Tiger Spot (tiger_spot) wrote,
Tiger Spot

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Farthing Party

Right! It's been busy around here. So Farthing Party.

An excellent time was had by all. The hotel was deeply strange; nearly as hip as the W[1], with attendant noise issues (it's "atmosphere", you see, so of course they cannot turn it off at breakfast). The area of Montreal it's in confused me; it was sort of scruffy, with strip clubs and whatnot, but not a kind of scruffy I recognized. It wasn't bohemian artsy scruffy, or college-student scruffy, or actually run-down scruffy, or just-about-to-gentrify scruffy, or any specific scruffy subtype, although there were elements of most of those. Lots of good restaurants, surprisingly varied architecture. It seems like it's one of the places that would be nicer to live in than to visit (if it were always late summer).

Panels were excellent; socializing was excellent. Summary is insufficient; have some quotes!

From the "How Hard is SF?" panel:

"I stay as far from falsifiability as I can. In case of velocity, distance, or time, I give one." -- Jim MacDonald

"I've been around rich people. They don't talk like that! . . . They have their staff talk like that." -- Jim MacDonald

"When people are talking to young writers, they say, 'Be concrete; be specific.' But not about the science!" -- Marissa Lingen

"The number of e-mails I've gotten about Venus [being in the wrong location in a story] -- Thomas Hardy never got e-mails like that!" -- Jo Walton

"You can't Google every word you make up. It takes too long. And you mostly get weird porn sites in Indonesia." -- Jo Walton

From "The Enterprise of SF":

"The world is made out of two things: there's stuff, and then there's thinking about stuff." -- Teresa Nielsen Hayden

From "Fractally Weird":

"There's a strangely numinous event going on, and you look at it and say, 'This is the Tim Powers universe; look out for loss of limb.'" -- Teresa Nielsen Hayden

From "Generation Starships":

"It's really hard to get star-crossed lovers these days." -- Marie Bilodeau (I think -- I couldn't quite see, so it could have been any panelist on that side of the room)

"I think launching Montreal into space is a good idea. . . . Launching Swindon into space is a better idea." -- Alison Sinclair

"There are cell phone towers arranged around Swindon in an asterisk, leading to an invisible footnote that says Don't Live Here." -- Jo Walton, quoting someone else

[1] Huh, okay, that story predates my LiveJournal. Fascinating.
Tags: events
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