Worldcon Report, Part the First
Sep. 7th, 2004 09:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gnomiWhat if We Threw a Worldcon and 6000 People Came?
Well,mabfan (MAB) and I are back from Worldcon and have gotten a night's sleep. So now I will regale you all with Tales of the Con.
Wednesday
I worked my regular schedule on Wednesday, while MAB wrote in the morning and then headed out to the hotel. He got there a little after 1 PM to find that, despite what the hotel had told us Tuesday night, he could not yet check us into the hotel (our room was blocked but not yet cleaned, and therefore it was unavailable for our occupancy). He wandered around and talked to folks while waiting to check in, and then he finally checked into the hotel around 3 PM. He was pleased to find that the refrigerator we'd requested had been delivered. He then headed home to meet up with me.
I left work at 5, got on a bus that got caught in horrible traffic, ran an errand to Trader Joe's to discover they were out of the one item (spelt bread) for which I had made the errand, and then finally arrived home around 6:15 (I'd been aiming to be home by 5:45 or so). But I ran into friends on both the traffic-beset bus and on the bus I hopped from Trader Joe's back home, so that was nice.
We had dinner, did a final packing check, packed up all the food necessary for the convention, and hit the road (OK, so we schlepped all our stuff down to our lobby and called a cab, but same deal). There was a Red Sox home game, plus it was 1 September (one of the two craziest moving days in Greater Boston (1 June being the other)), so the cabbie wisely chose to take the "back way" to the hotel (random Boston geography geekiness: we live outside Coolidge Corner, and the hotel is near the Prudential Center, on Dalton St. So instead of taking the standard route down Beacon St. through Kenmore Square and over to the hotel, the cabbie took us through Brookline Village, through Northeastern and the hospital district, and approached the hotel from the Huntington Ave. side. There was still moving-related traffic but we completely avoided the ballgame-related traffic).
We arrived at the hotel right around 8 PM, went up to our room, and found that our first refrigerator had gained a friend, a second cube fridge. I unloaded the cooler into one of the fridges and then, once we'd determined that we had sufficient fridge space with the one, called housekeeping and asked them to remove the spare. Since another room that had requested one had not yet received their refrigerator, our spare went to them. Yay!
We got slightly settled and then went off to the gathering (in what would be the Con Suite) for the committee, staff, and volunteers to mingle and meet with the guests. MAB and I talked to many, many people, including Phil and Fruma Klass (Phil Klass, AKA William Tenn, was one of the convention's Guests of Honor (GOHs)). We spent about an hour there (during which time I spotted, for the first time,mamadeb and jonbaker) and then we went back to our room to get our laptops. The convention set up some wireless hubs around the convention areas, so there was wireless connectivity in the ConCourse (in the Hynes Convention Center) and in the Con Suite. On Wednesday night, the "public" network was not yet up, but the committee network was, and we were allowed to use that one so that MAB could blog as one of the official con bloggers.
We watched the last-minute preparations going on in the ConCourse, and then we decided to seek out some sleep, knowing that we'd get very little during the actual convention. We were back in our room by about 11:15 and after winding down, we went to sleep.
Thursday
On Thursday morning, we got up at about 8:30 AM and, after eating breakfast, headed out to the Shaw's supermarket to pick up some of the groceries we'd decided not to get before the convention. On our way from the hotel to the grocery store (10 minutes max in a covered mall), we ran into many, many people who had arrived to attend the convention. So our 10-minute errand became a half-hour errand). Then, groceries in hand, we headed back to the hotel. We brought our booty back to the hotel and were unpacking and organizing when the first of our roommates,farwing, showed up. She joined in on the organizing and then, after eating a quick lunch, we three headed down to see what was going on in the convention area. farwing went to go register for the convention and MAB and I joined the queue awaiting entrance at the ConCourse. At noon, the convention began. We wandered about the ConCourse for a bit, seeing and greeting people we ran into, and then we went into the really, really, really gigantic dealers' room and browsed very briefly.
Actually, that's not true. We went into the dealers' room, hunted around for the table at whichwildelven was working for the day, found NESFA Press and picked up our pre-purchased GoH books, ran into some more friends, hooked back up with farwing at Threads of Time (where we also found wildelven), then hunted down people at the table of Borderlands Books, where we'd been told by two separate people that we should track down two separate employees of Borderlands. We found the table mostly by trial and error, as the dealers' room was, as mentioned, gigantic and we hadn't yet found a map thereof (in truth, while I briefly saw a map of the dealers' room sometime on Saturday afternoon, I never got a chance to consult it).
During this time, we also went and found the Voodoo Message Board, so called because of its mechanism: there's a big board with an alphabetical list of the names of everyone registered for the convention (attendees who register at-con are encouraged to write their names in at the appropriate location). If you are in attendance, you are encouraged to circle your name. Then, if someone wishes to leave you a message, they put a pushpin next to your name (hence the Voodoo) and then stick a note for you with your name on the outside in the box, which is divided into sections by the beginning of your last name (thus, notes for John Smith are filed under Smi). The Voodoo Message Board is the brainchild of Erwin S. "Filthy Pierre" Strauss; more about him later. We ran into even more people during this time (assume during this whole report that, at any time that I note free time, we ended up "vortexing*" with friends in random places in the convention halls).
*I coined the term "vortexing" to describe the phenomenon of getting sucked into a conversation group while attempting to get from point A to point B during a convention.
At about 12:45, MAB and I joined the queue for entrance to the Opening Ceremonies, where we also encountered my father, attending his first SF convention ever. He accompanied us to the Opening Ceremonies (which were quite lovely). There was a fife-and-drum corps, and Deb Geisler, the chairman of the convention, introduced the Guests of Honor and then opened the con with a Really Big Gavel.
After the Opening Ceremonies, MAB and I headed off to his first panel, "(Really) Hard Science for Beginners." It was there that we first sawseborn, who was one of MAB's co-panelists. The panel was interesting, if somewhat physics-heavy. At the end of the panel, we saw Gary Wolf (he who created Roger Rabbit), who then accompanied seborn and me to the Green Room, where seborn stashed her Cart o' Chocolate. That was also when our other roommate, bob_greenberger, found us.
MAB, Bob, and I headed back to the room, where we shmoozed for a brief time (I also picked up a couple of knitting projects; I knit copious amounts during this convention).
At about 3:45, MAB, Bob, and I headed back to the convention because MAB had a 4 PM panel, "Stump the Scientists," for the 7-12-year-old kids' programming. I sat in the back and knit as MAB, Isaac Szpindel (a doctor and electrical engineer), and Bridget Coila (a biologist and zoologist) answered obscure science questions posed to them by the kids in the audience. At this point, I'm told, I was joined by a friend, but since she sat in my blind spot, I had no clue she was there. We caught up later in the con, though.
At 5, MAB had a signing spot at the Analog/Asimov's table, where we learned of the injury to Gardner Dozois (he was in a car accident; his shoulder was smashed and he required an artificial shoulder joint to be implanted, but he is otherwise OK) and signed the get-well card that was at the table. A number of friends stopped by to say hi during MAB's signing, includingsharan, shsilver, Robert Silverberg, and Tamora Pierce, among others. While MAB signed, I saw a number of additional folk and talked with them for a while. At 6, MAB and I left the A/A table and headed to my first panel.
I was the moderator of this panel, "Language: Barrier or Bridge." My co-panelists were Anna Feruglio Dal Dan, Yves Meynard, and Vera Nazarian, and I found myself in the odd position of being the only native English speaker on the panel. Since the topic of the panel dealt with books in translation and whether it was a good or bad thing to read books in translation, the fact that I was the only native English speaker allowed me to ask all those questions I've been wanting to ask. The panelists all had fun, the audience asked good questions, and a fun time was had by all.
After my panel, MAB was on "The Return of 20 Panels in an Hour," which revisited the Sunday Funny Sunday panel from this past Boskone. It was fun, though not as hilarious as the same panel (and the same panelists) had been at Boskone, which many of us chalked up to the timing. It was after this panel that I first sawastolat and her husband as well as a number of other folks.
At that point it was 8 PM and lunch had been a long, long time ago. So MAB and I andfarwing went back to the room and ate dinner (I cannot recall if Bob joined us, as well). After we ate, we all headed back to the convention center for our 9 PM program item, "Scene a Minute/Whose Line is it Anyway." We had wonderful performers who kept the audience in stitches. MAB hosted (in the Clive Anderson role) and I reprised my usual role as back-up brain and sanity checker, as well as playing the role of buzzer with a plastic slidewhistle. Our performers -- Josepha Sherman, A. Michael Rennie, Michael McAfee, and sdavido -- did excellent improv, and the fact that we only had 45 minutes of material for a one-hour block actually worked to our advantage, as the audience was appreciative without being overwhelmed (and we didn't completely burn out our performers).
At 10, MAB and I metscarlettina in the bar, where we had a lovely shmooze for over an hour and a half (though our conversation had Pres. Bush's acceptance speech as competition for auditory input). MAB and I brought her a sample of a local bakery's challah as well as a piece of a cake we made based on a recipe she gave us, both of which were accepted in the spirit in which they were offered. After a nice, long, meandering conversation, we discussed going party hopping, specifically to the LiveJournal party. Instead, MAB and I went back to our hotel room. Not long after we got back, we were joined by farwing and Bob. We had quite the slumber-party atmosphere in our room (this was actually true of the whole weekend), where the giggling was frequent and much fun was had. We eventually settled in for sleep, as we knew that the next day was going to be just as busy.
More to follow...
Well,
mabfan (MAB) and I are back from Worldcon and have gotten a night's sleep. So now I will regale you all with Tales of the Con.Wednesday
I worked my regular schedule on Wednesday, while MAB wrote in the morning and then headed out to the hotel. He got there a little after 1 PM to find that, despite what the hotel had told us Tuesday night, he could not yet check us into the hotel (our room was blocked but not yet cleaned, and therefore it was unavailable for our occupancy). He wandered around and talked to folks while waiting to check in, and then he finally checked into the hotel around 3 PM. He was pleased to find that the refrigerator we'd requested had been delivered. He then headed home to meet up with me.
I left work at 5, got on a bus that got caught in horrible traffic, ran an errand to Trader Joe's to discover they were out of the one item (spelt bread) for which I had made the errand, and then finally arrived home around 6:15 (I'd been aiming to be home by 5:45 or so). But I ran into friends on both the traffic-beset bus and on the bus I hopped from Trader Joe's back home, so that was nice.
We had dinner, did a final packing check, packed up all the food necessary for the convention, and hit the road (OK, so we schlepped all our stuff down to our lobby and called a cab, but same deal). There was a Red Sox home game, plus it was 1 September (one of the two craziest moving days in Greater Boston (1 June being the other)), so the cabbie wisely chose to take the "back way" to the hotel (random Boston geography geekiness: we live outside Coolidge Corner, and the hotel is near the Prudential Center, on Dalton St. So instead of taking the standard route down Beacon St. through Kenmore Square and over to the hotel, the cabbie took us through Brookline Village, through Northeastern and the hospital district, and approached the hotel from the Huntington Ave. side. There was still moving-related traffic but we completely avoided the ballgame-related traffic).
We arrived at the hotel right around 8 PM, went up to our room, and found that our first refrigerator had gained a friend, a second cube fridge. I unloaded the cooler into one of the fridges and then, once we'd determined that we had sufficient fridge space with the one, called housekeeping and asked them to remove the spare. Since another room that had requested one had not yet received their refrigerator, our spare went to them. Yay!
We got slightly settled and then went off to the gathering (in what would be the Con Suite) for the committee, staff, and volunteers to mingle and meet with the guests. MAB and I talked to many, many people, including Phil and Fruma Klass (Phil Klass, AKA William Tenn, was one of the convention's Guests of Honor (GOHs)). We spent about an hour there (during which time I spotted, for the first time,
mamadeb and jonbaker) and then we went back to our room to get our laptops. The convention set up some wireless hubs around the convention areas, so there was wireless connectivity in the ConCourse (in the Hynes Convention Center) and in the Con Suite. On Wednesday night, the "public" network was not yet up, but the committee network was, and we were allowed to use that one so that MAB could blog as one of the official con bloggers.We watched the last-minute preparations going on in the ConCourse, and then we decided to seek out some sleep, knowing that we'd get very little during the actual convention. We were back in our room by about 11:15 and after winding down, we went to sleep.
Thursday
On Thursday morning, we got up at about 8:30 AM and, after eating breakfast, headed out to the Shaw's supermarket to pick up some of the groceries we'd decided not to get before the convention. On our way from the hotel to the grocery store (10 minutes max in a covered mall), we ran into many, many people who had arrived to attend the convention. So our 10-minute errand became a half-hour errand). Then, groceries in hand, we headed back to the hotel. We brought our booty back to the hotel and were unpacking and organizing when the first of our roommates,
farwing, showed up. She joined in on the organizing and then, after eating a quick lunch, we three headed down to see what was going on in the convention area. farwing went to go register for the convention and MAB and I joined the queue awaiting entrance at the ConCourse. At noon, the convention began. We wandered about the ConCourse for a bit, seeing and greeting people we ran into, and then we went into the really, really, really gigantic dealers' room and browsed very briefly.Actually, that's not true. We went into the dealers' room, hunted around for the table at which
wildelven was working for the day, found NESFA Press and picked up our pre-purchased GoH books, ran into some more friends, hooked back up with farwing at Threads of Time (where we also found wildelven), then hunted down people at the table of Borderlands Books, where we'd been told by two separate people that we should track down two separate employees of Borderlands. We found the table mostly by trial and error, as the dealers' room was, as mentioned, gigantic and we hadn't yet found a map thereof (in truth, while I briefly saw a map of the dealers' room sometime on Saturday afternoon, I never got a chance to consult it).During this time, we also went and found the Voodoo Message Board, so called because of its mechanism: there's a big board with an alphabetical list of the names of everyone registered for the convention (attendees who register at-con are encouraged to write their names in at the appropriate location). If you are in attendance, you are encouraged to circle your name. Then, if someone wishes to leave you a message, they put a pushpin next to your name (hence the Voodoo) and then stick a note for you with your name on the outside in the box, which is divided into sections by the beginning of your last name (thus, notes for John Smith are filed under Smi). The Voodoo Message Board is the brainchild of Erwin S. "Filthy Pierre" Strauss; more about him later. We ran into even more people during this time (assume during this whole report that, at any time that I note free time, we ended up "vortexing*" with friends in random places in the convention halls).
*I coined the term "vortexing" to describe the phenomenon of getting sucked into a conversation group while attempting to get from point A to point B during a convention.
At about 12:45, MAB and I joined the queue for entrance to the Opening Ceremonies, where we also encountered my father, attending his first SF convention ever. He accompanied us to the Opening Ceremonies (which were quite lovely). There was a fife-and-drum corps, and Deb Geisler, the chairman of the convention, introduced the Guests of Honor and then opened the con with a Really Big Gavel.
After the Opening Ceremonies, MAB and I headed off to his first panel, "(Really) Hard Science for Beginners." It was there that we first saw
seborn, who was one of MAB's co-panelists. The panel was interesting, if somewhat physics-heavy. At the end of the panel, we saw Gary Wolf (he who created Roger Rabbit), who then accompanied seborn and me to the Green Room, where seborn stashed her Cart o' Chocolate. That was also when our other roommate, bob_greenberger, found us.MAB, Bob, and I headed back to the room, where we shmoozed for a brief time (I also picked up a couple of knitting projects; I knit copious amounts during this convention).
At about 3:45, MAB, Bob, and I headed back to the convention because MAB had a 4 PM panel, "Stump the Scientists," for the 7-12-year-old kids' programming. I sat in the back and knit as MAB, Isaac Szpindel (a doctor and electrical engineer), and Bridget Coila (a biologist and zoologist) answered obscure science questions posed to them by the kids in the audience. At this point, I'm told, I was joined by a friend, but since she sat in my blind spot, I had no clue she was there. We caught up later in the con, though.
At 5, MAB had a signing spot at the Analog/Asimov's table, where we learned of the injury to Gardner Dozois (he was in a car accident; his shoulder was smashed and he required an artificial shoulder joint to be implanted, but he is otherwise OK) and signed the get-well card that was at the table. A number of friends stopped by to say hi during MAB's signing, including
sharan, shsilver, Robert Silverberg, and Tamora Pierce, among others. While MAB signed, I saw a number of additional folk and talked with them for a while. At 6, MAB and I left the A/A table and headed to my first panel. I was the moderator of this panel, "Language: Barrier or Bridge." My co-panelists were Anna Feruglio Dal Dan, Yves Meynard, and Vera Nazarian, and I found myself in the odd position of being the only native English speaker on the panel. Since the topic of the panel dealt with books in translation and whether it was a good or bad thing to read books in translation, the fact that I was the only native English speaker allowed me to ask all those questions I've been wanting to ask. The panelists all had fun, the audience asked good questions, and a fun time was had by all.
After my panel, MAB was on "The Return of 20 Panels in an Hour," which revisited the Sunday Funny Sunday panel from this past Boskone. It was fun, though not as hilarious as the same panel (and the same panelists) had been at Boskone, which many of us chalked up to the timing. It was after this panel that I first saw
astolat and her husband as well as a number of other folks.At that point it was 8 PM and lunch had been a long, long time ago. So MAB and I and
farwing went back to the room and ate dinner (I cannot recall if Bob joined us, as well). After we ate, we all headed back to the convention center for our 9 PM program item, "Scene a Minute/Whose Line is it Anyway." We had wonderful performers who kept the audience in stitches. MAB hosted (in the Clive Anderson role) and I reprised my usual role as back-up brain and sanity checker, as well as playing the role of buzzer with a plastic slidewhistle. Our performers -- Josepha Sherman, A. Michael Rennie, Michael McAfee, and sdavido -- did excellent improv, and the fact that we only had 45 minutes of material for a one-hour block actually worked to our advantage, as the audience was appreciative without being overwhelmed (and we didn't completely burn out our performers).At 10, MAB and I met
scarlettina in the bar, where we had a lovely shmooze for over an hour and a half (though our conversation had Pres. Bush's acceptance speech as competition for auditory input). MAB and I brought her a sample of a local bakery's challah as well as a piece of a cake we made based on a recipe she gave us, both of which were accepted in the spirit in which they were offered. After a nice, long, meandering conversation, we discussed going party hopping, specifically to the LiveJournal party. Instead, MAB and I went back to our hotel room. Not long after we got back, we were joined by farwing and Bob. We had quite the slumber-party atmosphere in our room (this was actually true of the whole weekend), where the giggling was frequent and much fun was had. We eventually settled in for sleep, as we knew that the next day was going to be just as busy.More to follow...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-09-07 07:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-08 11:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-19 06:37 pm (UTC)Sorry we didn't get to see more of you during the con, it went by way too fast...
no subject
Date: 2004-09-07 08:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-08 11:34 am (UTC)