\u2026being one of my favorite quotes of the con so far, courtesy of Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman during an 80-minute Q&A on how science fiction led him into economics. \u00a0The night before, a couple thousand of us got to be flies on the wall for another hour-and-a-half free-form conversation between Krugman and Charlie Stross.<\/p>\n
You gotta love this event.\u00a0 A science fiction convention featuring three solid hours with a Nobel-winning economist, bestselling author and NY Times columnist.\u00a0 And what did I see the local media taking footage of?\u00a0 Furries and people in Star Wars costumes.\u00a0 So remains the face of fandom to the self-proclaimed Those With Lives.<\/p>\n
‘SOkay, though.\u00a0 I finally met Charlie Stross in the flesh, and Jetse de Vries.\u00a0 Reacquainted myself with John Scalzi, who is too nice to exist.\u00a0 Bumped too infrequently into Elisabeth Bear (and hope to rectify that in the following days). Met Kim Binsted (U Hawaii, AI dudette), Kathryn Myronuk (of Sinularity U) and Brad Templeton (of the EFF, and author of perhaps the most articulate critique of BSG’s failed finale I’ve read).\u00a0 Glenn Grant.\u00a0 Nalo Hopkinson (who made it after all). \u00a0Dave Williams.\u00a0 Others too numerous to mention.<\/p>\n
Panels have all gone down well so far; the reading (with Scalzi and Jon Courtenay Grimwood) was a glorious triumvirate of literary nihilism full of Russian vivissectionists and flayed gods and shapeshifting rapist-missionaries; my contribution was, if anything, the lighthearted comic relief.<\/p>\n
Another cool quote:\u00a0 “Fungi are Nature’s Internet” (although I forget the attribution).\u00a0 Not to mention the aforemention updated Turing test criterion.<\/p>\n
Biggest Letdown so far:\u00a0 an hour-long event called “Neil Gaiman Reads Cory Doctorow”.\u00a0 Yes, technically that is what happened\u2014 but as Glenn pointed out, I think most of us were probably expecting the man to read aloud<\/em>\u2026<\/p>\n Pictures to follow, but only when I get home.\u00a0 For some reason my laptop isn’t detecting the damn camera card when I slot it in\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u2026being one of my favorite quotes of the con so far, courtesy of Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman during an 80-minute Q&A on how science fiction led him into economics. \u00a0The night before, a couple thousand of us got to be flies on the wall for another hour-and-a-half free-form conversation between Krugman and Charlie Stross. You […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-road","category-public-interface"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=636"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":691,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636\/revisions\/691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}