Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

I find that I do not really like being crammed into a CRJ900 on a long flight in the non-reclining last row of the plane. The exit row on the 757 between SLC and OAK was much nicer, even on a completely full flight.

I'm home, tired, about to fall into bed and dreading having to go to work in the morning. It's not MARCon's fault that there aren't a lot of good flights back to Oakland.

As expected, everything at the hotel/convention center area was closed this morning, so I went for a morning walk in search of anything that might be open for breakfast. I found a little greasy-spoon diner that served a cholesterol bomb of a breakfast, so I reckon it's a good think I walked about 4 km getting there and back.

Now I need to finish packing out of the room and store my bags for a couple of hours before going to the airport.

Lisa called me while I was in the Dead Dog Party to inform me of her initial progress to the Indiana state line. She said things were a little slow because she'd stopped to indulge in a couple of guilty pleasures which are unobtainable on the west coast: White Castle (only two burgers, she said) and Waffle House. Other than that, things have been going just fine once she fixed that balky battery cable just before she left Columbus. She's happier to have to fix that cable now rather than in a rainstorm in the middle of Wyoming.

I have posted a backdated entry with some photos and fuller description of my afternoon here at MARCon. Anyone who complains at me about bandwidth-sucking photos has been warned not to look.

My last panels are done (photos later) and I attended the feedback session where I thanked the management for being so kind to me and for everyone's hospitality here in Columbus. As I said, standing there in my WSFS uniform, "The White Star Federated Spaceways takes its hat off for you." And I did.

Then it was time to get Lisa moved out. We went to the room, changed out of our uniforms, and Lisa started packing. She wanted to head out earlier this afternoon, but there were panels and such to do. In a few minutes, I'll help her move stuff down to her pickup parked in the garage attached to the Hyatt and Crowne Plaza by skywalks.

My internet connection turns into a pumpkin soon and in order to avoid having to renew it more than once more on this trip, I don't expect to sign in again until late this afternoon. After breakfast but before my Noon Autograph session (about which I continue to scratch my head) and 1 PM panel, I need to help Lisa pack the heaviest stuff out to her pickup, for she will be heading out mid-afternoon today. I'm here until tomorrow afternoon, so I don't have to worry about packing until tomorrow morning.

My thanks to people who have chimed in over the drinking issue overnight. I probably have some significant blind spots on this issue, given that I have no taste for alcohol and therefore almost never serve it at parties I host. Although I do remember a MythAdventures Fan Club party I was hosting where some loud and pretty lubricated people came in demanding, "Where's the beer!"

I said, "We don't have any." They made loud noises of dissatisfaction. I asked them, "Is there any chance you'd join the club if we served beer,"

They said, "Hell, no!"

I asked, as reasonably as I could, "Then why should we bother serving it?" They had no answer to that and left.

Lisa and I donned our WSFS uniforms this afternoon and went down to mingle and look around. We poked our heads into Ops where Kim Williams (and others) were not busy (this is good) and said hello, then went over to the Dealers Room. Just outside the hall, Rebecca Forstadt was signing autographs and selling various things, including the ROBOTECH soundtrack CD. We certainly had to get one of those if only to get "Lynn Minmei" to autograph a CD to Lisa Hayes.

We ended up spending a lot more money than I usual spend in a dealers room these days. I reckon this may be because we've seen most of the stuff that dealers on the West Coast circuit have, whereas many of these folks are new (to us). We were in the Dealers Room much longer than I expected, browsing various dealers' wares, socializing with people, having our picture taken, and handing out my business card with the link to the long version of the WSFS Armadillo story.

We got as far as the entrance to the Art Show, but they require all bags to be checked, and Kuma Bear rides in Lisa's bag and certainly wasn't going to ride to the bag check, so we'll have to skip the Art Show. We tried to make ourselves visible and accessible around the con as much as I could, walking the hallways, going through the Gaming area, and so forth. After a while, Lisa said she was getting tired and a little hungry.

There's no way we were going to eat in those all-white outfits. While they can be cleaned, they're natural attractants to dark staining things. So we went back to the room and changed into "civvies" and went out looking for dinner. The North Market is only open until 5 or 6 O'clock, and after walking that far, Lisa decided we didn't need a fancy sit-down meal, so we headed back to the food court at the convention center, where we got a burger and fries.

Lisa is a bit more tired than I am -- probably the cumulative fatigue of the 2500-mile drive from Oregon catching up with her -- and is not generally interested in convention masquerades anyway, so we decided the better part of valor was to get back upstairs while the masquerade was running. We could move between floors by stairs once we were up there.

Again, I don't want to be a hide-in-his-room guest, but we did need some unwind time. We'll make the rounds of the parties a little later. For now, I'm taking the chance to work off some of the backlog of unread e-mail.

My first panel this afternoon was about Virtual Communities (MySpace, LiveJournal, etc.). I'm not sure whether we shed any further light on the subject, but we enjoyed talking about it. I pointed out that a lot of the behaviors about which they were complaining aren't much different than what used to happen when fanac was by postcard and fanzine, but it just moves much faster, with drama that once took months happening in minutes.

Then it was on to my panel on "Doctor Who Fan Vids." Due to unfortunate miscommunication, I didn't realize that the entire 75-minute block was mine, so I only brought the "Making of" films, as I mentioned earlier. We might have been able to show the entire The Zombie Legions if we'd started it within a minute or two of the start and ran slightly overtime into the 15-minute changeover. As it was, the thirty or so people in the audience were very appreciative of what we did show in the "Making Of." If you're one of the people who were there who have first encountered this LJ because you came here on account of me referring to it, thank you! It's always fun to show this film before an appreciative audience. I'm only kicking myself for not bringing the full-length film along "just in case."

A point I made in both these panels was that IMO there is no One True Core Fannish Way and that there are lots of different ways to be fannish, and that all of them are "right." My entire life is a living testament to this attitude.

After the panels, we had a stop in ConOps where I picked up my GOH per diem money. (There was no urgency about this; I have credit cards.) Then we grabbed a snack in the Green Room and came back to the room for a short while to clean up and change into our WSFS uniforms. We'll be heading out to walk around the convention during this "prime time." While Lisa is taking a quick bath, I need to find the business cards I printed with the "Why is he wearing a ship's captain uniform" business cards that point at the long version of the story.

[Back-dated because I didn't pay for another day of T-Mobile connectivity until I got up this morning.]

Lisa and I spend some time looking around Friday evening's activities, but didn't find much to our taste. The Con Suite was full of karaoke, from which Lisa pulled me before I was tempted to see if I really can get in the right key for certain Billy Joel songs. We then decided to go up to what we were told was the party floor (5th). After waiting a while for elevators and letting one go by that was already full, we decided to walk. One nice thing about this hotel is that you can actually get from the ground floor to the upper floors by stairs. That is, the stairs down to the ground floor are not "emergency only - alarm will sound" type. OTOH, we discovered that due to some mysterious internal configuration issue, there are twelve flights of stairs between the third and fourth floors, rather than the two flights found between most other floors. So the fifth floor is more like the tenth or eleventh. Still, we needed the exercise.

Once we reached the fifth floor, we found only one party. Other fans present said that things are normally slow on Friday night and that we should expect more on Saturday.

Having run out of things to do and -- I hope -- done my best to make myself available, we decided to go for a walk outside the hotel. Specifically, we planned to walk to a convenience store we'd spotted during one of our other walks. Heading up High Street, we crossed paths again with Rebecca Forstadt and her boyfriend, who had walked down to a tapas bar located in the Short North area. I was worrying that they'd think we were stalking them or something like that, but it's sheer coincidence.

Incidentally, SMOFCon will be here in this same city in December (assuming they get themselves together -- there's no sign of any organization that I know of yet, and I've not spoken to its organizers this weekend yet). I assume that the Drury Inn in which they're located (and for which I have a reservation) is the one that adjoins the Convention Center. If this is the case, then we'll be well set for dinner expeditions during the convention, as this is an area well-situated for food.

Anyway, after buying a few things from the mini-market, we headed back to the hotel and, as it was after midnight, turned in for the night.

After finally dragging ourselves out of bed, we headed out to find food. We went north along High Street and through the Short North Arts District. To our right was the Columbus Convention Center, which is built out over the railroad tracks and the freeway, both of which are depressed through this area. The Convention Center seems pretty big, and there are several hotels in the area other than the attached Hyatt. From my cursory survey, there seems little doubt that from a facilities standpoint, Columbus could have easily hosted a Worldcon. It probably would have been a bit like downtown San Jose, where if you turn one way you have forbidding-looking office towers, parking garages, and similar urban wasteland, but if you turn the other, you find a district full of shops, clubs, and restaurants, all quite walkable.

We continued up High Street, where we happened to come upon Rebecca Forstadt and her boyfriend Doug walking back the other way. After talking with them, we realized that we were off by one street for the North Market, a market area sort of like the marketplace next to the Pennsylvania Convention Center at MilPhil. We walked back to the market and had lunch there, Lisa buying a large chunk of freshly-baked focaccia bread and me getting lamb curry over basmati rice.

Then, needing to walk off the lunch, we headed down past the Nationwide Arena to the riverside park and up the river, looking at the replica of the Santa Maria moored there as well, before looping back up to street level and to the hotel. I found the weather just right, although I wish I'd brought my sunglasses.

Convention programming is just starting up, so in a few minutes we're going to head down and get familiar with the convention space before the opening ceremonies, which are at 7 PM.

Because the T-Mobile service is a 24-hour day, I may not log back in late tonight if today's time has expired -- I'll wait until tomorrow morning.