Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

World Fantasy Con 2021 reported today (and sent email to its members, which is how I first heard about it) that they "received a report of a positive COVID result that was likely contracted during the convention."

First off: it's not me.

Second: I'm fully vaccinated, was tested before I went to Montreal, right as I arrived at YUL, and on the Sunday of the convention so that I could fly back home on Wednesday. (All tests were obviously negative, or you would have heard it by now and I either would not have made the trip or would be right now self-isolating in the hotel in Montreal.) Also, I think I was pretty good about wearing my N95 (an actual US-made N95 from DemeTech, not a Chinese-made KN95) mask nearly all of the time except while eating. I am more concerned about being exposed to Covidiots going through O'Hare than anything else.

I have no symptoms, but as I mentioned yesterday, Lisa was already keeping isolated in her travel trailer, and I won't be going anywhere for a week. I will self-monitor for any symptoms, and I have two at-home COVID tests, the first of which I will take in a few days. As I have a COVID booster shot booked for next Friday, it's doubly important that I be sure I am not positive before getting it.

This afternoon, I saw Lisa, with both of us masked and at a multiple-meter distance. She's been working on breaking up more of the pallets we have accumulated, and I used some of that to restart the fire in the fireplace. Speaking of which, when I get the photos that Lisa took while she was working on the stove while I was away, I'll be able to show off the work she did that was easier to get done while I was not around.

Meanwhile: I woke up ahead of my 4 AM alarm this morning, did Day Jobbe stuff for a couple of hours, and then had breakfast and dealt with some of the accumulated email for Worldcon and other things. About 9 AM, I went back to bed and slept until 2 PM. I would have liked to stay in bed all day, but I did have things that needed to get done.

Tomorrow is the first day in a while when I've had no morning commitments. I'm very happy to have no alarm set, even though I've mostly been waking up before my alarm.

I have been "showing the flag" of SFSFC at World Fantasy Con, in the form of our WFC 2009 book bag, which I find much handier than the one they gave folks here at Registration anyway. (Mind you, I'd broken the zipper a while ago, and Lisa repaired it just before I came over here, which made it much more useful again.) I also was able to get away from the con for a few hours to go see the Brighton Pavilion, which is a remarkable place and I'm glad I got to see it. This evening, I went out to a nice dinner with friends I don't get to see often enough before retreating to the room to get a bit of mundane bookkeeping done before I head back down to the Mass Signing. Later tonight, we hope to give one of the winners of the SF & Fantasy Translation Awards her plaque, as we have three of the six directors of the Awards' board of directors present in person, a remarkable event in itself, as well as the winner.

As appears to be the way of such things, there are only two panels on the entire convention program that I wanted to attend, and they were both at the same time. I chose the one on "Do Awards Matter?" and was happy that the panelists called on me when the discussion got into some of the finer points of how the Hugo Award rules work and why there's a 5% cut-off to make the ballot in any category. (It has the practical effect of preventing a "long tail" of nominations leading to an overly-long ballot with, say, a fifteen-way tie for the last place on the ballot.)

Meanwhile, Chris Garcia, who is also at WFC, tracked me down to do an interview with me he'd been meaning to do for a long time. Yes, someone I see every Monday night in the Bay Area (when I'm there, which is less often these days) had to travel to the UK, as did I, to do an interview. Life is funny sometimes.

Lisa pointed out to me last night that, given that I have to be in Chicago next week anyway, I should have flown there this Thursday, then flown on my own dime to Columbus to attend the World Fantasy Convention, returning to Chicago on Sunday. In effect, my employer would have paid to get me most of the way to Columbus. She's right, but it hadn't even occurred to me while I was setting up the travel to Chicago that I could have piggybacked a WFC side trip on top of it.

OTOH, I'm certainly glad that I did not need to travel to Chicago yesterday! Whew, what weather!

This morning at the World Fantasy Convention, we showed up to discover that a pipe from the swimming pool on the 4th floor had broken and was sending water down through a service stairwell in between the registration area and where the dealers' room is. Despite what at least one person Tweeted, the ballroom was not "flooded." Some water dripped along one wall of the Dealers' Room. No dealers' tables or stock were damaged, but the convention staff moved their tables away from the area along the wall where the drip was coming down and where water was soaking the carpet. There were a couple of very interesting indoor waterfalls on the ground floor which I filmed and videoed; however, for some reason my camera refuses to connect to my computer this morning, so the pictures may have to wait until I get home.

This is a minor annoyance, but not a catastrophe by any means. There's some disruption in the Dealers' Room, but as far as we can tell, everything else, including the Banquet this afternoon, will continue as scheduled.

Was working until after 2 AM this morning before getting a few hours of sleep, then getting back up and heading off to a WFC committee meeting in San Francisco. When I got home, there was plenty of fannish work piled up, most of it from Worldcon, but also some Westercon and WFC stuff. And I'll need to be up early on Monday because I need to get to the office earlier than usual to get the computer that was hit by a power failure running again (and reconfigured, if possible, to reboot itself when power is applied in the future).

I'm a little wrung out.

Today was a 2009 World Fantasy Convention meeting up in Oakland at the home of Sarah Goodman. Sarah has a wireless internet connection, so I was able to stay online during the meeting and even made a couple of simple corrections to the WFC2009 web site on the spot. For instance, we set the deadline for the current $125 memberships to be the end of August, at which time it goes to $150, and it will be $200 at the door in the unlikely event that there are any left. (WFC has a membership cap and usually sells out pre-con.) Changes like that are simple and I like being able to get them done quickly so that they don't get forgotten.

Thanks again to Glenn Glazer and David Gallaher for giving me a ride to and from the meeting. Now I'm staying inside out of the sun and the heat.

We officially opened up hotel booking for the 2009 World Fantasy Convention late yesterday. The pages were there for a few days, but we were doing some cleanup and testing, with staff members making reservations and several of us fiddling around with the Hotel & Travel pages on the WFC web site. Apparently, we didn't test quite enough, because shortly after booking opened, John Picacio pointed out to us that certain ranges of dates showed no rooms available. Upon a little further experimentation, I found that it appears to be October 28 that thinks there are no rooms, which isn't true -- we have plenty of rooms. We've informed our hotel liaison about it and she'll be working with the booking agency to clear up the bug. However, it might take a few days to get it fixed, what with a long holiday weekend ahead.

There's little danger of running out of hotel rooms, because the Fairmont has more rooms than the convention has members, and we've been reassured that if we were to fill our initial block of rooms it should not be difficult to get more. But as the note I put on the hotel information page says, if you want to book right now, call the hotel directly at the number shown on the booking page and you can make the reservation that way (this is why we know the rooms are really available), but then e-mail the hotel liaison to say you've done so.

My participation in this is to update the WFC web site pages quickly. If you happened to be looking at the WFC web pages late yesterday afternoon, you would have seen the site pages changing every few minutes while I worked to rearrange things in what I hope is a logical manner.

When the booking site bug is squashed, we'll start making announcements in other places.

Update, 1455: Updated the nature of the error after some more experimenting with individual nights and isolating the problem.

I'm nervous when we put out a major announcement coupled with a new web site launch. Last night, the WFC date change and roll out of the new 2009 World Fantasy Con website was the second time in the past year we've done that. (The first was the launch of the Westercon San Jose 2011 bid website.) Aside from the fact that I double-typoed the dates in the short-form announcement on the web site (and thus the RSS feeds got the wrong dates because they don't get new copies when you fix the immediately-noticed error), things seem to be going all right so far. Here's hoping that we haven't outraged the people who have already bought memberships -- we are, as you'll have seen, offering unconditional refunds to anyone who bought memberships prior to the announcement and who can't attend because we've moved the dates a week earlier. And because you can't book airline flights more than a year in advance, I assume we haven't wrecked anyone's previously-purchased tickets to San Jose.

I will not be attending this year's World Fantasy Convention in Calgary after all, for reasons detailed here. Yes, I could go on my own, but without Cheryl, my heart really isn't in it. (And that's besides the financial aspects; while it's a shame to lose the sunk cost of the membership and airline ticket, there's still the other costs I'll avoid.)

This situation makes me furious at my own country's government and the way they have set up a border "protection" system that keeps out productive, law-abiding, good people who have been trying to follow the rules for reasons as arbitrary as "the person at the desk was having a bad day and decided he didn't like your looks, and there's nothing you can do about it." It's yet another step down a very slippery slope leading from rule-of-law to rule-of-man, and I don't like it one bit.

I'd write to my congressman, but I don't know what good it would do.

As long as the wi-fi signal holds out, Cheryl is blogging the World Fantasy Awards at SF Awards Watch, starting here.

Update, 13:05: Final results posted on SF Awards Watch and the WFC Awards Page.