Westercon Show Schedule

According to the Preliminary Westercon Schedule, we're supposed to be doing two shows of Match Game SF at Westercon this year: Friday night from 8 PM and Saturday afternoon 2:30-4:30. I think it rather likely that we'll start a few minutes late on Saturday on account of having at most 30 minutes set-up time. (We have several hours for Friday night so it's not an issue.)

We still don't have an Announcer or a Show Producer (sometimes that's the same person), and I would welcome people coming forward who can announce the show introduction and read the commercials, as well as someone who can keep track of the various prizes and dole them out to people. We also are currently showing an open panelist slot in the preliminary program, but I hope that Programming will fill that on the day.

A most pressing need is more questions. With two 2-hour shows, we'll probably need enough questions for eight games, although we may not need them all. If anyone has any questions they'd like to suggest, please send them to me so that we can minimize the amount of recycled questions we'll have to use. (Even though many of the audience or contestants will not have seen them, it's boring for the panelists to have to answer old questions a second or third time.)

It's a pity that the "day game" isn't first, with "late night" later in the convention; however, I can see for myself that the scheduling wouldn't have worked the other way around. Among many other things, I'm busy during the day on Thursday and Friday working on the Tonopah in 2012 bid table and helping prepare for the Tonopah bid party on Thursday night. This isn't a complaint; I'm flattered that Westercon wants to dedicate such a large chunk of its program to us.

Saturday is going to be a very busy day for me, with a panel at 10 AM, the Westercon Business Meeting at 10:30 AM (same room), and Match Game at 2:30. At least the "costume" -- my business suit -- works for all three.

Update, 12:20: Updated the schedule matters when Lisa pointed out that I was mis-reading how much time we had before and/or after each item.

How to Understand Tinnitus

Two nights ago, Lisa had a particularly bad spell with her tinnitus. After recovering slightly, she explained to me that it's like having those vuvuzelas (the noisy horns from the World Cup) running all the time, and that you can't adjust the volume or change the channel to get away from it. All you can do is make another noise that's louder than it is but not quite as annoying. In a way, it's like cancer chemotherapy, which poisons the patient in the hope that the therapy will kill the cancer before the poisons kill the patient.

Progress Report 1 Posted

Westercon 64 has published Progress Report 1, and it is now available for download from the convention's Publications page. For more information, see the announcement at the convention's web site.