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Aaaand finally, here's my proper Escapade report, mostly coherent and possibly insightful.
Wednesday 18 February 2004: American Airlines may bite me
The plan was as follows: I would get on a plane in Brussels at 10:45 AM, fly to Chicago, have a two-hour layover to get some nicotine into my system so I wouldn't be nicfitting all over Sky (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
schuyler) and Molly (amatia) and Dale (viggorlijah), then fly to San Francisco, arriving there between five and six local time, and be picked up by Sky and taken to do some sightseeing and have dinner with local slashers.
To say that the plan was not followed would be the understatement of the century. The flight to Chicago was cancelled, I was re-routed via London, and when I finally got onto the plane at O'Hare, we were kept on the tarmac for an hour because they had to make some repairs so it'd be "legal" to take off. (Passengers: "Um. We don't really care about legal, we'd like it to be safe.")
All in all, it added up to five hours delay and a semi-panicked phone call to my mum to please e-mail Sky and Molly to tell them I'd be late. It's a good thing I had my migraine painkillers on me.
But I did in the end get to San Francisco safe and sound, met Sky and Molly and Dale, as well as Fennec (fennec) for a bit.
We went to Sky's place and proceeded to stay up far, far too late considering we had to drive to Oxnard the next day--and by "we had to drive" I mean of course "Sky had to drive", since the rest of us either have no license or didn't want to drive in California.
Thursday 19 February 2004: Mooom, Dale's on my side of the seat!
We had some errands to run before we could really hit the road, including saying goodbye to SkyMom, getting liquor for the New Yorkers, gas, and of course coffee at Starbucks, where Dale and I proceeded to go into a coma-like state from all the choices.
Molly&Sky: We,ll have a double this with a shot of that and whatever of the other.
Melle&Dale: Um. We'd like some ... coffee? Do you have coffee?
Don't confuse my poor little communist brain with all these choices, dammit!
We drove down to Oxnard along the coast, and I marvelled over the palm trees. No, I had never seen those before in real life, at least not out in the open air and thriving like that. The drive contained everything a real road trip has to have: fuzzy dice on the rear view mirror, a theme song (California from the O.C. soundtrack), inane car games and surreal conversations. Also, sheepherder AUs.
We finally arrived at the hotel around eight, met Ruth (rsadelle), squealed a lot (or at least I did, other people were slightly more dignified), and got settled. And I just realised, I cannot for the life of me remember where (if?) we had dinner on Thursday. Anyone care to refresh my memory?
Friday 20 February 2004: Today Ron's ass, tomorrow the world!
On Friday, I got my con badge, so people could recognise me, and then we mostly just hung around the con room and places, chatting with people. We met Charles (j_crew_guy), who dubbed Molly, Sky and I "the Damon/Affleck Dykes", and who is also, incidentally, very cute and adorable.
Ruth, Molly and I were roped into monitoring duty, so we sat around for an hour checking people had badges and trying to see if we knew people without looking like we were staring. Lots of people stopped to comment on Ruth's fabulous HP hat. ("Note to self: Get a hat, meet more people.")
We then went to the Aging and De-aging in Harry Potter panel, which was a bit of a disappointment because personally, I'm not that interested in the Marauders, and I wouldn't call Lucius Malfoy a major character in HP, whereas Ron and Hermione, who were not on thie list of characters, are. Though there was an interesting point made about Snape being a lower class person who's struggling to work his way up in the class system (which IMO is all-encompassing in the Wizarding World, as I noted in my journal in all-caps), and this is part of why he's so bitter.
So we left halfway through, though I had been planning to go to History of Fandom panel right after, but didn't feel up to it, so if anyone did and wants to tell me what I missed, that'd be cool.
We went up to our room to play HP Uno, and it turns out that Ruth has Mad Card Shuffling Skillz, and HP Uno is a lot harder to figure out than you'd think. Or maybe we were just stupid. <g> We then moved on to playing Go Fish with the Uno cards, and using descriptions of the pictures ("Do you have Ron's Ass?"), including calling the Skip card (Harry and Draco in the Forbidden Forest) "Strangers In The Night", because that's the song my brain insists on playing every time I see that picture.
Ruth also insighted over HP Go Fish that the Marauders are really a lot like Draco, because they were assholes and they grew up to be the good guys.
Friday evening was, of course, our Fancy Dinner. The five of us (Sky, Molly, Ruth and Dale) ended up at this weird little restaurant with a musical duo who were very loud and played (un)obtrusive soft jazz. So of course Molly had to ask them to play As Time Goes By. It also became apparent that they could overhear our conversation, and at one point the man said "I wish you girls would just talk about your boyfriends," which caused mass hysteria at the table.
Then we came back to the hotel and this is where things get a wee bit blurry, because all I remember is being smashing drunk, and in a hot tub full of slashers for about five minutes before they kicked us out of the pool. Bummer.
I also remember Dara being there. but as I said, it's blurry.
Saturday, 21 February 2004: Oreo-fisting 101
Molly and I were still tipsy when we woke up, partially because we woke up insanely early, as we would most of the weekend. We all lounged about, and watched Cool Runnings, which taught us the important lesson that there's not much to do in Jamaica.
And then I went downstairs to meet Dae, who is incredibly cute and went to breakfast with us, and then I went to spend a bunch of cash at Borders. (Borders, incidentally, gave us 20% off for being Escapade people. Words cannot express the coolness of that!)
Of course, this all meant I couldn't go to the Slash As a Queer Culture panel, so again, if anyone has any notes on this, I'd love to know about it.
Dae left around three, and I went to Molly and Dale's and err, two other people's RPS and Ethics panel. I'd been fearing bloodshed and hair-pulling, but it was actually a very good discussion. Various interesting points were raised and mulled over, Minotaur (minotaurs) noted that even though he writes RPS, he still sometimes feels twingy about the Golden Rule ("Would I like it if I were them?"), and then the discussion veered a bit into the realm of canon and fanon in RPS and in FPS, which was quite interesting.
Next up: Fandom and the Age of Consent. This was supposed to be led by Molly (covering underage characters) and myself (covering underage slashers), but Molly managed to trick me into doing all the talking and the keeping people from talking before their turn, and I felt like a university professor by the end, but I did manage to prevent violence, and there was a good discussion! Yay!
Then, of course, I was usurped (usurped, I say! ;) by Dale, who led the panel into a discussion of squicks and kinks and other fun stuff on the Pushing the Envelope panel. Things I learned: 1) It's very surreal to stand in front of a room full of women, most of them old enough to be your mother, and explain to them what snowballing is; and 2) There is nothing quite as loud as the shriek of terror from a room full of slashers when Michael Jackson is mention in an RPS context. :D
After that I had to rush to join people for dinner at BJ's, where I blabbed to Mouse (mousewrites) and Manic (whose LJ I cannot find) about my HP War Theories, and while I was going on about my IRA theory, it occurred to me to wonder if the Muggle government (or at least the part of it that knows about the Wizarding World) has ever helped, or offered to help, to get rid of Voldemort. after all, Muggles died during Voldemort's First Reign, to say nothing of the Muggleborns, so you'd think they'd offer to help get rid of the power-hungry, insane wizard overlord on the loose.
Afterwards, Ruth, Dara and I went to the He/He game, where I had a weird, allergy-type reaction to a sip of margarita, but which otherwise rocked the cashbah. We started out with five people and ended with close to twenty, I think, and as the evening went on and people got drunker, things to a turn to the surreal, bizarre, and disturbing--and considering we'd started with a whole bunch of Bill Gates mentions, that's saying something.
Sunday 22 February 2004: Squick Melle Day!
Big communal breakfast, during which people discussed Mpreg and Clark giving birth to a baby through his ass, and is it any wonder I lost my appetite? Then we went to Borders, again, where Ruth played Personal Book Shopper for me, and then it was time for Ruth's panel.
Escapade: The 20 Second Elevator Question was intended to be about how to explain Escapade to people who don't know anything about fandom, and in a broader sense about how out we are to various people in our lives. We somewhat deviated, though, and it became a free for all to share stories about elaborate lies to explain away why we're in Oxnard for the weekend. (One woman was "buying library furniture"!) I seemed to sense a theme in that most people will just fudge the truth, lying by omission, because explaining slash tends to just be too much trouble a lot of the time. (This is excluding people who have to lie to, say, keep their job, which I think is a perfectly logical thing to do. Although, you know, LIBRARY FURNITURE? Hee!) Possibly my favourite panel I attended.
Right after that was Best Fic I Never Wrote, run by JiM (and I now remember why I remember her so well, she wrote Space: Above and Beyond slash! And I didn't talk to her about it! Wail!) which was basically a bunch of us sitting around coming up with reasons/excuses for why we never did finish that one, it-was-going-to-be-brilliant story. Much fun as well.
We went to have post-panel pie (PIIIIEEEEEE!), and then we hung out in the con suite, where Ruth forced me to read Eroica translations (such hardship, really) until it was time for our SAG Awards Cocktail party, which had lots of pizza, alcohol, and snark, and then we all managed to lose on both of the categories we bet on, so now I've to write Sean Penn/Benicio del Toro and Lance Bass/dead!Johnny Depp. And the worst thing is I volunteered those pairings myself.
After the SAGs were over, the New Yorkers came to hang out and read out bits from bad due South slash zines. And there was much wailing to be heard from room 315. (Rainbows!)
Monday 23 February 2004: Roooaaaad Triiiiiip!
Had quick breakfast with Dine (dine), and then went on our way. As we drove to the airport to drop Ruth off, the back seat people were making up a slashing the slashers AU. I was the Belgian resistance member, Molly was the intelligence officer, Dale was the slightly insane English cryptographer, Ruth was in the German resistance or something and Sky was the American nurse. Or something. Someone ought to actually write that.
Somewhere along the way, I was told I needed to name my MP3 player, so it's now called Sam, because it doubles as a memory stick, and caries everything for me.
Seven hours of music and more bad due South zines (HORSES!) later, Sky dropped me off at elfie (elfiepike), with whom I went shopping and watched Underworld, about which we quite possibly got far too deep, but it was fun!
Tuesday 24 February 2004:
Got up far, far too early so we could go for coffee before I had to get on BART to go to the airport, and over coffee I decided that a Harry Potter/Underworld crossover would be a great idea. (Selene hunting Remus!) Clearly, I was not thinking straight, but then again, what do you expect after a slash con? ("Not straight ahead, but gayly forward!")
The airline behaved itself this time, and I got home in one piece, albeit a very tired and sore piece with a very heavy suitcase.
And that was the report of my first slash con. Stay tuned for my loot list and pictures, which will be posted when they're developed!
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Also, I think your accent mated with mine, because I'm still sounding like a British Valley girl. this is most vexing.
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Well, it's not like there's m/m slash possibilities in it, and I think elfie's friend wrote some Selene/the blonde one, whatshername. Will look that up.
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Woo!
And I thought the panel on "beyond" was (expectedly) fun, and well done; and the one on "the story I never wrote" was the one that surprised me the most as being thought provoking; I suppose I expected it to be a bunch of retelling great and unwritten plots.
Hope you're recovered, and coming back for more next year! Are there any great Euro-slash cons?
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"Beyond" was much fun, and educational! :D And I think the entire hotel heard that collective scream of terror about Michael Jackson. <g>
I'm SO coming back next year!
There's a relatively new (second year, I think?) slash con in the UK, but I'm not sure about going to that one. The organisers don't seem to like RPS, and I don't think I'd feel at home. Perhaps I'll organise a big Euro-slashers get-together, without panels or anything, just hanging out together. That'd be fun!
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"This really is an anything-goes slash con, pretty much. Chan hasn't really come up -- a bit of Harry Potter, but not much more, but RPS certainly has. To be honest, we are into so many different fandoms and genres that excluding any on the grounds that they don't fit or are immoral would be a bit hypocritical *g*. Plus, the slash community in Britain is small enough that there's not really room to specialise!
We don't accept chan and rps (or dd for that matter) for the con zine, but that has rather more to do with covering our asses than any particular anti."
So if I can swing it, I think I will try to go. It would be great to get more of the Euroslash contingent there. And I'll look for news on your relaxacon! Cheers -
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Re: Woo!