HSU IT Department

...or is there something fundamentally wrong about this bit of end-of-semester marketing?

Cool: What fire looks like in zero gravity

Cool but makes my head sort of want to explode: Some infinities are bigger than others

Creepy but also still cool: A lyre made out of a human skull

Creepy and really, really not cool: Major fantasy/sf author Marion Zimmer Bradley (Mists of Avalon, etc.) allegedly abused her own daughter for years; see here and here. So disappointed and sad...*

*Edited for clarity, sorry for the ambiguity of original sentence

So yay, I finally have time to write about the Pop Culture Association conference, which as I said the other day was brilliant. I think I'll break it up and do one post for each day, since there's so much to say about it.

So first, the background: I've wanted to go to this conference for ages, ever since my brother told me about it when he first presented there six years ago (his field is horror movies) and I looked at the program. This year not only was my brother presenting again, my boss at work was also presenting, plus it was in Chicago (easily accessible via Amtrak, plus I could do a side trip to see my mom, stepdad and grandmother). So this seemed the ideal time. I was not disappointed!

On the spectrum that runs from rabid fans on the one end to Spock-like academics on the other, this conference is tilted about 15 degrees toward the rabid fan side. This is both good and bad: on the one hand it makes for a different tenor than other professional conferences I've been too, very lively and kaleidoscopic; on the other hand the number of presenter no-shows and "lightweight" presentations was higher. It's also by far the biggest conference I've ever been to in terms of number of presenters -- the full program is over four hundred pages! -- and every session involved two or three people. This also was both good and bad: the sheer number of interesting topics was fantastic, but I was left wanting more in-depth information on just about everything, since regardless of how scholarly the paper, there was only time for a very surface overview.

Wednesday we arrived around 3pm so I only was able to hit one session. I chose one on Monsters and the Supernatural, which had three papers: "Which 'Witch' Is A Witch?: Negative and Inaccurate Portrayals of So-Called 'Witches' In Horror" (Charmed, Buffy, etc.), "Rooting for the Monster: 21st Century Creature Features and the Devaluation of the Human" (about how we now cheer for the monster in the movies instead of the humans, e.g. King Kong, Godzilla), and "Monsters and Men: Guillermo Del Toro and the Subaltern" (Pan's Labyrinth, The Devil's Backbone, etc.). I was tempted by another session, "Star Trek as a Mirror of American Culture," but that one seemed relatively obvious so I opted for the other one. "Rooting for the Monster" was particularly interesting, proposing that increased awareness of environmental issues may be part of why we now root for the "monster" -- that is, we don't automatically see man as the hero because we acknowledge the damage that homo sapiens has done to the planet. Instead of seeing Godzilla's or King Kong's death as this great victory, we recognize the tragedy inherent in the death of a unique creature.

Wednesday night we had an awesome time at the "Welcome to Our Nightmare" movie sponsored by all the different horror focus areas: Trilogy of Terror (eeeeeeeek!!!) They had a trivia contest before the show and gave away all kinds of cool stuff: movies, books, t-shirts, etc. The questions were ridiculously detailed (Q: Who played Jonathan Harker in the 1931 version of Dracula? A: No one, the Harker character wasn't in that version!) and of course sooo many people knew the answers, because FANS. (I got a Lon Chaney question almost right but not quite, drat the luck.) The movie itself was hugely entertaining, three tales based on stories by Richard Matheson. The first one was seriously unnerving, though perhaps not for quite the reasons the filmmakers intended (sexual predators being so much more in the news these days). The second was predictable, and the last was just utterly silly: a creepy little African statue comes to life and hunts a woman through her apartment, gnashing its tiny little teeth and waving its tiny little spear, like some kind of humanoid gremlin. It survives stabbing, drowning and being stuffed into the oven. I won't spoil it by telling you the closing scene, you really need to see it for yourself XD All in all it was a prime example of cheesy 1970s horror and the audience shouted things at the screen and laughed and so on, but it was all done with great affection (because, again, FANS!).

OK, enough for today. Tomorrow: Stephen King, "You've got more problems than lesbians in your sauna!", crossover fics, Star Wars and the monomyth, and who called the fandom police??