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.

Current main reading August 2022.

Still reading Wheel of Time book 4 (so long!), Track Changes history of word processing, and Loren Wiseman RPG columns. Newly reading Shadowlands book about lost villages etc, Shelf Respect, and The Housekeeper and the Professor a Japanese novel.

I am enjoying the Wheel of Time book a lot, but it is taking ages to read. It is almost the longest book in the series by far, only narrowly beaten for page count by one other.

Track Changes feels overwritten in places so I am skipping bits, but there are some real gems.

The Loren Wiseman book continues to delight.

Shadowlands looks fantastic, an in depth visit to a number of lost villages, towns and cities across Britain.

Shelf Respect isn’t deep at all, full of reading anecdotes, lists etc, but appeals to bibliophile me.

And the Japanese novel is a read for the book group run by an Aussie booktuber I follow. Looks good.

Current reading, end of June 2022 edition.

Lud-in-the-Mist, a forgotten fantasy; John Dickson Carr’s Castle Skull; Greg Carpenter’s The British Invasion about comics giants; Keith Houston’s typography book; Gary Goodman’s bookseller’s memoir; and Loren Wiseman’s Traveller RPG musings.