Strange Dreams

I was not able to sleep easily last night, despite being so tired, because the congestion in my head meant that I couldn't breath even with the CPAP machine pushing, so I woke up repeatedly and had to clear my head. At one point, I awoke from a dream where I was watching what I think was a Worldcon masquerade on television. That part wasn't strange. What was strange was that there was play-by-play, replays, and analysis being done by the commentators from NBC's Winter Olympics ice skating commentators. I'd see the entry, then there would be a replay with the commentators going over the fine points of the costumes and the presentation.

Now, I could see Kevin Roche and Andy Trembley doing that sort of thing if we had the tech to do the broadcast. But Dick Button and Scott Hamilton?

Where Does the Worldcon's Money Go?

With the minor storm over L.A.con IV deciding that spending more than $30,000 to provide wi-fi service to their members was not a good use of the convention's resources (I agree), there has been some discussion of what a Worldcon spends its money on. There are some (IMO uniformed) people out there who have a hard time thinking that a Worldcon is spending money on anything because so much of what the convention must do is either invisible or taken for granted. So I dug through my files and did a rough breakdown of ConJose's income and expense by major category. I had to fiddle around quite a bit because the budget was arranged by division, but the expenses that get people excited are not necessarily neatly arranged. That's why there are several "other" categories and a miscellaneous into which a lot of small items from throughout the convention were rolled. If you really want to know this at a fine level of detail, e-mail me and I'll send you the line-item budget.

Another adjustment I made was to show only the net Art Show income (after paying the artists), rather than the gross. (ConJose's records showed the gross sales as income -- needed for sales-tax reporting -- and the payments to artists as a convention operating expense. I consider it misleading to show 15% of the convention's revenue that way because it's sequestered -- everything except the convention's commission goes to the artists.

( Here be pie charts )

Again, anyone who wants the fine details behind these numbers should write to me directly and I will send you the latest and I think last version (revision 50) of the ConJose budget, which shows every line item on which we received or spent money.

This message is posted as public. If you want to send it on to someone else or point people at it, I don't care, and you don't need to ask my permission to do so.

Edit, 10:45: Based on a comment, added explanation that expenses were also $850,000, the same as revenue.

Edit, 11:30: Modified the pie charts so that the charts themselves and their ScrapBook Gallery descriptions include the gross amount of approximately $850,000.