extrapenguin | Things happen, even IRL

Now that my sibling has finally stopped dragging their heels and bought a Worldcon membership, I can reserve a hotel room for us! I went for the nearest-by option in the price range. This is A Success in my adulting life. Now, the plane tickets...

fandom_stocking now has a list of needy stockings available! Full disclosure: I am on it.

For those of you who are exchange mods,

morbane was in correspondince with AO3 over the Reveals Bug – and discovered that there moderation queue functionality is apparently a bug. Post with explanation. I'm drafting together an e-mail to AO3 over this, asking them to please not "fix" this "bug".

In the realm of actual post-posts to make, I have an idea for a post that is half condemnation of Hogwarts House sorting and half rage at the "archetype and 1-2 quirks" school of characterization, a half-post idea that's basically just me quoting stuff someone else wrote on Tumblr + adding a few other translations of the relevant passage, and of course the "OCs must serve either as foils or worldbuilding" post, but: tired. I have to pack and do a ton of bureaucracy and ugh.

space_swap fandom pimping post will go up over the weekend.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Woo, Worldcon! After the fun I had last year in San Jose, I am really looking forward to living vicariously through my flisters who are going to be attending in 2019 :)

I'm also looking forward to your Hogwarts House sorting condemnation post (even though I love sorting people/characters into Hogwarts Houses as shorthand/discussion driver ;)

Fair warning, I'll probably not post anything during, only the weekend after. :P

My main condemnation will be that it simplifies things overmuch, and all the characters I like are complex! Moreover, I like the complexity about them! *shakes fist at sky* But I'll leave my actual talking points for the post.

I'm hoping my now-living-in-the-UK friend will have a chance to go and keep me posted on the real-time by liveblogging. But looking forward to your weekend-after post :)

My main condemnation will be that it simplifies things overmuch, and all the characters I like are complex!

It definitely does that! Are you familiar with the Sorting Hat Chats system, which relies on the Hogwarts houses, but also adds another dimension (or several) to it? I've found it to be a really neat framework to think about the more complex characters where the simple one-dimensional Hogwarts House system fails or comes down to picking one house out of a hat.

But, anyway, yeah, I'll wait for your actual post!

I've heard of the Sorting Hat Chats system, but especially with characters "set" far away from the British boarding school genre Rowling conceived the books in, it's a bit like asking whether the characters are square or triangular, when in fact they are all circles and the defining trait is color, y'know? I'm also not that into categorizing characters into arbitrary boxes I guess.

I mean, sufficiently abstracted, the Hogwarts Houses become completely divorced from the British boarding school house system and just a set (or, in the Sorting Hat Chats system, a matrix) of traits by which to sort characters into arbitrary boxes, not that different from Myers-Briggs. But if sorting characters into arbitrary boxes is not an exercise one enjoys, then that doesn't really help :P

Wow, thank you for the link to Morbane's post! Yeah, I seriously hope they won't "fix" that ...

I'm drafting my e-mail to ask them not to do it. Will likely send after dinner...

I just wrote them an email myself.

Ah, I wish I could go to Worldcon this year! (Can't afford it rn.) I had a great time in Helsinki. I'd never been to a con that size and I got such a kick out of everything.

Yeah, hotels and flights to Dublin are kinda expensive. Worldcon Helsinki was an amazing experience.

It really was. I had been in a bit of a fannish slump, but going to Worldcon reignited my interest in SFF and made me want to become active in fandom again. It was just amazing to be there. And outside the content and fannish enthusiasm, it was fascinatingly... American in a good way, if that makes sense.

Hmm, so, eager and outspokenly friendly and enthusiastic? That it was! (I can tolerate it for a week or so at a con, but not all the time everywhere.) The whole "lots of people working together for common cause of letting everyone have fun" aspect is wonderfully inspiring.

That's part of it, but (and apologies for pretentious rambling) being there also made me think about... inclusion, I guess, and how it's understood differently in the US.

Take religion, for example -- it was interesting to me to read the guidebook and see it had info on different places of worship and where to find them. That's something I've never seen in a Finnish info package for a secular event, and it struck me that that must be how the American idea of religious freedom comes up in practice. I'm so used to thinking of religious freedom being respected by not talking about religion in public spaces at all if possible. I knew it's a fundamental conceptual US/Europe difference (freedom to do smth vs. freedom from smth) but it was cool suddenly seeing an example of it. And it wasn't just the religion thing; it's kind of hard to explain, but there were these little social cues in interactions that I could only identify as vaguely "American."

I think this sort of ~open atmosphere of self-expression could be seen as the positive side of US culture, even if I think it would get exhausting living like that... All in all it was just weirdly fascinating seeing Americans irl -- I haven't met many. They really exist!

My preferred method of character sorting, if I'm going there at all, is by Magic: the Gathering colors. It's mostly useless because it doesn't come with that same widespread familiarity as Hogwarts houses, but it's more interesting.

I'd be interested in your thoughts on OCs--I still, in 2019, see people say they won't read fics with OCs.

Y'know, I do actually like that a bit better (and have sorted characters into Guilds of Ravnica color pairs); I think it's because Magic has to be more ... emergent, it has the game mechanics and each category has to be equivalent, in a way the Hogwarts houses aren't necessarily. Oh, and I have yet to be overexposed to Magic colors as ~keys to understanding characters~, unlike with Hogwarts houses.

I still, in 2019, see people say they won't read fics with OCs.
I've seen that too, as well as OC hate. The OCs I write into my fics, on the other hand, tend to be very well-received, and people tell me they love them. Even the one who ended up together with the protagonist. :P Thus, I decided I should probably write down some of my OC creation philosophy.

Ooh, are you guys going to the one in Ireland this year? I've been waffling about if I should go or not for a while now. I went to the one in Finland a few years ago and it was so much fun! But at the same time, it's so much money. D:

Yup, we're going to the one in Ireland! It's a bit expensive, but then again, how many Worldcons will there be in Europe in the near future? If they're all in America it'll be even more expensive.

That's true. Maybe I need to look into it some more. (I kind of want to go to the 2020 one in New Zealand though, so if I want to do that, I really should skip this one and save the money, just the flights there are so freaking expensive, but I've wanted to go there ever since the freaking lotr movies came out and this would be a cool combo reason to go)

Yeah, better skip Ireland and save up the money then! (Ireland is objectively not that interesting, despite the colossal tourism industry. A lot of it is fueled by Americans who have one Irish ancestor from the 1800s and want to ~reconnect with their heritage~ in the cringiest way possible. Another big chunk is Catholic countries sending kids over to learn English in a safely Catholic environment...) Or perhaps investigate flights to and from New Zealand, and how much they'd cost, plus hotel rooms. Hotels only book for a year in advance, IIRC, but con hotels would get some discount rates.

Things happen, even IRL

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