The smoke clears

Portland sits in a river valley with hills and mountains all around it, which means it's always had a tendency to trap pollution. An air quality alert or two is a pretty standard part of summer around here.

My suburb sits in the next valley to the west, which has a profile that isn't quite as prone to collecting pollutants. My area has spent a lot of the last week in the Hazardous section of the AQI scale, but it's had nothing like the off-the-scale readings that downtown Portland has seen.

After predictions of gradual clearing over last weekend, then possible rain on Monday, then maybe Tuesday, then admissions that the National Weather Service's models really don't know how to handle that much smoke, it was a moment of great excitement on Wednesday afternoon when our local AQI abruptly improved all the way to Unhealthy. But it went back up overnight, and it wasn't until a storm system started moving in late Thursday that the permanent improvements started.

It seem to have been less the rain itself scrubbing the smoke out of the air than clean air flooding the area that finally turned the corner. Yesterday, after the main front had moved through, the AQI kept dropping until we made it down to Good in the evening and I finally switched the AC out of recirculation mode.

Dumb homeowner confession: It wasn't until the local news started running articles about ways to minimize exposure to smoke that I even knew home HVAC systems had a mode for using only recirculated air. I hope I remember that come the next tree pollen season.

The storm seems to have done everything we were hoping it would. It came with lightning, but didn't cause any new fires; it swept the smoke away; and it helped calm down the existing ones, including the fire right on Portland's doorstep (on the other side of town from us, luckily) which was only 6% contained as of yesterday.

The long-term forecast says that's about it for the hot days of summer, but I can't say we're that sorry to see them go at this point.

Further convention technology notes

I didn't attend Dragon Con Online, but kept an eye on it to see if it came up with anything exciting on the online front. Dragon Con's gaming track eventually showed up on Tabletop.Events. It stood out in a weekend of about a dozen conventions as the only one charging for signups. The fees were explained as a way of defraying the costs of... choosing to use Tabletop.Events.

Dragon Con's dealer room was run through Eventeny, which allowed every dealer to set up their own online storefront, if they chose to take the time to list every single product there. For this it charged a total of 7.9% of each sale in fees, though this was offset by Dragon Con not charging its own table fees. And by the realization that dealers could showcase their products on Eventeny and then encourage people to buy directly from their own sites.

Gen Con's first stab at its planned monthly community gaming weekend was also Labor Day weekend. Very little happened, but it happened with the use of RPG Schedule, a combination of a scheduling site and a Discord bot. The Web site authenticates you through Discord; you set up your proposed event there, and then the event is posted in a Discord channel. People can then use emoji reactions to sign up or drop. Very easy to use, recommended, shame that the name suggests that it's only for RPGs.

Hopping back a bit, kevin_standlee talks about Gather Town as used for NASFiC here. Gather is pitched as the answer to the problem of Zoom et al only allowing a single stream of conversation.

I haven't had a chance to try Gather myself yet. I asked around at work if anyone had used it, thinking about building a case for it to be used for a recently started monthly get-together which is a bit too big for Zoom. No one had, but one guy was so intrigued that he set up an instance one night, invited all his friends, and came back the next day singing its praises. So that sounds like another thing to add to your convention toolbox.