Worldcon 76 Day 2: After the Meeting

After the Business Meeting on Friday, we got everything packed up and an old friend of mine appeared.

( Friends Since College )

After lunch, I had to do some more work supporting the WSFS division, helping Site Selection and getting some other things done. But then I was sort of on my own, which is good, because I had some books to sell on behalf of Wizard's Tower Press. I spent a chunk of the afternoon distributing copies of The Green Man's Heir from WTP to various booksellers around the Dealer's Room.

Lisa and I tried to go out to dinner with Scott Sanford, but the first few restaurants we tried were backed up solidly, so we went back to the convention and Callahan's Place and ate snack bar food, but that was really not so bad, as we ended up with a number of friends joining us, and I think it was for the best.

After dinner, we tried to hit the social events in the Fairmont, but most of them were so crowded we couldn't get in to them, and besides I had video work to do trying to convert the video Lisa shot to higher-quality files. The lower-quality "proxy" files that Scott got off the camera are online already, but the camera's native format requires a bunch of work in Adobe Premiere to turn into nicer-qualify files. So we headed back early, after picking up a few groceries from Safeway.

Alas, it has been a while since used Premiere, and it's taken me a couple of hours to get to the point where I could set the computer to grinding out the higher-quality files. I'll know in the morning whether my settings are correct. The goal is to get the higher-quality files uploaded tomorrow as well, thanks to the Wicked Fast Internet access in the convention center (that's the actual name of their network). So tonight I will get much less sleep than last night.

Worldcon 76 Day 3: First Main Business Meeting

After three consecutive years of very long, very contentious, and very difficult WSFS Business Meetings, we appear to be returning to relatively normal conditions. Today's WSFS Business Meeting dealt with nearly everything on the agenda, and it looks pretty good for us to complete the remainder well before the Worldcon Chairs' Photo Session tomorrow afternoon at 12:30.

( The Whole WSFS Gang )

Once the meeting convened, we fairly flew through the agenda. I could barely keep up with things and still participate myself.

( Business Meeting Summary )

So "Lodestar" is the official name of the new YA Award, effective in 2019. Someone wanted to try to make this retroactive and to apply to the award being presented this year. That's out of order for both legal and practical reasons. The legal one is that while ratified changes become part of the Constitution the moment they are ratified, they don't take effect until the end of the Worldcon that ratifies them. This is part of the Constitution, not the Standing Rules, and cannot be suspended. The practical one is that the plaque for this year's award has already been engraved!

( On to the New Business )

And thus at 11:13 AM, the Business Meeting adjourned having disposed of nearly everything there was on the agenda. We'll be back on Sunday at 10 AM for Site Selection business, including the announcement of the results of the 2019 NASFiC and 2020 Worldcon elections, followed by Question Time for the 2019 Worldcon and potentially for any 2020 NASFiC and 2021 Worldcon bidders. No earlier than 11 AM, we'll take up the Pro/Fan Artist Hugo proposal, and probably another late addition to the Standing Rules relating to which report the 30-day deadline applies.

The meeting thus broke up almost 2 hours early, but I was there for much longer, along with Scott and Lisa.

( A Video Crisis )

I've been as time permits converting the much-higher-quality video files available from the camera to MP4 so I could upload them to YouTube. It took quite a while, even with good upload speeds available here, but the higher-quality recordings (only two per day instead of six or seven) are now online at the 2018 WSFS Business Meeting (Higher Quality) YouTube playlist.

Dealing with the Business Meeting, even a short one like this, took up a whole lot more of my day than I expected. Fingers crossed that tomorrow won't be quite as hectic, although we'll have a game of musical chairs as we quickly reset the chairs (and then put them back afterwards) for the Worldcon Chairs' photo at 12:30 Sunday afternoon.