Progress Reported

[kevin_standlee]

Westercon 74 has published Progress Report 1, available for download from Westercon 74's Publications page. This is a small PR, designed as a booklet and intended to be printed double-sided on an 8 1/2 x 11-inch sheet of paper and folded twice.

An e-mail notice has gone out to all of Westercon 74's members who provided an e-mail address. Paper copies were mailed on Monday to those members for whom we had no e-mail address. We'll also mail paper copies to those members with e-mail addresses who requested paper copies, although probably not until early February.

The most important news in the PR is that Westercon 74's membership rates are going up at the end of February 2020, and the special discount for those people who voted in Westercon site selection at SpikeCon in Layton last year expires then as well. So if you voted in site selection but haven't yet taken advantage of the $10 conversion to attending, now's the time to get it done, because starting March 1, 2020, the extra discount goes away, and thereafter, voters (and any other supporting members) who convert to attending will pay whatever the current attending membership prices is minus the $20 they've already paid.

Comments

[wild_patience]

Kevin, what about handicapped access? Will there be a sufficient number of hotel rooms which work for guests with mobility issues? Will there be electric carts available for rental? Distance from hotels to the programming? Handicapped access at the con site (programming and dealer's room and art show)?

[kevin_standlee]

Per the Westercon 74 Hotels page, "Approximately 5% of the hotel rooms in Tonopah are specifically equipped as handicapped-accessible, and approximately 1% have roll-in showers." (That page also includes photos of accessible rooms where we were able to get access to them during our visits thus far.) Westercon 74's hotel liaison's wife is a wheelchair user herself, and therefore they are very aware of the issue.

I do not expect there to be electric carts for rental. It's too far from Reno or Las Vegas.

As I say in "From the Chair," in PR 1, and as we foreshadowed while we were bidding, we aren't planning to hold an art show, due to lack of space.

Per the Westercon 74 Convention Center page, "The convention center is ADA compliant, with ramps between the lower and upper levels, handicapped parking spaces, and accessible restrooms." We have included photos of the convention center on that page. Click through most of those photos to see more photos of the area.

There are two programming function rooms in the convention center itself, and one other room (the 150 seat "ballroom") located above the Mizpah Club. There are sidewalks, paved streets, and accessible routes, albeit that the accessible route between the Convention Center and the Mizpah Club is longer than the non-accessible route. I've walked all of these routes myself in person. That's why I used the gmaps-pedometer tool rather just Google Maps; I wanted the routes to reflect a realistic path, avoiding steps or unpaved areas. There are links to detailed maps of the walking routes on the Convention Facilities page.

There is video of a walk between the Convention Center and the Mizpah on the Convention Facilities page. (Note that the video "cuts the corner" on the accessible route, as there is set of steps I go up at one point.) You might also want to consider using Google Street View to "walk" the area virtually.

Because we expect to need to use nearly all of Tonopah's hotels, there is no single answer to "distance from hotels to programming." See the Hotels page for the details.

Is there anything on those pages (or elsewhere on the Westercon 74 web site, or in the linked-through photographs in my Tonopah Tour Flickr album) that leaves you in the dark about anything? While I'd love to publish all of this material in paper form, it's not very practical to do so. Consequently, we've been trying really hard to put lots of material on the web site answering these sorts of questions. If you think we're missing something, please let me know. If it's possible for us to add it to the site, we'll do so.

[delosharriman]

I have to wait for my new cheques to come. I used a hundred in just over ten years… it didn't make much sense to order more than that, but the result was that the shipping was more than the actual cheques! But, once they do, I'll write one for $10 & pop it in the post.

[kevin_standlee]

Thank you! And thanks for saving us what amounts to around 25% of what you'd be paying if you did it online. The processing fees on small purchases eat us alive.

[delosharriman]

You know I never miss a chance to deploy my space postage stamps ― although, in very truth, the thing which led me to discover that I needed to order cheques was the need to write one to a stamp dealer for another batch! I've been sending out copies of LUNARCY! to the various chapters of the National Space Society, which has used up a big chunk of what I had on hand.