SF Awards Watch Web Site Launched

In the SF community it seems to be common to launch new things just before Worldcon. Publishers do it. WSFS did it with the new Hugo Awards web site. And now Cheryl and I are adding to the general mayhem with a new web site of our own. The new site is called Science Fiction Awards Watch. Please take a look and tell us what you think. I'm disabling comments here as we'd prefer to get feedback at the site itself.

Trading Seals at Nippon 2007

Besides the things I have to do at work to bring my current project to a point where someone may be able to work on it for the three-plus weeks I'm gone, there were plenty of convention- and travel-related things that I needed to do today. Net result it that I'm still in the office here at 10:30 PM, and I have a conference call at 8 AM tomorrow.

At the last moment, Lisa and I decided to make trading seals for distribution at Nippon 2007. Now, we can't perfectly match the standard 24 x 17 mm size, but by taking Avery 8167 80-up labels (0.5 in high by 1.75 in wide) and cutting them in half, we get approxmately 22 x 13 mm, which is certainly close enough.

My seals are the WSFS "White Star" logo from Interaction. Because the underlying stock is a rounded-corner sticker, one side of the sticker is flat while the other is rounded. After I printed the first sheet, Lisa suggested inverting the print so that the flat side is always to the left -- that way it looks a bit like a flag. Clever.

Lisa's seals are a portrait-format picture of Kuma Bear from CascadiaCon, with him sporting a hall costume rosette that is nearly as big as he his. We printed more of mine than of Lisa's, as the WSFS logo can be taken as the "Business Meeting" seal as well, which some people may want to collect.

I would have preferred to use the Business Meeting rubber stamp created for ConAdian's "Passport to the Universe" (a similar sort of idea) promotion in 1994, but the stamp -- which I do still have -- has long since run out of ink, and doesn't seem to have any way to refill the ink inside of it. And there's no way I'm going to risk the mess that carrying a stamp pad in my luggage could cause if it got loose.

Our seals, of course, are likely to be far less popular than these seals that feorag plans to distribute.

Also today, I got word from my travel agent that the last of our hotel reservations (three days in Aomori at the JAL City) has come through. I had the agent mail the paper copies of the confirmation to the Oregon PO Box, so it will be there by the time I arrive and before we leave for Portland on Sunday the 26th