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TeslaCon: JttCotE
14 November 2014 07:56 pmWhen this year's TeslaCon theme “Journey to the Center of the Earth” was announced last year, I immediately wrote a posting on the history of the various hollow Earth “hypotheses” in both utopian fiction and in what passes for reality in the deranged minds of the adherents. This was to be the foundation of a convention lecture on the subject and when the call went out for TeslaCon panels, I submitted my presentation, and my corpus of previous lectures, for consideration.
The summer months dragged on into fall and I received no word about the acceptance of any of my half dozen presentation submissions. Lord Bobbins specifically requested more immersive performances and, since I am not an actor, I let him know that if I did a presentation it would be as I usually do. If he preferred people to act their characters as if this really were 1884 then I wouldn't be surprised if I were left off the program. Besides, there are plenty of other people who do fine presentations and I have been on the program many times before. I do not begrudge others the opportunity.
Two weeks before the con, Lord Bobbins published the final schedule for the con and the first thing on the program, was a hollow Earth presentation, the description of which matched some of the ad copy I had made with my submission.
I had received no advance warning. My name was not on the program (in fact, few names were), and the description had been edited down. Was this for real? I contacted the program committee and, yes, they confirmed that I was on the program.
Thus began the panic.
Well, not exactly a panic. While my article of the year before was most of the script I was going to have, I still needed to flesh out the AV presentation with appropriate illustrations, expand on the script to fill the allotted time slot and read up to ensure I was comfortable with the material. Being still unemployed gave me ample time for this so, when crunch time came, I was not entirely unprepared.
Pittsburgh to TealsCon is a 10 hour drive. We made very good time until we hit Chicago's rush hour. Then we lost all that and then some.
Arriving when I did on Thursday night left time for hanging out in the hotel bar/restaurant and meeting the others who had arrived. I few I knew. Many I did not. There were also a significant number of people I would like to have seen, had seen in past years, but who hadn't attend this year. Kapitan von Grelle, Graf von Ziger, Matt Oztalay, Steampunk Boba Fett, all were missing. Tea Wispfaerie made it to the hotel in time to have kidney issues and go to the emergency room to have life saving surgery.
I missed seeing them all.
I hung a Union flag over the balcony and would have posted online that I could be found by that banner but security took it down and left me a note. Apparently the con rules had been changed at the last minute and the use of masking tape was prohibited. Whether they were concerned with the tape causing damage (something it was specifically designed not to do) or that it would fail and drop the flag on someone in the atrium (an insignificant danger) seemed to be undecided when I finally found someone the next day and recovered my flag. That I had never had either of those things happen in 30 years of con-going and banner-hanging was irrelevant. That no one in security seemed to know why the policy was in place, merely that they had to enforce it was also irrelevant.
My Hollow Earth presentation was scheduled for 10am Friday. Normally, such an early start time would mean a low turnout but Lord Bobbins had scheduled a welcoming ceremony at 9:30. That meant that when the ceremony was over, people were going to be scattering to programming and, since my program room was right off the atrium, I had decent attendance.
When I was setting up, I found out that my recent Ubuntu OS upgrade and concurrent change over from OpenOffice Presentation to LibreOffice Impress had given me new features. Normally, the projector would display exactly what was on the screen. With LibreOffice, the software recognized that I was working with a projector and gave me a presentation screen. While the projector showed the current screen, my laptop's screen showed that slide and also the next slide in the sequence. Additionally, it had the current time and the elapsed program time so I knew exactly where I was. Had I tested it earlier, I could have had the screen set to include program notes.
As this was the first time doing the presentation, it turned out being about 15 minutes short of the time slot. There is certainly material available on the subject for me to expand on things and better fill the space with content. I intend to start actually reading more of the Hollow Earth Utopian fiction of the time instead of just relying on summaries and synopses.
There was another Hollow Earth presentation scheduled for later in the day. I was concerned about whether it would cover the same things as I did and was pleased that the presenter showed up at my presentation thinking the same thing. There was little overlap. While my tack was more historical, following the progression of the Hollow Earth hypothesis from Athanasius Kircher and Edmond Halley, through the spiritualist believers and Utopian speculative fiction of the 19th Century with only a final mention of the contemporary nutballs who believe in subterranean shape-changing lizard people, his presentation was much more literary, touching a little on the Utopian fiction of the period but spending a lot more time on more modern fictional tellings.
The official opening ceremonies was the usual. I know that sounds a bit harsh but I have been attending since the first and given the grand production number it is intended to be but, in general, the plot, performances and cinematography of TeslaCon ceremonies are a formula, one pretty much like the other.
That is, until Lord Bobbins takes off his persona and really welcomes us to his convention. Here is where he shows us how much he is committed to the guests at his con. He talks a bit about the work he's done, he talks about what he wants to do in the future, he talks about dreams and fun, and he thanks those on the staff who make it all possible, and he thanks us for giving him a chance to do what he does. And, yes, even though that too is “usual” in that we see it every year, it's the sort of genuine performance that doesn't get old. More so that the story, more so than the computer animation, more so than the overacting, THIS is what I come to opening ceremonies for.
When we left opening ceremonies, there were dinosaurs. A pair of therapods from “Dakota and Friends.” Much like the “Walking with Dinosaurs” full-body puppets but not nearly as animatronic and with performers not nearly as expressive. Probably also not nearly as expensive to get to come to a steampunk convention. Dakota the deinonycus had a broad, flat head and given the limited range of motion my fez sat atop his head without issue.
Jim Trent invented a card game called Twisted Skies into which he has dropped various steampunk personalities. Last year, he produced a commemorative set for TeslaCon and I am one of the cards. I am told it is a fairly powerful card. I purchased one of the sets from him on Friday to have the card but I haven't played the game myself, nor have I played any other similar card games to know if, in fact, mine is a powerful card.
After kidney surgery, Tea Wispfaerie did actually make it to the convention on Sunday. It was great that she got a chance to see people and that I got a chance to talk to her, even if it was only one day spent mostly in her room. It was important to her.
And, in a way, to me. While I talked to her I realized some things about myself.
I want to be famous. Not really famous, and I don't expect to make any sort of money off of my fame, but I do want to be known. In the same way I will choose to go to a presentation based on the person giving it moreso than the topic itself, I want people to come see my presentations because it's me. I want conventions to contact me to bring my presentations to their convention. I want to be sought out for my knowledge and presentation skills for panels. I want to be comped a badge now and again. It's a craving for recognition. For affirmation.
Am I being selfish? Does that make me egotistical? A narcissist?
There are times I think that may be the case but then someone stops me in the hall to tell me how much they liked the presentation of mine they attended last year. Someone stops me in the hall asking if I'm doing any presentations this year and are disappointed to hear that they missed the one I was scheduled for on Friday morning. I hear Jim Trent tell someone that my TeslaCon Civil War was one of the best things he's read in the genre. He said he would like to help me out so I can come to his con down in Texas. I ran into some people building a con in St. Louis and they offered to comp me a badge.
Each time, tt's like getting my legs kicked out from under me and I am humbled. And even if I was on my way somewhere else, I stand in the hall and talk to them for as long as they like because they deserve to be talked to. It's the least I can do for the compliment they have given me. I already have what I wanted. I have a measure of that fame I was looking for and am embarrassed by it when it manifests. I am overwhelmed. I feel undeserving. This is how I know I'm not being selfish.
Humans are such contradictory creatures.
It has been two years since I wrote “A World Unmade,” an American Civil War documentary set in the TeslaCon universe. Lord Bobbins had initially wanted to have it released prior to the con in serial form but that didn't happen. He wanted to publish it in book form along with his photomanipulations but that didn't happen. Part of my plan this year was to corner him and let him know that, if he wasn't going to do anything with it, that I wanted it back. I wrote it for him and his con but if it wasn't going anywhere I wanted to be able to post it on my website so people could see it. It did no good, either as entertainment or as a representation of my wordcraft, it if continued to sit in a drawer.
Lord Bobbins is regularly asked about novelizing the con narrative but he says he's not an author and not a publisher. I had offered to do so but ended up writing the Civil War narrative instead. That sort of gives me my answer about him doing something with it. Jim Trent had a similar question but had his own answer. He's a publisher and told me that he was going to talk to Lord Bobbins about producing an anthology of TeslaCon stories. Including my Civil War narrative.
By the end of the con, Jim had talked with Lord Bobbins about that but I did not hear the details. Hopefully Jim will be able to move it forward and my 30,000 words will see the light of day.
Sitting at the very back of the room during closing ceremonies, I got the chance to talk to Aloysius Fox about several things we had spoken about at Old West Fest. The first was about accents. At Old West Fest I learned that Aloysius accent, what we Americans would call a proper English accent, is an affectation of sorts. He had taken his regional accent and, with theater training in school, changed it to the “proper” accent.
Now, as my persona backstory involves the maid Aimi Somerton doing the same thing with her accent, I was curious as to what that “proper English” accent is. Is it a specific regional accent, say that of London, that is taken for being the base or core accent, or is it a class thing?
In point of fact, it is looked on as neither. The “proper” English accent is looked on as being the lack of an accent. The removal of all regionalisms, dropping syllables and the like. Of course, do that to an American English accent and they won't sound like they are on the BBC World Service. Functionally, though, it is more of a class thing. The upper classes have the tools (money for training) to “correct” their elocution. There is also the societal pressure to not sound the outsider. Aloysius says that he has affected it so effectively that other British expatriates living where he does treat him as at a higher social station than he is because of his accent.
The other conversation we revisited from Old West Fest was his idea that next year he would try for a more immersive experience. (TeslaCon has that effect on people.) I had been sort of ambivalent about it because I am not an actor. On the drive home, however, I thought more about what I was capable of and thought that I could come up with a presentation that was more of a period performance while not being hindered by my not being comfortable acting.
The aether and John Worrell Keely's hydro-pneumatic pulsating vacuo-engine.
I would need to build the rotating sphere and I have a few vintage electric parts (including my newly purchased knife switch) that I could use. Add some quotes by Lord Kelvin, throw in John Newlands' Law of Octaves, and top it off with some of Walter Russell's pseudo-scientific hand-waving spiritualism claptrap.
Next year's TeslaCon theme is Wild Wild West. I've been doing that for years. In fact, at the first TeslaCon, I was one of very few with western styling. Now, it's common place. Even so, I have plans: Steampunk Punisher.
The summer months dragged on into fall and I received no word about the acceptance of any of my half dozen presentation submissions. Lord Bobbins specifically requested more immersive performances and, since I am not an actor, I let him know that if I did a presentation it would be as I usually do. If he preferred people to act their characters as if this really were 1884 then I wouldn't be surprised if I were left off the program. Besides, there are plenty of other people who do fine presentations and I have been on the program many times before. I do not begrudge others the opportunity.
Two weeks before the con, Lord Bobbins published the final schedule for the con and the first thing on the program, was a hollow Earth presentation, the description of which matched some of the ad copy I had made with my submission.
I had received no advance warning. My name was not on the program (in fact, few names were), and the description had been edited down. Was this for real? I contacted the program committee and, yes, they confirmed that I was on the program.
Thus began the panic.
Well, not exactly a panic. While my article of the year before was most of the script I was going to have, I still needed to flesh out the AV presentation with appropriate illustrations, expand on the script to fill the allotted time slot and read up to ensure I was comfortable with the material. Being still unemployed gave me ample time for this so, when crunch time came, I was not entirely unprepared.
Pittsburgh to TealsCon is a 10 hour drive. We made very good time until we hit Chicago's rush hour. Then we lost all that and then some.
Arriving when I did on Thursday night left time for hanging out in the hotel bar/restaurant and meeting the others who had arrived. I few I knew. Many I did not. There were also a significant number of people I would like to have seen, had seen in past years, but who hadn't attend this year. Kapitan von Grelle, Graf von Ziger, Matt Oztalay, Steampunk Boba Fett, all were missing. Tea Wispfaerie made it to the hotel in time to have kidney issues and go to the emergency room to have life saving surgery.
I missed seeing them all.
I hung a Union flag over the balcony and would have posted online that I could be found by that banner but security took it down and left me a note. Apparently the con rules had been changed at the last minute and the use of masking tape was prohibited. Whether they were concerned with the tape causing damage (something it was specifically designed not to do) or that it would fail and drop the flag on someone in the atrium (an insignificant danger) seemed to be undecided when I finally found someone the next day and recovered my flag. That I had never had either of those things happen in 30 years of con-going and banner-hanging was irrelevant. That no one in security seemed to know why the policy was in place, merely that they had to enforce it was also irrelevant.
My Hollow Earth presentation was scheduled for 10am Friday. Normally, such an early start time would mean a low turnout but Lord Bobbins had scheduled a welcoming ceremony at 9:30. That meant that when the ceremony was over, people were going to be scattering to programming and, since my program room was right off the atrium, I had decent attendance.
When I was setting up, I found out that my recent Ubuntu OS upgrade and concurrent change over from OpenOffice Presentation to LibreOffice Impress had given me new features. Normally, the projector would display exactly what was on the screen. With LibreOffice, the software recognized that I was working with a projector and gave me a presentation screen. While the projector showed the current screen, my laptop's screen showed that slide and also the next slide in the sequence. Additionally, it had the current time and the elapsed program time so I knew exactly where I was. Had I tested it earlier, I could have had the screen set to include program notes.
As this was the first time doing the presentation, it turned out being about 15 minutes short of the time slot. There is certainly material available on the subject for me to expand on things and better fill the space with content. I intend to start actually reading more of the Hollow Earth Utopian fiction of the time instead of just relying on summaries and synopses.
There was another Hollow Earth presentation scheduled for later in the day. I was concerned about whether it would cover the same things as I did and was pleased that the presenter showed up at my presentation thinking the same thing. There was little overlap. While my tack was more historical, following the progression of the Hollow Earth hypothesis from Athanasius Kircher and Edmond Halley, through the spiritualist believers and Utopian speculative fiction of the 19th Century with only a final mention of the contemporary nutballs who believe in subterranean shape-changing lizard people, his presentation was much more literary, touching a little on the Utopian fiction of the period but spending a lot more time on more modern fictional tellings.
The official opening ceremonies was the usual. I know that sounds a bit harsh but I have been attending since the first and given the grand production number it is intended to be but, in general, the plot, performances and cinematography of TeslaCon ceremonies are a formula, one pretty much like the other.
That is, until Lord Bobbins takes off his persona and really welcomes us to his convention. Here is where he shows us how much he is committed to the guests at his con. He talks a bit about the work he's done, he talks about what he wants to do in the future, he talks about dreams and fun, and he thanks those on the staff who make it all possible, and he thanks us for giving him a chance to do what he does. And, yes, even though that too is “usual” in that we see it every year, it's the sort of genuine performance that doesn't get old. More so that the story, more so than the computer animation, more so than the overacting, THIS is what I come to opening ceremonies for.
When we left opening ceremonies, there were dinosaurs. A pair of therapods from “Dakota and Friends.” Much like the “Walking with Dinosaurs” full-body puppets but not nearly as animatronic and with performers not nearly as expressive. Probably also not nearly as expensive to get to come to a steampunk convention. Dakota the deinonycus had a broad, flat head and given the limited range of motion my fez sat atop his head without issue.Jim Trent invented a card game called Twisted Skies into which he has dropped various steampunk personalities. Last year, he produced a commemorative set for TeslaCon and I am one of the cards. I am told it is a fairly powerful card. I purchased one of the sets from him on Friday to have the card but I haven't played the game myself, nor have I played any other similar card games to know if, in fact, mine is a powerful card.
After kidney surgery, Tea Wispfaerie did actually make it to the convention on Sunday. It was great that she got a chance to see people and that I got a chance to talk to her, even if it was only one day spent mostly in her room. It was important to her.
And, in a way, to me. While I talked to her I realized some things about myself.
I want to be famous. Not really famous, and I don't expect to make any sort of money off of my fame, but I do want to be known. In the same way I will choose to go to a presentation based on the person giving it moreso than the topic itself, I want people to come see my presentations because it's me. I want conventions to contact me to bring my presentations to their convention. I want to be sought out for my knowledge and presentation skills for panels. I want to be comped a badge now and again. It's a craving for recognition. For affirmation.
Am I being selfish? Does that make me egotistical? A narcissist?
There are times I think that may be the case but then someone stops me in the hall to tell me how much they liked the presentation of mine they attended last year. Someone stops me in the hall asking if I'm doing any presentations this year and are disappointed to hear that they missed the one I was scheduled for on Friday morning. I hear Jim Trent tell someone that my TeslaCon Civil War was one of the best things he's read in the genre. He said he would like to help me out so I can come to his con down in Texas. I ran into some people building a con in St. Louis and they offered to comp me a badge.
Each time, tt's like getting my legs kicked out from under me and I am humbled. And even if I was on my way somewhere else, I stand in the hall and talk to them for as long as they like because they deserve to be talked to. It's the least I can do for the compliment they have given me. I already have what I wanted. I have a measure of that fame I was looking for and am embarrassed by it when it manifests. I am overwhelmed. I feel undeserving. This is how I know I'm not being selfish.
Humans are such contradictory creatures.
It has been two years since I wrote “A World Unmade,” an American Civil War documentary set in the TeslaCon universe. Lord Bobbins had initially wanted to have it released prior to the con in serial form but that didn't happen. He wanted to publish it in book form along with his photomanipulations but that didn't happen. Part of my plan this year was to corner him and let him know that, if he wasn't going to do anything with it, that I wanted it back. I wrote it for him and his con but if it wasn't going anywhere I wanted to be able to post it on my website so people could see it. It did no good, either as entertainment or as a representation of my wordcraft, it if continued to sit in a drawer.
Lord Bobbins is regularly asked about novelizing the con narrative but he says he's not an author and not a publisher. I had offered to do so but ended up writing the Civil War narrative instead. That sort of gives me my answer about him doing something with it. Jim Trent had a similar question but had his own answer. He's a publisher and told me that he was going to talk to Lord Bobbins about producing an anthology of TeslaCon stories. Including my Civil War narrative.
By the end of the con, Jim had talked with Lord Bobbins about that but I did not hear the details. Hopefully Jim will be able to move it forward and my 30,000 words will see the light of day.
Sitting at the very back of the room during closing ceremonies, I got the chance to talk to Aloysius Fox about several things we had spoken about at Old West Fest. The first was about accents. At Old West Fest I learned that Aloysius accent, what we Americans would call a proper English accent, is an affectation of sorts. He had taken his regional accent and, with theater training in school, changed it to the “proper” accent.
Now, as my persona backstory involves the maid Aimi Somerton doing the same thing with her accent, I was curious as to what that “proper English” accent is. Is it a specific regional accent, say that of London, that is taken for being the base or core accent, or is it a class thing?
In point of fact, it is looked on as neither. The “proper” English accent is looked on as being the lack of an accent. The removal of all regionalisms, dropping syllables and the like. Of course, do that to an American English accent and they won't sound like they are on the BBC World Service. Functionally, though, it is more of a class thing. The upper classes have the tools (money for training) to “correct” their elocution. There is also the societal pressure to not sound the outsider. Aloysius says that he has affected it so effectively that other British expatriates living where he does treat him as at a higher social station than he is because of his accent.
The other conversation we revisited from Old West Fest was his idea that next year he would try for a more immersive experience. (TeslaCon has that effect on people.) I had been sort of ambivalent about it because I am not an actor. On the drive home, however, I thought more about what I was capable of and thought that I could come up with a presentation that was more of a period performance while not being hindered by my not being comfortable acting.
The aether and John Worrell Keely's hydro-pneumatic pulsating vacuo-engine.I would need to build the rotating sphere and I have a few vintage electric parts (including my newly purchased knife switch) that I could use. Add some quotes by Lord Kelvin, throw in John Newlands' Law of Octaves, and top it off with some of Walter Russell's pseudo-scientific hand-waving spiritualism claptrap.
Next year's TeslaCon theme is Wild Wild West. I've been doing that for years. In fact, at the first TeslaCon, I was one of very few with western styling. Now, it's common place. Even so, I have plans: Steampunk Punisher.
