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thank you mods for bringing us Fanworks Con despite all of 2020! I haven't been to a con in a decade and I certainly haven't presented outside of work/school in ages either*, so this was super exciting! I'm so so grateful to ASH for looping me in, this was great and I absolutely wouldn't've found it on my own.

Quick con report :D

friday night: vid party! always love to see Violace's Na Na Na - imagine that up on a big screen! - but also I'm glad they let me share X_D
saturday programming: ok tbh I did miss a lot of the morning sessions because a) time zones and also b) life etc, so I think it would've been great and theraputic to join This Is Fine, because yk, nothing is. but did make it to Does Lossy Mean Bad? Compression Explained! which tbh was a bit over my head as I don't do much visual, but it's all skill-building!
and then, Sunday: ahhhhhhhhhhhh!
- Panel on ficbinding: what it is, how to bind your own book, why we're doing this - as community, and as queer community specifically.
  - One example that we didn't get to this time, as to the delicacy of queer publishing: One of my favorite books is Peter Darling, by S.A. Chant. It's gay and trans and was published by Less Than Three Press, which went under a few years ago, and now used copies are about $125 on abe books. Chant's looking for another publisher, but it is so easy for queer lit to be lost. We happen to have a skillset; you bet that we want to leverage it where we can to back up what matters to us.
  - I didn't get to talk about DADT, Damyata, Dayadhvam either, but tl;dr reading it in 2008 vs now are such different experiences; I want to read it in another decade and just can't summon up the faith in LJ alone. Digital infrastructure is great but it is not sufficient. Digital infrastructure owned by capricious companies or dependent on donations are not enough. OTOH, someone would have to commit explicit property crimes to keep me from being able to read Switch again, now.
  - It was! So much fun though! and we had a whole hour of conversation after, only breaking for:
- Everything You Think You Know About Copyright Law Is (Probably) Wrong: which was also fun because it turns out I do have a working background in copyright, actually!
  - gavagai, though
- and then back at it with the panel on archiving!
  - guys, there are so many good pathways to take out there and we're setting out on them
  - https://archivists-assemble.dreamwidth.org/767.html
    - (speaking of links through there, I did get Carmen Miranda's Ghost last week too and I'm so glad to finally have a full copy)
  - like, I am such a noob to organised preservation efforts but getting to sit in with folks who know what they're doing and see behind the curtain while decisions are being made is so, so exciting. I've been backing things up on my own since eh 2008 but literally just last week, that computer died in a fit of plastic smoke. Single points of failure are just not tenable, I love love seeing better systems come together.

so! as long as you don't ask me about school or work, it's going great! I'm getting by by wringing every iota of serotonin from Lullaby for a Weary World so this is fine. I mean, things really, really aren't, but in one corner of life, at least!