SF part deux: the return.

My panel went, honestly, better than expected. We had a turnout of 12 people, which made it the largest panel I went to on the first day. The other two presenters talked about nationality in Hedwig and the Angry Inch and performance art on a traffic island in NYC, so it was a diverse and interesting panel. The performance artist had also been filmed as part of the project and had many relevant insights into how the public gaze worked, after spending 72 hours in a woman's "boudoir" constructed in the middle of a downtown Manhattan intersection. I've met several roleplayers and cosplayers here who had further thoughts about the directions that LARP research could go in, which has been fruitful fodder for my own future scholarly work. Dinner last night was with a few panel attendees at a local Irish pub, with quite the authentic menu and also quite the loud Irish musician helping us to decide what we should do with the drunken sailor early in the morning.

Other panels I've been to so far investigated links between video sports games and steroid use (video game users are less likely to use drugs); death as a narrative device in solo-player console gaming; Brecht's alienation effect in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas; Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, and the new "upscale" male; and gender in World of Warcraft. If it's happened in film, on television, online, or plugged into a socket, there's probably a bunch of scholars here talking about it. As I discovered to my benefit today there are also non-electronic culture groups here, including fashion, commodities, and food culture.

The most interesting adventure to date was a panel led by local Chowhounds. Chowhound.com is a very active board for foodies who live in certain major U.S. cities (sorry, Denver/Boulderites, we're grouped in with the "Midwest"). Five Chowhounds led a panel discussion of all sorts of local and national foods. Then we took a bus and went on a walking tour of Chinatown complete with deli tour, pineapple buns, and a fortune cookie factory. The tour was led by a native San Franciscan who lived in Chinatown as a child and still lives in the Bay area, so he knew the true local spots quite well. (Nothing like a bunch of conference nerds, many still wearing badges, clogging up already busy sidewalks in an area where they can't read the language on the signs.) There were about 20 of us on the tour so it was a great chance to meet people from across the conference disciplines and to try some amazing food together while getting out for a walk on a beautiful day.