Getting Gussied Up

[kevin_standlee]

In about 30 minutes, the reception for the Hugo Awards Ceremony will begin. The ceremony will be 90 minutes later. We just got back from lunch (and from buying croissants and stuff for breakfast tomorrow morning, which saves money and time) and will shortly be changing into our formal clothes to head downstairs for the reception.

There are only slightly more than 1000 seats in the main hall for the Hugo Awards. (They are running overflow video seating in other rooms of the convention center in order to handle the load.) I of course have a reserved seat for me and Lisa, for which I'm grateful.

Anyway, time to get cleaned up and ready to roll. Not sure when I'll be back online after the ceremony, as there is the Hugo Losers Party to attend after the reception. Be sure to check the Hugo Awards web site starting from around 2000 Yokohama time. We'll be getting the Hugo results posted as soon after the ceremony as I can call Cheryl with them.

Comments

[darrelx.livejournal.com]

There were much fewer than 1,000 seats in ther overflow seating in room 501, and during the ultraman fight scene at the beginning, someone tripped over the projector cord. If I didn't run back there to push the power button and turn it back on (I work with projectors and recognized the problem right away) then place chairs in front of the plug so it didn't get knocked out again, no one in room 501 would have seen the hugo ceremony at all...

And, sorry to gripe, but the camera switching and audio-feed into that room was painful to watch, apparently with no one up there to give feedback to whoever was controlling the panel downstairs.

After the third time they switched AWAY from the "in memoriam" list in the middle of it to show faces in the audience, I decided to just walk out. I really would have liked to be able to read those names.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Well, obviously my POV was down in the reserved seating area, but I will note that only a tiny handful of Worldcons (mainly those held in Anaheim) in recent years have been able to all but guarantee a seat for every single member at major events. If N2007 had 1500 seats for the 2200 or so people here on site, that's a pretty reasonable percentage and certainly within keeping of recent practice.

Second, N2007 did exactly what every recent Worldcon -- including the one where I was division manager of Events -- did, which is reserve too many seats for the nominees/acceptors/press/VIPs. In practical terms, you have to do this because the consequences of having not enough seats is so dire. But the front-of-house management didn't, after all of the reserved-seat folks were seated, let more people in to fill those remaining seats. Thus there were a scattering of really good seats around my area vacant.

Note that filling up those reserved seats was something they did during Opening Ceremonies load-in. I have no inside information; it may have been deliberate policy to leave the nominee area a quarter vacant to make it easier for winners to get out of their rows. We'd been told that acceptors needed to sit near the aisles. Me, I sat near the middle of my aisle on account of I considered the odds of me being called upon to actually go collect a trophy were pretty long.