The 35th Life, The Universe, and Everything conference, my second, has come and gone, and it was a blast. I got to sit on a few panels, hang out with Larry Correia, Jim Curtis (OldNFO online), and a few others, chat briefly with James Minz (executive editor at Baen), and along the way let the gears turn, leading to several new ideas, refinements of old ones, and possibly get some new, or new-ish projects rolling. (There should be audio of Kill Yuan forthcoming in the next few months, for instance.)
Most of the panels I was attending (as opposed to being a panelist), I was sort of half-listening, half letting the gears turn. That’s how the back-cover byline for Lex Talionis changed halfway through the “Hook” panel. Originally intended to be “The Hunters Have Become The Hunted,” which fits, but has been used before, it will now be “War And Politics Have Consequences.”
There were a couple of weird parts. There was a member of the “Writing Action Scenes” panel, who will remain nameless, who asserted that video gaming provides the real experience of being in a fight. (I may or may not have seen Larry twitch toward a double-handed facepalm at that one.) Since I was in the audience and not on the panel, I can now say what I was thinking at the time: No, there is no corellation between videogaming and real-world violence. No one should think that Call of Duty experience equates to being in a real firefight.
Such moments aside, it was still a great time. And thanks to Larry, again, I now have to find reasons to use the term, “Skin suit full of lizards…”
I heard through the grapevine that there were some panel shenanigans. Is that something that you can share? I’ve been considering making the trek west from VA.
I’m not there this year, nor was I there last year, so I can’t speak to recent events. There did seem to be a growing undercurrent of SJWs, including the likes of an individual whom a friend of mine refers to as “Mary Three-Names,” who was complaining, the first time I went in 2016, about “So many stories about white male experiences,” or some such dreck. It sounds like some of the panels might have started getting run by people with such attitudes, but as I said, I can’t speak to ’18 or ’19.