{"id":41379,"date":"2020-05-12T01:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-05-12T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=41379"},"modified":"2020-07-06T10:39:47","modified_gmt":"2020-07-06T14:39:47","slug":"qotd-a-jaundiced-view-of-science-fiction-conventions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2020\/05\/12\/qotd-a-jaundiced-view-of-science-fiction-conventions\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: A jaundiced view of science fiction conventions"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>When I went to my first science fiction convention […] I noticed a couple of things. <\/p>\n

The first was that nobody at these gatherings, at least as far as I could tell, actually read<\/em> science fiction, or much of anything else. <\/p>\n

There were plenty of board gamers. (This was long before computer gaming or even Dungeons and Dragons<\/em>; the hottest item on CRT was Pong<\/em>, or early versions of Star Trek<\/em> eating up mainframe time across the country.) There were plenty of self-proclaimed artists of one kind or another, and hordes of kids — of all ages — who loved to dress up in costumes. <\/p>\n

Another thing I noticed was that these conventions, or “cons” as they were called, seemed to be the only social life most of their attendees had, a sort of portable soap opera migrating from city to city throughout the year. The atmosphere was heavy with prehistoric rivalries and hatreds, grudges and vendettas, sometimes going back decades. <\/p>\n

Actually, the first thing I noticed — although I was too polite to put it first here — was that the vast bulk (and I use the term advisedly) of female attendees could have used a carload of deodorant and long-term memberships in Weight Watchers. Which, of course, was why events like these were the only social life they had. Nobody else wanted them hanging around.<\/p>\n

L. Neil Smith, “The Security Syndrome”, The Libertarian Enterprise<\/em><\/a>, 2005-01-15<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I went to my first science fiction convention […] I noticed a couple of things. The first was that nobody at these gatherings, at least as far as I could tell, actually read science fiction, or much of anything else. There were plenty of board gamers. (This was long before computer gaming or even […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,28,41],"tags":[1382,150,85],"class_list":["post-41379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gaming","category-media","category-quotations","tag-lneilsmith","tag-obesity","tag-sf"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-aLp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41379"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41379\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57097,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41379\/revisions\/57097"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}