Ok, that's just freaky

It rained last night? Weird. At least the folks in the Santa Cruz fire zone will be happy!

Baycon Review

I decided to take in a single day at Baycon, since I have a bunch of catching up around the house to do this weekend. One of my planned hanging-out buddies cancelled, so it was just me and scotica with occasional intersections with the downstairs tenant who had gotten a ride with me. I managed a small amount of bumping into folks and chatting. The programming was a bit disappointing though. It seemed like there were more program slots where there wasn't anything much of interest than there were where I had to make decisions between items. A few too many "generic con panel on standard topic X" and moderators who contributed to off-topicness rather than guiding things back on-topic. But at least the day ended up with a couple of unintentionally-amusing panels. (In the same way that historic-theme movies can be unintentionally amusing.) The panel on historic female pirates (the Baycon theme for this year was pirates) inspired scotica and I to review our "historic movie/fiction fallacies" checklist. We got as high as 21 checkbox items, although we invented some new pirate-specific ones. ( A sampling of checkbox items. )

I confess I allowed myself to be egged on to a leading question with side bets on the panel's answer. After the panelists had listed off a handful of anecdotes about "actual historic Viking women pirates" I asked about what sources I might use for further research into this topic if I wanted to dig deeper. You'd think that after we'd been told about some highly specific examples, the proposed reading list would be a bit less vague than "sagas and runestones". (I'm afraid it was about the level of specificity that the bet had predicted.) I'm all for people researching and educating about non-traditional women in history. Unfortunately you don't research and educate by rattling off a string of vague unsupported and unsourced claims.

We were hoping to bump into klwilliams at some point, but concluded she must have been hanging out in room parties somewhere with all her famous author friends. (pout)