Mishalak

From about 1999 until 2014 I was a member of DASFA. With three years to look back on I am overall happy that I left.

Making any group work can be like pushing a rope uphill. The trouble with special interests groups (as opposed to groups like old line churches or rotary clubs with a more general membership) is that they often attract extreme personalities. A club for rose lovers is a grand idea, but the people who are going to be members are probably people who have the fewest other social outlets, want to use the club as a way to promote their rose business, have the loudest opinions, and the like. A person who has a couple roses and knows quite a bit about them is not going to show up to meetings. Even the otherwise well rounded and stable rose fancier is likely to drop out because hanging with the users and the extremists is not going to be fun.

So it is with science fiction/fantasy clubs. In the modern era due to competition from online resources, the lack of inexpensive meeting space, and lack of free time on the part of potential members they are much more in danger of dying out. New members are turned off by the old guard who are 50% people who have no other social outlet because they are such assholes that no other group will take. There are definitely some good people who I like on an individual basis in the club and who I see at other events, others who I like well enough but we do not have much to socialize over, and then a small group of people I cannot stand.

Yes, I would liked to have been a member of an ongoing club. The thing is that to make that happen I would have needed to be a bad guy who either worked with reforming behavior or threw out troublesome members. That was not what I wanted to do and I think even the members I like would not have gone along with or supported that kind of plan. I think it is healthier for me to not be a member of a somewhat more general group of secular/agnostics/atheists/humanists. There are still people I do not get along with, but there is a general enough attraction to the group that I can make plenty of friends.

I would love to write about my wonderful experience at Bubonicon this past weekend, but I think I do not have the required time while still awake. As is usual for lit-fandom conventions I stayed up to 1am and woke up around 7am each day due to the force of my usual habits. As an extrovert I am absolutely happy and ready to keep going for days since I have been hosed down with social contact and compliments over four days so at this moment I feel like I could write a book or become an astronaut if I just buckled down to it. In reality I am going to go to bed no later than 21:00 mountain daylight time because I know intellectually that I need to make up my sleep deficit. I hope that I will still be ready to take on the universe tomorrow morning so that I may clean my house to geek company standards (somewhat lower than judgmental parents), go out to get a few important school books, and finally write up my experiences.