No Surprises Here

This afternoon, Site Selection closed at 5 PM (the absolute earliest that it could close under the specific configuration of programming and Business Meeting that Seattle scheduled). I had volunteered to help administrator Ron Oakes count ballots, and arrived a few minutes early. I made a last trawl through the adjacent Dealers Room and Art Show doing the Town Crier thing warning people that Site Selection was about to close, and then helped with the last little surge of people who arrived just on the stroke of 5 PM. After that, I helped tidy up Site Selection and we and the representatives of the Utah Westercon bid headed up to my room (where Lisa had been winding down) to count ballots.

It wasn't a really difficult job, what with only 75 ballots having been cast over three days. (Indeed, only one ballot was cast on Thursday, the first day of the convention.) The results are on the Westercon web site. Utah won handily, with 59 out of the 71 ballots cast that expressed a preference. At 5:28, the results were certified as official and we congratulated Dave Doering, the chair of the newly-seated Westercon 67. On behalf of the Westercon Business Meeting, I instructed the Administrator to destroy the ballots.

I composed the message to the Westercon 65 newsletter with the results (public announcement of the results is part of the requirements of forgoing a Business Meeting) and updated the Westercon web site both with a posting including the voting results and by moving Utah from the Bids section to the Upcoming Conventions section of the left sidebar.

By the time I got everything done that I wanted (including something I hope to say more about on Sunday), it was close to 9 PM, the Masquerade was over, and Lisa and I still hadn't had dinner, so it was once again over to Denny's for a couple of plates of spaghetti, good and filling.

Finally, we hit the parties on the Penthouse level, including the victory party for Westercon 67 and the "Ordinary Hotel Room" party for Westercon 66 featuring the ThinBot drink-making robot. I even got into the act as one of the drinks is a non-alcoholic raspberry-lime mix that I can drink.

Lisa and I were fading out shortly after 11 PM, but decided to get slightly ahead on the Sunday morning move-out. We borrowed a bell cart and moved to the van everything we could box up that we no longer needed, such as the remaining cans of soda not used at the Tonopah party and that we'll drink ourselves (eventually). We'll probably need to get a cart again tomorrow, but we reckon there is only one more load to go before we can close out the room.

The Majestic Files

The wormhole between Seattle and Tonopah's timelines popped open briefly this morning and spat out issue 6 of the at-con newsletter from the Tonopah Westercon, titled The Majestic Files. It only included the front page of the two-page 'zine, but it appears that Utah won the Westercon Site Selection in that universe as well, so perhaps the breech in the timelines is healing.

( Other Headlines )

As fifty copies fell through the wormhole, I kept a few for travelswithkuma, Lisa, and me, and went downstairs and distributed the rest of them. I was amused when one person apparently mistook it for the Seattle newsletter; however, as one of Tonopah's pre-supporters was standing with him, I hope she was able to clarify things for him.

With luck, we'll see a copy of issue 6 of The Majestic Files on efanzines.com soon.

Farewell to Westercon

First things first: Issue 6 of The Majestic Files is now available on efanzines.com. My thanks to Bill Burns for making it available to everyone. We found about 50 paper copies in our room Sunday morning and I handed out most of them at the convention.

After packing out of the hotel room and getting checked out today, Lisa and I had a few hours on the final day of Westercon with not a whole lot to do before the final event of the convention, the Opening Ceremonies. (Westercon 65 was running backwards, this being the end of time and all that.)

While going through the Dealers' Room for the last time, Lisa found a hat that she decided suited me well, and she bought it for me.

( I Haz a New Hat )

I always hate leaving a convention and would have liked to have stayed longer, but we had a long way to travel still, so soon after the final event, Lisa and I bade farewell to Westercon and set out south for Portland.

During the final event of the convention, Chair Bobbie DuFault announced that Westercon 65 drew around 800 attendees ("warm body count") and about 1000 total members. This exceeds San Jose's count last year and may indicate something of an uptick in attendance after more than a decade of decline. The Seattle Doubletree is a little large for a convention of this size compared to the relative overcrowding of Norwescon, and therefore it was not as obvious that we had 800 people there. If we draw that or more to Sacramento next year, it's going to be even more awesome than we originally thought.