Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

Another backdated entry: Again, most of the interested people will have seen it already, but here's my take on the final session of the 2024 WSFS Business Meeting. Once again, thanks to File 770, Kate Secor, and Gray Anderson. Because of the way we jumped around in the agenda, there were places where my notes lead to dead ends.

If you want to know what the text of any of the matters mentioned here are, you need to download the 2024 WSFS Business Meeting Agenda. This post will not restate the text of anything that is already in the Agenda. If no vote tally is shown, it means the vote was by uncounted show of hands. Counted votes (there were none today) were taken by "serpentine" voting, and yes, there were provisions to count people who could not stand for a serpentine vote.

( The Final Meeting )

With all matters dealt with, the 2024 WSFS Business Meeting gave chair Jesi Lipp a standing ovation for their work in steering the meeting through a minefield. The meeting then adjourned in memory of Deb Geisler at 13:25, ninety minutes before we would have run out of time and been forced to adjourn.

It was with great relief that we filed out of the room. Prior to the first meeting, Seth Breidbart was speculating on how far through the agenda we would have gotten. I'm glad he didn't actually set an over/under and take bets on it, as I would have taken the under and lost. I really did not think we could manage to complete that agenda, and I expected us to hit a crisis by overflowing the room, but neither happened. Possibly putting the meeting across the river (thus requiring a 400 or so meter walk each way) put people off, as did the requirement to attend if you wanted to participate and vote.

While personally I think they should have used the Forth Room in the Armadillo (where we held the Business Meetings in 2005), I also personally liked the Village because it had a Starbucks in the lobby, which meant I could get the white chocolate mocha Frappucinos and IMO better lunch sandwiches that the wraps that the hotel was selling us.

Had I known that the meetings were going to be in the Village, I would have been very tempted to book in to that hotel. It would have meant far less walking, and in retrospect the internet would have been vastly better. OTOH, I'm an IHG platinum level member, which means I earned nearly 64,000 IHG points just on the stay alone, not counting the 5x USD spent bonus I will get from the IHG credit card, which hasn't yet posted to my account. That's going to prove to be very useful, possibly very soon.

( Closeout )

Thank goodness I wasn't planning on leaving until Wednesday and thus didn't have to pack. I fell into bed and may have been asleep before my head hit my pillow.

For those who might not have seen it elsewhere, here is Cheryl Morgan's Public Statement re the Hugos.

I can't say anything else, lest someone accuse me of revealing Sekrit Information About the Hugo Awards.

We worked out that we need to catch a 6:45 AM bus pm Tuesday morning from Europa Bus Terminal (across the street from our hotel) to be at Dublin Airport for 8:45 for our 11:45 AM flight to Reykjavik. We've won our bid for a Saga class upgrade for this flight, which means we'll have access to an airport lounge, and thus we should be able to get breakfast there. This is good because we have to leave too early to get the breakfast we already paid for at the Holiday Inn. To my relief, the hotel front desk was able to take the £20 off our bill for that final morning.

After checking at Europa about how to book the bus to Dublin Airport, Lisa and I boarded a train at Great Victoria Street heading toward Lanyon Place. As it happens, it was the same train (but one hour earlier) that we planned to take out toward Cultra and the Ulster Transport Museum. We went to the Hilton and waited in the lobby, socializing with fans who were around that morning. I also downloaded the Translink app and while waiting managed to book Lisa and me for the bus on Tuesday morning.

Feòrag NicBhrìde joined us and we headed out to Cultra. The reason Lisa and I bought local bus-rail cards is that they include trains on that line as far as Cultra, which is convenient.

( To the Trains! )

After traversing a gallery about the Titanic and its sister ships, including the class ship Olympic, we moved in to the Bus and Tram Gallery.

( To the Trams! )

We moved on to the Automobile gallery.

( A Natural Display in Ireland )

And almost finally, the Air Gallery.

( VTOL in NI )

I did not get any pictures of the horse-drawn carriages gallery. There is one full-sized ship on the grounds of the museum.

( The Result )

We spend more than four hours here, stopping back in the train gallery for a snack.

( Preserved Cafe )

Returning to the gift shop, we managed to escape buying only two train books. I'm glad I sent a few kilograms of stuff home by mail, so there's no question that there's enough room for a couple of small train and air books.

( Last Trip to the Hilton )

At the Hilton, we said goodbye to Feòrag and sat down in the Eurocon social space on the first floor, socializing with some of the people who had not gone off on the convention's all-day bus tour. When I tweeted out that we'd settled in, Cheryl Morgan headed over from her hotel, having dressed to impress for that evening's Game of Thrones-inspired banquet.

( Cheryl Looking Good )

We hung around for a while socializing as the various bus groups returned and things got busy again. When the doors opened for the banquet, I gave Cheryl a goodbye hug and Lisa and I joined Sharon Sbarsky looking for our own dinner (none of us having booked for the banquet). We headed for Fish City, located about 750 m from the Hilton.

( Door Along the Way )

We've had a lot of fish and chips on this trip, but the ones we had at Fish City, plus the seafood chowder, was among the best of the lot. I'm willing to admit that our exhaustion from all of our walking today (13K steps) may have improved the savor, and that it was improved by the company and by the lack of time pressure. After dinner, we took a taxi back to the hotel and headed back to Lanyon Place.

Trains don't run as often on Sundays and Bank Holidays (like tomorrow), and if the gate staff hadn't radioed ahead to have the crew on the platform hold the train that was arriving just as we came through the gate, we would have had a 40 minute wait for the next one. (Which in practice means that we would have walked "home" instead.)

Unlike most of our friends who have either left already or are on their way home tomorrow, we have one more day in Belfast tomorrow before we move on to our next stop: Iceland. We haven't figured out what we're going do to on Monday, but that's okay. We can't be out that long anyway due to the early morning departure on Tuesday.

This afternoon, Lisa and I went over to the storage locker looking for some books. Cheryl still has lots of her books with me that she was obliged to leave here, and she's asked me if we can find some specific books and send them to her. (Storage is cheaper here anyway.) We gingerly opened the locker, Lisa killed the (expected) black widow spiders, and we spent a while looking through boxes before sunset (and cold) moved in. We found some of what we were looking for. Unfortunately, I did not store these books in any particular filing system. Mainly it was a case of what would fit in the boxes I had. We'll go try again soon.

Lisa was a big help, as she has a better feel for way the boxes are stored. Sort of like slow 3-D Tetris, she said.

Now we need to wash our jackets, because there was a serious amount of dust in that locker.

[Backdated entry because it was much too late when I got back and my computer was long out of power.]

When I got back to the hotel after Girl Genius Radio Theatre, Lisa asked if I would mind if she took the rest of the day off. I assured her that she was off the hook, we had no more stuff for her to do, and she should get some rest. I composed a wrap-up entry for the Newsletter, changed into my suit, packed up my computer again, and headed back to the ExCel.

( Low on Power )

Over at the ExCel, I met up with Cheryl Morgan, who had just had her dinner, and after she changed into a very nice dress, we headed off to main hall, where there was no problem in going through a side door due to our semi-press-pass-like condition as the hosts of TheHugoAwards.org's live coverage of the ceremony.

( On With the Show )

Within a minute of Ancillary Justice being announced for Best Novel, I had the award results posted as a new main page post on THA.org. (Yes, I did have an embargoed copy of the results given to me shortly before the ceremony. I'm glad it wasn't too far in advance. I don't want to let thing slip by mistake.) In a sense, I was a little too fast: the link to the detailed reports wasn't working right away, although it started working about fifteen minutes later as Loncon got the document uploaded to their web site. I wish I could have put a copy of the PDF on the Hugo site, because then I would have redone the link on THA.org to our local copy to spread the load between multiple servers, but there was something preventing me from doing the upload to THA.org. (I did do so later.)

We wound up the broadcast and before the tech crew could impress us into service helping to strike the set, we got out of the hall. Many of the nominees and winners were off to the by-invitation post-Hugo Party, but not all of them.

( The Lovely Mary Robinette Kowal )

( Doctors in the House )

( A really good evening )

I was really happy with how this year's Hugo Awards Night went. The tech worked, everyone who wanted to see the ceremony could do so (the auditorium did not quite fill up), and it was just really what I think we'd been wanting to have happen for years: a good show and a lot of happy people afterwards.

[I've been listening to a lot of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar episodes while driving to and from the Bay Area, and the episode titles are all in the form of "The ___ Matter."]

Cheryl Morgan writes more eloquently than I can about the brief tenure of Jonathan Ross as Loncon 3's Hugo Awards host.

( How the 2002 Worldcon Handled Selection of Headliners )

Having had to deal with horrible PR blunders with the 2002 Worldcon makes me sympathetic and less willing to criticize other Worldcons' mistakes. (And Twitter hadn't even been invented yet!) Go read Cheryl. I share her frustration, although I'm not yet so annoyed as to walk away from everything just yet.

As announced on the Hugo Awards web site and the LoneStarCon 3 web site, the 2013 Hugo Awards Ceremony will be streamed live (and advertising-free) on Ustream, and TheHugoAwards.org will be doing live text-based coverage using CoverItLive as we have done the past several years.

LoneStarCon 3 has been working with Ustream to prevent a repetition of the unfortunate situation last year when one of Ustream's 'bots determined that the clips of Hugo Award nominated dramatic presentations were copyright violations and shut down the live feed. That was in no small part because we were using Ustream's free and ad-supported services, which are more prone to such takedowns. Ustream and LSC3 are working together to make sure that doesn't happen this year.

The Ustream and CIL feeds are not synched in any way. CoverItLive is relatively low bandwidth. If your connection isn't fast enough to handle the streaming video, you can watch us describing the action as it happens in San Antonio. Based on our past experience, the CIL feed can get several minutes ahead of the video, similar to how the radio and television coverage of the same sporting event are rarely in synch with each other. Indeed, the CIL coverage is analogous to the radio coverage of a sporting event, while Ustream is the television coverage.

I've had people say, "if you have live video, then why bother with the CIL stuff?" Well, returning to the sports analogy, the fact that it's possible to watch a baseball game on television didn't kill the need for radio broadcasts of the same event. Also, because Ustream is high-bandwidth and is a resource hog, lots of people just can't use it. Also, the CIL coverage allows moderated discussion of the events as they come in.

Speaking of moderators, while Mur Lafferty and I will be "calling the action" from the auditorium in San Antonio, our Studio Coordinator and the third member of our coverage team is Cheryl Morgan, who will be up in the wee hours of the morning in Wiltshire moderating the coverage and contributing her own thoughts to the event as it happens. Cheryl is the person who effectively created the CIL-casts in the first place, when she recruited Mur and me to cover the 2010 Hugo Awards for SF AwardsWatch.

I hope that if you can't make it to San Antonio to see the Hugo Awards ceremony that you'll watch it live on video or join Cheryl, Mur, and me for the call of the action from the Grand Ballroom as WSFS presents its highest honors.

If it hadn't been for Cheryl tipping me off to it, I would not have known about today's Google Doodle (link will only show the doodle in question today; otherwise it will be the main page) [Permalink added] on google.co.uk celebrating Frank Hornby's 150th birthday.

Last weekend, I was emergency holographic back-up sound tech for the Small Blue Planet podcast hosted by Cheryl Morgan. Cheryl's guests were Mélanie Fazi and Lionel Davoust discussing French science fiction and fantasy and many other interesting related topics. Cheryl has her description of the show on her site as well.

I didn't actually participate, as my job was to record the Skype conference call by which the four of us were able to "meet" for the interview. I did chat a little bit with them after the show, including telling them the story that debgeisler told me about a Boston Worldcon flyer translated into French by one of her Parisian colleagues and the reaction from Canada's Boréal Francophone SF convention, which amused them. (I'll leave to Deb to decide if she wants to retell it in public.)

It's an interesting hour-plus interview, and I hope folks will head over to the Locus Roundtable site and download and listen to the show.

Something that happened this past week with little fanfare (and that was intentional) was that The Hugo Awards web site migrated from our old hosting service (which was being phased out) to a new one, and once we were sure that was working, Cheryl also took the opportunity to upgrade the site to the newer version of WordPress and update the site theme. This is something that we've been meaning to do for some time (and we had a hard deadline of the end of the year from the old host), but there were countless delays behind the scenes into which I see no reason to digress. But thank goodness WSFS reversed the decision of the WSFS Mark Protection Committee, allowing Cheryl to be reappointed to the Hugo Awards Marketing Committee earlier this year, and further thanks to Cheryl for being willing to come back after the way she was treated by a past administration. Also thanks to debgeisler, who manages the domain registrations on behalf of WSFS for that site, for taking time out during one of the hectic times in the academic calendar to help us out.

In any event, this part of the year is probably the best time to do migrations and changes to the Hugo Awards site, as the traffic on the site is quite low (except for spambots). In a few weeks, when this 2013 Hugo Awards ballot is released, I expect traffic will heat up again, and I'm glad we have the new version of the site in place before then.