Worldcons & Entitlement Culture

[kevin_standlee]

As I expected, L.A.con IV will not have convention-provided internet service because the amounts the hotels and convention center want to charge for it are absurdly expensive. I should be, but am not, astonished at the people who have complained that the convention should do it anyway, who have said, "But [fill in local convention name here] held somewhere else has free access; that means you should, to," or assume that the L.A.con IV committee only just now noticed the situation.

Internet access has been one of many, many things the committee has been chasing down. Despite what some people may think, I expect it was not the most important thing. In fact, there were a lot of more important things. I know from my own experience that one of the hard parts about chairing is having to pick between multiple things when you'd like to have them all. You can't always get everything you want. Deal with it, folks! If you need internet access that badly, you can buy it yourself from the hotel or convention center. Would you really be happy to see your membership go up by enough to cover the cost of "free" internet service?

Some things are more important at a Worldcon than free internet service. Holding the Hugo Awards or the Masquerade, for instance.

Comments

[palatinate.livejournal.com]

I can't remember for sure how many stations we had - I think it may have been 8. Pre-con we would have liked to have gone to 10 or 12, but in practice 8 was pretty much enough. I walked past it quite a few times and there were lines, but never very long, and everyone seemed pretty happy with the service.

[querldox.livejournal.com]

Well, the general lack of lines would be because you signed up for a slot. If the slots for the next, say, hour were all filled, there was no point hanging around waiting since you knew both that it'd be an hour and that you would get that slot without having to be there until then.

8 stations as I recall, and InterThingy did do a good job with 'em.