a job of letting my Seattle-area friends and acquaintances know we're now in Bellevue as I'd hoped.

Bellevue is an hour from Lake City by bus, more than that if you miss a connection, as we did om the way back; we spent significantly more time in transit than at the pub, but I'm willing to do that now and then, since part of what we get by living in Bellevue is a much shorter commute for Cattitude. (Our specific location in downtown Bellevue is also handy to a small but important list of things, including a supermarket and the library.)

It would have been nice to get to Corflu myself, but the timing didn't quite work. There's a slight chance I'll get to see Sandra next weekend, but that's very much up in the air.

Just because you like someone doesn't mean they won't do bad things. It's a cliche to hear "but he's a nice guy" when someone is accused of harassment, and we tend to side with our friends. That's part of what friendship means, in practice if not in everyone's ideals. (For me, if it's a matter of whose needs to prefer, who to help first, I will tend to help my friends. But there's a difference between helping someone with the rent and driving a getaway car or faking an alibi.)

I recently got a reminder that my judgment of people isn't perfect, that I can enjoy someone's company and call them a friend, and that proves little or nothing about what they're capable of when I'm not around.

Genevieve Valentine was repeatedly harassed at Readercon. She posted about it, and there was some discussion of ways in which the harasser's behavior was inappropriate, and why you don't get to insist on someone's attention to your apology after she has repeatedly told you to go away. The conversation in the comments was pretty good (despite one or two people effectively defending the harasser, by trying to create impossible and shifting standards of proof).

At that point, Genevieve had filed a complaint but was waiting for a decision from the Readercon committee. The harasser had not been identified. A few days later, on July 26, badgerbag asked if someone could tell her who was being talked about. They did, and she posted the information: The harasser was René Walling.

Until this, I've thought of René as a friend. A few weeks ago, I was playing board games with him while visiting papersky, and it's been the sort of friendship where we hug hello and goodbye, which I've been comfortable with.

The fact that I have felt safe around Rene proves nothing, or nothing relevant. (Few harassers or sexual predators try to grope every woman they meet, after all.) Maybe he's just not attracted to me. Maybe he leaves me alone because he knows I'm partnered and therefore I look less vulnerable. The reasons don't matter, because I don't think they're likely to change: whether I want to keep spending time with Rene will be about whether I am comfortable knowing that he harassed other women, not about my own safety.

Yesterday, Readercon told Genevieve that they were suspending the harasser for two years and would be making no announcement about this, just telling her (and presumably him) privately. Bear in mind that until now, Readercon's official policy was that anyone who harassed another con member would be suspended permanently.* After a few hours of people pointing out that they were violating their own policy, that Genevieve did not feel safe, and that they seemed to be prioritizing either the con's reputation, or Rene's, above Genevieve or any woman's safety, Readercon issued a statement which basically said that they were going easy on Rene because he had admitted his deeds but told them he was sorry. Oh, and if they get "substantiated reports" of him harassing anyone elsewhere, they may ban him permanently.

There's a lot wrong with that, discussed in the Readercon LJ community and elsewhere.

At the moment, I'm expecting to see René next weekend (in the company of dozens of other people). I'm not at all sure how I feel about this. Yes, he's a friend and normally I would ask him what he had to say about this. But having read and thought about most of the story before I knew it was about him, I can't think of much he could say that would make a difference. He has admitted to harassing Genevieve. The Readercon committee, while asking for his side of things, didn't follow up on the other complaints about him—but they are significant, and mean that my friend, this guy I enjoy hanging out with, is a repeated sexual harasser. One instance may not imply two; two implies more.

Do I want to try looking past that, and if so, why? Do I believe that he is going to try to rehabilitate himself, and if so, would my saying something like "I think the Readercon ban should be permanent*, but I think we can still hang out together" be helpful in that? (If I conclude that his contrition is an act, and he's just going to be sneakier from now on, my decision is easy: someone who intends to keep harassing women is no friend of mine.) My social circle is large enough that I am statistically confident it includes other sexual harassers. I can only hope that the harassment is entirely in the past. If René stops, is that good enough for me to keep socializing with him? Trust, no: but I don't need trust on that level to play boardgames or proofread something for him. (There are different kinds of trust: I don't think he'd be likely to cheat at cards, but that doesn't matter if I decide I don't want to sit at the same table with him.)

* I pointed out in comments to someone that while the phrasing in the not-actually-followed Readercon policy is "zero tolerance," enforcing that wouldn't mean throwing Rene in jail, or confiscating his car or other property, or banning him from all conventions. Just Readercon.