Toys that should not exist

Remember Baby Alive? It was this doll that was made in the late 1970s or early 1980s; it ate and pooped. You could change its diaper. It is possible that it even got a diaper rash. I was kind of fascinated by this doll, though my mother (sensibly enough) reacted to my tentative interest by saying something along the lines of, "Are you INSANE? Why on EARTH would anyone want to change poopy diapers unless they were at least getting a real baby out of the deal?"

So today I ran across a link to Barbie and her pet dog, Tanner. You can feed Tanner dog biscuits! And then he poops them out. And Barbie can clean them up with the pooper-scooper. And then you can feed them to him again!

I'm going back and forth between thinking that this is the most appalling thing ever marketed to children and thinking that Kiera and Molly would find this toy screamingly funny. Also, this seems like a Barbie with potential for cross-gender appeal.

Diversicon report

I arrived on Saturday just in time for my first panel, on Cost. We talked about stories that handle cost well (I mentioned Scott Lynch's novel again) and that don't really, and whether there are any sorts of stories that don't require cost (I suggested that trickster stories could get away without cost some of the time, since avoiding the cost can sometimes be the whole point of the scam). For some reason, the Flying Spaghetti Monster came up as we were waiting for an audience to arrive, and I had the opportunity to share the noodly goodness with still more people in fandom. I'm thinking that maybe for some future con I will suggest a programming item on the FSM; for one thing, the people you'll find at cons would be fabulous potential contributors to the FSM's think tank ("a think tank devoted to proving our a priori assumption that He exists using whatever specious arguments and circular logic available to do so.")

(I also tried to explain the Eight I'd Rather You Didn'ts, rather unsuccessfully. They're available on Wikipedia if you're curious. My favorite is #5: "I'd Really Rather You Didn't Challenge The Bigoted, Misogynist, Hateful Ideas Of Others On An Empty Stomach. Eat, Then Go After The Bastard.")

My second panel was on Post-Human Economics, and as predicted, I really didn't have much to add. The next panel, "Whom Will We Hate," was really pretty interesting. Someone brought up the Geek Hierarchy Flowchart, and one of the audience members, a woman named Rachel Kronick, explained and then defended Furries. It was kind of fascinating, because I swear I could see her thinking, should I mention here that I'm not a Furry? Does that make me a hypocrite? Oh, what the hell, I'm mentioning it. She commented that when she's defended Furries in the past, someone nearly always says, "if I have to live in a world where I'm not allowed to hate Furries, I don't even want to LIVE." She was interesting, articulate, and funny, and I was pleased to see that she was on both my Sunday panels.

On Sunday, Lyda Morehouse, Rachel and I were on two back-to-back panels in the same room. According to the schedule, we were supposed to talk about GLBT characters in SF starting at 10 a.m., and then at 11 we were supposed to change the subject and talk about religion in SF for another hour. Rachel was late to the first panel; Lyda invited Ellen Kuhfeld up to join the panel since she watches Anime and could comment on it. Neither Lyda nor I watches a whole lot of TV; we both watch Battlestar Galactica (and are up to about the same point, midway through season 2) and we both groused about the distinct lack of GLBT characters in the show. Lyda read (or at least started) every single paperback original SF novel that was published last year (she was a judge for the Philip K. Dick award) and apparently the GLBT characters were few and far between there, as well. Someone commented that if G, L, and B characters were rare, the T characters were completely invisible. Rachel had some DVDs of trans-themed movies, some of which looked rather fascinating; she passed those around, and I wrote down titles, which I don't have handy.

I also got to participate in a "mass autographing," which was actually very small: me, Phillys Ann Karr, Bryan Thao Worra, and Kelly Link. A couple of people stopped by and had us sign programs, and I got to sign two copies of my books. I hadn't met Bryan before: he's funny and pleasant and a fine person to be stuck sitting next to for an hour.

Finally, I got to meet muneraven and tambyrd, which was really fun.