From Friday through today, we attended Loscon 34, an LA-area science fiction convention. Every convention has its own personality. Loscon's is of a well-read, highly-educated and extremely vocal party guest who knows more than you do about any subject you bring up. Perhaps because the organization that puts it on, LASFS, is close to JPL, the con is suffused with experts on history, science, and even cruise ship lore. (When we were in line for the masquerade, one line-member's comments about the Titanic were met with a torrent of corrections from another, who worked for a cruise line.) This often leads to disagreements between those who believe they know more than the experts at their sides. One panel on pulp fiction featured contradictory comments from pulp historians on whether the paper used to print pulp magazines was the same grade as or lower grade than the paper on which comic books were printed.
Loscon is also well-known for its Saturday-night room parties. One of the more unusual ones we visited last night was thrown by an author to promote her small-press fantasy novel. The author herself dressed up in a Xena-type warrior-woman outfit to plug the book.
As we were leaving this costume-filled milieu early Sunday morning, we shared an elevator ride down with two young women wearing costumes of a different type -- i.e., short skirts and low-cut tops that could barely contain their surgically-bestowed assets. One dropped a hotel key card as the elevator descended; but she waited until we left the elevator before bending down to retrieve it -- for obvious reasons.
Plainly, these women were not fans; they were "pros."
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