Late Night Success

I've been sufficiently busy with other things that I've had little time to write about Westercon, but I do want to say that I think our late night show, Saturday night at Westercon 68, was very good. We used the space that had been the Masquerade green room, and we were in fact moving our gear in while the judging was still being announced, so we had to dodge people in costume and not interfere with them. I was briefly concerned that people wouldn't come to a 10:30 PM item, but we had a mostly-full house and people seemed to have a good time. An advantage of this room over the other two in which we've done shows this weekend is that it had a riser, so we could do a proper two-level panel. Lisa once again had to do the announcing in addition to running the tech, and she did just fine. We played four games of MGSF because we didn't have an end constraint the way we had for the earlier two shows, and because the last of the four went to overtime (and actually all the way to Sudden Death), we didn't get out until after Midnight. It did seem like a success, and I want to once again thank Westercon 68 for inviting us and for putting up with all of our requests for extra tables and special room setups.

After spending a little while at the Finland and Montreal parties, Lisa and I went back to the hotel room, and while getting ready for bed, Lisa reacted with horror when she discovered that her Leatherman multi-tool (an older original Leatherman that they don't make anymore) was missing. She turned things upside down looking for it, including getting dressed again and making another loop back through the parties and to the minivan in the hope that it had fallen out there, but with no luck. She actually had me buy another one online and put in a bid on yet another one before we finally turned in. I'm glad we had no early commitments, so we could sleep in until nearly 10 AM.

First thing after getting out of the hotel room this morning, we went down to Pacific 1 (where the show was last night), and to Lisa's immense relief, she found the Leatherman tool sitting on one of the tables. She thinks that someone interrupted her while she was using the tool to get the speakers set up last night, and instead of putting it back in its holster, she set it down there and forgot it. Fortunately, it just sat there until she recovered it this morning.

Much of the gear is now packed back up in the minivan. The rest goes out tomorrow, as do we.

Video Processing

As time has permitted since the Fannish Inquisition on Friday, I have been processing the video from the various presentations and uploading it to a Westercon 68 Fannish Inquisition playlist on YouTube. This is a time-consuming process, involving converting the MXF files to MP4/MP3, then joining the video and sound in MovieMaker, then generating a combined file, then uploading the videos to YouTube. Not wanting to spend the entire rest of the weekend in my hotel room, I've done things in bursts. As of this writing, the seated Worldcons' and the 2017 bidders' (the three who showed up at Westercon, to wit: DC, Helsinki, Montreal) presentations are online, and the 2018 bids should be online by the time we leave tomorrow. If I'm lucky, I'll get the 2019 presentations online by the time we leave as well, but they might have to wait until later.

At some point I will upload one of the "quick" MP4 files generated by the proxy card in the camera so the people can get an idea what the difference between the camera's native format (albeit converted) is versus the "quick and dirty" recording. As I've said before, for the WSFS Business Meeting, our current plan is to upload the "quick" files as soon as we can. They have good sound but indifferent video, but they don't require all of that post-processing and can be simply uploaded straight to YouTube; thus people will be able to hear what happened at the Business Meeting the same day, rather than several days later.