Sumana

I am at WisCon, where the Otherwise Award has several related events and program items this year!
I've already caught up with a few fannish acquaintances and am looking forward to further conversations.
If you would like to hang out in person, please note that I am pretty cautious about COVID and am only eating outdoors, or alone in my room.

I am planning to attend PyCon North America, in person, in mid-April in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. I'm also planning to attend WisCon in person -- that's in Madison, Wisconsin, USA, in late May (DW comm is wiscon).

I blogged about why and how I'm going to PyCon this year, and the COVID mitigation steps I'll take. I have not (yet) made a similar post about WisCon but it would have a pretty similar logic to it.

Both conferences are hybrid this year, with a lot of support for remote attendees and with strong COVID risk mitigation measures in place. So I hope to interact with you, in person or virtually, if you attend/participate!

(Note that there will be no WisCon in 2024.)

A few weeks ago I read this thread by twwings about Brooklyn Nine-Nine and about what it would take to take the existing show and change what ideologies it carries and feeds regarding the criminal justice/law enforcement system. "it is copaganda, has been copaganda from the start, and it looks like the new season is going to be copaganda as well," writes twwings.

Over the past several years -- usually on airplanes -- I had seen maybe 6 episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. But I've been thinking about related stuff for a while -- see this thread from early 2019 as folks discussed a potential wiscon program item originally called "disaggregating & reconstituting the pleasure of military/spy/police stories", and this musing:

in trying to figure out how one constructs a story that hits a bunch of the same buttons that spy/military/police fiction hits, yet avoids the ideological squick that the genre inherently pokes, I am a bit like someone trying to hack together a gluten-free or vegan equivalent of a favorite wheaty/dairy/meaty food

(Did that WisCon session actually happen? I forget...)

Just around the time that I saw that Twitter thread, I entered a particularly stressful few weeks and sought out comedic entertainment. So, right now I am watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine in its entirety -- I'm currently partway through season 4 -- and so that twwings thread was fresh in my mind when I started.

Which of this show's pleasures depend on it being a cop show?

I think there are a few categories here, getting progressively more specific.

People in relationships with each other and humor arising from situations they are in - this is the basic situation comedy format. This particular version of the sitcom has snappy writing, a balance between drop-in accessibility for new viewers of individual episodes and engagement/depth for longtime viewers, a shakycam/mockumentary-influenced filming style at least for some scenes, etc. None of this is dependent on the police setting, although I assume there is some genre connection where shakycam subconsciously influences how the viewer settles into a crime- or police-related narrative.

Workplace: There are many workplace sitcoms, and many Brooklyn Nine-Nine stories could take place in any workplace sitcom, e.g., "an energy-saving drive means [person] needs to give up their space heater," "boss sends staff to team-building activity they aren't enthused about," "the janitors don't like this team," "the higher-ups are corrupt," "management incentives backfire," etc. The corruption-type stories are a little more specific because the stakes can be lower in some workplaces, but you can still tell that story outside a cop/military/spy setting.

High stakes/arduous work/suspense: Some Nine-Nine plots or moments depend on this stuff -- stakeouts, for instance -- but, as I've seen other folks point out, you can tell these stories in settings like the ever-present medical procedural, or in firefighting, wilderness search and rescue, and maybe some other kinds of public service agencies. The high stakes help with stories about camaraderie, loyalty, leadership, tradecraft, competence, etc.

People improving the world in some way: Nearly exclusively, the way characters in Brooklyn Nine-Nine improve the world is by arresting criminals; we see/hear a little about community outreach but it's treated as laughable and pretty much an afterthought. There are shows about teachers, lawyers, social workers, supernatural entities, etc. that are more directly about community service.

This brings me to a point laurashapiro made in the WisCon session idea thread:

I feel like the cop show is essentially scratching multiple itches for fans: character depth, buddy dynamics (which could occur in any line of work), action (which is almost always violence, hence problematic), and a desire to see evildoers brought to justice (always problematic within a law enforcement milieu). So while the other professions you mention might address some of these needs, the only show I've ever seen that does all of them successfully without feeling icky on a social justice level is Leverage.

So let's come to the hardest-to-substitute pleasures in Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which have to do with violence and justice. And not just ad hoc defensive violence, but deliberate and prepared use of violence or threats of violence, or preparations for being attacked by malicious people, and organized violence as a means towards justice.

I think that maybe 15% of Brooklyn Nine-Nine plots and whatnot have a hard dependency on the violence and violence-adjacent stuff. There are very few substitutes for this particular story component outside cop/spy/military stories, I think -- we have gang/organized crime/vigilante stories such as Leverage, and some private investigator-type mystery/noir stories.

And then there's the desire to see evildoers brought to justice, which may undergird a bunch of Nine-Nine in nonobvious ways; I will keep looking for that (and violence and threats of/preparations for violence) as I keep watching, and I'll keep looking to get a greater understanding of which of this show's pleasures are not fungible, and what that means regarding what the show is uniquely doing. I also want to understand what the show's trying to do regarding concepts of strength and power, and if you know of interesting writing on that topic, please share a link!

Saturday and Sunday I was at Visioning WisCon, the online WisCon-y thing. I missed the in-person interaction, but

• the Otherwise Auction went fine and people laughed and we raised some money (also, here are some links I shared)
• the Vid Party wiscon_vidparty was fun and I saw some fun vids (warnings/listings spreadsheet)
• the Zen Cho reading helped me hear some of the characters' voices in Black Water Sister properly
• I talked with a few people in Kumospace and that was nice -- including Orange Mike, which to me was part of what made it feel like WisCon!

Looking forward to going to Madison next year.

I am also planning to go to DisCon III, the Worldcon that will be in Washington, DC December 15-19 this year. If you would like to participate in DisCon panels -- online or in-person -- please fill out the program participant form.

Quick notes before I forget.

Otherwise volunteering: The Otherwise Award needs to be more structured about "here are volunteer opportunities we have" in a more accessible way, the way WisCon is! A brief list of some things we need help with (you can email volunteer`@`otherwiseaward.org):

* writing blog posts about exciting stuff our former winners and fellows are up to
* helping with data entry/spam-killing/general textual updates for our website
* helping me with the auction (either in Madison or remotely, including by doing things like live-tweeting/Discord-checking)
* serving on a future jury
* apprenticing to our bookkeeper
* apprenticing to our auctioneer (I am sure I will not be the auctioneer forever!)
* making art for next year's winner
* sourcing/making merchandise to sell in our online shop
* dealing with our stuff-to-auction storage in Madison
* spreading the word to get more people to nominate work

And more, I'm sure.

This came out of the discussion following the "renaming the Otherwise Award" panel which people seemed to appreciate -- may have time to talk about that in a followup post.

Discord: There was a Discord chat this year. It made some things easier. Naturally, some people suggested: what if we do this every year?

I'll quote and slightly edit what I said in response to one discussion:

I appreciate the desire for a textual backchannel for all of WisCon even in years when we can meet in person. I agree about how the experience of finding centralized discussion is better this year. I agree that being able to do backchannel only among the registered members (as opposed to public, Twitter/Dreamwidth/Google Group/etc.) is reallllly good. But there are a few reasons I am leery of doing this especially with Discord:

1. The Safety team would have to staff up to be available and to keep an eye on both physical and digital spaces simultaneously (we could mitigate this by getting more volunteers and having some more bots to help alert Safety of stuff to look at)

2. Discord is closed-source and its ownership is in that startuppy kind of approach that I have distrust for (we could look at alternatives)

3. An important part of WisCon, most years, is how most of your conversations are ephemeral and not recorded/saved/searchable; having a central text backchannel increases the invitation to create a shared archived searchable record of members' thoughts/conversations (and I do not trust Discord to be the home for that in the long term), which would be something we'd have to remediate, and that feels more complicated

....

Zulip/Slack/Discord/similar as backchannel for staff feels like a different thing that I see fewer problems with

....

[in response to the fact that Slack (for the free plan) only displays most recent messages]: Slack still has those archived messages... it's a mitigation

Zulip is better than Slack or Discord in most ways IMO. But the ONLY reason I hesitate to recommend Zulip for WisCon right now: I am waiting for them to implement https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/168 muting/blocking. Then I can shout to all fannish groups and say USE ZULIP.

I emailed email personnel`@`sf3.org to say:

1. there's a conversation about all this stuff, for the several minutes prior to [link to Discord discussion]
2. I'm willing to put in 3-5 hours of work or a small monetary donation to help figure this out next year

and that way WisCon's tech committee can take me up on that when they have a chance to take a breath. Anyone else who is interested, please follow my lead; I know I can't do this alone but together we can make a backchannel 2.0 that suits more people's needs and rises to meet our values.

One thing that came up in oral discussion in a small spontaneous videocall: some people really like the topic-based structure because then they know, for example, if they go into a "video games" channel, it's ok to just start saying stuff about videogames, to have conversations about that, etc. I only realized today how that didn't particularly suit me, because I trust that I'll be able to meet any person at WisCon and have an interesting conversation with them that ranges over various topics, and I want to basically start with the person, not the topic -- connection BEFORE content, not connection-through-content. The way I ended up doing this was by announcing (in the spontaneous meetup channels and in the "lobby"): "hey, I'm holding an impromptu short Jitsi videocall right now for the next 20 minutes, anyone want to talk?" and talking fluidly with the 1-6 people who showed up, about whatever topics came up. There's one day left in the con and perhaps I'll try some experiments to see whether there's a Discord-based channel/home (or whether I could make one) for the kind of conversation I'm talking about.

What if we did more of this? People also talked about year-round or more frequent WisCon or mini-WisCon events. Again I'll quote/edit what I said:

There needs to be Safety consistently available to moderate the space and help it stay safe. If the current Safety staff say, after this year's con, "it took more people than it usually does, here is how many person-hours it took over the course of 5 days to moderate this" then accounting for that is going to be a key factor in how often this kind of space can exist.

However! WisCon-inspired mini events that WisCon publicizes, like "here are this month's WisCon-inspired events that are indepedently run and organized" would be lower-stakes; 5-10 different book groups, cons, meetups, friend groups, etc. all around the world could take turns hosting online WisCon-ish panels, and discussion in ephemeral spaces (the "ephemeral" is important).

I love the idea of different meetup groups, book clubs, institutions like the Speculative Literature Foundation, etc. taking on the task of rotating around having WisCon-ish panels/sessions remotely, a few per month, and hosting ephemeral discussion about it -- WisCon could publicize and link to it but not say "this is run by WisCon and will be monitored by WisCon's Safety folks", just, this is an org trying to keep WisCon-y stuff going. Like FOGCon & Think Galacticon stuff -- cross-publicizing.

Otherwise Auction: went all right! I may have more thoughts later. This was meant to be a quick post. Very grateful to everyone who donated, helped work on the auction, bid, and/or laughed/enjoyed!

Next year's guests: People who read this journal may know that I am kind of a Zen Cho superfan and am extremely excited that she is one of next year's Guests of Honor. I have emailed in and nominated her for WisCon GoH a few times now. At Penguicon a few years ago I proposed and led a Zen Cho appreciation session that ended up just being me monologuing about themes in her work for 45 minute. Thus: I will be proposing some panels for WisCon 45 as soon as I can.

You have till 8pm ET tonight -- so, about 6.3 hours from me publishing this -- to register for this year's WisCon if you want to attend the auction I'm hosting on Saturday night (watching via YouTube livestream). You can register for USD$0 if affordability matters to you.

The auction is a comedy show where you don't need to spend any money, but you can donate to support some worthy causes.

This Otherwise blog post about the auction includes a one-minute video trailer/preview, and a list of auction items.

A very kind recommendation from jesse_the_k in case you haven't visited the auction before!

I'll also speak on Sunday within a panel on the recent renaming of the Otherwise Award (blog post).

(Crossposted to Cogito, Ergo Sumana)

Check out the panel suggestion idea-sharing discussion in wiscon. Deadline for proposing panels for this year's WisCon is January 19th.

I'm on my way today to WisCon, the feminist science fiction convention. This'll be the tenth anniversary of my first!

I'm a panellist or performer for three sessions:

1. "Ethics In The Good Place And Crazy Ex-Girlfriend", panellist, Friday 9:00-10:15pm, in Caucus.

   
   Fantastical US TV shows The Good Place and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend both explore what we owe to each other, and to ourselves. What ethical frameworks do they explore and seem to approve? How do the shows judge the appropriateness of self-sacrifice, the importance of pleasure, the choice to fix or leave a dysfunctional relationship, and other ethical issues? And how do they use fantasy to approach and consider these questions?



2. Tiptree Auction: comedian and auctioneer, Saturday 7:30-9:30pm (probably more like 9pm), in Capitol/Wisconsin.

   
   It is totally fine to just turn up for 15 minutes of this and spend no money and laugh at my jokes and then go get dinner. But also all the money we raise goes to the Tiptree Award.



3. "Imaginary Book Club", panellist, Sunday 10:00-11:15am, in Conference 4.
   

   Panelists each choose an exciting book from the last year to describe, and the group discusses them all. The catch: we made all of them up. This year, we might talk about Charlie Jane Anders's inspirational romance, a newly discovered YA dystopia by F. Scott Fitzgerald, G. Willow Wilson's entry in the Babysitter's Club series, and the 90s-nostalgia horror anthology I'll Be There for You(r Blood).

And I will be getting cool free clothes during the Gathering and going to the Dessert Salon and subsequent speeches so I may catch you there!

I am also attempting to meet MetaFilter acquaintances on Sunday night and to hang out with other farflung friends over the course of the next week. Here are some tips for contacting me and so on during the con.

Crossposted to Cogito, Ergo Sumana.

WisCon is a feminist scifi/fantasy convention in Madison, Wisconsin, USA, May 25-28. It's got a quiet room, interesting panels, semistructured social activities, a clothing swap, and free snacks; more first-timer-friendly description of WisCon at this post.

I'm going to be at WisCon and performing as the auctioneer for the Tiptree Award auction (it's totally fine to come and enjoy the show and not bid), and may be on other programming as well. If you need financial help to attend, especially as a first-timer, I hope you apply to the Member Assistance Fund. The deadline to nominate yourself or someone else for up to USD$500 of financial help to attend WisCon is this coming Wednesday, Feb. 28th.

If you live in Madison I hope you'll at least consider buying a one-day pass and coming Saturday night for the Tiptree Auction. This is basically the one stand-up comedy performance I do all year and I would love for more people to enjoy it.

And if you want to dip a toe into public speaking at conferences, WisCon's sessions are mostly multi-person panel conversations. On Feb. 26 they'll open up panel sign-ups, where you can raise your hand and say "hey, I'm interested in serving on that panel" and the program committee may select you as one of the panellists. I wrote a comment on Cate Huston's blog explaining how WisCon plans and supports panels and makes them fairly high-quality experiences for everyone. I'll go ahead and reproduce it here with mild editing:

Panels at WisCon, the feminist scifi convention I try to attend every year, are usually worthwhile as a participant and as an attendee. Some factors:

• WisCon has a ton of different sessions going on at once, and hundreds of panels throughout the con, which lowers the stakes for any one panel, usually, and makes it possible for panels to dive into a single specific topic for 75 minutes. This also strengthens cultural expectations of what a WisCon panel is supposed to be like.
  
• Anyone can propose a session, so most panel ideas come from community members and are then shaped by the programming committee. Each panel has a title and a paragraph-long description to make it easier for volunteers to decide what to sign up for (as panel participants or moderators) and to set audience expectations. It’s quite common for panels to veer off the panel description but it’s expected that the program item as listed in the schedule is the main jumping-off point.
  
• WisCon gives all panel moderators advice on how to moderate well, both as a written document available well in advance of the con, and in a “so you’re moderating your first panel” session early in the con. And WisCon offers tips for panelists.
  
• Usually, in the weeks leading up to the panel, the moderator and panellists communicate via email to create a lightweight structure and agenda for the panel, giving everyone a chance to shape the discussion and to prepare their own anecdotes, talking points, references, etc.
  
• A panel’s members meet 10-15 minutes ahead of time in the con’s Green Room, giving them a last-minute chance to prep agenda, learn each others’ faces, etc.
  
• Most attendees, and most panel participants, are women, so that affects gendered communication interactions. (Which is to say, there's almost no conversational domination by men.)
  
• Every panel member has, in front of them, a name card. The back of the name card (visible to the panellist) tells them the panel name and description, the names of the moderator and the other panellists, and the time and date of their next panel assignment (if they have one).
  

(The word "panel" looks weird when I see it a lot. And I actually don't have a strong preference for "panellist" versus "panelist".)

Anyway, I've had mind-changing conversations and made good friends at and via WisCon -- WisCon is what got me on Dreamwidth in the first place. Please consider coming.

I'm at WisCon right now, and leaving early Monday morning! Right now I'm preparing for the Tiptree Auction, which is tonight, about 7:30pm-9:15pm. I am not on any panels this year. Please feel free to say hi if you see me!