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Belated Arisia Report I: The Panel
Jan. 25th, 2011 11:48 pmIt was bound to happen eventually: on this, my sixth Arisia and my tenth or eleventh con overall, I finally got the shiny green "Program Participant" label on my con badge. (Benefits as follows: access to real food in the green room, the ability to point and say, "Hey, look! Program Participant label!") I felt a bit of a sham, as I was scheduled exactly one (1) panel, but at least I made it a doozy: Religion and Kink. As ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
avivasedai and asim commented on my way to the room, I seriously jumped into the pool with both feet.
There were just a few problems:
1) 12:30 a.m. on Friday night / Saturday morning. Yes, you read that correctly. We were scheduled in the con witching hour, when the grid was showing Rocky Horror, a filk sing, a hentai screening and us. Luckily, being the only game in town meant a pretty decent turnout, which was pleasantly surprising.
2) I felt like a question mark in a sea of exclamation points. My fellow panelists were all longtime members of the kink community, and brought with them fascinating insights on cultural and scientific backgrounds, as well as their own personal tales of, "This is how I incorporate my spirituality with my BDSM play." Meanwhile, I was the guy on the end whose stated purpose on the panel was that I didn't have any answers, and whose background where religion and kink intersected was a matter of "tab A seriously does not fit into slot B," in the form of, "Being a Dom and a Quaker pacifist at the same time is, like, really hard."
That said, I think I did pretty well. The panel itself was fairly subdued (probably because zomigod 12:30 in the flippin' morning), and I did less talking than the folks who knew what they were talking about, but I got across what I wanted to get across, and it generated some interesting dialogue, and I got to meetarchangelwells when she came up afterward to start a lively discussion on the topic, so all was well.
As a side note to those of you who dove into schedules with eight or more panels for the weekend: How?! And for that matter, why?!
avivasedai and asim commented on my way to the room, I seriously jumped into the pool with both feet.There were just a few problems:
1) 12:30 a.m. on Friday night / Saturday morning. Yes, you read that correctly. We were scheduled in the con witching hour, when the grid was showing Rocky Horror, a filk sing, a hentai screening and us. Luckily, being the only game in town meant a pretty decent turnout, which was pleasantly surprising.
2) I felt like a question mark in a sea of exclamation points. My fellow panelists were all longtime members of the kink community, and brought with them fascinating insights on cultural and scientific backgrounds, as well as their own personal tales of, "This is how I incorporate my spirituality with my BDSM play." Meanwhile, I was the guy on the end whose stated purpose on the panel was that I didn't have any answers, and whose background where religion and kink intersected was a matter of "tab A seriously does not fit into slot B," in the form of, "Being a Dom and a Quaker pacifist at the same time is, like, really hard."
That said, I think I did pretty well. The panel itself was fairly subdued (probably because zomigod 12:30 in the flippin' morning), and I did less talking than the folks who knew what they were talking about, but I got across what I wanted to get across, and it generated some interesting dialogue, and I got to meet
archangelwells when she came up afterward to start a lively discussion on the topic, so all was well.As a side note to those of you who dove into schedules with eight or more panels for the weekend: How?! And for that matter, why?!
