I'm not going to MediaWestCon
Apr. 18th, 2003 09:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tzikehHeart-poundingly exciting news for all of you, I know.
So, yeah, I'm not going to MediaWestCon this year. I've gone every year for... God, can it be ten years? Something like that. But it's just not for me anymore.
MWC has become my Con of Diminishing Returns. I pay for membership, I pay for the hotel room, I pay for gas for the car to get there and back, I pay for food. In return, I get a con which has increasingly become twenty different cons, none of them cons I want to attend. It's schizophrenic and fraught; it tries to be everything to everyone, with the result that it's nothing much to nobody in particular. I'm tired of having to avoid the Star Wars blaster battle in the hallways, I'm tired of the eight-hour (!) vid show and competition with no sense of fairness or organization, I'm tired of looking through a four-day list of panels and finding nothing interesting to attend.
The panels... well, the panels at MediaWest have never been the main draw, but they used to at least be about fandom. Now, they have panels on massage, birding, ESP, ... isn't this supposed to be a media con? You know - with discussion about tv shows and movies?
For example:
Beading Workshop I: Beginning beadstringing. I have nothing against crafts. At a crafts fair.
PDAs: A General Discussion of PDAs. So, it's a tech conference?
Clinical Hypnosis: Uses, benefits, risks, ethics. No, it's a pseudo-science conference.
To be fair, the lion's share of the panels are about tv and movies, but even then they're unbearably dull -
Some suggestions for this year's con:
Angel: Season 4 overview. Wow. That's... stirring. Are you going to tell us what happened? 'cause I think anyone attending this panel already knows...
X-Files: Coping without. Uh... if you need a panel for this, you need way more than a panel for this.
Sentinel: Bad to the bone. Who was your favorite villain, and why? This isn't a panel topic. I'm sorry. This is something a bunch of fen discuss in a hotel room after drinking too much - usually with loud music on. There's nothing wrong with that - in fact, it's great fun. But it's not a PANEL TOPIC.
And I think that is where I have to leave MediaWest behind - the majority of the attendees' idea of what a sci-fi/media con panel should be and my idea of same are very, very different.
And even that could be countered by a good moderator and/or panelists, but the panelists at MediaWest are there for one of two reasons: to pontificate on their own personal fannish journey through Quantum Leap / Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea / Scarecrow and Mrs. King, or because they have absolutely no ideas or opinions at all but they want to be noticed, and figure sitting behind a table in front of a room of fen in their fandom is a good way to get attention. I attended a panel one year that had nine panelists (not an exaggeration), and not one of them had anything to say.
Not joking.
I ran a panel at MediaWest one year, and had people coming up to me through the rest of the con telling me how much they enjoyed the panel - seriously, I got several "best panel I ever went to here" - and what a great moderator I was. Folks - all I did was keep it on topic, invite people to speak up, made sure everyone got to speak who wanted to, and had a series of questions related to our topic that I could ask to stir conversation if it flagged. This is the bare minimum of what a moderator/panelist should do. And if you want your con to be a fun place, you should make sure your moderators know this. I've seen moderators come into panels ten minutes late (they're supposed to be running the panel, right?) and flop down in a chair and say, "Okay, so, I don't really get this topic - what do you guys think?"
Not joking.
There's costuming at MediaWest, but not enough so that if that's you're thing you'd be satisfied. There's role-playing, but it's scattered and difficult to join if you don't know about it already. Adult art is out in the wide open at the art show, but adult vids are relegated to late-night showings. You know, segregate your adult-themed fannishness or don't, that's a real choice to be made for a con that welcomes children, but don't arbitrarily decide that "adult" vids (which almost never contain nudity and are all about innuendo) have to be shown at insanely late times while "adult" art (full-frontal male and female nudity all over the art show) is sitting out there all day.
The vid show - well, don't get me started. Suffice it to say that I don't like vid "competitions" to begin with; I think it's truly nuts to try to judge any vid after one viewing, let alone when there are fifty different fandoms represented in eight HOURS of vids. But the competition at MediaWest is so unbelievably arbitrary - pick up a ballot and fill it out by the deadline on Saturday. No, you don't actually have to watch all the vids to vote on what you think is best - in fact, you don't have to watch any of them. Last year I attended a fandom-oriented party in the con suite, and one of the attendees' friends brought her vid and a bunch of ballots up to the party, showed everyone her vid, and asked everyone to fill out a vidshow ballot and vote for it. They hadn't seen a single other vid that weekend.
Her vid won.
Look, there's a lot to enjoy about MediaWest. It's got a little of something for everyone, so it's not a bad starter con. The dealers' room is huge, though you can find pretty much everything for sale in it online nowadays (although the used zine bins are a treasure). The hotel sells out to fen every year; it's like living on Fan Planet for an extended weekend, which is relaxing and delightful in and of itself. Wandering the halls to look at door decorations and visit room dealers gets you into some interesting conversations, and you never know exactly what you might find. But for me, none of this is close to being enough to get me to go back there.
Maybe, in a few years, if I miss it. But right now I'm not putting money on that.
So, yeah, I'm not going to MediaWestCon this year. I've gone every year for... God, can it be ten years? Something like that. But it's just not for me anymore.
MWC has become my Con of Diminishing Returns. I pay for membership, I pay for the hotel room, I pay for gas for the car to get there and back, I pay for food. In return, I get a con which has increasingly become twenty different cons, none of them cons I want to attend. It's schizophrenic and fraught; it tries to be everything to everyone, with the result that it's nothing much to nobody in particular. I'm tired of having to avoid the Star Wars blaster battle in the hallways, I'm tired of the eight-hour (!) vid show and competition with no sense of fairness or organization, I'm tired of looking through a four-day list of panels and finding nothing interesting to attend.
The panels... well, the panels at MediaWest have never been the main draw, but they used to at least be about fandom. Now, they have panels on massage, birding, ESP, ... isn't this supposed to be a media con? You know - with discussion about tv shows and movies?
For example:
Beading Workshop I: Beginning beadstringing. I have nothing against crafts. At a crafts fair.
PDAs: A General Discussion of PDAs. So, it's a tech conference?
Clinical Hypnosis: Uses, benefits, risks, ethics. No, it's a pseudo-science conference.
To be fair, the lion's share of the panels are about tv and movies, but even then they're unbearably dull -
Some suggestions for this year's con:
Angel: Season 4 overview. Wow. That's... stirring. Are you going to tell us what happened? 'cause I think anyone attending this panel already knows...
X-Files: Coping without. Uh... if you need a panel for this, you need way more than a panel for this.
Sentinel: Bad to the bone. Who was your favorite villain, and why? This isn't a panel topic. I'm sorry. This is something a bunch of fen discuss in a hotel room after drinking too much - usually with loud music on. There's nothing wrong with that - in fact, it's great fun. But it's not a PANEL TOPIC.
And I think that is where I have to leave MediaWest behind - the majority of the attendees' idea of what a sci-fi/media con panel should be and my idea of same are very, very different.
And even that could be countered by a good moderator and/or panelists, but the panelists at MediaWest are there for one of two reasons: to pontificate on their own personal fannish journey through Quantum Leap / Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea / Scarecrow and Mrs. King, or because they have absolutely no ideas or opinions at all but they want to be noticed, and figure sitting behind a table in front of a room of fen in their fandom is a good way to get attention. I attended a panel one year that had nine panelists (not an exaggeration), and not one of them had anything to say.
Not joking.
I ran a panel at MediaWest one year, and had people coming up to me through the rest of the con telling me how much they enjoyed the panel - seriously, I got several "best panel I ever went to here" - and what a great moderator I was. Folks - all I did was keep it on topic, invite people to speak up, made sure everyone got to speak who wanted to, and had a series of questions related to our topic that I could ask to stir conversation if it flagged. This is the bare minimum of what a moderator/panelist should do. And if you want your con to be a fun place, you should make sure your moderators know this. I've seen moderators come into panels ten minutes late (they're supposed to be running the panel, right?) and flop down in a chair and say, "Okay, so, I don't really get this topic - what do you guys think?"
Not joking.
There's costuming at MediaWest, but not enough so that if that's you're thing you'd be satisfied. There's role-playing, but it's scattered and difficult to join if you don't know about it already. Adult art is out in the wide open at the art show, but adult vids are relegated to late-night showings. You know, segregate your adult-themed fannishness or don't, that's a real choice to be made for a con that welcomes children, but don't arbitrarily decide that "adult" vids (which almost never contain nudity and are all about innuendo) have to be shown at insanely late times while "adult" art (full-frontal male and female nudity all over the art show) is sitting out there all day.
The vid show - well, don't get me started. Suffice it to say that I don't like vid "competitions" to begin with; I think it's truly nuts to try to judge any vid after one viewing, let alone when there are fifty different fandoms represented in eight HOURS of vids. But the competition at MediaWest is so unbelievably arbitrary - pick up a ballot and fill it out by the deadline on Saturday. No, you don't actually have to watch all the vids to vote on what you think is best - in fact, you don't have to watch any of them. Last year I attended a fandom-oriented party in the con suite, and one of the attendees' friends brought her vid and a bunch of ballots up to the party, showed everyone her vid, and asked everyone to fill out a vidshow ballot and vote for it. They hadn't seen a single other vid that weekend.
Her vid won.
Look, there's a lot to enjoy about MediaWest. It's got a little of something for everyone, so it's not a bad starter con. The dealers' room is huge, though you can find pretty much everything for sale in it online nowadays (although the used zine bins are a treasure). The hotel sells out to fen every year; it's like living on Fan Planet for an extended weekend, which is relaxing and delightful in and of itself. Wandering the halls to look at door decorations and visit room dealers gets you into some interesting conversations, and you never know exactly what you might find. But for me, none of this is close to being enough to get me to go back there.
Maybe, in a few years, if I miss it. But right now I'm not putting money on that.
