WisCon was again great. WisCon’s level of discussion is uniformly very high and much more clueful than at a lot of other cons. I don’t do much gaming there, but it entertains through mind-expansion. And this year’s WisCon had a great deal of gaming-related programming; I think it’s second only to Convergence, for me, in opportunities to talk about gaming.

One particular topic I want to highlight: This year’s WisCon had a lot of panels and discussions where thoughts of nerd self-loathing was kind of roiling under the surface. Dealing with imposter syndrome; people feeling they need to apologize for not being published prose authors ‘yet’; a worldbuilding panel that seemed almost entirely focused on making sure the world was ‘productive’ and not ‘wasteful’; feeling like we need to apologize for wholeheartedly and un-ironically enjoying things; arguing for the value of hobbies in terms of their ‘productivity’ value; being ashamed to admit that one is a gamer; etc. This overarching topic keeps coming up, and I hope that WisCon manages to address it more head-on in years to come. I will certainly continue to talk about it here. Forward the Squeevolution!