#escapade 2017

[canadian-riddler]

for the benefit of my nonexistent Ottawa EDM fam

[olderthannetfic]

Escapade Dance Party Vids

These are the vids we showed at the Escapade Con dance party. They were chosen to be OT3 (this year’s theme), slash (the overall topic of the con), good to dance to, or in fandoms people specifically asked for. (We ran out of time for the last three though.)

I found these by searching AO3′s ‘fanvids’ tag, looking at Festivids and VividCon, and some Youtube searching. Boy do I wish more vidders would post to AO3 and label their stuff clearly. Youtube is a pain to search.

First half:

I Ship It by Not Literally Productions (Original)

1941 by rhoboat (Agent Carter)

Goody Two Shoes by Laura Shapiro (due South)

Moves Like Jagger by TheOriginalAliKat (Leverage)

Crying Blood by franzeska (Haven)

Kiss You Off by fiercynn (Kinky Boots)

Ready or Not by Anoel (Hamilton)

Rulebreaker by Vialana (Shadowhunters)

Light It Up by livingyosuke (Sailor Moon)

Thank God for Girls by himundergreen (Kurukami) (Multi)

Slow Motion Makes Everything Cooler (Reservoir Dogs Style FanVid) by thesulah (Supernatural)

It's Always a Good Time by absternr (Brooklyn Nine-Nine)

Thrift Shop by LightSpinner (Deadpool)

Dance by Anoel (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend)

Good Girls by LightLeadingMe (Ghostbusters (2016))

I Like That by shirasade (MCU)

3 by talitha78 (Fastlane)

You Got It by lilly_the_kid (The Magnificent 7 (2016))

Bonfire Heart by RenegadeMasquerade (The Librarians)

No by roanegraphics (roane) (Star Wars all)

Wynonna Earp ft. Xavier Dolls by franzeska (Wynonna Earp)

Uptown Funk by Allonso Allonsy (Kingsman)

What A Knight by Treon (Galavant)

Get Lucky by such_heights (Singin' in the Rain)

Second half:

Alright With Me by Josette_Arnauld (White Collar)

Fever by Ungifted Fanvids (The Musketeers)

Va Va Voom by obsessive24 (Merlin)

Lady Marmalade by giandujakiss (Cleopatra 2525)

It's Tricky by bradcpu, Milly

(Legends of Tomorrow)

Battleflag by darlulu (Stargate Atlantis)

Imma Be by talitha78 (Leverage)

Grand Theft Hydra by mithborien (MCU)

Lust for Life by astolat (The Fast and the Furious)

You and Me and Her by Gwen Frankenstein (Butch Cassidy)

Loves Like This by Sarashina_Nikki (Black Sails)

Games by franzeska (Piratas)

Bulletproof by Aria (MCU)

Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard by Laura Shapiro & Norah (Y Tú Mama También)

Bad Boy by sdwolfpup (Dante's Cove)

Like a Virgin, the 80's One by thesulah (Supernatural)

Coming After You by TheEdokinzAlchemy (Miraculous Ladybug)

Never Look Away by helcinda (Yuri on Ice)

Big Bad Handsome Man by 3226629 (Shadowhunters)

Whole New Way by mresundance (Sherlock Holmes)

Larger Than Life by Deejay and Mister Anderson (Pacific Rim)

Starships by bironic (Multi)

Han's Girl by roanegraphics (roane) (Star Wars OT)

collarbone by pollyrepeat (The Mummy)

Napoleon & Gaby ♥ Illya by franzeska (The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (movie))

[apaintedmaypole]

Escapade 2017 Debrief!

Got back from Escapade 2017 just in time for the epic amounts of snow happening on the East Coast. Wheee!

As always, however, a fabulous time was to be had at Escapade this year. If you didn't come, you should come next time. :)

Also, I made/premiered my very first vid ever at Escapade this year!! OMG, I still can't believe this finally happened.

I was a co-mod on four panels this year. I'm also starting a campaign to get everyone to take panel notes in sharable Google Docs. This year, I used my modding powers to make this happen three times! So, instead of trying to write a con report (which my brain is incapable of), I'm going to list the panel descriptions below and link to the Google Docs with the panel notes in them.

Panel Notes Escapade 2017:

Let’s Collab! New Forms of Collective Fan Creativity Mods: k8, Lola Panel Topic: Changing technologies mean that we collaborate with each other in ever-evolving ways when we create fic and vids. What are the possibilities for collaborating beyond geographic boundaries with digital technologies? How are you collaborating with fellow writers and vidders these days? Are you interested in finding new collaborators and new ways to connect? And are these new forms of collaboration creating new forms of creative fan work?

It’s Canon, But Is It Slash? Mods: k8, Aral Panel Topic: From K.J. Charles to C.S. Pacat, professional m/m writers are flourishing. But do these works scratch the same itch as slash? What do we like? What do we hate? What do we want more of?

The Kids Are Not the Problem Mods: Aral, k8, sinead Panel Topic: In recent years, media fandom has grown enormously. It has also scattered, spreading out to new platforms and meeting spaces. In response, you often hear talk about “the kids” versus “the olds,” Tumblr versus LiveJournal, or the problem of recruiting and retaining new fans. In this panel, let’s try flipping that script. Let’s assume the kids are not the problem. Instead, how can we change and grow? What awesome things are other fans doing/trying that people at Escapade should know about? Most importantly, what strategies can we use to leave our fannish bubbles and more fully experience fandom in 2017?

Feel free to share these notes and/or leave comments on them.

[iesika]

Not dead, writing again

On the off chance anyone is still following me and might be interested: I’m writing and posting again. Not currently in DC fandom, though I’m hoping some in the future.

I checked my info on AO3 and I think it has literally been four years since I posted something new. I was recently reinvigorated by Escapade (what up, fangirls!), where I spent last weekend and which was super-duper fun. 

Here is the new thing I am posting currently. If you are looking for Space Syphilis or more superhero LGBT club, this is not it, and I apologize for that. I still hope to get back there eventually but basically DC broke my heart so bad I haven’t even read comic-based fic in years.

Omiai by iesika - Hannibal (TV)

Will acquires a murderous secret admirer, and learns how much easier the habit of violence can be with an enthusiastically willing target.

A courtship through blood and… other means of influence.

Please please please read the AO3 tags for warnings. What I’ve posted so far is reasonably tame, but it’s about to pop off. Do not feel bad if you like me personally but don’t want to read this story. Hannibal is fantastic and I 100% recommend it, but it is not for the faint of heart.

[canadian-riddler]

They moved Escapade from the Rideau Carleton Raceway to Landsdowne Park

looks like I’m finally going to Landsdowne

[olderthannetfic]

Escapade 2017 Con Report

I gave @rhaegalks​ a lift, came home, and flopped on my bed for a few hours. It turns out that a gross head cold plus a ton of parties plus the hotel’s alarm going off at like 7am is not good for my ability to be upright and functional. Zzzzz.

This year, we were in a new and fabulous hotel. Let’s hope we can afford it next year too. (Check out Escapade’s crowdfunding campaign.) The rooms are big, with an excellent fold-out couch in the outer room and two TVs: it’s the perfect set up for room parties.

Not that I had any of those this year. I was too busy helping with the Friday night dance party and hosting the Saturday night after party in the con suite. I would have thought that the hotel’s layout made sound travel, but we had no security issues, so I guess the sound proofing is better than I thought or we just weren’t that loud.

Booze and food:

What? You don’t think those are the most important parts of a party?

The hotel has happy hour every day. All the ehhh wine or basic mixed drinks you can cram down from 5:30 to 7:30. I didn’t eat at the hotel restaurant; reportedly, the burgers were dry. The old hotel is just across the street, and its restaurant is very good, if overpriced. I brought some real food for the con suite. I wish I’d been able to do more. Maybe next year, a few more of us can bring entree type offerings. I love how BASCon let you just eat lunch out of the con suite to keep things cheap. (RIP, BASCon. ;__;)

Friday, there were three specialty cocktails served by the hotel bartender. Vodka (ew), more vodka (ew), and a specialty margarita (pretty good for a bar at a hotel event). The hors d’oeuvres were great: little egg rolls and beef skewers.

Saturday, a bunch of us went out for swanky Mexican a short drive away. (The con is in the cultural wasteland that surrounds LAX, so the options are mostly bad chains, plus terrible Mexican, better Mexican, and swanky Mexican. Not so much with the variety. There’s a Greek place I’ve still never been to.) I had duck molé and regaled @t-cupsandtime​ with my many lolwhut fandom adventures. (Yes, I talked about myself all through dinner. Why do you ask? ;D)

Later, after the vid show, I hosted the after party in the con suite, where I set up a bar to serve a variety of lovely cocktails, each a different color. (Predictably, I got caught up dealing with tech issues in another room, so people just drank all the vodka and poured themselves whatever they felt like, but I did have a cool cocktail menu in theory!) 

We also watched a few vids and, more importantly, I was able to inflict Always Crashing in the Same Car on a whole roomful of fans. Come dwell with me in terrible kinky porn land, friends!

My cocktail offerings were:

Negroni - in honor of Killa always eying my sugar death bomb drinks with alarm

Moonlight - in honor of Joi McMillon’s gushing at Visible Artists over the editing process on Moonlight (you fangirl, you!)

Amaretto Sour - because I had a lot of home-grown lemons

Grasshopper - because SUGAR DEATH BOMB

China Blue - no, not that vodka bullshit in a martini glass: the tropical weirdness with lychee liqueur, blue curaçao, and grapefruit juice

White Russian - can’t go wrong with the Dude

Penguin - frothy, pink, and full of gin--in honor of Escapade’s mascot, gay penguins

Vids

This year, there was just a vidding 101 panel (which I did not attend) and vid review (which I did). The Friday dance party was my playlist, which you can see on Tumblr here. It wasn’t as OT3-y as I wanted, but it worked great as a dance playlist.

I’ll mention again that I started my vid search based on the fandoms on people’s profiles on the Escapade website. 90% of you didn’t fill anything out, so I didn’t look for your fandoms. Just saying! The dance party also takes suggestions, both for fandoms and for specific vids. Suggest early; suggest often!

I did a lot of my vid hunting on AO3. Unlike Tumblr or Youtube, you can search it properly for just things that are fanvids or just for fanvids in specific fandoms, and you can find things that were posted longer ago than last week.

The Saturday vidshow is the big one where vidders premiere their vids for a rapt audience as opposed to a bunch of loud drunk people... unless you’re in the loud room, in which case, it’s still a bunch of loud drunk people. This year, it was a little underwhelming. While the vids were all excellent--maybe even better than in other years--they were also heavily drawn from last Festivids and last VividCon. As often happens, many of them were rather heavy. For the dance party, I chose based on music, even if the only copy of a vid I had was grabbed from Youtube and full of pixilation. The real vidshow tries to keep image quality higher, and that makes finding vids much harder: most vidders don’t think in terms of HQ files that will look good on a projector. I think that’s a pity because, while our numbers at Escapade are small, we’re a very dedicated audience. Make pretty HQ versions, vidders! Let us love you! And post to AO3! Let us find you!

Panels!

Lots of meta and recs panels for me this year. I ran a panel on films about fandom: the problematic ones that exist, the ones we’d like to see, and my grad school thesis that I’d like you to donate to when the indiegogo goes up.

I also ran The Fannish Dating Game, the panel where you pimp your fandom by being a bachelorette and answering our lovely contestant’s questions. Certain People having failed with McHale’s Navy last year were determined to drag everyone into Barney Miller this year. When I was a contestant, the three options turned out to be The Eagle, Master and Commander, and Cardcaptor Sakura--all fandoms I used to be in. Heh. I think I’m due for a turn back through Hornblower, to be honest, but maybe another Age of Sail frenzy will follow.

The Kids Are Not the Problem: I know I attended this, but I can’t remember a thing about it other than who the mods were... Doh.

Home on the Web: This was a panel about what’s missing in Tumblr or other alternatives today and where we should go. The discussion circled around the idea that there needs to be a fannish-run social media site and that we need a good backup/download tool for Tumblr lest it go away some day. I don’t think we really discussed what’s wrong with Dreamwidth: many things are great about it, but it lacks some of the audiovisual aspects that I’ve grown to love elsewhere. One thing that came up again and again for me is that some of the requested things exist or could exist, but we either aren’t making use of tools we should, like filling out our AO3 profiles or using AO3′s bookmarks feature, or we don’t know where to find the good fuckyeah tumblrs and other replacements for fannish newsletters. In my opinion, everyone should go ahead and invest time in tumblr even if its economic model is unsustainable, but we should figure out how to back it up ASAP. Everyone should also go have the threaded discussions they want to in AO3 fic comments.

Let’s Collab! New Forms of Collective Fan Creativity: I couldn’t make it to this since it conflicted with Home on the Web. I’d love to know how it was.

How to Threesome: We played with posable dolls and nattered about what kinds of sex we like in OT3 fic and whether or not it’s similar to what makes sense in real life. (Answer: of course it’s not. It’s exactly like two-person couples in erotica and romance in that there’s lots of Souls As One simultaneous shit and much less realistic sex where one person takes a lot longer than another.)

The Slash Book: This is really cool. There’s talk of a slash book that combines fan and academic perspectives.

OT3 for Me: Another panel of OT3 squee. (It’s Escapade 27, so the theme is OT3s.) We all wanted more canons with OT3s and other poly arrangements. What year is this again? Surely, there should be more in self-published ebooks at least by now? Lots of us talked about shipping teams together: buddy cops = OTP, Leverage = 2+3, MCU = team orgy.

It’s Canon, but is it slash? I proposed this but didn’t run it, so it spent a lot of time on the meta question of what defines slash. I was more interested in the question of whether pro m/m is scratching the same itches and what’s good. We concluded that it theoretically could, but the vast majority of it doesn’t because it’s just not good enough at setting up the iddy character dynamics before it gets to the fucking. Give us buddy cops and superhero-supervillain feuds before they bump uglies, please!

You’re Totally Welcome on my Lawn, but I Wish You Wouldn’t Pee on the Grass: Not, as it happens, my panel. Anyone have a panel review?

We’re All Going to Hell: Obviously an amazing panel full of all of My People. Now where are my noncon xeno recs?

Wank: It’s Coming from Inside the Fandom: We tried to define both ‘wank’ and ‘The Discourse’ and never really settled on anything, but we did get to explain His Wife, A Horse to the unwary. Muahahahaha!

[olderthannetfic]

Home on the Web

“LJ’s Russian overlords have removed HTTPS support and are moving the server activity to Russia; some say a shutdown of US services is on the horizon. Yahoo fails to make money with Tumblr. Dreamwidth is slow, and doesn’t have media hosting. Email lists are a hassle. Imzy, a startup, places branding aesthetics over design usability. Where’s the next place for fandom, or should we reclaim one or more of the platforms from the past?”

Who’s joining me at this Escapade panel?

[canadian-riddler]