Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

I've said it in various places, but for the record:

I declined nomination to the seat that I have held for many years on the WSFS Mark Protection Committee. My current term ends (in effect) on the first day of Seattle 2025, when the MPC holds its final meeting of this term. Unusually, we will know who my successor is before then, because the election to fill the three seats up for election will be held during the virtual Business Meetings behind held before the in-person convention happens.

Please take note that my decision do to this was unrelated to anything having to do with the Hugo Awards. I have not been a Hugo Award administrator for many years, and in particular, I was not a member of the Hugo Awards Administration Subcommittee in 2023. Unfortunately, due to some intemperate remarks by me about how WSFS works, I was reprimanded by the MPC and resigned as Chair of the MPC, but did not resign my seat as a member of the MPC and the ex officio directorship of Worldcon Intellectual Property, the non-profit corporation that manages the WSFS service marks on behalf of the World Science Fiction Society.

It appears to me that there is a strong sentiment among a large-ish number of people who are apt to participate in the process that WSFS needs some change. Well, by golly, I'm going to give them changes, and this year, those people have an opportunity to elect at least two people who are not incumbents, as the only one of the three incumbents who stood for re-election is Nicholas Whyte. I wonder if those people who said that I personally was the person doing the most harm to WSFS are even members of Worldcon and if they are, will they vote. Yes, those accusations still rankle, as did being threatened with being sued into oblivion for malfeasance as an MPC director and officer. Such accusations tend to chase away our most valuable and useful people in an organization that depends on dedicated volunteers to keep it working.

I declined nomination to the Trial Committee that will hear disciplinary charges against certain WSFS members. If you want to know more, read the linked article from File 770. The entire issue was discussed in executive session at the July 13 virtual WSFS Business Meeting, and aside from what is in the Presiding Officer's official statement, I do not think I can discuss any of the substance of the issues.

I appreciate people nominating me, but I do not think that I can serve in good conscience. I do not even expect to be personally present when the results of the Trial Committee's deliberations are presented to the Business Meeting, although it's likely that Kayla will be there.

I had to take today as a sick day, which is a great sacrifice for me because my vacation and sick leave both come out of a common "paid time off" fund and therefore every day I take sick is a day I can't have as vacation. But I needed this one. After checking in with work at 7 AM and telling them I was too ill to get any work done and that I hope to work from home tomorrow, I went back to bed and slept until about 11 AM when the workmen came by with a leaf blower and woke me up. They stuck around the area for about an hour, after which I slept some more. I spent most of the day in bed or on the sofa, although I did do a little bit of catching up on the lower-priority e-mail. Some stuff will simply never be read.

I do not yet have enough energy to work on some of the projects like reducing the MPC meeting minute notes to a minutes document yet. I'm still very much not myself and need more rest before I can get back to normality.

Oh, and in the meantime I've been given advance notice that I may need to fly out to New Jersey for most of the first week of October. This meeting has not yet been confirmed, but I'm making my October travel plans around it. I was supposed to go to Oregon for three weeks starting October 1, but assuming this trip is going to happen, the plan is for me to fly straight to Portland from NJ and spend the three weeks from there. This is less convenient in one way because I can't haul along the extra gear I normally carry when driving, but also means that I'll only have to pay for the travel one way (the return to the Bay Area at the end of October.

WSFS's attorney asked me today if there was anything that showed the Hugo Award trophy in use in its early days, so that if we are asked by the US Patent & Trademark Office (we're in the process of filing a service mark on the rocket trophy design), we could show first use. Thanks to the FANAC fan history web site, I was able to find a page from a 1955 Worldcon progress report that shows pictures of that year's trophy and calls it a Hugo. In those early days, "Hugo" was only the informal name, the formal one being "Science Fiction Achievement Award," a la Oscar/Academy Award.

Note that not only had they prepared their trophies in plenty of time to have pictures of them in their last progress report, but that there was none of the current nonsense about keeping the trophy base design a secret until an unveiling at the ceremony. Of course, in those days the bases were all simple blocks, too.

My work has reached the point of letting a very complicated optimization model run for several hours. This means I can go ahead and leave it alone and go into Salem to accomplish the things we weren't able to get done yesterday due to bad timing.

And I need to remember that I promised an short article for Denvention 3's Souvenir Book editor about what the Mark Protection Committee is and who is on it by the end of this week.

Having written this article about the WSFS Mark Protection Committee, I decided there was too much material there to not get more use of it, and I adapted it into this entry on the Conrunner Wiki, an online resource that has the prospect -- if more people get involved -- of being a really fantastic resource for convention-running information.

Although the disadvantage of wiki-based systems is that anyone can edit them and thus introduce inaccurate information, this is also an advantage, in that I can update WSFS information (say, the membership of the MPC) without having to wait for the one person with the keys to the web site to have the time to do it.