Election and convention

I settled in on election eve with junk food and wine and braced myself for doom scrolling and stress eating. I had read all the stats and felt intellectually good but emotionally fragile, and even seeing the first day numbers do exactly what was predicted by fivethirtyeight, it still made for several very long days. But eventually the results were in and now it’s all over but the yelling (though boy is there a lot of that).

Luckily, my return to work had lasted all of two hours before the furlough extension announcement came down and off I went again, so I was able to commit full attention to obsessively refreshing the news. More importantly, once the dust settled, I was able to get ready for Punctuation!

John, Alison, Liz, and Steve put together an online convention for British fandom for the middle of the month, basically intended to fill the gap left by Novacon. I was on two items; Your Favourite Book Nobody Has Ever Heard of, lifted in its entirety from a 2011 Fogcon panel, which seemed to go well, and then a panel on fannish cookbooks where we each made something from a themed cookbook in our possession and showed it off, reviewed the book, and generally chatted about food. Being fandom, there was a surprising variety and the conversation kept going till we had to vacate the room.

The convention was intentionally a social-focused, with scheduled zoom party blocks, channels set aside for socialising specifically as well as others for programming chat, gaming (them tabletop people) and games (scavenger hunt, jigsaw), and a fair amount of activities aimed at getting people to hang out (breakfast zoom, cheese tasting, beer tasting, park run).

I had a great time, stayed up late both nights and woke up slightly hungover, so it’s as close to the real deal as I’ve had recently. But obviously I’m biased, living with one fourth of the committee.