Readercon, day two
Jul. 11th, 2010 12:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eclectic_boyAnother good-if-not-great day, one with more-enjoyable panels. Some highlights:
• A "crypto-aviation" talk by Elizabeth Hand, about her time in the 1980s working at the National Air and Space Museum, specifically the many bizarre 19th-century proposals for flying machines (and 20th-century "folk-engineering"). She promised to send me copies of this detailed handwritten proposal by one Nicholas Margolis (sp?) for a "plane/planet/plan" that would fly-and-then-rocket to Uranus in 40 years, carrying all of humanity. The vehicle would be over a thousand miles long.
• Having dinner with Andrew Plotkin (who's friends with Ruth & Gavin), and being inspired by his later talk on interactive fiction. I now have a couple of ideas of things I want to create, and possibly the drive to actually work on them.
• The Kirk Poland Memorial Bad Prose Competition, which is Poem Fictionary only with dreck SF/F, and causes more laughter per hour than just about anything else in the world. "Her buttocks were like lovers. They were Romeo and Juliet. They were Tristan and Isolde. They were Abelard and Heloise. They were King Arthur and Guinevere and Lancelot."
• A "crypto-aviation" talk by Elizabeth Hand, about her time in the 1980s working at the National Air and Space Museum, specifically the many bizarre 19th-century proposals for flying machines (and 20th-century "folk-engineering"). She promised to send me copies of this detailed handwritten proposal by one Nicholas Margolis (sp?) for a "plane/planet/plan" that would fly-and-then-rocket to Uranus in 40 years, carrying all of humanity. The vehicle would be over a thousand miles long.
• Having dinner with Andrew Plotkin (who's friends with Ruth & Gavin), and being inspired by his later talk on interactive fiction. I now have a couple of ideas of things I want to create, and possibly the drive to actually work on them.
• The Kirk Poland Memorial Bad Prose Competition, which is Poem Fictionary only with dreck SF/F, and causes more laughter per hour than just about anything else in the world. "Her buttocks were like lovers. They were Romeo and Juliet. They were Tristan and Isolde. They were Abelard and Heloise. They were King Arthur and Guinevere and Lancelot."
