Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

The Chengdu committee and individual staff members kept giving me gifts — so many of them that I couldn't figure out how to get them all home! Fortunately, Donald Eastlake had extra space in his luggage, so he offered to take the larger boxes home with him and mail them to me. They arrived today.

( Unboxing Kormo )

I spent most of today editing the raw 2023 WSFS Business Meeting video from the multiple files generated in the camera into one file per day of the Business Meeting, uploading them to the YouTube WSFS Business Meeting channel, and arranging them into a 2023 Business Meeting playlist.



There were three WSFS Business Meetings. All business was disposed of by the conclusion of the third meeting, so we did not have to hold and "overtime" session.

The room was under-lit. I tried to compensate in the camera settings and in post-production, but the videos still came out darker than I would have liked.

The meeting was conducted in English and Chinese, with simultaneous translation through headsets. There was no mechanism for combining those translation feeds with this video.

There was CART transcription in both English and Chinese, but it was computer generated and computer translated, which means it was not all that accurate. In some cases, we tried to swing the camera around to pick up the approximate English translation, but we did not managed to do so in all cases, especially when I wasn't operating the camera, which I was unable to do when I was presiding over the meeting as the deputy presiding officer.

These videos are CC-attribution licensed, so if anyone wants to create translations, they are welcomed to give it a try as long as they apply the same CC licensing.

It's later than we would have liked, but the 2023 WSFS Business Meeting Agenda has been published. Apparently there were some people who thought there was a rule that required the agenda be published a certain number of days in advance, but there is no such rule. Technically, the agenda doesn't have to be published in advance at all. In theory, you'd know what was on the agenda by showing up at the meeting, just like it used to be. There is a rule that sets the deadline for submitting new business to 30 days before the first Business Meeting. It used to be 18 hours before the Preliminary Business Meeting!

Getting the Agenda ready was challenging this year. Not only are there a total of 13 new proposals (including two from committees), but there was the requirement from the host convention that the agenda be translated and made available in Chinese. This is especially important as many of the proposals are coming from the Chinese members.

I won't be giving my opinion on these proposals, except for one where I'll recuse myself from the head table because I am one of the sponsors. I also will present the report of the WSFS Mark Protection Committee, of which I am Chair. In addition, I'll add another country to my tally of countries in which I've presided, as meeting Chair Donald Eastlake III will present the report of the Nitpicking & Flyspecking Committee of which he is Chair, so during that report and the debate over business arising from it, I will preside over the meeting as Deputy Chair.

As I've said before, I'm going to try and record the Business Meeting if I can. It will be challenging as we have nobody yet recruited to mind the camera, so we have to hope that things work as planned, and we also won't have anyone to pan across the room during any serpentine votes, as Lisa has always tried to do to show people watching the meeting that the vote is actually happening.

I don't know if Chengdu plans to live-stream the meeting. Even if the meeting is live-streamed, remember that only WSFS members physically present at the meeting can vote.

There's still a lot we don't know about this year's meeting. It's apt to be one of the most challenging to manage for lots of reasons. Just bear in mind that those of us trying to manage the meeting don't have a hidden agenda: only this published one.

Thanks to some help on Mastodon, we seem to be getting closer to finding the hotel in which I'm staying and in which some of the Worldcon activities/programming will happen.

It would appear that the hotel is called "Chengdu Tianfu Hengbang Sheraton" in Chinese, but "Sheraton Chengdu Pidu" in English. (Link is to the Marriott website for the hotel.)

Putting that address into Google Maps, I get this:



Remember that we are assuming that the area above and to the left of the lake is the building site that is now the convention site (or should be as they rush to finish construction). Note that the address pin doesn't have anything around it. However, if we go to the "maps" page on the hotel's website, we get this:



This makes much more sense, and is consistent with the hotel overlooking the lake.

I then went to the gmaps-pedometer tool, which much more usefully shows the outline of the convention center/Chengdu Science Fiction Museum site. Using the tool, and assuming that the dashed lines on the map are a lakeside path, I got a walking route between the hotel and the museum of about 1.15 km. So while the two are not adjacent, they are also not an impossibly long walk from each other. It appears to be about the same distance as from the part of the ExCel Convention Center in London to the Crowne Plaza Hotel where I stayed at the 2014 London Worldcon.

The number of things I need to transport with me to Chengdu keeps growing. It's getting to the point where I am seriously considering taking two checked bags, even thought that will cost me a bunch extra in luggage charges. On the other hand, I won't need to take as many clothes as I typically do, because all I'm doing is flying to Chengdu, attending the Worldcon, and flying back. In fact, due to the fact that the return flight leaves at 8 AM on the morning after the convention ends and the airport appears to be almost 80 km (straight line) from the hotel/convention center, I'll have to skip the final post-closing-ceremony part of the convention (which is often one of my favorite parts of the event) and head out to TFU airport on Sunday evening to stay at a Holiday Inn Express near the airport.

That of course assumes that I've actually identified the hotel in which the convention has booked me and the convention site itself. For all of the pretty pictures on the Chengdu website, I've had a bit of a challenge trying to figure out where in the Chengdu area the convention is actually happening! I think it may be where this map shows a lake with what looks like a building site on one shore. If there is something on the Chengdu Worldcon website that gives actual directions to the convention site, I haven't found it yet. Considering that for about as how long as the technology has existed to do so, it has been my practice to "virtually walk" the area around a Worldcon using Google Maps, not being able to do so this year is yet another thing that makes me nervous.

Yesterday, the 2023 Chengdu Worldcon announced on their Facebook page and their Twitter feed that they were changing their dates to Wednesday, October 18, 2023 through Sunday, October 22, 2023 and the convention venue to the Chengdu Science Fiction Museum in Jingrong Lake, Pidu District. The new headquarters hotels are the Sheraton Chengdu Pidu and the Wyndham Grand Chengdu. Shortly after I saw the announcement, I posted the news on the Worldcon.org website and updated the WSFS.org, Worldcon.org, and TheHugoAwards.org websites with the revised dates.

The previously-announced dates were August 16-20, 2023, and the previous venue was the Chengdu Century City New International Convention and Exhibition Center, with the Intercontinental Hotel and other nearby hotels as part of the complex. As of when I composed this message, the Chengdu Worldcon website still shows those dates and that venue. No reason for the change of dates and venue was given in their announcement, and I do not have any further information about why they made the changes.

Today I have seen complaints from people suggesting that WSFS Must Do Something, or claiming that WSFS must have approved this, or saying that Chengdu claims that they consulted with WSFS before making this change, or that nothing like this has ever happened before.

Sigh.

( The Long-Form Explanation )

Now I've made no secret that I have never been enthusiastic about going to China. However, while I may not care much for China, I care very much for WSFS, and when Don Eastlake III asked me to be Deputy Chair of the 2023 WSFS Business Meeting, I accepted, and despite my by-now notorious involvement in the other bid for the 2023 Worldcon, Chengdu's committee approved my appointment. If it is possible for me to travel to Chengdu (and between COVID restrictions and getting a visa, this is not certain), I plan to go, in order to keep WSFS's government moving forward.

I'm personally slightly disappointed at the change of venue, because I had already booked a room at one of the Holiday Inns located near the original venue, and was going to be able to use my IHG points for the stay. There are no IHG hotels near the new venue. Fortunately, I was able to cancel the reservation and get all of my IHG points back, so I'll be able to use them eventually.

The later dates may be something of an advantage. Besides the fact that the weather will probably be better, the dates mean I won't be taking close to a month of time off between July and August this year due to both NASFiC and Worldcon. (I'm planning to drive to Winnipeg and then take the train to and from Churchill, Manitoba after the convention.) I will spend far fewer PTO days on China, as I plan only to fly in, attend the convention, and come home; however, it's still a lot of days. Again, this is contingent on China lifting restrictions significantly to allow me to even apply for a visa and then being approved for a visa. This is the first time I'm ever going to travel to a country where a visa is either not required (Canada, UK/EU) or relatively trivial to obtain (Australia), and the requirements for China are onerous. I simply don't know whether I'll actually be able to go or not. Chengdu has not volunteered much information about what they can do to help me and the other people who want to attend. I hope they're more forthcoming about that than they are about how people who aren't already members and who are outside of China can buy a membership!

So there's my initial take on what's going on with the Chengdu Worldcon. While surprising, there's simply nothing wrong legally with their actions. And if any of you reading this think that "WSFS" is a Big Media Company with a massive headquarters, millions of dollars, and an army of lawyers... well, you're wrong. I know, it may be hard to believe (and I've met people who are convinced that I'm lying to them about it), but WSFS is run on a shoestring, and depends on all of the people participating in the society to act in good faith.