Apologies to those who asked me personally how the panel went and didn't get a response, Friday really wore me out and I was dragging along for most of yesterday. Today I'm still pretty tired and a teensy bit cranky, so I probably won't go super in-depth about every little thing that happened during the panel; you may want to give me a few days if you need more details. If you want to know what it was about, click here. No, it wasn't filmed. I may put the slides on Slideshare later on, haven't decided. I'm looking for a new job right now, I really don't want employers to Google me and see this slideshow.
So first of all, presenting a panel at 11pm sucks. It seriously, honestly sucks. At 9:30 I was tired, sick to my stomach and dizzy, and seriously wanted to go home. I can see why there aren't many good panels at that time, who the hell wants to present that late if they don't need to?
Around 10:15 or so I headed over to the panel room to wait outside, and to my surprise, people were actually lining up ahead of time! To be clear, I've never seen this happen. Yes, my first panel had a line out the door after it had started because we reached capacity, but I've never seen a line before the room clear, so I consider this a pretty big milestone. And this line was pretty significant. If you're familiar with the layout of the 3rd floor, this panel was in 309, and the line went all the way to the bathroom. Might've even passed that, didn't actually check.
Anyway, as people were streaming in I decided to set the mood by playing The Internet Is For Porn, which people sang along to, and it was awesome. I had a whole playlist of songs about sex, like Show Me How You Burlesque from the movie Burlesque, and March of the Hookers by my new favorite band, Blair Crimmins and the Hookers (check them out, they're awesome!). Didn't go over as well, but got me plenty pumped to talk about sexy stuff!
The presentation itself seemed relatively well-received. I started off with a fairly full room, there had to be at least 50 people in there easily. Of course, some people left, but that happens. Unfortunately, I couldn't use my usual format of having people participate in the discussion from their seats, because we were right next to the karaoke room, people had to come up to the microphone to talk. Not cool, really threw off the dynamic.
How did I do? Eh . . . I said "um" a lot, blanked out a few times, and probably could've either sat with better posture or actually stood up. But I managed to throw in a few jokes, like when I explained that the porn debate, even between sex positive feminists and sex negative feminists, is a "sticky issue." Some of my slides got a good laugh as well. So I'm still not a great panelist, but I'm getting better with experience.
