The thing about Norwescon is that it’s crazy about dragons. There are dragon mascots and dragon henna tattoo booths and people with dragons on their clothing and dragons on my press pass. An artist here at the convention is “known for his drawings of dragons.” There’s a large metallic dragon in the front lobby, and other dragons spread throughout the hotel. I don’t know exactly why this is, except for the fact that dragons are awesome.

So it turns out that filk does not, in fact, stand for Fiction I’d Like To Keep. It’s science fiction and fantasy fan music. I learned this at the Filk 101 seminar I just attended. People who sing filk are officially known as filkers. When you sing filk, you are filking. I couldn’t stop thinking of felching through the meeting, but I held my attention long enough to learn what to do when one of your fellow filkers fumbles a falsetto, or otherwise sings poorly. If you filk with someone who sings off-key and you can’t stand it—“I’m a classically trained singer and I have absolute pitch, so it’s like fingernails on a chalkboard to me,” one attendee said—here’s what you do: go to the bathroom when the bad filker is filking.

It turns out, though, that some bad filkers are good filk songwriters! One of the “cornerstones of the East Coast filking community” has a grating pitch to her voice, but she’s a great filk songwriter.

That settled, I headed down to a discussion about Second Life.

I have nothing to say about Second Life.

That is all for now.