Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

"Sort of" because this isn't the post mortem or anything--it's just some thoughts from a tired person.

Minicon was a blast. Rooming with Jo, Emmet, and Sasha was excellent, because we spent a lot of time together, and because it meant I kept going to the hot tub with them, or such of them as were also awake. And there are worse ways to start a morning than waking and immediately hearing someone going "Hot tub. Hot Tub. Hot tub...." He's a good kid.

If I ever run programming, I will not put non-fans on panels with fans. And if I must, I will explain that this is a panel discussion, not a presentation. No Powerpoint anything. Please. And if there's someone with a really relevant and interesting powerpoint presentation, that can be a one-person presentation: it's not a panel.

Working in the Green Room was cool. As usual. Cally took it on at the last minute, and wound up with an all-rassef floating Green Room staff, enough of us that nobody had to work too hard or too many hours. And we got an actual room (the plan had been to give us a corner of the con suite. Right.), and even a coffee/tea setup on Saturday.

I'm a good moderator. I think I knew that. I looked at the time on Sunday, said "Oh shit, my panel begins two minutes ago," ran down the hall, and was informed that there had been a coup, and I was moderating. Okay. This is an excuse to catch my breath, and to introduce myself simply as "I'm Vicki Rosenzweig, I'm your moderator" and hand the mike to Emmet, who has an obviously relevant-to-the-panel background. We were doing "biotech, hype or hope?" My panel was a researcher into plant genetics, a futurist (see above about non-fans, though he wasn't the one with the powerpoint), a bioinformaticist, and a veterinarian. And, unofficially, Jon Singer, sitting in the first row, treated as panelist, meaning I called on him more than on non-panelists, because I knew it would work. And the copyeditor who wants to know everything, meaning I was more up on things than the futurist: it's odd telling a futurist "that's not a prediction, we're already doing it, it was in New Scientist a few weeks ago". So we bounced ideas, possibilities, and the latest news in bio around for a while. And being moderator meant I got to say things like "We did that panel yesterday" and "Nanotech is a different panel" when people diverged too much. It was fun. An hour earlier, I'd been doing the "why am I on this panel, should I quit?" thing; twenty minutes in, I remembered why I was on it. On the way out, someone in the audience wanted to know how he could keep up on things, so I pointed him to New Scientist and my Weblog.

Much good food, and good company to eat it with, including a really nice pot roast sandwich with Elise, two meals with Pamela and DDB, two with Kate and David who I wasn't expecting to see there, and why should I, David's previous Minicon was 20 years ago.

Too little sleep, and nonetheless too little music because I needed to get to sleep. Flash Girls were fun, but could have been--and have been--better. Emma still can't play guitar, because her elbows are still healing, but she can sing, and they had Lojo Russo and PNH sitting in, plus Steven Brust on drums. And, of course, the Fabulous Lorraine, who cheerfully introduced one song with "This is by my favorite author, and not just because he just handed me whiskey". (Neil Gaiman was there, quietly, and even on one program item, but not announced as such.) Alas, the concert overlapped Ask Dr. Mike, so I only got to the last few minutes of that.

I will not run programming. I will not run programming. I probably could do it better than this year, but (a) there are volunteers for next year who also could, and (b) I doubt I have the energy, and having a programming head collapse a month pre-con would not be an improvement.

One of the Minicon panels was "Human Footnotes." Everyone in the audience got a piece of paper with a large asterisk, and then Graydon Saunders, Jo Walton, John M. Ford, and Teresa Nielsen Hayden talked, with occasional questions from Elise Matthesen, who moderated. Whenever one of the panelists said something that anyone was confused by, that person held up an asterisk and got an explanation. Some of the remarks were designed to elicit queries, because someone wanted us to have the footnotes--Teresa "corrected the galleys at Lepanto," Elise's "and you are our audience and I claim my five pounds"*--and others were unpredictable.

The motivation was that many of us have topics about which we know enough that we can confuse people, or images and metaphors we now take for granted but that aren't entirely common currency, whether the private language of a small group or a reference to a TV show that two people in the room didn't happen to see. Four interesting people got an hour to tell us, and each other, things--with explanations as needed.

But many things in life could use asterisks, a low-emotion way of saying "please tell me what you mean by that." It wouldn't be perfect, of course. Jo pointed out that if you have to explain X in order to explain Y, it'll work, but if you have to explain W, X, Y, and Z in order to tell someone your great new idea, you or they will get lost.

Hyperlinks try to do that, a little, but the problem is that if I dropped in a link here, it would be to what I thought you needed to know, which probably wouldn't be what actually confused you.

If you stopped people every time you needed a footnote, they'd lose track of what they were saying, and so would you. It might be fun, in a non-linear way, but I doubt it will catch on in the era of the sound-bite.

*unfortunately, I had nothing smaller than a ten-pound note; this is what comes of not having a script.