Poll! And Defining Fandom Moments!

[telophase]

I rented some movies on the way home, because there is nothing at home that interests me right now and I am WAY TOO DAMN TIRED to do anything but lie on the couch and moan tragically. And since the only being around to hear me moan tragically is the cat and she doesn't give a damn, it's rather a boring pastime.

So, poll.

[Poll #838730]


And another con-related question: tell me your Defining Fandom Moment(s). Can be at a con or not, however you want to interpret it. Here's one of mine:

A few years ago when I was on the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list, she came by Austin on a signing tour. An Austin resident on the mailing lsit threw together a party and invited anyone on the list who could make it, plus a lot of local fandom people, and Bujold herself, who showed up. Anyway, at one point, the normal party Brownian motion led me in the direction of a group of little old white-haired ladies sitting in the corner, deeply involved in an animated discussion. I wandered over and eavesdropped. They were discussing attack helicopters.




(OK, of of the white-haired ladies was Elizabeth Moon, so it's not entirely unexpected, but still...)

Comments

[farli.livejournal.com]

Aeon Flux was not a good movie at all. At least the DOA movie, /terrible/ as it was (and it was) was far more entertaining in its awful.

Watch Narnia. It's good stuff.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I'm more interested in the visuals and the special effects on AF, so I'm not worried about the awfulness of it. :D I'll probably watch about half of it then put something else in, which is why I waited until it was off first-run status. XD

[solarbird]

Narnia's not bad - it gets better as it goes, which is a happy thing - but having seen it both ways, I gotta let you know that it's much better on hallucinatory painkillers. Particularly the first half.

We're watching the season three premiere for Battlestar Galactica tonight, but if that fails, we've got Thank You for Smoking which just came out. Everyone I know who saw it in theatre thought it was the funniest movie they'd seen in a year. Or maybe two.

My "defining fandom" moment is similar, but instead, it was a day-and-a-half-after-the-convention verrrrrrrry sleep 10pm discussion with me, two writers, and another fan over FM audio standards in television broadcast sound.

[tokyoghoststory.livejournal.com]

thanks now i wanna watch narnia. but i don't own it ;o;

[selenite.livejournal.com]

My defining Renfaire moment was when the conversation paused among 20-30 Kelts and we realized the men were all discussing sewing garb while the women were talking edged steel.

Fandom defining moment

[tammylee.livejournal.com]

Way back when I was on a panel about Yaoi or something and somehow I wound up admitting to having written a particular fic, the only fic I wrote under that name actually, and everyone on the panel recognized it and one of my fiction writing heros told me it was one of her favourites!

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I actually really liked the Aeon Flux movie; its script is good for what it is (and it is trying to be a real science fiction movie, which I think confused people, especially since it changes gears midstream), but it really excels in architecture and design. Seriously, I could write a paper on why the faux-utopian/totalitarian architecture is SO FRICKIN' BRILLIANT, if I had an excuse to. So I think if you're watching it for the visuals you probably won't need to turn it off midway.

[rayechu.livejournal.com]

I watched a little of the commentary at the end. Everyone else's outfits were neat. But hers were not-so-good. I remember cringing at the one made out of beads.

[m00nface.livejournal.com]

Normal party Brownian motion?

[telophase.livejournal.com]

As per Wikipedia: The term Brownian motion (in honor of the botanist Robert Brown) refers to either

1. The physical phenomenon where minute particles, immersed in a fluid or floating on its surface, move about randomly such as attendees do at parties; or
2. The mathematical models used to describe such random movements.

[m00nface.livejournal.com]

And that comprises the entirety of my botany knowledge to date. Thank you for improving my potential to converse knowledgeably with reely clevr people! ^___^

[telophase.livejournal.com]

And it allows you to get one of the jokes in this passage from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy:

The principle of generating small amounts of finite improbability by simply hooking the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 Sub- Meson Brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong Brownian Motion producer (say a nice hot cup of tea) were of course well understood - and such generators were often used to break the ice at parties by making all the molecules in the hostess's undergarments leap simultaneously one foot to the left, in accordance with the Theory of Indeterminacy.

Many respectable physicists said that they weren't going to stand for this - partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn't get invited to those sort of parties.

Another thing they couldn't stand was the perpetual failure they encountered in trying to construct a machine which could generate the infinite improbability field needed to flip a spaceship across the mind-paralysing distances between the furthest stars, and in the end they grumpily announced that such a machine was virtually impossible.

Then, one day, a student who had been left to sweep up the lab after a particularly unsuccessful party found himself reasoning this way:

If, he thought to himself, such a machine is a virtual impossibility, then it must logically be a finite improbability. So all I have to do in order to make one is to work out exactly how improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbability generator, give it a fresh cup of really hot tea ... and turn it on!

He did this, and was rather startled to discover that he had managed to create the long sought after golden Infinite Improbability generator out of thin air.

It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn't stand was a smartass.

:D