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plutherusI'm sitting in a hotel room in San Jose, taking a break from WorldCon. Spent last night at room parties and all day today at various panels. Learned the end of the DS1 saga, which I've been following at presentations at various SciFi cons since 1998, (some people follow Phish around, I follow NASA spokespeople :-)
Missed the "Who needs planets, anyway?" panel, as I had a major headache, came back to the hotel room to get some painkillers, lay down for a minute and suddenly an hour had gone by. Either I fell asleep or was kidnapped by aliens. Given the location, I wouldn't be too surprised at the latter. I've seen a lot more aliens than sleeping people around here.
First panel of the day was "When will my cave get cable", about techology in areas that aren't terribly technologically advanced. When someone mentioned that many countries simply don't have the infrastructure for widespread technology (computers, cell phones, gas stoves, etc.) I pointed out that in a few years they won't need to. You can recharge a laptop computer with solar panels, and soon connect it to the internet via Teledesic. After the panel, I hung around and talked to a few people, wowed them with my Geeks Without Borders stories and discussion of Iridium in Africa. (One of the major reasons Iridium failed was because nobody wanted to pay all that money for something that was, in the US, only marginally better than the cell phones that were already ubiquitous. A couple of months before bankruptcy, some smart guy in marketing discovered the existence of Africa - an entire continent that wasn't full of cell phone towers already, but by then it was too little, too late.)
Other panel was diversity in Science Fiction, where Star Trek was held up as the quintessential case of an ethnically diverse cast (kinda funny, given recent discussions on a certain mailing list I'm on). Someone brought up the "token Black man" and Steven Barnes commented that that's fine. It's gotta start somewhere. If a Black actor is just a token, at least that's one more person of colour in a visible role, and one more actor with a SAG card. It's not ideal, but it's a positive step toward true racial diversity. There were token gay characters on lots of shows for a while before producers felt comfortable enough to create Willow and whats-her-name on Buffy. I'd never thought of it that way before. After Bjo Trimble ("The Woman Who Save Star Trek") raised the issue of money, Barnes pointed out that once the makeup guys at Paramount discovered it was cheaper to make black people into Klingons than white people, they cast almost exclusively blacks, to the great boon of many struggling actors careers...
Talked a bit after the panel with one guy who still objected to Tuvok being a black vulcan, saying that there would unlikely be such a person. I pointed out that given what we know of Vulcan's climate, it's actually unlikely that there'd be any white Vulcans, and that Spock and his family were almost certainly genetic freaks who'd've died out if the Vulcans hadn't had advanced medical technology long before we did. I don't think I really convinced him, but he did change the subject after that :-)
Well, enough of this. Gonna go prepare for my game (Campus Crusade for Cthulhu 2: Shadows Over Babylon 5) for an hour or so, then off to room parties for the rest of the night!
Missed the "Who needs planets, anyway?" panel, as I had a major headache, came back to the hotel room to get some painkillers, lay down for a minute and suddenly an hour had gone by. Either I fell asleep or was kidnapped by aliens. Given the location, I wouldn't be too surprised at the latter. I've seen a lot more aliens than sleeping people around here.
First panel of the day was "When will my cave get cable", about techology in areas that aren't terribly technologically advanced. When someone mentioned that many countries simply don't have the infrastructure for widespread technology (computers, cell phones, gas stoves, etc.) I pointed out that in a few years they won't need to. You can recharge a laptop computer with solar panels, and soon connect it to the internet via Teledesic. After the panel, I hung around and talked to a few people, wowed them with my Geeks Without Borders stories and discussion of Iridium in Africa. (One of the major reasons Iridium failed was because nobody wanted to pay all that money for something that was, in the US, only marginally better than the cell phones that were already ubiquitous. A couple of months before bankruptcy, some smart guy in marketing discovered the existence of Africa - an entire continent that wasn't full of cell phone towers already, but by then it was too little, too late.)
Other panel was diversity in Science Fiction, where Star Trek was held up as the quintessential case of an ethnically diverse cast (kinda funny, given recent discussions on a certain mailing list I'm on). Someone brought up the "token Black man" and Steven Barnes commented that that's fine. It's gotta start somewhere. If a Black actor is just a token, at least that's one more person of colour in a visible role, and one more actor with a SAG card. It's not ideal, but it's a positive step toward true racial diversity. There were token gay characters on lots of shows for a while before producers felt comfortable enough to create Willow and whats-her-name on Buffy. I'd never thought of it that way before. After Bjo Trimble ("The Woman Who Save Star Trek") raised the issue of money, Barnes pointed out that once the makeup guys at Paramount discovered it was cheaper to make black people into Klingons than white people, they cast almost exclusively blacks, to the great boon of many struggling actors careers...
Talked a bit after the panel with one guy who still objected to Tuvok being a black vulcan, saying that there would unlikely be such a person. I pointed out that given what we know of Vulcan's climate, it's actually unlikely that there'd be any white Vulcans, and that Spock and his family were almost certainly genetic freaks who'd've died out if the Vulcans hadn't had advanced medical technology long before we did. I don't think I really convinced him, but he did change the subject after that :-)
Well, enough of this. Gonna go prepare for my game (Campus Crusade for Cthulhu 2: Shadows Over Babylon 5) for an hour or so, then off to room parties for the rest of the night!
