A Few Photos From Nova Albion
Mar. 26th, 2011 11:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kevin_standleeI should have really carried my camera with me all day at Nova Albion Steampunk Con, because everywhere you turned there were people in spectacular and wonderful outfits. I've posted those photos I did take to a set on Flikr, but it just doesn't do justice to an event where I feel a little out of place because I'm not wearing a costume. Well, I wore my fez along with my Westercon t-shirt; I have, after all, spent a good chunk of the day at the Westercon table.
I particularly liked this couple, and I'm really sorry that I took only this one photo and that it didn't turn out very well. These two were just so cute it was scary.
With many Westercon staff on hand today, we all had time to go look at the convention and attend panels if we liked. One I attended and really enjoyed was an interview with Kaja Foglio that I understand will be podcast somewhere, but I forgot to find out where! If I learn where it ends up, I'll post a link to it.
Chris Garcia gave the keynote address: "The State of the Steampunk," working from a text published in issue 16 of Exhibition Hall. (That issue isn't yet published on eFanzines as I write this, but presumably will be later.) But those of us who came to the speech got a lot more animated talk than the plain text will suggest. At one point, Chris was talking about Worldcon and admonished me to not to argue with him. He went on to talk about how Worldcon is, at its best, a "big tent" event. I asked him after why he scolded me, because I agreed with everything he'd said!
When the table closed at 7 PM, I found that I was very tired and very hungry, having not felt like having lunch and subsisting on food bars all day. So I'm afraid I blew off the entire evening social scene and headed off to my hotel, the Milpitas Crowne Plaza, had dinner thereafter, and turned in to work on getting these photos posted and getting some other maintenance done on the Westercon web site that came up during today's activities at the convention.
I wasn't as last year's iteration of this event at the Emeryville Hilton Garden Inn, but the Santa Clara Hyatt (current home of BayCon) is a much better site than that HGI possibly could have been. Having stayed at that HGI once (the night before my train trip to Montreal in 2009), I can't see how they possibly made it work in that hotel. But it's still not ideal. In particular, they effectively had to split the dealers room between two rooms on two levels, plus the mezzanine, and even then I think they have the aisles uncomfortably narrow.
But complaints about this and about the much-too-small type on the name portion of the membership badges aside, I really must praise this event for the high energy and enthusiasm level of the attendees. It's fun. I may have more to say about this after I get home tomorrow evening, but for now I need to get some sleep.
I particularly liked this couple, and I'm really sorry that I took only this one photo and that it didn't turn out very well. These two were just so cute it was scary.
With many Westercon staff on hand today, we all had time to go look at the convention and attend panels if we liked. One I attended and really enjoyed was an interview with Kaja Foglio that I understand will be podcast somewhere, but I forgot to find out where! If I learn where it ends up, I'll post a link to it.
Chris Garcia gave the keynote address: "The State of the Steampunk," working from a text published in issue 16 of Exhibition Hall. (That issue isn't yet published on eFanzines as I write this, but presumably will be later.) But those of us who came to the speech got a lot more animated talk than the plain text will suggest. At one point, Chris was talking about Worldcon and admonished me to not to argue with him. He went on to talk about how Worldcon is, at its best, a "big tent" event. I asked him after why he scolded me, because I agreed with everything he'd said!
When the table closed at 7 PM, I found that I was very tired and very hungry, having not felt like having lunch and subsisting on food bars all day. So I'm afraid I blew off the entire evening social scene and headed off to my hotel, the Milpitas Crowne Plaza, had dinner thereafter, and turned in to work on getting these photos posted and getting some other maintenance done on the Westercon web site that came up during today's activities at the convention.
I wasn't as last year's iteration of this event at the Emeryville Hilton Garden Inn, but the Santa Clara Hyatt (current home of BayCon) is a much better site than that HGI possibly could have been. Having stayed at that HGI once (the night before my train trip to Montreal in 2009), I can't see how they possibly made it work in that hotel. But it's still not ideal. In particular, they effectively had to split the dealers room between two rooms on two levels, plus the mezzanine, and even then I think they have the aisles uncomfortably narrow.
But complaints about this and about the much-too-small type on the name portion of the membership badges aside, I really must praise this event for the high energy and enthusiasm level of the attendees. It's fun. I may have more to say about this after I get home tomorrow evening, but for now I need to get some sleep.
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no subject
Date: 2011-03-27 08:09 am (UTC)Bears likes dressings ups.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-27 03:08 pm (UTC)This is a perennial problem. For what it's worth, GameStorm badges this year are straightforward laminated paper. The typeface could be bigger, but there's no art in the way of other things, there's room for long badge names, the legal name is included in smaller type (and gray, less obvious than the badge name), and in general it's a functional con badge. Not as good a piece of art as many I've seen, but I'll accept that as a price for meeting the other criteria.
From a staffer point of view...
Date: 2011-03-28 09:21 pm (UTC)The fans are what make any fan based event. A lot of things went well, several did not. Overall, I feel like the hits did outweigh the misses, and I credit that to the faith, perserverence, and optimism of the attendees. Many lessons were hopefully learned during this year's exhibition, and I would hope that in the future these lessons prove valuable to the attendees, in the form of better execution of the event.
From my point of view, I was thrown into the deep end of the pool on this one. If it weren't for several volunteers who stepped in at the right times, and places, I can think of countless places where things could have gone horribly wrong.
The crew I ended up with was top notch, and they rolled with nearly every punch, and caught almost every curve ball. They even had the stage set up AND torn down in RECORD time! I have never had a load out happen in under 90 minutes... Heck I usually measure the load in , and load out times in hours, and at Nova Albion, everything happened in minutes!
I was tentative going into this, but in the end I am really glad I go to participate.