Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

As most of you who follow me may know, John Mansfield, chair of the 1994 Winnipeg Worldcon and an important figure in Canadian fandom, passed away a few days ago after a long period of decline. His funeral service in Winnipeg was today, and was live streamed and recorded so that people (including me) who could not come to Winnipeg could attend virtually.

John was an important person in my life. He trusted me sufficiently to ask me to be part of the ballot-counting team for the 1994 Worldcon (technically, I was an extra person added by the administrator, as was the third person from the other bid on the ballot). He appointed me WSFS Division Head for ConAdian, at a time when I think a fair number of people in Worldcon fandom still considered me a crank, even though I had the same position for ConFrancisco, the 1993 Worldcon. (To be fair, there probably people who still think I'm a crank, but I'm never going to reach them, so who cares.) The icon on this post is me at the 1994 Worldcon holding a Hugo Award, the base of which I co-designed. I was also later named one of ConAdian's two deputy chairs, along with Christine Barnson, because John didn't want an American as his sole deputy. Christine and I were primarily there to be John's "life insurance" during the convention, but we did also surprise him during the Closing Ceremony to present him with an award including the ribbon that said "The Man Who Made It Happen" because without him driving the effort, I feel certain that Winnipeg would not have been the 1994 Worldcon.

Winnipeg was one of the best Worldcons I have attended. It's better than the one I co-chaired. I regret that I never got back up there, and I was very much looking forward to honoring John as Fan Guest of Honor at Pemmi-Con, this year's NASFiC. He'll still be FGoH, and he died knowing that he had that honor. I'm just sorry that he never got to experience it fully in person.

John was my friend, and I will miss him.

Last night, Lisa decided that she just was not up to attending Costume-Con. She's not sick; she just did not have enough spoons to deal with it. She did tell me that she wanted me to go, though, and I was essentially committed, even though my original staff position evaporated when nobody filed a bid for the Costume-Con two years from now. (The owner of the Costume-Con service mark will make a Direct Award.) I'll be running at able for Pemmi-Con, and I have a doctor's appointment on Monday morning.

I intended to sleep in for an hour this morning, but I woke up just a few minutes after my alarm would have normally gone off anyway, so I decided to go ahead and get started.

( Breakfast for the Road )

My timing was pretty good. I missed any significant traffic in Reno (but it's a good thing I wasn't going the other way out of Reno as I-80 eastbound was blocked at Lockwood, east of Sparks). I got a coffee in west Reno, stopped at the lottery sales at Gold Ranch to cast the $4 winning ticket I've been holding since the last big round of lottery sales, and kept going west. Next stop was Donner Summit. The weather was fine.

( Watch your Step )

Another stop for more coffee at Colfax, and then it was off to Sacramento. My timing was such that I passed through during a mid-morning lull and turned south on I-5. I stopped to refuel at the Flying J at Lodi Jct, and made one other brief restroom break along the way, before getting to the Doubletree San Jose about 2 PM. Seven hours for this trip is pretty good by my standards.

This hotel, back in the 1990s when it was a Red Lion Inn, was at one time Fan Central Station for the Bay Area, and I was spending up to a month per year (not all consecutive days, of course) here. However, I think it's been more than five years since I last stayed here, and after moving in to my room, and I to familiarize myself with the place in its current configuration. However, before I could do that, I had to lie down for a while and take a nap for about an hour. It wasn't enough, but it would have to do.

The food situation isn't great. The hotel rooms don't come with refrigerators or microwave ovens. (A 'fridge would have cost an extra $25/day that I wasn't prepared to spend. I did find a very promising burger place 850 m from the hotel. (That's about the same distance as the walk between my house and the post office in Fernley.) I have a feeling that I'll be back at BurgerIM at least once again this weekend. Breakfast I should be able to get for take-out from the hotel restaurant, or else I can go to the Starbucks about 500 m from the hotel.

If I had a refrigerator, I could get a half gallon or gallon of milk, but as it stands, I have no way to keep anything larger than a quart, as that's all that will fit in the ice bucket in the hotel. Oh well, I'll manage.

I have my membership badge, and I have the package of Pemmi-Con promotional material that Tom Becker handed off to me this evening for me to use at our promotional table this weekend. Now all I need is some sleep, which shouldn't be difficult.

I did have the third of three non-profit board meetings (CanSMOF in this case) in three weeks today, but I'm not the Secretary of that one, so it's less work.

( Home Cooking for Breakfast )

The rest of the day was very quiet. Tomorrow, if Lisa and I can get our sleep schedules into the right place, will be busier, but I'll write about that if and when it happens.

I'm at (Virtual) Norwescon 43 this weekend, staffing a Club Booth (as their online platform, Airmeet, styles it) for Westercon 74 Tonopah along with lindadee.

( Behind the Scenes at Studio Tonopah )

The Airmeet platform that Norwescon is using appears to me to be reasonably good for programming on what Airmeet styles as "stages." The booths -- used by fan groups and dealers alike -- are less good. As far as I could tell, hardly anyone comes into them, and as more than one person has said, you can't even talk to your neighbors.

( Airmeet and Norwescon )

We've been asked repeatedly if we'll do Westercon 74 online. The answer has been on our website since before the pandemic: we're going to equip one room with the necessary hardware to do a "hybrid" program with both in-person and remote attendees (including program participants), but we are not going to try and reproduce every aspect of the in-person convention online, and we never intended to do so. We said we'd use the significant A/V and internet connectivity built in to the Tonopah Convention Center so that non-attending members (even supporting members) could participate in a part of it, and that was part of our campaign in 2019, before anyone had ever heard of COVID.

I guess it's just as well that I'm doing this from home, because with the timing of that spider bite, I would have been already on the road when the infection hit and things would have probably become much more unpleasant.

Day Jobbe is just a madhouse right now, so much so that I'm trying to take a "look at the bright side" approach to having no in-person Worldcon right now. (We would have been leaving for New Zealand eight days from now.) So if you've been expecting a reply from me for something or assuming I'm keeping up on the usual fannish news sources, don't count on it. I'm nearly as far behind as I typically fall during a Worldcon trip, and that usually ends with me declaring "bankruptcy" and wiping a lot of stuff.

I'm doing my best to keep up with what I consider the highest priority things, but after 10-12 hour days, even working from home, I have only limited brain cells left.

I was feeling alert enough this afternoon so that after I finished with Day Jobbe, Lisa and I went into Reno for a few errands. First we collected a part we'd ordered from Summit Racing (they have a large warehouse/retail store in Sparks), then went to Lowe's to buy some things the Fernley store did not have. We were going to go get groceries next, but Lisa was hungry so we went to the Peppermill buffet for dinner, getting there just after they opened. Things were pretty quiet. Lisa asked the manager about how traffic had been, and she said, "You probably want to finish up by 6:30, because that's when the gamers will arrive." We didn't understand what she meant until we went for our usual post-dinner walk around the upstairs function space.

( GAMA in Reno )

We talked with a few people, and it quickly became clear that the people we met knew "our" fandom. I could talk about "Worldcon" without having to explain what it was, for example. We could have hung around longer, but I have to work tomorrow, and we still had grocery shopping to do, so we had to move on to WinCo Foods. We saw a few signs of panic buying, particularly in the toilet paper aisle. (We bought one package ourselves, but that was on our regularly scheduled shopping list.) They were limiting purchases of bottled water, hand sanitizer, and other things. We weren't panic buying; this was just our normal grocery shopping, which we completed without incident. As my day was drawing to a close, Lisa drove us home.

This post adapts material I posted to Twitter today, with (I hope) the typos and missed words fixed, and also adds a few new pieces I thought about as I was cleaning this up. Also, unlike Twitter, if I spot typos later, I can go back and fix them.

It is a story I call "Fandom is a Pot-Luck Dinner," told for the benefit of people who might wonder about why Worldcon doesn't generally give free memberships to their volunteers/staff/committee/program participants in advance.

Imagine a group of six friends who are all foodies. They come up with the idea of having a series of pot-luck dinners where each person brings a dish and everyone shares with everyone else. Initially, they rotate the dinners between their houses.

The friends start telling their friends, and it's agreed that friends of friends can participate, but they all have to bring their own dish, and you have to host one of the gatherings.

It isn't long before you discover a problem. Nobody has a house big enough to host the dinners!

So you get the idea of renting a local community center to hold your pot-luck dinners. People continue to bring their own dishes, but now everyone is asked to pay their share of the cost of renting the hall. Not only that, but people are expected to help set up the chairs and tables and share in the labor of cleaning up the hall afterwards. Everybody pays, everybody eats.

[Nobody is trying to make a profit. If you end up collecting more money than it cost to put on the event, the person whose turn it is to organize the event generally tries to refund part of the cost back to the people who made it happen. Sometimes, unfortunately, the organizer doesn't collect enough, and sometimes they end up having to make up the difference out of their own pocket, although it's not uncommon for other members to help take up a collection to help out the person who was out of pocket.]

Your event is now even more popular than ever. One of your group happens to know a celebrity chef. Y'all get the idea of inviting them to attend your gathering, give a talk, and maybe even cook some stuff. But that costs money, so everyone has to help pay for that. [And that celebrity is essentially a paid guest of honor and is not expected to pay/help like the ongoing members do.]

[Some of the members of your group are professional chefs themselves. They bring dishes to show off, and sometimes to talk about what they're working on. They, however, pay their share of the hall and they share in the work of keeping things working.]

Time passes. You've outgrown a local community hall and now have to rent a ballroom in a hotel. You somehow manage to get the permits for the food, but the costs are going up faster than the division of costs per person.

It's still popular, but now you have people who want to attend and eat but are not themselves particularly good cooks.

[One of the celebrity chefs, Martin George, has been bringing dishes since before he got his own television show. He likes the gatherings so much that he continues to bring dishes and pay his share of the costs.]

The members of the "Elves, Gnomes, and Little Green Men Chowder Society" (as y'all whimsically named your movable feast) decide that it would be okay to allow non-cooking members, but that everyone still needs to pay their share of the cost. (Onlookers will recognize the reference here to a historical Bay Area SF fan group.)

More time passes, and now only about half of the people attending the EGLGMCS feasts are bringing dishes. [But that's okay because there's always a lot of leftovers, and besides, the cooking members have always liked to share.] Everyone is still paying for the cost of the facilities, and there's still an expectation that everyone will help in some way.

But the newcomers (who just wanted to eat the food at this funny sort of restaurant they heard about) don't understand why they not only are being charged for their food, but are expected to help set up chairs and clean up afterwards. They've never even heard of pot-luck dinners. If you pay money and get food, it must be a restaurant, and they expect to be treated like the paying customers they consider themselves to be. Anything else is cheating them. [When the earlier members point out that they also are paying, and they're also cooking the food, setting up chairs, and washing up afterwards, the newcomers look at them like they're really space aliens, because paying and working is manifestly and obviously insane.]

Here endeth the parable.

Worldcon, the oldest continually-running science fiction and fantasy fandom event, has been organized as a metaphorical pot-luck dinner from the start in 1939. It is not a paid entertainment event, anymore than a pot-luck dinner is a buffet restaurant.

This afternoon after work, Lisa and I did something we ordinarily do not do, which is go into Reno during Hot August Nights, a week-long event designed to draw lots of people from out of state into Reno/Sparks and have them deposit as much of their money into the local coffers as possible. We tend to avoid Reno during this time because it's usually too crowded; however, there were a few final things that Lisa needed before the trip, and I had a discount coupon from Cost Plus World Market that would expire by the time we got back from Worldcon, so we went into Reno anyway. Fortunately, Wednesday afternoon wasn't too awfully crowded. We even managed to get our regular table at the Peppermill, on account of having gotten there just after the buffet opened.

Our first stop was Mill End Fabrics, where we were looking for a non-Chinese-made fabric measuring tape, and we found one, to our surprise. While waiting in line, we noticed the girl in front of us buying a couple of yards of lovely gold fabric. She said she was making "costume armor," and we asked more. She showed us the reference photo, and said it was for a costume she's making for Reno Pop Culture Con, an event I admit to not having heard of before. I introduced myself as a former Worldcon chair (albeit not of the Worldcon that was held at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center) and bragged about some of Lisa's costumes.

We got all of our errands done, had a nice dinner at the Peppermill, which is more crowded than usual (we had to park on the top floor of the parking garage, which is rare), and got home by 7:30 PM. There was a bit of a detour in Sparks because the main exit (Pyramid Way) is closed on account of all the Hot August Nights events tying up downtown Sparks, but it wasn't too bad. It certainly wasn't like that awful accident-related backup a week ago that obliged us to detour up to Pyramid Lake.

When we left Fernley, a series of thunderstorms were blowing through the area. We could see the ominous dark clouds from Reno, but the storms didn't come to the west. But there was evidence of them when we got home.

( Rainbow Over Fernley )

The rain made it muggy, but it did cool things down somewhat as well, which was a welcome relief from temperatures in the mid to high 30s C.

With luck, the only time we have to go to Reno again during Hot August Nights is on Sunday morning as we drive through on our way to the Bay Area. But that does remind me that it's in our best interest to get away as soon as we can on Sunday to avoid the worst of the traffic coming back to California from the event.

There's a decent chance that I will have insufficient time and energy for the next few days to keep up my journal or post much of anything on social media. These even-earlier-than-usual hours plus needing to work on some urgent and time-critical fan things for Worldcon 76 are taking a big toll on me, and even this coming weekend may be too soon. Also, I'm seriously out of practice living out of the RV. By a week from Thursday, when I get to Sea-Tac for Norwescon, I hope to be back in form.

(And sometime in the next few days, I need to prepare some candidate material for publication in the local newspaper up in Lyon County for my candidacy for the NLCFPD board. It never rains but it pours, I guess.)

Norwescon, you say? Yes, I'll be there to be hosting one of several simultaneous announcements of the 2018 Hugo Award finalists planned for March 31 (Saturday) at Noon Pacific / 8 PM BST. More details later when the official announcement is posted, if I have the energy to write anything about it.

Saturday of SMOFCon was so packed with stuff that I really don't have time to do justice to it, and I didn't take the photos I should have done.

( Statistics, Not Probability )

After that was the panel I was on about badge design, for which to my surprise we had a decent turnout (that is, not everyone went to the discussion about what made Sasquan different), and I think a good discussion about the various factors that go into convention membership badge design. I posted my four main design elements from my article in Argentus, and we discussed how the factors will inevitably change based on the nature of the event. For example, the priorities for a 150-person fandom meeting-planner event like SMOFCon are radically different than those of 10,000-person anime convention that has had a serious badge counterfeiting problem.

Lisa had gone off with pcornelius to ride and look at trains today, so I went to lunch with bovil and kproche. We walked across the Water Garden to the Omni Hotel and had lunch in their restaurant. Because of the big buffet breakfast, I just had a bowl of the venison chili, which was quite good.

As it happens, there wasn't much in the afternoon program that sent me, so I divided the afternoon between taking a short lie down (not really a nap, I think) in my room, then hanging out the con suite, where I ended up eating more good chili, until going to a light dinner and then helping Lisa (back from the Interurban Railway Museum in Plano) carry and set up equipment for the "Fannish Inquisition" — presentation and questions for future SMOFCons and for current Worldcons and bids for future NASFiCs and Worldcons.

Lisa recorded as much of the Fannish Inquisition as she could under the circumstances; however, we don't have time or bandwidth to upload the videos right now. It might not get online until Christmas, based on our travel schedule. I couldn't work on it immediately afterwards, because I had the Probability & Statistics Seminar to organize immediately after the Inquisition. Thank goodness Chris Carson was there to help Lisa break down her equipment.

Chicago was selected (without opposition) to host SMOFCon 34 next year, at a Chicago-area site to be announced.

( Some Bits of the Fannish Inquisition )

We've improved the Fannish Inquisition over the years, including better time discipline on presentations and the Q&A session. Unfortunately, it appears to me that there is a streak of SMOFS who have taken this as a challenge for throwing in more irrelevancies and jokes to try and once again expand the event to an uncomfortable length. There were a couple of people who seemed to want to announce bids and jokes for just about everything, and thanks to that, the event didn't finish until 11:30 PM, and a lot of us, including me, were getting a bit exasperated. I think we're going to have to find some way to split this thing into two pieces, putting the SMOFCon selection and seated conventions presentations and Q&A into one 90-minute item and the bids into another one. Not everyone thinks that spending more than three hours in a progressively hotter-and-stuffier room listening to people announce yet another joke bid is a productive use our of time.

Lisa adds that if the Inquisition were better managed, it would be much easier for the person doing the video to do in-camera editing and thus easier to get the video posted sooner. Of course the event is geared around the people actually in the room, but it would be much appreciated if the moderator could be more cognizant of the recording without someone having to stand up and shout "stop!" and "start!" to get his/her attention.

( Shuffle Up and Deal )

It was a pretty good peak day at SMOFCon. It would have been better if Worldcon bidders could show a little bit more restraint.