Geeked

It’s mid-afternoon on the last day of July, and the geeks have descended upon Gonzaga, stalking a meridian around Jepson and College and Cataldo Halls. They prepare to do battle on its quadrangle. They have clogged Cataldo’s main entrance, their horde swamping the registration tables, searching for lodging, complaining about inefficiencies. There is no line to speak of, just a mass of bodies.

Norma Barrett-Lincoln has prepared for the onslaught, but she and her tiny band of registrars risk being overrun by questions of niggling, bureaucratic minutia. Inside, vendors have already filled Cataldo’s great room with their wares — board games and replica swords and Warhammer figurines and rag-edged gypsyish skirts made from old neckties. The vestments and favors of war.

And of course describing a crush of fans as a marauding force is the most abject of writerly clichés, but how the hell can you resist? An impressive number of the swarm gathered for SpoCon 2009 are dressed like Visigoths and members of some vaguely magical, roughly medieval noblery. Many others, including Barrett-Lincoln herself, bear the brass-colored goggles of the Steampunk acolyte. Among the swell are vampire fangs and fairy (faery, faerie, etc.) wings. There’s a Jedi sword or two as well.

Nationally, Cons are becoming big business. Two weeks ago, much of Hollywood was on hand to court nerds at San Diego’s 40th Comic-Con. Robert Downey Jr., James Cameron and Johnny Depp (hustling Sherlock Holmes, Avatar and Alice in Wonderland, respectively) were among the 140,000 attendants. The event played host to some 6,500 fans of the book and film series Twilight alone, which led to picketing by vampire fundamentalists.

SpoCon, in its second year, is still small and basically devoid of enmity, though it has its share and caliber of celebrity. The film company Dead Gentlemen Productions is in attendance, along with game designer Steve Long and writers V.E. Mitchell, L.E. MoDesitt Jr, and MSNBC Science Editor Alan Boyle.

The 700 registrants Barrett-Lincoln expects this year mimics last summer’s numbers. Stasis isn’t a bad thing, she says, tipping up her pith helmet and nudging her glasses into place, “especially in this environment.” There’s a real-world nation called America, and its economic woes have reached even deep into fantasyland.

Minutes later, in College Hall room 130 (“Theatrical and LARP Costuming”), Terry Campeau is also advocating an assault. “Raid your grandparents’ closets!” he cries with a baroque flourish, his fangs emerging for a split second from behind his thin lips. “I’m not kidding. You’ll be shocked at what you find.”

Campeau says costumage is a vital part of LARP — Live Action Role Playing, a broad term with a ton of subcultures, including the famous swordsmen of Manito Park — but almost everyone LARPs on a budget. Chain mail is expensive, as are the long, canvas greatcoats and clockwork gadgetry of the Steampunk bureaucrat. It’s important to stretch your dollars where you can, especially when you pledge fealty to more than one LARPing tradition.

“Accessories!” Campeau declares, pointing to a man dressed as a Steampunk airship captain. “Look at him! His watch, his goggles.” These are the things that denote his class and character more than his pants and shirt, Campeau continues. “With those, people look at you and say, ‘Ah! I know what he is.’”

Campeau himself is a mid-transition vampire to Steampunk LARPer. The dental acrylic fangs go with his Vampire character. The fitted black vest and driver cap is more Steampunk. The slightly flowy button-up shirt underneath works with both. “The fangs cost me a pretty penny,” he says, “but I wanted them.”

For good, cheap clothing, Campeau advocates Value Village. An audience member suggests the Civic Theater’s yearly costume sale. Even panelist Ruth Frey, who is a total geek for historically accurate clothing (which is pretty much always expensive), has found ways to cut corners. “If you can develop a skill,” she says, “There’s this wonderful thing called ‘bartering.’”

“Yes! Yes!” Campeau is pleased she mentioned this.

More important than even accessories, though, is attitude. “It’s not just about costuming,” Campeau tells the assemblage, “it’s about creating a character across the LARP.” Campeau draws the room’s attention (in case we missed it) to his affected mannerisms and “demanding presence.” That says vampire as much as the fangs do. “Forget what I’m wearing,” he says. “You notice me.”

The rest of the room, dying the whole time to tell their own stories of cunning and thrift, quickly fractures into an exhuberant bubbling over of cheap tricks for LARPing.

Before the session devolves into shit-talking and a giddy fanboy squall of arguments — chain mail: aluminum vs. titanium, for example — Campeau is able to say one last truly cogent thing: “Imagination will lead you anywhere in LARP. Don’t be self-conscious. Self-consciousness destroys imagination.”

Down the hall at “Where to Place Your Planet,” imagination has rules. MSNBC’s Alan Boyle, novelist James Glass and physicist Mike McWatters are in complete geek-out mode over the pure science of planetary creation, motion and destruction.
There are clouds of debris all over the universe full of the kinds of things that become planets but also made of the organic molecules that allow for life. “My God,” Glass says, “we find everything but DNA in those interstellar clouds.”

And we’re finding, more and more, Boyle says, planetary systems that don’t behave at all like ours do. “Hot Jupiters and hot Earths circling red dwarf stars probably can’t support life,” he says, “but their moons could.”

Glass cuts in: “Epsilon Eridami has two asteroid belts. We’re seeing planets dodging through them! There’s all sorts of weird celestial mechanics.”

Paying attention to the latest science, Glass notes, is actually a great way to get ideas for the most bizarre (but still plausible) forms of life. Because of the ways and technologies by which we observe the universe, all we really see are the oddball systems. “We’re seeing all the exceptions.”

Eventually the discussion spins to specifics. “In order to have life, you’re going to need a solvent,” McWatters said. Water is ours, but there are others. “Research liquid methane, ammonia.”

Glass cuts in: “On Titan, well below the surface, we think we’re finding entire oceans and lakes of methane. There could be life in these methane seas. All you need is heat.”

Glass seems particularly fond of the idea of methane, which is a relatively low energy source, “so your creatures would be very slow and lethargic.” He describes a species of balloon-like creature that floats in an ammonia atmosphere in one of his stories.

Of course, the weird doesn’t begin where our atmosphere ends. There are plenty of odd things on Earth even, like cave-dwelling “sulfur eater” bacteria found across the U.S., in Mexico and central and Eastern Europe.

“We have strange enough organisms on this planet,” McWatters says. “Imagine if they evolved to be macrobiotic.”

SpoCon is a hearty mash of all realms of geekery — filmmaking, videogaming, board gaming, role-playing, anime, sci-fi and fantasy writing, Filking (sci-fi/fantasy music-making, to risk oversimplification) and straight panels on science (“NASA and the Future of the Space Program”) and technology (“The Bionic Contact Lens”). More than any one thing, SpoCon 2009 is a crystal palace of imagination.

At its debutante ball of sorts, “The Masquerade,” the imaginative process — costuming, character building, the ironic interplay between reality and fantasy — is on display.

Onstage in a three-quarter-full Magnuson Theatre (which for sheer Viking-ness and British spelling of theater, toh-tally sounds like a World of Warcraft place name), a procession of flamboyant characters in mostly hand-made costumes takes turns regaling the crowd.

Two young kids act out a scene they’d written based on The Legend of Zelda. Another, Matthew Steiner, takes questions as “the 60 Dollar Man.” A woman named Sola takes the Ice Queen character from Chronicles of Narnia and gave her an Ottoman bellydancer flair.

By far the audience favorite, Brad Steiner plays OBGYN Kenobi. His “use the Forceps” is a groaning scream of a one-liner.
It is ballsy and often awkward, but completely exuberant. Like the entire weekend, the masquerade has an odd kind of energy, as though something done for years behind closed doors is pushing its way into the light.

The rise of the geek has happened all over the country and though SpoCon still feels fringe for the area, it also feels like the kind of thing that could, given a few more iterations, have the mainstream appeal of Robert Downey Jr. in Ironman.