These, in the late afternoon, both went well. My camera worked properly and I was awake.
"Foundational Fantasy You Should Read": pre-con conversations with the other panelists had convinced me that introductory remarks on Dunsany and Peake would be useful, and also some guide into Tolkien's obscurer gems, for which I resurrected The Forgotten Women of Middle-earth. Others recommended some authors I could really do without, but I kept silent about that. We talked a little about the forging of "fantasy" as a publishing genre in the 1960s, and my definition of "foundational" was "from before then," but some of the audience members defined it as anything from before their personal time, so we also got in UKL and DWJ.
"Writing Fantasy in Real Worlds": I'd originally signed up for this because I had things to say on this subject, but finding myself moderator of a panel with five pretty high-powered pro authors on it, including Andrea Hairston and Sarah Pinsker, whose work B. knew even if I didn't, I figured I'd better just pose the questions and let them talk. They gave good value, talking with detail but not from a self-promotional angle about what they've done with these settings, how, and why (notably Wole Talabi's story about rescuing stolen African treasures from the British Museum); and they all also responded with enthusiasm when I asked them to name such work by other authors they'd recommend. Both that and their own work were both more recent and more multicultural than my own knowledge of the subject, so leaving it to them was for the best.
After dinner, about an hour into the Masquerade I turned that on, to find some unskilled belly dancers flouncing around to some really irritating music. This going on for several minutes and showing no signs of ceasing, I turned the feed off.
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