Arduinna

Perhaps I should have taken the fact that the hotel's Starbucks' espresso maker was broken Saturday morning as an omen for the rest of my day. I was able to get caffeine by running across Rockville Pike to the Chateau again, but it was a very “??” and “!!” start to the day.

Naomi and I were both on a panel at 10:00 am entitled “Benevolent AIs. The moderator, Wendy Delmater Theis (formerly of Abyss & Apex), went down the row and introduced herself before the panel, which was fine. She asked everyone who they were and seemed very confused by my general existence. I’m not sure if it was the horror of, “Oh no, a name I don’t know how to pronounce?” or (something I’ve been getting on and off here, which is) "... and you are?”

I am admittedly sensitive to the latter. Much more than when someone flubs my name. It’s not a real microaggression against me when someone isn’t sure if my name is LIE-duh or LEE-duh or ends up calling me Lynda or Lydia. I’m a white lady. You mispronouncing my name is not a reflection on how you feel about my ethnicity or my heritage. It’s annoying to me when fear of mispronouncing my names stops people from calling on me on a panel or saying, “You, the end,” rather than trying and failing to say LIE-duh. But, like, it's just something I live with. 

However, the whole long stare of ‘hmmm, you have said you are an author, but clearly you are one I have not heard of. Whelp, I guess that means you’re not important” is something that feels much more like a microagression of a sort. I’ve been slowly getting used to it happening. It was always a crapshoot outside of my regional conventions if anyone had heard of me, and this has only increased as time wears on.

But, while I did get ‘the long stare’ and the ‘uh, YOU, at the end’ from our moderator, that wasn’t the real problem with this panel.

First, as expected with a panel about AI, it was somewhat unclear if we’d be talking about LLM and other so-called AI, like ChatGPT, that are operating in the real world as we know it right now or if we’d be talking about fictional versions. The panel description didn’t actually help. Neither did the moderator. Worse, she was one of those moderators that really just wanted to be the one talking. She’d pose questions, let us throw out a couple examples--scold us if we were not precisely on the format she set out (film, TV, books, series) and… I don’t really know because at some point my soul left my body after she shut down Naomi for starting to talk about the AIs in Murderbot Diaries (ART and Mickey) because those were AIs from a book series, not standalones and we were on standalones. Like, wow. We were in the book category why the distinction and is it really something to get cranky about? Whatever. I checked out.

It wasn’t bad in the “someone brought up Hilter” kind of bad (that would be my next panel-panel) but more a “WTF was that?”

Next up wasn’t exactly a panel, it was me interviewing Naomi. And this went fine--quite well, actually.

Scott Edelman, who published my first professionally published short story (in SF Age back in the 90s), chatted with me in the hall for a long time before the interview. We were waiting for Naomi to get out of the panel she was on and just sat on the hallway couch chatting about this and that. Scott did a lot for my ego by apologizing for not knowing that I was going to be at this convention as he would have had me guest on “Eating the Fantastic,” as well. (This is the podcast where he interviews writers over meals that I linked to in yesterday's post). He noted that couldn’t just slot me in because he reads everything the author has written in preparation and, I don’t know if you know this, gentle reader, but I’ve written and published sixteen novels. That would be a lot to just read in a matter of hours. And maybe he was lying, but 1) I don’t think so. He genuinely seemed to remember me. And 2) even if he was, it was a nice thing to say.

The interview was great. Naomi is easy for me to talk to, of course. We’ve been friends for decades.

At some point there was a run to get sandwiches for lunch at the local grocery store and.... then came the panel from hell.

I seem to have been cursed with moderators who really had points they wanted to make on Saturday. This panel was called “For the Love of Evil” and, ostensibly, was about villains we should hate, but secretly love (or perhaps that we love to hate.) I had a nice little list of names like Killmonger, Moriarty from Sherlock, (Milton’s Satan?), and Loki. Things started off well because Capclave is an East Coast con and East Coast cons have the culture of “list all your books and awards” and so I got a big laugh when I noted that ,when I won the Philip K Dick Special Citation for Excellence, I sent out a press release that said, “Lesbian wins Second Place Dick” (which I really did!) But, as things turned out, that might have been the high point of the panel?

Things went along for a while pretty well, but then for reasons known only to our mod, Larry Hodges, he decided that he needed to monologue about how various real life villains mapped to fictitious ones. This was already a bad idea because he was talking about Stalin and Mussolini (neither of which he could pronounce) and... of course, we could see where this was going.

Inexorably, he gets to Hitler, whom he likens to Thanos because “he thought he was doing what was right for the world.”

The author next to me, Diana Peterfreund, dropped her head to the table.

I full-body disassociated.

For me, it was a kind of decision paralysis. I was torn between grabbing the mic and just saying “no, no, no” until Larry stopped talking or faking my own death/dropping the the floor and marine crawling out the door.

Meanwhile, of course, Larry is still making his case that Hilter was just trying to right the wrongs of the world (in his own head, like how a villain thinks he’s a hero, but still, Larry, there’s no justifying this, so please just STOP.) But he didn’t stop, he kept talking, and so thank GOD for Diana who finally does manage to grab the mike and say, “SO! Change of subject, Loki sure is hot!” This allows me to finally return to my body and I grab my mike and say, “So hot!” We go back and forth like this until the bad feelings go away.

Why do people feel the need to EVER bring up Hilter? I feel like unless you're comparing the current presidential administration to the Third Reich, just don't. 

Anyway, Loki is not exactly what we talked about--Diana managed to be far more articulate, but I no longer remember anything other than SOMEHOW we managed to literally wrestle the panel back to something akin to squee about villains. And when I say “we,” I mean Diana, with some support from me. The panel was saved. It even, miraculously, snaps back to true and we end with some nice questions from the audience which aren’t just “WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST WITNESS?”

I did have some great things happen on Saturday, like the chat with Scott E. and running into some other folks I know like Carolyn Ives Gilman and Walter Hunt. I was the “comealong friend” to Naomi’s Scintilation Discord group dinner, which was delightful. Then, just before retiring upstairs, I watched the WSFA award ceremony which was nice in the classic small con award way, even though Marissa Lingen didn’t win.

No further mishaps.

But, the ones I had? Doozies.

Thanks to all the trauma, I retired early last night. As noted previously, I just don't really function all that well in social situations after dark any more. Naomi was apparently out until quite late. I woke up long enough last night to have a nice chat with her about it all (and catch her up on all my trauma). 

This morning we'd been invited to breakfast with Joe and Gay Haldeman at 9 am. The two of them are, of course, quite wonderful so we had a lovely time talking to them both for several hours over eggs and toast.

Today things wrap up in the early afternoon, so I've been put in charge of finding something fun for us to do this evening. Tomorrow we're still in DC for some sightseeing, and then it's home Tuesday afternoon.