#escapade 2017

Booze and food:

What? You don’t think those are the most important parts of a party?

The hotel has happy hour every day. All the ehhh wine or basic mixed drinks you can cram down from 5:30 to 7:30. I didn’t eat at the hotel restaurant; reportedly, the burgers were dry. The old hotel is just across the street, and its restaurant is very good, if overpriced. I brought some real food for the con suite. I wish I’d been able to do more. Maybe next year, a few more of us can bring entree type offerings. I love how BASCon let you just eat lunch out of the con suite to keep things cheap. (RIP, BASCon. ;__;)

Friday, there were three specialty cocktails served by the hotel bartender. Vodka (ew), more vodka (ew), and a specialty margarita (pretty good for a bar at a hotel event). The hors d’oeuvres were great: little egg rolls and beef skewers.

Saturday, a bunch of us went out for swanky Mexican a short drive away. (The con is in the cultural wasteland that surrounds LAX, so the options are mostly bad chains, plus terrible Mexican, better Mexican, and swanky Mexican. Not so much with the variety. There’s a Greek place I’ve still never been to.) I had duck molé and regaled @t-cupsandtime​ with my many lolwhut fandom adventures. (Yes, I talked about myself all through dinner. Why do you ask? ;D)

Later, after the vid show, I hosted the after party in the con suite, where I set up a bar to serve a variety of lovely cocktails, each a different color. (Predictably, I got caught up dealing with tech issues in another room, so people just drank all the vodka and poured themselves whatever they felt like, but I did have a cool cocktail menu in theory!) 

We also watched a few vids and, more importantly, I was able to inflict Always Crashing in the Same Car on a whole roomful of fans. Come dwell with me in terrible kinky porn land, friends!

My cocktail offerings were:

Negroni - in honor of Killa always eying my sugar death bomb drinks with alarm

Moonlight - in honor of Joi McMillon’s gushing at Visible Artists over the editing process on Moonlight (you fangirl, you!)

Amaretto Sour - because I had a lot of home-grown lemons

Grasshopper - because SUGAR DEATH BOMB

China Blue - no, not that vodka bullshit in a martini glass: the tropical weirdness with lychee liqueur, blue curaçao, and grapefruit juice

White Russian - can’t go wrong with the Dude

Penguin - frothy, pink, and full of gin--in honor of Escapade’s mascot, gay penguins

Vids

This year, there was just a vidding 101 panel (which I did not attend) and vid review (which I did). The Friday dance party was my playlist, which you can see on Tumblr here. It wasn’t as OT3-y as I wanted, but it worked great as a dance playlist.

I’ll mention again that I started my vid search based on the fandoms on people’s profiles on the Escapade website. 90% of you didn’t fill anything out, so I didn’t look for your fandoms. Just saying! The dance party also takes suggestions, both for fandoms and for specific vids. Suggest early; suggest often!

I did a lot of my vid hunting on AO3. Unlike Tumblr or Youtube, you can search it properly for just things that are fanvids or just for fanvids in specific fandoms, and you can find things that were posted longer ago than last week.

The Saturday vidshow is the big one where vidders premiere their vids for a rapt audience as opposed to a bunch of loud drunk people... unless you’re in the loud room, in which case, it’s still a bunch of loud drunk people. This year, it was a little underwhelming. While the vids were all excellent--maybe even better than in other years--they were also heavily drawn from last Festivids and last VividCon. As often happens, many of them were rather heavy. For the dance party, I chose based on music, even if the only copy of a vid I had was grabbed from Youtube and full of pixilation. The real vidshow tries to keep image quality higher, and that makes finding vids much harder: most vidders don’t think in terms of HQ files that will look good on a projector. I think that’s a pity because, while our numbers at Escapade are small, we’re a very dedicated audience. Make pretty HQ versions, vidders! Let us love you! And post to AO3! Let us find you!

Panels!

Lots of meta and recs panels for me this year. I ran a panel on films about fandom: the problematic ones that exist, the ones we’d like to see, and my grad school thesis that I’d like you to donate to when the indiegogo goes up.

I also ran The Fannish Dating Game, the panel where you pimp your fandom by being a bachelorette and answering our lovely contestant’s questions. Certain People having failed with McHale’s Navy last year were determined to drag everyone into Barney Miller this year. When I was a contestant, the three options turned out to be The Eagle, Master and Commander, and Cardcaptor Sakura--all fandoms I used to be in. Heh. I think I’m due for a turn back through Hornblower, to be honest, but maybe another Age of Sail frenzy will follow.

The Kids Are Not the Problem: I know I attended this, but I can’t remember a thing about it other than who the mods were... Doh.

Home on the Web: This was a panel about what’s missing in Tumblr or other alternatives today and where we should go. The discussion circled around the idea that there needs to be a fannish-run social media site and that we need a good backup/download tool for Tumblr lest it go away some day. I don’t think we really discussed what’s wrong with Dreamwidth: many things are great about it, but it lacks some of the audiovisual aspects that I’ve grown to love elsewhere. One thing that came up again and again for me is that some of the requested things exist or could exist, but we either aren’t making use of tools we should, like filling out our AO3 profiles or using AO3′s bookmarks feature, or we don’t know where to find the good fuckyeah tumblrs and other replacements for fannish newsletters. In my opinion, everyone should go ahead and invest time in tumblr even if its economic model is unsustainable, but we should figure out how to back it up ASAP. Everyone should also go have the threaded discussions they want to in AO3 fic comments.

Let’s Collab! New Forms of Collective Fan Creativity: I couldn’t make it to this since it conflicted with Home on the Web. I’d love to know how it was.

How to Threesome: We played with posable dolls and nattered about what kinds of sex we like in OT3 fic and whether or not it’s similar to what makes sense in real life. (Answer: of course it’s not. It’s exactly like two-person couples in erotica and romance in that there’s lots of Souls As One simultaneous shit and much less realistic sex where one person takes a lot longer than another.)

The Slash Book: This is really cool. There’s talk of a slash book that combines fan and academic perspectives.

OT3 for Me: Another panel of OT3 squee. (It’s Escapade 27, so the theme is OT3s.) We all wanted more canons with OT3s and other poly arrangements. What year is this again? Surely, there should be more in self-published ebooks at least by now? Lots of us talked about shipping teams together: buddy cops = OTP, Leverage = 2+3, MCU = team orgy.

It’s Canon, but is it slash? I proposed this but didn’t run it, so it spent a lot of time on the meta question of what defines slash. I was more interested in the question of whether pro m/m is scratching the same itches and what’s good. We concluded that it theoretically could, but the vast majority of it doesn’t because it’s just not good enough at setting up the iddy character dynamics before it gets to the fucking. Give us buddy cops and superhero-supervillain feuds before they bump uglies, please!

You’re Totally Welcome on my Lawn, but I Wish You Wouldn’t Pee on the Grass: Not, as it happens, my panel. Anyone have a panel review?

We’re All Going to Hell: Obviously an amazing panel full of all of My People. Now where are my noncon xeno recs?