totient | Entries tagged with worldcon

After much deliberation I have finally decided on my first place vote for the site of the 75th World Science Fiction Convention: Minneapolis in '73.

A first place vote for a bid which has not filed papers followed by second and subsequent preferences is exactly equivalent in result to a vote for the subsequent preferences starting from first place instead of second, except that the first place vote is reported in the official voting records. I like to vote this way because I think it encourages hoax bidders to see their names in lights, and also because it gets me out of telling my friends on the various serious bids who I voted for.

The problem: I don't know who'll be hosting hoax bid parties at Sasquan and I'm not attending in person so I can't reward the party-throwers immediately. But it's pretty common for the MPLS73 folks to throw parties at Worldcons, and Minneapolis is one of the small handful of cities with nonstop air service to Spokane which might make that even more likely. I suspect that Chris Garcia will also be throwing a Boston Christmas bid party, but that one sounds a little bit too real.

Crossposts: http://totient.livejournal.com/162527.html

Some time ago I suggested that the correct Hugo voting strategy was to read (at least some of) all of the nominees in each category regardless of slate, and also read the most promising entries in the Nebula and Locus award shortlists as proxies for which work was squeezed off the Hugo nominees list by Puppy nominators. Having done that, any work not actually on the Hugo ballot is replaced by "No Award".

I've only just started applying this strategy to my own selections, but I can already say that I'll be voting "No Award" first for Best Novel. Sorry, Ann Leckie, I'm sure you were deserving of the Hugo you won last year but Jeff Vandermeer outdid you this time.

Crossposts: http://totient.livejournal.com/161738.html

We sure are seeing the difference between a European Worldcon and a US one this weekend.

Crossposts: http://totient.livejournal.com/161019.html

Every convention that uses function space is paying for that function space somehow, even if it doesn't appear in their budget anywhere. They can do this in several ways:

Build the cost into the hotel room rates (as Arisia does). Typically 30% of the room rate counts towards function space cost.

Build the cost into the catering budget (as most hotel weddings do). Typically 50% of catering expenses count towards function space cost.

Build the cost into tax revenue from conventiongoers (as some cultural festivals held in government owned facilities do). Amounts here are a little opaque.

Build the cost into associated revenue from attendees and/or payments from captive contractors. Amounts here are completely opaque.

Pay cash (as most Worldcons do). The least opaque option.

In the US we tend to prefer the hotel rate solution, because it is effectively sliding scale. Those less well off can share rooms or stay in cheaper offsite lodging that's not supporting the cost of function space. Regionals especially prefer this because so many of their attendees have the option of commuting, so the hotel room is really a convenience tax. In fact we like this answer so much that it's not unusual to raise the rates even more and have the hotel provide a cash payment to the convention. Albacon, for instance, for years got $10 per room night from the hotel. Overseas, smaller hotels and different economic patterns make this less desirable or effective.

Running a convention in function space is a financial risk, both to the convention and to the facility. The convention doesn't know what its income will be and risks falling short, and sometimes doesn't know how much space it will need either and risks overbuying. The facility for its part doesn't know how much associated food-and-beverage, parking, wifi, etc business it will do, or how much hotel-room or sales-tax supporting revenue there will be. The convention and the facility will each want the other to assume the risk. Of course each party has a different view of how much risk there is, which plays into the negotiations. And some negotiators are better at getting their partners to assume risk, or sometimes at hiding how much they are getting their partners to assume.

If you have ever worked in theatre, you will know that Disney's negotiators are *excellent* at getting their contract partners to assume risk. Cue ominous music...

So let's look at the three bids and what their function space is going to cost them.

( Helsinki )

( Spokane )

( Orlando )

Crossposts: http://totient.livejournal.com/156939.html

I've posted here about the relative merits of Orlando and Spokane's function space. That was before Helsinki entered the race. How does Helsinki stack up?

Helsinki is using the convention center, which has an attached hotel, a bunch of small to medium sized meeting rooms, way too much exhibit space, and a couple of nice large auditoriums suitable for the Hugos.

Like most hotels in Europe, the hotel attached to the Helsinki CC is too small -- only 244 rooms. We do have the whole thing, which is nice, at reasonable rates, and as in Glasgow it is an easy transit ride to a lot more hotel rooms. Unlike in Glasgow the transit will be free.

The meeting rooms are on three levels, which is good as it cuts down on walking, and they're a mix: some rooms that split up (which is handy) and some that don't (which makes for better sound isolation), some that are right on a central foyer and some that are more hidden, some little ones and some big ones. The entrance to the hotel is also right on the foyer rather than off to one side, which means those rooms are right there. The particular sizes of the rooms are an unusually good fit for a SF convention. The arrangement of rooms and the different sizes available mean this is true for conventions ranging from 2000 attendees up to 5000. The airwall vs non-airwall room configurations (and resulting room sizes) are similar to those of the Westin Waterfront in Boston, which is happily home to both 1200-person Boskones and 3800-person Arisias, without either con finding the space terribly inappropriate.

Behind the meeting rooms are some big exhibit halls. Too big, as usual, but the convention center will rent us any fraction of one we like and charge us only for what we use. Unlike many other convention centers the exhibit halls are *not* stacked with the program rooms, so the exhibits aren't isolated from the rest of the convention. A convention with a lot of exhibits would entail a lot of walking in this convention center but because we'd only use a little bit of exhibit space, we won't have that problem.

One thing you will often hear me complaining about is the unsuitability of many facilities for hosting the Hugos. These days 60% of the attendees go to the Hugo ceremony so you need a great big room. But the Hugos are the only thing that fills the room, and it takes a long time to set up and tear down and rehearse for, so many Worldcons wind up with a big dark spot in the middle of the convention that everyone has to walk past to get from one program room to another. The room itself is expensive and mostly a wasted resource even or perhaps even especially if you put the Masquerade in there too. Helsinki addresses this in several ways. Unusually, we only pay for the nights we're actually using the room. Also unusually, although we pay for tech from the CC, we *don't* pay for the time it takes to set up and tear down the tech, which means we save money compared to some fan-run tech setups. There are two possible rooms, both located where their darkness will go unnoticed during the rest of the con, and if the con is big enough to need the larger one for the Hugos but the smaller one still fits the Masquerade we can do that without paying extra.

Convention centers are expensive and this one is no exception. The fact that we only pay for the space we use means that the facilities cost per attendee is much more predictable even though we don't know how big the convention will be. I put together a spreadsheet and it looks like the cost of function space and tech comes out to between $80 and $90 per member, which is a little on the high side for a Worldcon but not completely off the scale. What's unusual is that this number holds whether the con is 2000 people or 5000. Above 5500 or so things stop fitting so neatly (as they would in the Westin Waterfront, too) and it gets more expensive to fit the con in to the space. It's hard to imagine that Helsinki could really be bigger than Noreascon 4. If it is, though, there are probably enough other amortized fixed expenses that we can afford to spend $100 per member on space instead of $85.

Crossposts: http://totient.livejournal.com/156730.html

So you may have noticed a culture war in SF fandom. I have not been surprised to see an echo chamber forming at NESFA; Rene was a friend of theirs. (He was and is a friend of mine too, but it's easier to circle the wagons than it is to realize that your instinct to do so is the very reason why you must not.) But I have wondered at how all the women there have gone along with this. I got a little bit of a clue last weekend when a more recent female NESFA member didn't go along -- and remember that for NESFA "recent" is anyone who joined in this century. But the real clue is in the second to last paragraph of this post:

Keeping [the community] definition narrow and making sure it discourages newcomers also guarantees that you'll keep a staunch set of female allies. For those of us who had to mortgage significant parts of our identities at the door, it's hard not to see the new generation of geek girls as interlopers, getting a free ride where we had to laboriously claw our way in. When you're part of an underrepresented group, it's easy to fall prey to a reductive fallacy that there's only room for one way to be female (or Black, or disabled, or queer, or...) in geek culture, and anyone who approaches that identity from a different angle threatens your claim to it--not so different from geek culture's own struggle to maintain a discrete identity as our iconography and media bleed their way into the mainstream. If those people can be geeks, what will be left for me? And if the tent is that big, what, ultimately, is membership worth?

If you're keeping a culture wars reading list, this is worth adding to it. For me, it's another piece in a larger puzzle: what, if anything, do I want to do about the culture of conventions like Worldcon? Should I help push it kicking and screaming across the divide, or let it fade into irrelevance?

Crossposts: http://totient.livejournal.com/154207.html

Day 8 by one reckoning, and the first supernumerary day by the other. Either way, the last day of daily updates.

At some point last night, some food functions people dropped off an enormous pile of food, explaining that it was breakfast for the Art Show staff. It was vastly too much food for the five or so people we were expecting, and it was all crap anyway, so we sent it back. This morning I got downstairs for my 8am call to find that it (and some less-unhealthy stuff) had been set back up overnight, squarely in the way of where we were going to need to work, with the explanation that it was breakfast for the entire staff. Kerry had gotten it moved to a less dumb place in the room but was irked that no one had asked or indeed even mentioned that this was going to happen. And of course none of the staff had any idea it was coming, so we'd all had breakfast before coming downstairs. Of the well over 100 pounds of food we managed to consume probably a quart of orange juice before the food services people decided that breakfast time was over and that they needed the coolers and such to go on a truck. This pretty much typifies communication at this Worldcon. There aren't any cons in Chicago that need a staff of more than 50, and indeed few of the home cons of anyone working on Chicon 7 are that large. People, and especially upper management, expect information to propagate by osmosis, because that's how it works when you have a staff of no more than 50. But it's not how it works for a Worldcon, and Arisia would do well to check that we're being explicit enough in our communication as we grow.

We were planned to get four carpenters and two electricians at 8:00. In fact we got two of each. One of the carps was totally awesome, better even than the setup carps. The other was inefficient and surly. So I put the awesome one on taking down spines since that requires interacting with volunteers a lot, and then on taking electrical boxes off of helicopter arms since that's done to only some of the arms, and then on disassembling the electrical trees since there's a right way and a wrong way. The other guy got to take A-frames apart. I set the electricians to taking down lightbulbs and disassembling the rear end cap light fixtures, and gave them helpers to put the lightbulbs in boxes. They unplugged the helicopter arms unbidden, but took off without unplugging the electrical trees or the front endcap fixtures. I waited a while for them to come back in case they were on break but they never did so I just had volunteers do that so we could get the spines down. Not that I really thought they were on break after only half an hour of work.

I had plenty of volunteers to sort pipe and kee klamps, and the union folks stuck around for a little while to put electrical trees in the coffin and a few other things -- I think they hadn't hit their minimum, and even if they had the one carpenter was awesome enough and my volunteers tired enough that it'd have been worth paying him. By 10:00 everything from the Art Show was ready to go and I sent everyone but one volunteer off to help with other things, the rest of logistics now being behind two eight balls instead of only one. But that's another story.

Around this time some folks from the show after us came in to see if they could drop off some fastfolds. I told them fine, as it wasn't in the way and anyway I was pretty sure our teamsters were going to gaily ignore our noon deadline just as our electricians had gaily ignored our circuit game earlier, so I might as well let them ignore the pickup time too. This progressed immediately to setting up the fastfolds, which they started to do right in front of my pallets where the teamsters would have to drive their forklift to get them out of the room. But they were willing to move over and set up not in front of the pallets when I insisted, even knowing as I'm sure they did that there was no way the teamsters were going to be there on time, being as how they shared with the setup electricians a total freedom from arbitrary hotel rules.

Kim from Logistics and I spent another hour or 90 minutes putting some last minute treasury boxes on the pallets, and tie strapping and pallet wrapping everything, and putting a few more pieces of paperwork together. At 11:30, just as I was finishing the last of the paperwork, a couple of teamsters came in, looked around approvingly, and said they'd be back at 12:30. I headed upstairs and got lunch with Eugene and Crystal and Lucky, and then Crystal and Lucky headed for the airport and Eugene and I went upstairs to grab the last of our stuff from the room. We got down and checked out at 12:58 on a 1:00 late checkout and settled the bill. I'd joined Hyatt Gold Passport on this trip to get a week worth of free wifi and sure enough there was no charge for internet access on the bill. I put my suitcase in the back check that the hotel had set up on the skybridge and spent most of the next couple of hours hanging out in the lobby, punctuated by checking to see if the teamsters had moved anything in the Art Show. I'm not really sure why I bothered as I knew the con had dragooned the teamsters to help them load their truck, but it made me feel better to see that the incoming group, despite now legitimately having the space, had not managed to hide my pallets behind anything especially large.

I love the move-in/move-out days of a convention. I'm often working, often hard, but I also often have time for great conversations, and so do the people I want to have conversations with. Besides Eugene and Caycee, I had a long conversation with Dave Cantor. He's the second person in the last month to try to convince me to join MCFI, and I laid out what I think the problem with MCFI is: Mark and Priscilla Olson. (Priscilla, if you're reading this, the backstory of why I think you are the problem is in an unlocked post about six years ago, but I'm writing this on an airplane so I'm not able to go find the link.) I don't think MCFI is really going to be able to dilute Mark and Priscilla away. There's some chance a new member of MCFI might piss them off enough that they stormed off in a huff the way they have done with Boskone, but I don't think I am that new member, and I don't think that MCFI is likely to offer membership to someone like Crystal who is. We also chatted about a bunch of other things and I have a lot of food for thought, particularly as to whether it is a good idea to sign up for things -- like taking on the title of assistant Art Show director at Chicon -- that I can only give partial attention to. I did this with Cashier in Montreal, really, in that I counted on my staff and the Treasurer to handle the last bank run. Perhaps it is better to agree only to the things I can follow all the way through on, even if I think having part of my attention would be better than having all of the alternative. (This was certainly true for assistant ASD, the alternative being leaving the position empty.)

I didn't really have much to do after Dave went off to get ready for dinner with his Chicago cousins, but I ran downstairs to check on the Art Show one more time. Most of the stuff was out of the room, including two of the pallets. A couple of teamsters were trying and failing to get one of those into the freight elevator on a motorized pallet jack, and nearly managed to tip it over trying. Really? This is not rocket science. They eventually gave up and went in search of a manual jack. Unimpressed as I was, there was only one useful thing for me to do and that was get the hell out of the way, so I headed out to the airport. I got there a few minutes before checked-baggage closing time for my flight, so that made me less nervous even though I'd known it was going to be delayed. Having left behind some things that came out to Chicago with me, my bag was down to 48 pounds from 49.8, so it got another HEAVY tag. There's a reasonably good non-chain greek restaurant airside at MDW so I had a little bit of dinner, and a bit of computer time too. In the end the flight took off a little more than two hours late, and my seatmate offered me a free drink coupon. And on that note I think I'm going to close my Worldcon blog experiment and finish my drink.

Day 7, or 5. This is beginning to sound like the "making of" movie on the extras DVD for Magnolia.

You may have noticed that I have not been getting a huge amount of sleep this weekend. It hasn't ever been less than five hours, but it has pretty often not been much more. So when I say I slept in this morning, I mean that after getting to sleep at 3, I didn't get up until after 10:00, the next thing on my schedule being the 11:00-12:00 window in between when corwin and Cecilia would be up and dressed, and when they had to check out the suite. After a quick shower and some coffee I headed down to logistics and borrowed a hand truck, promising to have it back to them by noon when they had a big push, and knocked on the door of the suite at 10:59. We managed to get two loads of leftovers onto one cart and I gingerly wheeled it through all of the hallways, elevators, and ramps between the suite high in one tower, and the food functions prep suite at the top of the other.

Entering the final elevator I managed to topple a bunch of supplies over but there was a food functions volunteer with an empty cart heading that way so we put a bunch of stuff on it. Of course, as I'd have known if I'd chanced across a copy of that morning's newsletter, the prep suite was not actually where things needed to go; it was really headed for a function room near the Art Show, two elevator rides away from where I wound up. Still, I got logistics' cart back to them in time.

I had expected that the next thing that would happen is that when the Art Show closed at three, the volunteers would suddenly have a lot of work to do including packing up mail-in art, taking down and sorting and packing up pegboard, and preparing bins and totes and crates for shipment back to Boston. But two things didn't really work how I expected. One, at the last minute insistence of the hotel's captive decorator, the pegboard panels had been put up by union labor. This was in some sense the payback for being allowed to pair volunteer labor with their carpenters, or perhaps for the particular carpenters they sent us being too efficient. The other thing was that enough art sold during the weekend, and enough artists were granted permission to check out before the show was technically closed, that by noon the show was looking like a picked-over yard sale and so the Art Show staff didn't wait to start packing up mail-in art. So there was no into-the-night full court press. But there was plenty of get-ahead work for me to do. After hauling up the carts from their storage place and finding a few missing mail-in art boxes, I packed up clips and hooks, and sorted extension cords to go to their proper owners, and coordinated with Filthy Pierre about his flyer racks and with Treasury about a bunch of equipment that's going to San Antonio by way of Boston because oddly enough it turns out to be cheaper that way. I put address tags on things, and on pieces of things so that when they came together they'd be labeled. I put out empty boxes for the light bulbs, and loaded the remaining spare bulbs back into the lightbulb cart. I made some plans for where all the light fixtures would be packed. And I'm sure there are a bunch of little tasks I'm forgetting here.

But before I did any of these things, I tried to salvage the idea of sorting pegboard to go back to where it actually belonged. When the peg had gone up, we'd started by using all the NESFA peg, and then added Arisia peg to bring it up to the amount we needed. So that meant that three of the spines were mostly NESFA, and one was mixed, and the last two were mostly Arisia. But we hadn't started with peg sorted by color. So in order to get the panels to match, we'd shuffled pegboard sandwiches around, and that meant all of the spines were at least a little mixed. We'd also shuffled sandwiches to cope with broken or misbuilt sandwiches. And the sandwich assembly line wasn't strictly first-in, first-out so there were a few mixed sandwiches too.

Since I couldn't just take all the peg down on Monday and sort it properly, I came up with a plan to tag the peg that was on the wrong spines and move it to the right ones. Then I could preload the carts and pallets with appropriate leftover peg (broken sandwiches meant there was some NESFA peg that didn't actually go up), and we could move the incorrect peg, and shuffle things around to make the peg fit in the carts, and it'd all miraculously work out. But I had visions of teardown going over on time, so I decided it'd be better to get as close as I could and fix it in Boston. I might have to move fifty pieces of pegboard between Arisia and NESFA, but that will fit in a car.

So in the end I filled each of the Arisia carts and NESFA flats with enough pegboard that when one spine worth was added to each, they'd at least contain the right number of pieces. The Arisia carts got all Arisia leftovers, and got put next to the two mostly-Arisia spines and the mixed spine. The NESFA carts got mostly but not entirely NESFA leftovers, and got put next to the three mostly-NESFA spines. This means about 85% of the peg will wind up in the right place. Not great, but we can fix it at leisure and without having to pay usurious labor markups to the decorator.

In the end I puttered around in the Art Show until after nine, with plenty of breaks along the way, and then I got an invitation to a thing that I thought was going to be dinner. I got there having dropped off my bag in my room and saw lots of drinks and not much food, and realized, of course, this was not going to be dinner. So I ran downstairs for a quick bite and got back to find that it wasn't a party either. Instead it was a bunch of next-generation fans from all over the world, all of whom share a sense of having been locked out of the halls of power, looking for some kind of purpose, and conducting a strange kind of thing that looked something like the Business Meeting. I'm not sure what they were really trying to accomplish, or how they chose the format they were using, or who put them up to it, or whether many of them thought what they were doing was really productive. In addition to a purpose they're looking for a name, the main issue being that all the ones that react to the term "SMOF" have some aspect of secrecy bound up in them, and one of the things they want to accomplish is to make conrunning more transparent. At the same time they don't want to be invaded by certain former Worldcon chairs, and so the gathering tonight was, in fact, an invite only affair, and enough of a secret that I feel I'd be betraying a trust to give any more details. Surreal. But I think there is building momentum to drag Worldcon towards an actual community and away from its current status as an all-welcoming, Geek-Social-Fallacy-infected, collection of misfits. Expect more on this as soon as the young fen figure out how they plan to go about it.

Day, um. 6, or 4. They have started to blur together.

This was Arisia party night, and also Art Show auction day. Got up in the morning and printed up some party flyers with the room numbers and put them on all of the message boards. Started to gather up party material and clean up the room, and delegated a bunch of party tasks to all of my fantastic helpers. Then I got a text that Circlet Press was offering the use of their suite. Awesome! And scary, because the last time that happened, at LAcon, we suddenly had to go buy a lot more groceries and dragoon people into party duty and all in all it only worked because we had a dozen people available to staff the party. But this is a smaller suite than that, and the newsletter had not gone to press with the room number yet, and it would have the side-effect of making there be a place for my still somewhat ill roommate to hide if he needed it (which, happily, he turned out not to). So after some dithering I accepted the offer, and sent off a bunch of texts to everyone affected. All this happening just as Art Show was getting busy was less than ideal and I bet Kerry thinks I am goldbricking. But I was able to help with closing bids, and a little with data entry.

By the time I actually made it up to the party suite it was nearly ready to go, and we opened the doors a few minutes early. At the very beginning the crowds came and went quickly, and the oscillation between super-crowded and nearly empty reminded me of a pulsejet. But things smoothed out and for the rest of the evening we had a great buzz going on without being intimidating. At any given time we typically had two and a half people working, so I sat the desk and served booze and sold memberships, and other people put out food and talked up the con, and we didn't bother with a door dragon.

The layout of this particular suite made running a party easier than it would have been in a guest room, and we had the right amount of food. Thanks especially to the Commonwealth party who gave us all the beverages we needed. No thanks to whoever "helpfully" donated the great big tote of useless crap just as we opened so that they wouldn't have to haul it to the dead dog themselves. I should have told them to haul it down there themselves.

We had a weird rush of memberships right around midnight. At one point we had a line to register! The Square app was great and people were impressed with how good their signatures looked on my iPad with the stylus. In the end we sold 27 memberships.

The plan had been to stay open until 2. But the party was going strong and the room hosts seemed OK with it so we wound up closing the doors to new partiers around 2:30, and didn't finish cleaning up and kicking people out until nearly 3. Good thing Monday isn't an early morning for me.

Day 5, or 3. Today's task was to cope with the fact that the room which the art show was assigned for storing equipment between Thursday and Monday, in fact was not available after midnight Saturday, a fact that we had not realized until after we had put our stuff in it. Plan A according to facilities was to use another function room in another part of the hotel. But the other room was... well, it's not just that it was the furthest possible function room from the one we had. It's that the two function rooms are the furthest apart from each other that it is possible for function rooms to be in this hotel. And then we'd have had to reverse 90% of that distance to return the equipment to the art show. But there was a much better option. So I confirmed the situation with facilities, and made sure there was room in the other option, and cleared it with the other users of that space, and made sure that logistics was on board with doing the actual move.

That done I popped up a map on my iPad and asked it how to get to the Museum of Science and Industry. The answer is that there is an express bus that runs door to door every ten minutes and that the next one was about to arrive. So I hopped on it and spent a lovely afternoon walking all around the place. It has been a very long time since I'd been to exactly that sort of museum (rather than a museum of one or the other) and this one was very impressive. They have a bunch of significant train stuff and I stood in the cabin of the 999 and also some other interesting trains. They have an enormous model train set with some fun Easter eggs and an incredible level of detail. The set is fully signalized just like a real train setup, with red yellow and green lights at the start of each section of track and automatic throttling of the engines. They have crossing gates that blink and go up and down when a train comes. They have an HO model of the entire Loop plus each adjacent block outside it including every building, good enough that you would not easily be able to tell the difference between a cell phone pic taken from the balcony and one of the real thing taken from an airplane.

Not everything at the museum is brilliant. Skip the historical main street recreation, especially if you have seen the much better ones at the Henry Ford or the House on the Rock. And there were a few other exhibits that didn't really stand up. But there was a great exhibit of science fiction and another of science fictional things about to become reality, and the level of detail on the u-boat is fantastic, and the aircraft include some you won't see anywhere else. The weather exhibit was really neat. And there were a few random things here and there that really tickled my fancy.

My bus foo on the way back was not as good as it was on the way there, so I managed to exactly miss the Carl Brandon Society awards. But there was a lovely Indian food dinner, and some good party hopping and a Japanese tea ceremony, and I presupported Helsinki. Eemeli seems a little dazed by the number of $20 bills people have given him. I suppose the next step is to take a look at the facilities and the local scene there and what kind of support he has and see what I think. This is a Next Generation bid and it might be able to address some of the issues I mentioned in yesterday's post. But it might not either if, like Orlando, it has some tragic flaw. We'll see.

Day 4, or 2.

Started the day with a surprise: Worldcon can in fact sustain the level of discourse I'd expect at Wiscon, even at nine in the morning, at least occasionally. It helped that the panelists and most of the audience were all Wiscon attendees. I am reminded of what an excellent moderator and all around awesome person Julia Rios is. I took four pages of notes including a whole lot of panel ideas I will be taking back to Arisia, and one of those I think will be a star panel, one that Arisia is uniquely qualified to host.

Also in program notes, later in the afternoon I attended a condensed what's up in Japan panel, which featured all of the neat bits I was looking for put together. Japanese cons open with a film presentation; large cons do a custom animation, and smaller ones do a slideshow. There was also a slideshow of absolutely amazing art by Youchan, and a wind up geisha presented Paulo Bacigalupa with his Seiun award for the translation of Wind Up Girl which was of course quite a photo op.

The dealers room here is in a room with a bunch of historical exhibits and other relics like the fanzine lounge. The emphasis on used books and the general feel of the dealers room, and the unexamined displays of 40 year old souvenir books with covers you'd never use today, all added up to a "blast from the past" atmosphere that frankly I did not think was a good thing. There is a cultural divide here and Worldcon has not even contemplated crossing it.

Walking through the 60's futuristic tunnel between the two halves of the hotel I encountered a woman with a Babel fish in her ear. It was pretty large, with a black box twice the size of my phone kind of strapped to her head, and I don't know if it did anything other than English to Japanese. But in five years these will be the size of an ordinary hearing aid, and five years after that they'll fit in your ear canal.

I mostly ignored the art show today, but I managed to be there to help out with a small crisis, so that was lucky timing. There's another logistical issue which I did not resolve and which has a Saturday night deadline to figure out, but apart from that I think it's more important to be rested for the crazy packing out schedule on Monday night and Tuesday morning.

I managed, barely, to be in the room for the public announcement of the Helsinki in 2015 bid as well as both 2017 bids. Very pleased to see Japan bidding. Not sure yet whether I'll be supporting Helsinki, mostly because there are a whole lot of details the bid hasn't worked out yet.

Crystal dragged me along on a dinner for her Secret Journeymen of Fandom group. A MITSFS fellow tagged along and after a little while exclaimed "I thought I was going to a young fans dinner. This is the Junior Illuminati". Which was about right. Lots of great notes here too, including that Boston area fandom should get together and do a Board of Directors training.

No parties tonight, I was too pooped. All the ones I wanted to get to are running tomorrow too. Except one that Michael Lee was running, but he was at dinner so that's OK.

Day 3, or 1: in which my numbering begins to match anyone else's.

Got up at a relatively leisurely hour, had some breakfast at the now open staff den, and headed down to the art show to make sure everything was going well there. We did need to dip into the peg hooks I'd bought, but didn't run out. Plan A for where to put the empty road cases didn't pan out but there was a room set aside for storing empty mail in art boxes so we put them there. That whole process took a while since logistics was still behind the eight ball, so there were still some boxes in the room when we opened to the public at 1:00. Fortunately the room is pretty big and there we're still artists checking in so it didn't look unintentional.

Eugene and Caycee and Johnny showed up in the early afternoon and I spent quite some time smoffing with them, and especially with Eugene. Then having exhausted Eugene I went up to the Mnstf party where I found Michael Lee and spent another couple of hours smoffing with him and some other Minneapolis folks. Also stopped in at the very impressive UK bid party where Lia poured me a beer I hadnt had before, the Kansas City speakeasy party which was a fun concept, and the Circlet Press party where I arranged to borrow the same knife and cutting board that Arisia borrowed from Cecilia at Wiscon.

I am starting to collect notes on things to bring back to Arisia's process. So far they're mostly minor touches, but those matter too and they're easy to do.

One thing that of course people talk about at Worldcon is Worldcons. I have a new perspective on why Minneapolis doesn't want to run one: it's just too close on the calendar to Convergence. Being in the other direction but about the same distance on the calendar as Arisia it's just too scary to contemplate wedging a Worldcon in. And skipping a year seems to have worked out pretty poorly for cons like Philcon and Archon that tried to do it that way. Maybe this is the real reason for a carpetbag bid. Or maybe the answer is more calendar flexibility for Worldcons.

Day 2... or day -1, I suppose. By this reckoning there will no more be a day 0 than there was a year 0.

Woke up quite early for an 8:00 call in the art show, which gave me some time to tidy up the room a little before heading out. I like to have things put away in hotel rooms, especially when I'm staying for more than a couple of nights. And also there will be roommates in the room soon and I want to leave room for their stuff, and eventually there will be a party in the room as well. It's just easier to get everything ready for that if there's an empty suitcase into which all my dirty laundry can go, and so on.

Made it down to the art show to meet the carpenters and electricians. The carpenters showed up first which was actually not quite ideal as much of the work I had for them required the electrical work to be done first. But I was able to keep them moving until the electricians got in.

As soon as the electricians did arrive I realized that I was working to an optimization that I had so internalized that I didn't even realize I was making it. In non-union hotels we buy power by the drop, and arrange things to use as few of them as possible, because we're not allowed to just plug in wherever we want. Hotel electricians don't have to worry about that. They can use all the drops that physically exist in the room if that is more sensible than, say, daisy chaining art show spines off each other. Duh! This is a better idea electrically anyway. And it didn't change the charge any. It did mean that they were uninterested in the spine to spine flyovers we had put up, and since not every spine had a flyover to the outside wall of the room they simply taped all the cords to the floor and I had the carpenters take down the wall flyovers too. The show looks a lot cleaner without them. And the particular spacing of the spines meant that instead of a great assortment of extension cords needed for the flyovers we wound up using *zero* of the heavy duty extension cords we'd brought from Boston for that. A few did get used elsewhere but this made the spines nice and clean looking and also meant that each of the combination vertical support/power strip poles had exactly one free plug for use by the occasional lighted art.

We had a few other hiccups along the way, but still were done with the carpenters and electricians by 11 and ready for art to go up by noon. By that time the art show army was getting restless so it was easy to find people to help clean up after setup, even given the huge number of people needed for mail in art.

Joni Dashoff recommended the Corner Bakery Cafe, a nearby lunch place, and Mary Dumas, her friend Pam, and I went there for lunch. It struck me as kind of a more upscale Panera but it was quite tasty.

After lunch I finished prepping the carts for storage, figured out what had happened to our load straps on the way in (one broke, but all parts were accounted for and the break won't keep us from using it opens the return), and generally try to keep abreast of the tide of chaos. After a few hours of setup it began to look like we wouldn't really have enough pegboard hooks, so I found a couple of nearby hardware stores that carried them and bought them both out. We can always go return them later.

Dinner with Joni Dashoff and Andrea Senchy continued my theme of dining with the smofs. But my meals have not really been smoffy -- these are all people who are already working on Arisia and who don't really need anything from me either. As I got back from dinner I noticed someone with Altadena listed on their badge and struck up a conversation. This turned out to be Jonathan Vos Post who is quite an interesting fellow. The next three hours were about 80% stories of his, 10% actual discourse, and 10% me failing my roll against conversational competitiveness.

There were a few parties going on including a Boston in 2020 hoax bid party. This is Chris Garcia's baby and I find it kind of annoying so I was pleased to see ribbons for a similar hoax bid for Garcia's home town of LA. This seems to have been spearheaded by the New Zealand in 2020 folks so I bought a presupport from them. Not that I'd have failed to do that otherwise.

Day 1. Or day -2, depending on your point of view. Got up at 5 after not enough sleep and hit good connections on the T to the airport. Checked a bag that weighed 49.8 pounds -- had it gone over I could have split it (this being Southwest) or moved some things to my carryon, but I enjoyed getting a red and white striped HEAVY bag tag for my collection without having to pay for it. MDW is also a new airport for me, so that's fun.

Riding the L in to town from the airport I was reminded of a recent conversation with

mangosteen about how Gotham in the most recent Batman movies has a lot of Chicago in it. The architecture is certainly right, even if the whole Gotham-as-an-island thing is wrong. There are gargoyles everywhere. But what I most loved is how rail oriented the place is. The L runs in from Midway along a 6 track main line. Six! The drawbridges are gorgeous, some with great serpentine rack and pinion mechanisms, some with enormous counterweight towers. Tons of industrial space, some still apparently in use making incredibly toxic products, and some converted to oh so hip looking loft space.

Went straight to the Art Show and commenced marshalling volunteers to feed work to the two union carpenters who're the only ones who can tighten screws in the show. We had them from noon to 4 and they were great. I think I did an OK job getting things ready for their arrival, and giving them and the volunteers tasks. As usual we had a great surplus of volunteers which made life easy if sometimes frustratingly unbusy for them, and also kind of annoyed the union boss who thought with all of these people we must have been cheating somehow on who was doing what. But when it came time to stand the A frames up it was great to have them. By 4:00 we were ready to hang pegboard on the six spines of pipe, most of the extension cord flyovers were up, and most of the light fixtures and supports were up too. There's a little more pipe assembly for the carpenters in the morning, plus they'll be the ones to actually attach the pegboard sandwiches. And we get electricians in the morning too, to install the bulbs and circuit the show and install the one fixture per spine that's just a fixture and no pipe.

I was trying to be clean about not doing *any* work myself and only delegating things to volunteers and/or paid staff, which of course I am terrible at, but it was good practice and I think I got a little better at it. With workers on the clock I needed to be 100% on keeping the hopper full and not worrying about how little time it saved me. And it seems to have been pretty educational for most of the volunteers. Sending a volunteer off to fetch me a yogurt to keep my blood sugar up was probably the best delegating I did all day, but it's going to take me a little while to get used to that kind of delegating being OK.

I honestly don't think I'd mind working with a hypothetical all-paid crew if we only had to pay them their living wage, and not the 300% markup that the various intermediaries add to it.

After the union folks left I handed off arranging pegboard to Kerry, checked into my room, and then went looking for a very late lunch, my previous meal having been nine hours earlier, airside at Logan. Had a burger with John and Peggy Rae Sapienza, which was pretty awesome, and we chatted about conrunning and Worldcons and one of her upcoming panel topics which was quite interesting. Poked my nose back into the Art Show for a bit and puttered around with some cleanup (the volunteers all having gone off for the evening), and then headed to bar in the hotel atrium where I ran into Mem Morman and Kent Bloom and chatted with them for a bit, which was also awesome. I will have to remember that just as I enjoy the early setup phases of Arisia, showing up early to Worldcons and NASFiCs gets me neat conversations.

This hotel is physically just about the perfect Worldcon venue. It's easily big enough, but laid out compactly enough to run into people. Function space is nicely stacked and the two sides of the hotel connect better than I expected. The city outside runs 24/7 and any service you could desire is close at hand. I haven't looked into the neighborhood but there are plenty of good and not terribly overpriced food options in the hotel. The lobby atrium provides a social nexus. It makes me want to see a Worldcon in the Peabody Orlando, to see how it would compare. Do you hear me, Mr. Beaton?

As you may know there are two groups bidding for the right to host the World Science Fiction convention in 2015. It has been quite a while since there was a contested Worldcon site selection, and it's nice to see multiple bids. And in fact the Orlando folks have a really, really good idea.

( the problem )

( the solution )

( why this is no solution at all )

( a real solution )

So don't vote for Orlando just because there aren't any non-stop flights from where you live to Spokane and instead you have to take a one-stop (with no change of plane, if you live in Boston). Don't even vote for Orlando because you like the committee's crazy ideas -- I certainly do. Take a look at whether they can make their ideas work.

Crossposts: http://palmwiz.livejournal.com/150091.html

A few nights ago, I had a dream that I was at Aussiecon Four and some SMOFs were trying to convince me that Arisia (or rather, a group with some Arisia people at its core) should bid for the 2015 Worldcon. I responded "But we just ran a Worldcon! It's too soon". They looked at me uncomprehendingly and pointed out that 2004 was six years ago and that it had been 11 years since the previous Australian Worldcon, at which point I said "No no, Arisia wasn't all that involved with Noreascon IV. I'm talking about Anticipation".

It's certainly true that Arisia the organization and many of the individual movers and shakers of Arisia put a lot more effort into Anticipation than we did into N4. It's also true that Anticipation was... disorganized. And much as I'd like to think that the bright spots are the ones I and my friends were in charge of -- areas like Logistics and Treasury and Staff Den which are either easily scalable or points of particular excellence at Arisia or both -- there are some dim spots which I can't escape thinking were due to the way Arisia approaches running conventions, and we would have to make structural changes before we were really capable of running a con with some of the features people expect from a Worldcon. Maybe we don't really care about those things, I don't know. But even if we did, when I say it's too soon, I'm not really talking about how long it has been since the previous con.

Backstory: a decade ago, I wrote a rejection of the way NESFA and people like them run their treasuries. I've been trying to get the word out about this set of practices because I think it works better for a whole lot less effort, and I've also been fine-tuning and extending it some in the intervening time. Spreading the word about this is how come I volunteered to run Treasury at

anticipation_09 and part of why I wanted Alexis Layton and Tim Szczesuil on my staff (OK, mostly I wanted them on my staff because they're awesome and I trust them, but showing them that lean treasury can work at a dual-currency Worldcon was a nice bonus).

Today was the boston-fandom barbecue that

sfrose put together. It seemed to me like mostly NESFen, though besides myself and

sfrose herself we did also have

deguspice,

quietann, and *hobbit* there to represent

arisia. Tim and I fell into a conversation about Anticipation treasury; he was curious about some of the things that had happened when he hadn't been in the room and wanted to apply my techniques to the Boskone that he'll be treasurer of next February. Mark Olson was sitting nearby, asked a few questions, and came up with a rephrasing of the basic principle. This accomplished he expounded a little on how it was a better idea and everyone ought to do it. Thanks, Mark. Fortunately, I don't care who thinks they invented the thing as long as it gets used.

Much more than in Toronto and almost as much as in Glasgow, this Worldcon seemed like the international event it ought to be every year. I worked treasury where we had planned operations in CAD and USD and unplanned operations in JPY and CZK. I was expecting panels in English and French but was not expecting that the most interesting panel I'd make it to during the con would be in Japanese. The person I probably spent the most time hanging out with at con was from Belgium.

5 of the 8 Worldcons 2003-2010 will have been outside the US. This is a good trend. I'm glad to see that Japan is bidding again, and wondering who will be next.

I can tell the Worldcon is getting nearer: I just, for the first time, hit "mute" on a thread on the staff mailing list.

There's a Montreal phone call in ten minutes. I'm not going to be on it.

Ultimately, I have to choose between Somerville Open Studios happening at all, or convincing Farah Mendlesohn that using Zambia would make Anticipation's pocket program not get nominated for a Hogu award for best work of fiction. Sorry, Farah, you just got thrown under the bus. If you climb out from under there on your own, more power to you.

phi

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