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I attended Scintillation! Many events happened while I was there. I will recap some of them.
The Final Afternoon/Evening of the Con! (6/12)
Part 1: So Much Steerswoman!
Okay, so one of the very best things about discord is searchable logs. This means that when Alexis said to me "can you believe that a year ago, you hadn't even read these books" and I was like "wait, it must have been more than a year ago" I could...go and actually check, since I knew that I had literally asked the discord about them when I first heard them mentioned. I checked, and it was literally June 26th, 2021. Since I won't be able to go into too many details about the panel, or the two more hours of discussion that followed, this is as good a place as any to talk about the interwoven network that brought me to being on the panel. Another book I love is Constellation Games, by Leonard Richardson. I am fairly sure my friend Diane recommended that to me, because she recommends many things to me, and has long been a great source of many things in my life (and also the co-creator of some of the best things I have made). Constellation Games is a first contact story where the main character is a video game designer and blogger, and he wants to play, review and remake alien video games. There is surely a better way to pitch the book than that. Constellation Games is a book about philosophy, art, and games and humor. Or: Constellation Games is a book about trying to figure out how a giant functional anarchist collective can interface successfully with a dysfunctional collection of earth bureaucracies. (In my opinion, it is mostly the story of Tetsuo Milk, heroic historian, and part time monster from space). You can read the first two chapters for free here. When his second book, Situation Normal, came out, I found some aspects consonant with what I loved about Constellation Games, and some aspects sort of jarringly shifted (a second read when I knew what to expect went much less jarringly, and I liked the book much better!). He posts chapter-by-chapter author commentary on his blog, so after I had read the book, I went and tracked it down, and saw a note about possible follow-up material in the Constellation Games world. I typed out a comment, and hit submit, but the site spit out an error, so I copied my comment into an email and just sent it to him directly with a note that explained that his site seemed like it was willing to accept the comment all the way up until the very end of the process. He replied to my note, and we had a medium-brief exchange in which he, in passing, mentioned the Steerswoman series (the context being "books that are especially good for comfort re-reads"). I got that email at 10:19 pm on June 26. I then went to the Scintillation discord, and posted:
has anyone here read the Steerswoman series? So, I bought the first book within an hour of that e-mail, and by July 18th I had finished reading all four books, and started re-reading them immediately, I had set up a discord server as a place for fans of the series to talk without having to worry about leaking spoilers all over the internet (want to join? Let me know!), and by late July I had read all the cut-scenes, pre-released excerpts, etc. and started writing a fanfic!
So, while it feels like I have been desperate to talk about these books with people for my entire life, it really has been about a year, and technically only 11 months. But I think we can all agree it has been an intense 11 months of enthusiasm for me. And it really does all go back to a conversation with Leonard Richardson about Constellation Games, and the fact that I happened to be plugged into a place where when i asked "hey have people heard of these?" there were many people who were like "oh, you're so lucky you get to read them if you haven't already!" when I mentioned them.
So, thank you, Leonard; thank you, Jo; and most importantly: thank you Rosemary!
I really don't have a basis for comparison to the way in which I have gone head over heels for these books, other than the way in which my musical consumption was deeply radically altered by my exposure to The Sunset Tree and the Mountain Goats more generally in November, 2013. In both cases the deep and overwhelming (perhaps manic?) enthusiasm came with a genuine transformation in my relationship to the domain in question. So, anyway, I hope this helps express some of how excited I was to be on a panel talking about these books. I tried really hard to make sure I wasn't interrupting people [Reader, I for sure interrupted people at least a few times that I remember, which means I also did it a few times that I don't]. But I also really wanted to hear what other people thought and had to say about the books. These are books that manage to cherish the forest and the individual trees: beauty in the commonalities and patterns but also in the individuals and variations. So hearing what other people responded to and noticed was such a joy. Getting to share my love of the books, and hear other people share theirs: that was a joy. And while I can't really talk much about the panel itself, it was fantastic. I loved it. And then after the panel, Rosemary, who had been at the panel, taking notes, strategically not responding to questions about future plot developments in the series, continued to talk with us about the series. A handful of us were there, chatting with her. The other panels that started next looked interesting, but I just got to keep talking about the Steerswoman for another two hours, I think. Eugene, Alice, Gretchen and I were just getting to talk about these books we loved, with Rosemary, for such a wonderful long time. There were such great aspects to this discussion, including stuff about oral tradition versus written traditions, which I wish I could tell you all about, but you haven't all read the books, and really, just, I can't spoil things for you! It would be rude. At one point after Eugene and Alice and Gretchen said some fascinating things, because, let me tell you, i spent this whole weekend surrounding by such smart and interesting people she said "I have the coolest fans", and like, I can attest to how cool the other panelists were, and everyone in the audience of the panel, and everyone on the discord server. People are always noticing such awesome details, and making such cool connections, and just loving these great books. And I just keep sharing them with as many people as I can. The ebooks are $3 a piece! And on smashwords you can gift them to literally anyone who uses any kind of ebook reader at all! [Not kidding: Buy these books and talk about them with me!]
Anyway I love these books so much and I will truly cherish the memory of this panel and the subsequent conversation forever.
Part 2: The Raffle
So, I am sorry I missed the other panels and readings! I bet they were great! I ran upstairs and got my raffle tickets. I came back downstairs, and sat down for the raffle. I did not expect to win the raffle. I had 22 tickets. They had literally sold out of raffle tickets. There were four bundled prizes, and many, many individual prizes. You could pick what you wanted when you won. If a bundle was left, you could take a bundle. If you didn't want a bundle, or none was left, you could take "a 3d item and a flat item" which roughly meant something substantive off the table and a postcard type thing, but it wasn't quite just post-cards/stickers; some of the flat things were like art-prints and so counted as 3d for purposes of raffle-prize category, but I don't think anyone was going to be genuinely confused. Also, you could unbundle items if you wanted most of a bundle but knew that something in your bundle was desperately desired by other people and turn it into an individual prize. There were lots of highly coveted items. Plush ammonite! Knit dragon! Cross-stitched mars-scape with a mars rover worked in! So! Many! Things! The bundles were themed. I do not remember the themes except that one was the "travel" bundle. Plus, there were just lots of items in general. Alexis started reading off raffle numbers, and the first few bundles got claimed. Suddenly I realized that the number Alexis was saying, no one was jumping up for and it was very close to the numbers on the strip of tickets I was holding! Very close because I was on the other end of the strip! I jumped up and I was like "oh! I have that ticket!" There was still a bundle left!
If I had at all anticipated winning, I would have maybe spent some real time thinking about what I would choose if I won, and what items to grab as second choices and so on. I had...not done this. But: there was a bundle left. So I grabbed the bundle. It was the travel bundle (this, of course, is why I know the theme of any of the bundles). It contained syrups both birch and maple, some liqueurs from Italy, a collapsible travel cup, a handmade travel scrabble set constructed from quilt material, a book of John M. Ford poems, a beautiful art print of vegetables with a dragon hiding within them, an "earth to mars" scarf (fancy-not-warm), a scintillation mug, and a lunar lander pop-up card. I was still looking through this bounty of winnings when I realized another of my tickets had won! Now, one item had kept catching my eye, every time I walked past the raffle table. And I feel like it says a lot about me that it caught my eye in a positive way, because other people I have shown this too have not necessarily been as enchanted with the idea of keeping this in their house as a decorative item.
This was rubber banded to a book called "The Turning" by Gillian Chan, and first off, it was a mini-bundle so that was exciting (though I declined to take a flat item, given that I was getting two items by taking the book and what I thought was a paperweight, but later realized was a wall-hanging). I was informed that this inspired one of the characters in the book. It is hanging on my wall now! And the syrups and other consumables are stocked away in my kitchen. But more on what happened to these prizes later.
The raffle was going on, and some people were winning three or more times! The number of times a Beth won was getting to be ridiculous (whether we hold fixed the same Beth or count all Beth victories!). Suddenly, I won yet again! I just gave my winning ticket away. There were still plenty of great prizes but I had already won so much, it seemed extravagant! It got to the point where people who won were saying "does anyone want a winning ticket?" and some people were very...principled? They wanted to win only if their ticket was pulled from the bin. Eventually, when there were only four or five items left, it clearly made more sense to simply ask whether anyone wanted a board game specifically for ages 6-11 (or what have you), rather than keep drawing tickets until someone won who wanted such a board game. And then eventually there was still a table full of post-cards and people were free to take some on their way out. And thus, scintillation came to a close!
Part 3: NOT SO FAST! THERE IS STILL A PICNIC!
There was to be an outdoor picnic at a park whose name I don't remember and will not be looking up. We got there by taking a train and then some people took a bus and others walked. It had rained but the rain stopped before the picnic. It was a potluck style picnic. People brought food to share, and drinks to share. When I first got there with the aforementioned Beths and Naomi (I think) and Anthony, Riley, ari, and Alexi, there were about four to six other people there. By the height of the picnic, there were maybe 40? (I could be wrong, because I didn't count and am not always great at estimating numbers of people. Assume that I could be undercounting by as many as 20). My contribution to the picnic was a callback to what felt like the first night of scintillation, when we wandered around an IGA trying to find the superior Canadian sensodyne, and mistook batons au fromage for cheese bayonets, which is to say that I bought cheese puffs that had their name written in french. I passed on buying Canadian Maple Leaf shaped ketchup flavored Cheetos, because that seemed like one too many things going on for a bag of chips. As with many cases of referential humor, my cheese puff joke amused, principally, me, but that's really all it needed to do.
Riley and I talked about ginger beer, which is a taste we share. Many people pointed out whenever dogs came by, because many of the people in this crowd are fans of dogs. There was a dog who was for sure officially-not-but-doubtless-yes a pitbull, and who seemed to be a sweet and loving dog, who got much attention from us later in the evening. Many people had to get going early the next day. Someone was going to head back and I said I would join them for heading back, and this triggered a cascade of many people starting their goodbyes and heading out. At local gatherings with people I see regularly, I sometimes say goodbye to just the host, and then hightail it, rather than make the rounds. With people I will see again soon, the full rounds can both take a lot of time, and also trigger a cascade of other people to head out. But these were all people I had just met in person, and people I may not see again for some time. I could not imagine not saying goodbye. So I felt bad about contributing to the cascade. But I was not going to ghost the picnic. And a group of us were on the metro together. Alexis had a different metro stop than us, but stayed on past her actual station to transfer at a later station so she could keep chatting.
That's the sort of thing I would do, too.
Next time: ...wait. How is there even a next entry? Surely this must have been the end, right? (Maybe I learned something about cliffhangers at that "pacing a series" panel, huh?)
The Final Afternoon/Evening of the Con! (6/12)
Part 1: So Much Steerswoman!
Okay, so one of the very best things about discord is searchable logs. This means that when Alexis said to me "can you believe that a year ago, you hadn't even read these books" and I was like "wait, it must have been more than a year ago" I could...go and actually check, since I knew that I had literally asked the discord about them when I first heard them mentioned. I checked, and it was literally June 26th, 2021. Since I won't be able to go into too many details about the panel, or the two more hours of discussion that followed, this is as good a place as any to talk about the interwoven network that brought me to being on the panel. Another book I love is Constellation Games, by Leonard Richardson. I am fairly sure my friend Diane recommended that to me, because she recommends many things to me, and has long been a great source of many things in my life (and also the co-creator of some of the best things I have made). Constellation Games is a first contact story where the main character is a video game designer and blogger, and he wants to play, review and remake alien video games. There is surely a better way to pitch the book than that. Constellation Games is a book about philosophy, art, and games and humor. Or: Constellation Games is a book about trying to figure out how a giant functional anarchist collective can interface successfully with a dysfunctional collection of earth bureaucracies. (In my opinion, it is mostly the story of Tetsuo Milk, heroic historian, and part time monster from space). You can read the first two chapters for free here. When his second book, Situation Normal, came out, I found some aspects consonant with what I loved about Constellation Games, and some aspects sort of jarringly shifted (a second read when I knew what to expect went much less jarringly, and I liked the book much better!). He posts chapter-by-chapter author commentary on his blog, so after I had read the book, I went and tracked it down, and saw a note about possible follow-up material in the Constellation Games world. I typed out a comment, and hit submit, but the site spit out an error, so I copied my comment into an email and just sent it to him directly with a note that explained that his site seemed like it was willing to accept the comment all the way up until the very end of the process. He replied to my note, and we had a medium-brief exchange in which he, in passing, mentioned the Steerswoman series (the context being "books that are especially good for comfort re-reads"). I got that email at 10:19 pm on June 26. I then went to the Scintillation discord, and posted:
has anyone here read the Steerswoman series?
I then remembered that I didn't have to wait to see if other people were around! So, moments later, the post became::uses search function:
many people here have read the Steerswoman series, and appear to have liked it, which was my main question
So, while it feels like I have been desperate to talk about these books with people for my entire life, it really has been about a year, and technically only 11 months. But I think we can all agree it has been an intense 11 months of enthusiasm for me. And it really does all go back to a conversation with Leonard Richardson about Constellation Games, and the fact that I happened to be plugged into a place where when i asked "hey have people heard of these?" there were many people who were like "oh, you're so lucky you get to read them if you haven't already!" when I mentioned them.
So, thank you, Leonard; thank you, Jo; and most importantly: thank you Rosemary!
I really don't have a basis for comparison to the way in which I have gone head over heels for these books, other than the way in which my musical consumption was deeply radically altered by my exposure to The Sunset Tree and the Mountain Goats more generally in November, 2013. In both cases the deep and overwhelming (perhaps manic?) enthusiasm came with a genuine transformation in my relationship to the domain in question. So, anyway, I hope this helps express some of how excited I was to be on a panel talking about these books. I tried really hard to make sure I wasn't interrupting people [Reader, I for sure interrupted people at least a few times that I remember, which means I also did it a few times that I don't]. But I also really wanted to hear what other people thought and had to say about the books. These are books that manage to cherish the forest and the individual trees: beauty in the commonalities and patterns but also in the individuals and variations. So hearing what other people responded to and noticed was such a joy. Getting to share my love of the books, and hear other people share theirs: that was a joy. And while I can't really talk much about the panel itself, it was fantastic. I loved it. And then after the panel, Rosemary, who had been at the panel, taking notes, strategically not responding to questions about future plot developments in the series, continued to talk with us about the series. A handful of us were there, chatting with her. The other panels that started next looked interesting, but I just got to keep talking about the Steerswoman for another two hours, I think. Eugene, Alice, Gretchen and I were just getting to talk about these books we loved, with Rosemary, for such a wonderful long time. There were such great aspects to this discussion, including stuff about oral tradition versus written traditions, which I wish I could tell you all about, but you haven't all read the books, and really, just, I can't spoil things for you! It would be rude. At one point after Eugene and Alice and Gretchen said some fascinating things, because, let me tell you, i spent this whole weekend surrounding by such smart and interesting people she said "I have the coolest fans", and like, I can attest to how cool the other panelists were, and everyone in the audience of the panel, and everyone on the discord server. People are always noticing such awesome details, and making such cool connections, and just loving these great books. And I just keep sharing them with as many people as I can. The ebooks are $3 a piece! And on smashwords you can gift them to literally anyone who uses any kind of ebook reader at all! [Not kidding: Buy these books and talk about them with me!]
Anyway I love these books so much and I will truly cherish the memory of this panel and the subsequent conversation forever.
Part 2: The Raffle
So, I am sorry I missed the other panels and readings! I bet they were great! I ran upstairs and got my raffle tickets. I came back downstairs, and sat down for the raffle. I did not expect to win the raffle. I had 22 tickets. They had literally sold out of raffle tickets. There were four bundled prizes, and many, many individual prizes. You could pick what you wanted when you won. If a bundle was left, you could take a bundle. If you didn't want a bundle, or none was left, you could take "a 3d item and a flat item" which roughly meant something substantive off the table and a postcard type thing, but it wasn't quite just post-cards/stickers; some of the flat things were like art-prints and so counted as 3d for purposes of raffle-prize category, but I don't think anyone was going to be genuinely confused. Also, you could unbundle items if you wanted most of a bundle but knew that something in your bundle was desperately desired by other people and turn it into an individual prize. There were lots of highly coveted items. Plush ammonite! Knit dragon! Cross-stitched mars-scape with a mars rover worked in! So! Many! Things! The bundles were themed. I do not remember the themes except that one was the "travel" bundle. Plus, there were just lots of items in general. Alexis started reading off raffle numbers, and the first few bundles got claimed. Suddenly I realized that the number Alexis was saying, no one was jumping up for and it was very close to the numbers on the strip of tickets I was holding! Very close because I was on the other end of the strip! I jumped up and I was like "oh! I have that ticket!" There was still a bundle left!
If I had at all anticipated winning, I would have maybe spent some real time thinking about what I would choose if I won, and what items to grab as second choices and so on. I had...not done this. But: there was a bundle left. So I grabbed the bundle. It was the travel bundle (this, of course, is why I know the theme of any of the bundles). It contained syrups both birch and maple, some liqueurs from Italy, a collapsible travel cup, a handmade travel scrabble set constructed from quilt material, a book of John M. Ford poems, a beautiful art print of vegetables with a dragon hiding within them, an "earth to mars" scarf (fancy-not-warm), a scintillation mug, and a lunar lander pop-up card. I was still looking through this bounty of winnings when I realized another of my tickets had won! Now, one item had kept catching my eye, every time I walked past the raffle table. And I feel like it says a lot about me that it caught my eye in a positive way, because other people I have shown this too have not necessarily been as enchanted with the idea of keeping this in their house as a decorative item.
This was rubber banded to a book called "The Turning" by Gillian Chan, and first off, it was a mini-bundle so that was exciting (though I declined to take a flat item, given that I was getting two items by taking the book and what I thought was a paperweight, but later realized was a wall-hanging). I was informed that this inspired one of the characters in the book. It is hanging on my wall now! And the syrups and other consumables are stocked away in my kitchen. But more on what happened to these prizes later.
The raffle was going on, and some people were winning three or more times! The number of times a Beth won was getting to be ridiculous (whether we hold fixed the same Beth or count all Beth victories!). Suddenly, I won yet again! I just gave my winning ticket away. There were still plenty of great prizes but I had already won so much, it seemed extravagant! It got to the point where people who won were saying "does anyone want a winning ticket?" and some people were very...principled? They wanted to win only if their ticket was pulled from the bin. Eventually, when there were only four or five items left, it clearly made more sense to simply ask whether anyone wanted a board game specifically for ages 6-11 (or what have you), rather than keep drawing tickets until someone won who wanted such a board game. And then eventually there was still a table full of post-cards and people were free to take some on their way out. And thus, scintillation came to a close!
Part 3: NOT SO FAST! THERE IS STILL A PICNIC!
There was to be an outdoor picnic at a park whose name I don't remember and will not be looking up. We got there by taking a train and then some people took a bus and others walked. It had rained but the rain stopped before the picnic. It was a potluck style picnic. People brought food to share, and drinks to share. When I first got there with the aforementioned Beths and Naomi (I think) and Anthony, Riley, ari, and Alexi, there were about four to six other people there. By the height of the picnic, there were maybe 40? (I could be wrong, because I didn't count and am not always great at estimating numbers of people. Assume that I could be undercounting by as many as 20). My contribution to the picnic was a callback to what felt like the first night of scintillation, when we wandered around an IGA trying to find the superior Canadian sensodyne, and mistook batons au fromage for cheese bayonets, which is to say that I bought cheese puffs that had their name written in french. I passed on buying Canadian Maple Leaf shaped ketchup flavored Cheetos, because that seemed like one too many things going on for a bag of chips. As with many cases of referential humor, my cheese puff joke amused, principally, me, but that's really all it needed to do.
Riley and I talked about ginger beer, which is a taste we share. Many people pointed out whenever dogs came by, because many of the people in this crowd are fans of dogs. There was a dog who was for sure officially-not-but-doubtless-yes a pitbull, and who seemed to be a sweet and loving dog, who got much attention from us later in the evening. Many people had to get going early the next day. Someone was going to head back and I said I would join them for heading back, and this triggered a cascade of many people starting their goodbyes and heading out. At local gatherings with people I see regularly, I sometimes say goodbye to just the host, and then hightail it, rather than make the rounds. With people I will see again soon, the full rounds can both take a lot of time, and also trigger a cascade of other people to head out. But these were all people I had just met in person, and people I may not see again for some time. I could not imagine not saying goodbye. So I felt bad about contributing to the cascade. But I was not going to ghost the picnic. And a group of us were on the metro together. Alexis had a different metro stop than us, but stayed on past her actual station to transfer at a later station so she could keep chatting.
That's the sort of thing I would do, too.
Next time: ...wait. How is there even a next entry? Surely this must have been the end, right? (Maybe I learned something about cliffhangers at that "pacing a series" panel, huh?)
