221B Con Wrapup

[neadods]

I started to liveblog 221B Con on LJ, but the phone keyboard/predictive texting teamed up to make me crazy.

The convention is moving ever more into social media. Livejournal was mentioned occasionally, but in a manner that made it sound like LJ had been discovered in a Leicester parking lot. Dreamwidth wasn't mentioned at all (sorry y'all!) but I'm going to crosspost fannish stuff here in an effort to broaden my own social media presence. The vast majority of attention went to twitter and tumblr. If you didn't have a tumblr, you didn't quite exist; everyone was introducing themselves by tumblr handles. And in-con communication was mainly via twitter. Three Patch Podcast tweeted when they were handing out limited-edition badge ribbons and parties; the Homeless Network (a new group) tweeted lost-and-founds and prize giveaways. The concom itself officially tweeted to John Finnemore during the Cabin Pressure panel.

So, I've unlocked the bookish_nea twitter and created the madenthusiasms tumblr. I don't expect to be doing massive amounts on either but... I built a fannish reputation on LJ; now it's time to start over.

Attendance was slightly down from last year - I know quite a few people who bought memberships and then couldn't go just from Tin Box alone - and the costuming wasn't as quite outrageous in the halls. No woman in pink on the floor; no Reichenbunny fall. But there was a Mycroft in a goldfish suit that is rather seared into my mind. And Ben Syder, guest star for the Asylum Sherlock Holmes movie, gamely posed with an inflatable T-Rex. (He also gave an excellent live podcast to the Baker Street Babes and snickered his way through a live commentary on the Curious Case of the Steampunk Dinosaur.)

There are always panels that sound great that you miss - I'm sorry I missed Neurodiversity in Sherlock Holmes, the Mrs. Hudson panel, and Rare Pairings in particular - but some great ones. And massive props to 221B Con, because there was a lot of thought to diversity on panels. The Women in Sherlock one was mainly run by women of color and that rattled my suburban whitebread assumptions nicely. (Example: I did not know that the actress who plays Janine is half Pakistani, thus never put the thought that one of the panelists put into the passing mention that Milverton's guard was a white supremacist.) That panel was one of the best kind - the one you stick your nose in thinking "I'll move on shortly" and get sucked into.

Massive props to the folks running the Fandom Unraveled and crafting circle panels; they not only talked about Ravelry (I'm going to have to stop lurking there) but had free patterns, learn-to-knit kits, and even a yarn tasting. There was a thing from The Fibre Company that was alpaca/silk/cashmere/camel hair that I have to check out.

AbudantlyQueer was there and gave a talk on Sebastian Moran that is apparently now up on YouTube. I was on The Woman (waving the flag for my Janine=Irene theory, plus a little Moriarty hate), Canon 101, Welcome to Night Vale, and Audio Sherlock Holmes. I was not on the Russian Sherlock Holmes panel and that's a good thing - last year I talked about the narrative; this year there was a cultural anthropologist talking about the underlying cultural markers.

Add-ons kept being added on. Cara McGee runs the tea and Three Patch Podcast runs the con suite, and this year there was a game room (M got serenaded as she passed with a Frozen song rewrite "Do you want to play a board game?") and the Homeless Network which gave away Cabin Pressure & Homeless Network bracelets and amplified lost-and-found notices and otherwise ran around being fun and useful.

Sherlock Fluxx got an airing at the tea party and in the bar after the con.

And then... it was time to go home. TSA got into my bag, nibbled a few M&Ms, and checked out the Johnlock porn. Since they didn't zip my bag up all the way, I hope the graphic omegaverse knotting illustration haunts whoever pried for the rest of their lives.

Comments

[stardreamer]

Forgive me if you already know this... if you do your posting from the DW side, it's trivially easy to cross-post to LJ, and that goes for edits as well. I do all my posting from this side now.

[fyrdrakken]

I bought a tablet on a whim a few months back because it was on sale and I was having technical difficulties with the desktop and the smartphone both. I use it too rarely to really justify the purchase, but one of the issues with it I was having was being driven buggy by the predictive text settings on the keyboard until I finally found where they were hiding and was able to tweak them. Even with the predictive text disabled, the error rate on typing on a touchscreen is high enough that I tend to avoid posting from the phone (let alone the tablet) unless I keep it short. So I feel you there.

(And, yes, I have my Dreamwidth set up to automatically crosspost to LJ, so all my posts are on both platforms. A side effect of coming to DW instead of to LJ to post being that I hardly ever read the LJ friends list anymore but see the DW posts on a weekly basis.)

Twitter I can actually keep up with on my phone, but Tumblr is maddening since I can't really save masses of lovely pictures like I could a few years ago when I was busily Tumblring away at work. (I'm fyrdrakken on both platforms.)

I haven't been to a con for years. Largely due to finances but also in part because DragonCon has turned so huge that it's become less and less fun. I need to make my way to a few more single-fandom cons.

[neadods]

GridlockDC is going forward in August. They're doing a good faith effort to be 221BCon North.

[fyrdrakken]

I apparently missed a really good fiber fest right here in Dallas a month or so back, and we've got a few other local cons that I haven't been bothered to go to, so I suspect I'll start getting back into the con habit here in my own backyard. (It really doesn't help that I work nights and weekends. Or that getting a Saturday night off would entail me actually finding a person in my department to agree to cover my shift. Getting out of town on a weekend is out of reach for some time to come.)