Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

Not every mention of Worldcon turns up in my daily Google Alert. I stumbled across this Worldcon/Japan trip report this morning. I enjoy reading trip reports like these, but I did hit a bit of a bump in the road on this:

The most senior committee members may receive some compensation since for them it is very much a full time job....

Say what? There was monetary compensation of some sort for this job? First time I've heard of it.

In complete fairness, the rest of what he says about how Worldcon is complete fan-run and so forth is quite true, and I appreciate people noticing it. I left him a comment asking what he means by "compensation." I don't deny that there are minor perks of the job. In 2002, I got a somewhat reduced-price room ($99/night), and was eventually reimbursed for room nights before or after the nights we would expect a regular Worldcon attendee to take anyway (and that meant the night before the convention wasn't reimbursed -- we assumed the night before the convention through the night after it ended, or Wednesday through Monday nights for a "traditional dates" Worldcon), and some other expenses, but I certainly was never paid a salary or stipend of any sort.

Lisa was very busy taking photos of the WSFS Business Meeting at Nippon 2007 as well as video, and I've now uploaded most of the photos that were on my computer. Most of them have not been edited or cleaned up in any way. The date of the meeting is embedded in the file name. Just to confuse things, the photos weren't uploaded in chronological order.

Nippon 2007 officially ended shortly after 1300 local time when chairman Hiroke Inoue wielded the Gavel of WSFS for the final time before handing it over to Kent Bloom, chairman of Denvention Three. But of course the final afternoon is hectic as well, involving much of move-out. Lisa and I didn't participate in as much of that as we maybe should have done, as we were instead having our pictures taken in our WSFS uniforms, taking pictures of other people in their great costumes, and engaging in an orgy of sticker-book exchanges. In the end, I filled 110 of the 120 spaces in my sticker book filled, which is pretty cool. I think it's possible that this sticker book thing could catch on at American cons if someone wanted to try it and promote it a bit.

By then, we had gone too long without food, and so we popped over to the Queens Mall for lunch at "Garlic Jo's" where Gilroy Garlic Festival posters decorate the walls and "garlic and spicy tomato" pasta needed a fair bit of red pepper to have real taste. We then spent 90 minutes or so in the Cosmoworld amusement park whose Cosmo Wheel "Yokohama Eye" looms at us out our hotel window. We rode the Big Wheel, then the roller coaster that dives down through the pool, the log flume, and the spinning "Wild Mouse" style coaster. We ended up with a single ticket good for one top-class ride, which I put into the auction at the BASFA meeting later that evening.

Then it was off to help with the setup for the Old Pharts (Worldcon Chairs) party. We were there early, but the setup was mostly done by the time we got there. One thing they didn't have was enough ice. We checked the massive Dead Crane Dog Party going on down on the third floor of the Conference Center, but they were out of ice as well. Trying to hit the hotel ice machines was pointless. Lisa and I hit the machines on eight different floors and managed only a kilogram or two. So we popped down to World Porters, where ice was for sale at "only" JPY198 for 1.1 kg. Ouch! And it was so late that the supply of breakfast pasteries from Le Bon Pain was miniscule, too.

The spread at the Worldcon Chair's party was impressive, and we made a dinner of the sushi and other goodies present. The room filled up nicely, and when the newest inductee into the Former Worldcon Chairs' Club, Inoue-san, arrived, David Clark and I asked him to come into the main room for a presentation to him from SFSFC. Dave gave him a case of six San Jose McEnery Convention Center mugs (ex-ConJose) while I gave him a package of Cable Car pins (ex-ConFrancisco). Yes, this means that Dave and I gave Inoue-san presents representing each other's Worldcon.

Shortly after 2100, the BASFA regulars and semi-regulars and see-you-at-Worldcon types went out into the hallway and took over the elevator lobby -- the party being too full for such foolishness -- and convened what we contend was Meeting 892, and we have pictures to prove it. As the closest thing to a club officer handy, I presided.

The meeting took a bit longer than I expected, and things got contentious over the Rumor of the Week, leading to much payment of surplus vote fees. In the end, the club took in JPY4387, which, using about the same conversion rate as Bank of America charged me, nets BASFA USD39, and I wrote the club a check for that amount. Now I don't have to worry about having enough 100-yen coins for the rest of this trip, I reckon.

Tomorrow morning, we head off to Kamakura, so I'll be gone all day and away from computers even worst than during Worldcon. Tomorrow evening is rough. We have to repack everything into "rest of trip" and "send to Narita Holiday Inn for storage" and maybe find a way to do laundry.

I need another copy of me -- one to go travel and the other to write about it here. Finding time to write is difficult.

I just can't even think straight about summarizing things today. Lisa and I went on the Donbura-Con dinner cruise, which had decent food and a nice ride, although Lisa was quickly driven from the front deck due to the noise from the sound system, which kept cutting in and hour and was very distracting. She spent a great deal of the cruise talking with Japanese fans, stretching her limited Japanese and their English, but often using Kuma Bear as a conversation starter.

After the cruise, we changed into our WSFS uniforms -- of course, we wouldn't have worn those on the cruise, lest we cause any confusion or offense to our hosts -- and went over to the Anticipation/Montreal 2009 Worldcon Victory Party, which was going strong in the Harbor Suite of the Convention Center. With the weather having turned relatively mild, this was a great venue, with hectares of outdoor space into which we could spill and no neighbors to annoy, save seagulls.

A little after midnight, we started making our way back over to the hotel across the walkways that connect the Exhibit Halls to the Intercontinental Hotel, and I stopped to take a photo of the hotel.

( A very striking hotel pic, if I do say so myself )

There's more I could write, but I'm beat. I'm going to post a short summary of WSFS Business and go to bed. Because the con ends so early tomorrow, we must get our acts together first thing and get over the to the Exhibit Hall when it opens tomorrow at 10 AM. Closing Ceremonies at Noon on Monday. We'll probably wear our WSFS uniforms again, it being the last chance for a while to get some use out of them.

The photo below the cut below is posted for frankwu's benefit. Sorry, Frank, but we were not recording video during the actual Best Fan Writer Hugo presentation, because Lisa was starting to get sick -- she ended up leaving right after the Fan Hugo categories -- and I was busy trying to take notes for the ceremony as part of my assignment to make sure the Hugo Awards web site had the results correct.

( Frank Wu accepts Hugo by Proxy )

I took this photo after the post-ceremony photo-scrum. I assure y'all that the actual acceptance went as well as anyone could have expected.

It was a very interesting evening at the Hugo Awards, including a cool "opening act" of Ultraman fighting monsters in live action on stage.

The dramatic part from my point of view went away early, as Chris Garcia did not win in either of the categories in which he was nominated. I have his two Hugo nominee rocket pins, his Hugo Nominee ribbon, and a slightly battered invitation to the Hugo Losers Party to bring home to johnnyeponymous.

( An alternative universe did leak in during the post-Hugo party, as pictured behind the cut )

I spent most of the evening after the ceremony at the post-Hugo Party, which was the only comfortable party at the con. The sixth-floor parties are still all fuggy and impossibly hot, while the weather has become very nice here in Yokohama, so the Harbor Suite where the post-Hugo Party was held was quite nice.

I want to write so much more, but I must get to bed soon. I still have one more Business Meeting to chair, and I have to be up in under six hours for it.

The Hugo Awards ceremony is this evening, but it starts two hours earlier than traditional. For me, that's an even earlier start because as an acceptor, I should be there for the pre-ceremony reception that starts at 4:30.

Shortly after the ceremony, I will telephone Cheryl in the UK to let her know the ceremony is over and that the results can be posted on the Hugo Awards web site and SF AwardsWatch. About the only places you'll see the results earlier will be anyone live-blogging them during the ceremony, and possibly Nippon 2007's own site.

I have a bunch of photos here. I have no time to go through and pick out some of them and show them to y'all with descriptions. Instead, I've been reduced to a relatively raw dump into Flickr. You'll get some idea of what's going on by the keywords and file names.

Besides the things I have to do at work to bring my current project to a point where someone may be able to work on it for the three-plus weeks I'm gone, there were plenty of convention- and travel-related things that I needed to do today. Net result it that I'm still in the office here at 10:30 PM, and I have a conference call at 8 AM tomorrow.

At the last moment, Lisa and I decided to make trading seals for distribution at Nippon 2007. Now, we can't perfectly match the standard 24 x 17 mm size, but by taking Avery 8167 80-up labels (0.5 in high by 1.75 in wide) and cutting them in half, we get approxmately 22 x 13 mm, which is certainly close enough.

My seals are the WSFS "White Star" logo from Interaction. Because the underlying stock is a rounded-corner sticker, one side of the sticker is flat while the other is rounded. After I printed the first sheet, Lisa suggested inverting the print so that the flat side is always to the left -- that way it looks a bit like a flag. Clever.

Lisa's seals are a portrait-format picture of Kuma Bear from CascadiaCon, with him sporting a hall costume rosette that is nearly as big as he his. We printed more of mine than of Lisa's, as the WSFS logo can be taken as the "Business Meeting" seal as well, which some people may want to collect.

I would have preferred to use the Business Meeting rubber stamp created for ConAdian's "Passport to the Universe" (a similar sort of idea) promotion in 1994, but the stamp -- which I do still have -- has long since run out of ink, and doesn't seem to have any way to refill the ink inside of it. And there's no way I'm going to risk the mess that carrying a stamp pad in my luggage could cause if it got loose.

Our seals, of course, are likely to be far less popular than these seals that feorag plans to distribute.

Also today, I got word from my travel agent that the last of our hotel reservations (three days in Aomori at the JAL City) has come through. I had the agent mail the paper copies of the confirmation to the Oregon PO Box, so it will be there by the time I arrive and before we leave for Portland on Sunday the 26th

I got a call from NTA, Nippon 2007's official agency, confirming that the sleeper surcharges are indeed per person, not per compartment the way they are in the USA, Canada, and the UK. I'm still astounded that nothing on any of the web sites I've read says this, and that indeed, some of them imply that it's a per-compartment charge (after paying for the rail fare). I still think the whole sleeper-reservation system makes no sense and is designed to make it impossible for someone using the rail pass to actually book the best compartments. But then, I'm used to American trains whose sleeping cars book up months in advance.

It's amazing how many things I have to get done to travel to Japan. Today I checked a number of them off my list:

( I've got a little list.... )

There are many more things that need doing, but all of these are little things that will make the trip better for us.