vivdunstan

I've just finished my marathon viewing of a large bunch of videos on catchup from the Glasgow Worldcon this summer. Watching on catchup I missed out the chance to take part in the live Q&As. And I also found the user interface rather cumbersome, that I had to watch on my laptop, which limited how frequently I could do so. But I still managed to get through quite a large number of talks.

Here are the events I watched, each one about an hour long, typically with 45 main minutes of discussion, followed by 15 minutes of audience Q&A:

• AI and Work - Do Androids Dream of Taking Your Job?
• ENIAC and the Post-War Dawn of the Computer age
• The Horror Out Of Space
• *Scot-ish: The Influence of Scotland on Fantasy Worldbuilding
• It's Life, Jim, but Not as We Know It
• *Iain Banks: Between Genre and the Mainstream
• All the Shakespeare: the Bard's Influence on SFF
• The Untold History of Worldcons
• Inadvisable Rocket Science
• A Fireside Chat with Samantha Béart
• Guest of Honour Interview: Ken MacLeod
• *The Many Legs of SF: Creepy Crawlies in Space
• 50 Years of TTRPGs
• Comics Can Save Your Life
• Faeries in Fantasy Literature

I've marked out above those with asterisks that I especially enjoyed. To pull those out specifically these were:

• Scot-ish: The Influence of Scotland on Fantasy Worldbuilding
• Iain Banks: Between Genre and the Mainstream
• The Many Legs of SF: Creepy Crawlies in Space

The first two of these had obvious Scottish connections, which I unsurprisingly appreciated. But I also found them particularly rewarding in other respects. But I enjoyed something in everything I watched, not just these particular highlight talks.

Martin and I had originally hoped to be at the Glasgow 2024 Worldcon in person. We had low cost attending memberships in place. But things didn't work out that way. However I was able to watch on catchup, and have very much enjoyed that. I was also active in the Discord during the convention, and treated myself to some purchases inspired by the Dealers' Hall.

Resorting to Lynx in my Mac terminal/shell to read an article today. That won't load in normal web browsers - probably subscription only. But as a last try before giving up I thought of trying Lynx! A very very old text based web browser, that I've used occasionally (but little recently!) since the early 1990s. Unix based, but I downloaded a version many years ago to my Mac laptop, and can run it in the shell terminal. Here is Lynx viewing another web page.

My current main reading, late July 2022. Novels Wheel of Time book 4 and The Twisted Ones. Matthew Kirschenbaum’s Track Changes history of word processing. Keith Houston’s typography book. If Venice Dies by Salvatore Settis. And more of Loren Wiseman’s Traveller RPG columns.