Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

[Composed Saturday morning because I did not have time on Friday to post this when I first encountered it.]

I subscribe to RAIL magazine, which follows UK railroading. Issue 612 -- now six weeks old -- arrived just a few days before I left for Norwescon, and I brought it with me. The issue includes an article about the English, Welsh, and Scottish Railway (EWS), the subsidiary of the Wisconsin Central that bought the lion's share of the UK rail freight industry when the system was privatized. EWS has since been sold off and is being re-branded by its new owner as DB Schenker, but the article includes the following recollections from EWS's former Chief Executive Ed Burkhart that I found ironic in light of the criticism that WSFS has received for its Hugo Logo Contest:

"The idea of having our fans participate in a contest to create our logo [in 1996] was a good one. And the results were excellent.... I remember going over the half-dozen logos that had been selected as finalists [by RAIL magazine, which managed the contest]. The quality was excellent, and we couldn't have done as well had we used a professional design firm.

It's been a busy day, with the roll-out of the Hugo Awards Logo Contest and some initial teething problems. Within an hour or so of launch, we had someone point out that entries were bouncing, whereupon we realized that we'd typoed our own address as .com instead of .org. I fixed the web site's links and the LJ entries with the press release, and sent out a supplemental announcement following the first press release, while debgeisler put a forward on the .com address (WSFS owns thehugoawards.com but prefers not to use it) so that entries sent to that address will forward on to the correct one.

I'm the actual person who sent the shotgun-blast press release, and it's a bit nerve-wracking to sit there trying to decide whether I've done everything right and it's safe to hit Send. I wouldn't wanted to have measured my blood pressure when I did so. In a sense, finding the bug with the address was a relief, becuase if that's the only bug, we'll be okay, I think.

Getting to this point has been a difficult process that has taken longer than I wanted, but I'm glad we got this far. And I've had to research and learn about way too many things about which I didn't really want to do. (For example, I now know why so many random-choice contests -- of which our logo design contest is not -- are footnoted "void in Quebec.") Now, fingers crossed that we have a good selection of entries from which the judges can pick. And while we will say that yes, we've already received entries, we won't be saying much about the substance of those entries.

And also, thank you to everyone who has posted encouraging words about the contest and has passed it on to their friends. We want lots of people to know about it so we get lots of entries.