petrea_mitchell | Entries tagged with worldcon

Worldcon is a complicated convention which develops complicated problems.

As previously mentioned, DisCon III, this year's Worldcon, previously sent out a survey asking members which they would prefer if it was unable to be held in person on its planned dates: a virtual con on the same dates, or an in-person con in mid-December. This was not to be a binding vote, just one that would inform an announcement that was to happen right around now about the convention's plans.

One can hope that vaccines plus the new administration will mean that it is considerably safer to visit DC in August. But since there is no way to know that for sure, I'm guessing that an in-person Worldcon in August is not in the cards.

The new wrinkle to the situation is that the owner of the con hotel has gone into bankruptcy. An unavailable hotel isn't a problem if you're not planning to use it (or if you have a backup facility), right?

From the con chair on their public Discord server:

If we announce anything but an in person in August without agreements, we open ourselves up to paying the hotels cancelation fees. We cannot afford to do that. Ideally we would have come to agreements in the past week, but the Wardman park closure has created issues as our contract may be considered an asset.

So while plans may be made, there may not be an announcement for a while.

Web forms I have filled out recently:

1. Gen Con's post-convention survey.

2. reCONvene's post-convention survey.

3. A bonus post-post-convention survey from Gen Con, asking what they might be able to do to turn their Web and Discord presence into a continuous year-round community. Actual Play videos? Game reviews? Maybe a monthly book club?

4. DisCon III's volunteer form. I went over to the site meaning to check whether I'd remembered to get attending memberships already (yes), wandered over to the volunteer openings page saw the "Brainstorming Staff" listing, and was all YES I CAN DO THAT PICK ME. Plus I'd be volunteering for something or other at-con anyway.

I made myself a list of things to see in DC in the hope that I make it to DisCon III, and maybe it can help you make up your mind or discover something new too. You can see there are a lot of blank spaces, and I'm sure there are errors and omissions, so please let me know about them in the comments.

(If DisCon III decides to copy any of this information, I am completely fine with that.)

Last updated: September 13, 2021

General notes

Highlight means one thing of particular interest to people who are fans of whatever the attraction is about. That one thing can be a collection, but it cannot be "Oh, it's got a bunch of cool things."

By transit entries work like this:

If there is a subway station nearby, that is listed.
If it is along a DC Circulator route, that route is given.
If it is otherwise reachable by bus, there are probably numerous ways to get there depending on time of day and distance you're willing to walk, so it will simply say "Bus". If there is no way to get there with less than a .3 mile (~.5 km) walk, I've noted the minimum walking distance according to the WMATA trip planner.

WMATA's trip planner is right on their front page. The con hotel is at 2500 Calvert Street NW. Remember to always include that NW/NE/etc, because many addresses can be found in more than one quadrant!

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I usually don't sign up for games starting before 8am my time, but I made an exception for Zohn Ahl, a traditional Kiowa game. This was another one played with the GM pointing a camera at a physical board, but it did not work so well in this case because it cut players off from the one interesting aspect of the game, which is how you roll to move.

Movement is determined with four counting sticks, flat on one side and round on the other. You find yourself a large, interesting rock and then drop the sticks on it, moving one space for every flat side that points upward (unless all four land on the same side). The "board" only allows linear movement in one direction for each team, so there wasn't really any playing of the game, just watching the GM play both teams.

This worked better for the next game, Patolli, a board game which was popular in the Aztec Empire. This has some striking similarities with Sorry!, but one big difference is that victory is determined by a betting mechanism. Each player starts with some beans (or whatever you want to bet) and landing on certain squares forces you to pay a bean to the player to your left.

Rolling would normally consist of tossing five beans which have been painted on one side, with each painted side displayed counting as one space of movement. The GM substituted d6s, which made things easier for playing on video but messed with the odds a bit, making it harder to get counters on the board.

Once you get multiple counters on the board you do get to exercise some strategy. I can see how this was crazy popular in Aztec times.

After finishing my games for the day, I went back to Worldcon to watch the closing ceremonies. I also found on its Discord that before it was locked down, someone had posted an invite to an unofficial server on all the social channels for fans to continue hanging out on.

So now it's all over, and there's no rush to pack and get home, just the return of reality and work tomorrow.

This was the big gaming day. First up was a game of DungeonQuest, a boardgame from 1985. When I was paging through the event listings for Gen Con, the fact that it was from 1985 caught my eye. I pointed it out the SO, who immediately looked it up on BoardGameGeek, found a bunch of reviews talking about how this game usually ends in death for all characters, and started doing dramatic readings of the especially entertaining ones. Which convinced me that I absolutely needed to experience this game for myself.

DungeonQuest is a ton of fun if your sense of fun is sufficiently warped, because yes, your character is almost certainly going to die, and the suspense is more about how interesting their death will be. There are a lot of options for surprise permadeath in this game, including: monsters that only some characters are equipped to handle, traps, dead ends, monsters that no characters are really equipped to handle, and the Doomshadow, which is what got me. It follows you around, forcing you to roll a d12 every turn, and if you ever roll a 1, that's it.

The GM remarked that he has run this game several times for cons now, and I was the first player to make it as far as the big treasure chamber at the center of the board. Alas, I did not make it back out again. The person who did win got stuck near the outer wall with a jammed door, then decided to stay near the wall, frantically searching for any treasure at all, finally finding some on the next-to-last turn and then teleporting out just in time.

The GM ran the entire thing with a camera pointed at a physical copy of the board and players telling him what moves we wanted to make, and rolling dice on Discord. This worked out much better than I thought it would.

Then it was time for the Pathfinder Society multi-table special kicking off season 2. I'll leave my thoughts about the scenario itself for the next adventure log, but I will note here that it ended an hour early, which I saw a couple Gen Con veterans attributing to the fact that everyone could actually hear each other. One big advantage for online play there over packing everyone into a ballroom or two.

Pie of the day: a second roast lamb one. Soda of the day: Root beer, the last different flavor to try. A rather disappointing one, too much sweetness and not enough rooty taste.

The early end of the PFS game freed me up to see "The History of the Book", which is my new favorite talk from Worldcon. If anyone reading this still has access to the option to rewatch panels, definitely catch this one. Lots of information that was new to me, the most shocking part being that when you see a parchment-era book being destroyed in a TV show, it's too expensive to make replica ones, so that is an actual historical artifact being destroyed.

I later tuned in to "In Space No One Can See You Hide the Evidence: Crimes in Space", but also needed to make dinner during that hour, so I was only able to listen with half an ear and didn't pick up much from it.

The last panel of Worldcon for me was, appropriately, "Virtual Conventions and Conferences", which revealed a disaster that nearly halted Worldcon before it started. No, not the virus, an error on Zoom's part. Worldcon got a package deal that was supposed to be in effect for a two-week period that included the convention dates. It was set up on July 12, and someone at Zoom entered the 12th as the first day, causing all the webinar rooms to vanish the day before the start of the con. It took nine hours to get it straightened out because Zoom's tech support only operates on Pacific time.

A lot of information was shared and compared about the specific platforms that various cons have used over the last few months. I would have liked to see some discussion about how easy it is now for people to run coattail events, but it wound up focusing on mostly technology.

That was not quite it for Worldcon, though...

I had nothing much to do Friday morning, so I caught up on anime and blogging.

Pie of the day: Lemon chicken, not as good as the classic chicken. Soda: Orange cream, not nearly as good as the vanilla cream.

"Improving Puzzles for RPGs" was a panel presentation about adding puzzles to your homemade RPG adventures. There were a lot of standard tips, like being aware that the puzzle will be much harder than you think it is, and making sure that the game doesn't become unplayable if the puzzle can't be solved. One non-obvious one was to make sure that harder puzzles fall earlier in a session.

"Designing Better Character Sheets" was a talk by a UX designer showing some horrid examples and her redisgns of them. The full-color version of the Pathfinder 2e character sheet was called out as a bad example for how the vivid contrasting colors distract from the important parts, oops. A lot of basic UI advice applies to sheets as well: stay away from fancy fonts, put the important stuff near the top, remove what you don't need, etc.

"Time Wizardry and Mind Games for GMs" was a big disappointment. The talk turned out to really be about constructing a profile of each of your players, their gaming style and what motivates them, which I guess was useful to GMs running long campaigns for the same group of players every week. Not the tips and tricks on psychology at any gaming table that I was hoping for.

Over to Worldcon, then, where "Constructed Language: From Elvish to Esperanto to Dothraki to Belter" must have been much like every other conlang panel I've been to because nothing about it particularly sticks in my mind.

I took a break during the Hugo ceremony (I'm not in the habit of going, since it's usually so late at night, and there was no category I was especially exercised about this year) and came back fresh for the last panel I was appearing on, "The Decade in Anime".

Mostly this one was the panel enthusing about our favorite shows of the last ten years. In the Discord chat afterward, it was agreed that there were way more good shows we hadn't gotten around to mentioning. I tried to get into some discussion of trends in the industry and fandom, but that didn't go very far and we went back to recommending shows.

Gen Con kicked off with the launch of the Pathfinder 2nd edition Advanced Player's Guide, bringing a whole new bunch of ancestries and heritages to 2e. I really wanted to try out the witch class and something from the new ancestries and heritages, so I rolled a few dice in public view on the main PFS Discord server, and now I have a half-angel goblin ready to bring in when Yara graduates from the 1-4 tier.

First game of the day was Cosmic Colonies on Tabletopia. The game itself uses cards and polyominos as you attempt to make asteroids suitable for habitation. One neat feature for evening things out is that you get a random hand to start the game with, but any cards you play are then passed to the player on your left at the end of the round. Pretty good, would play again.

Being the first session of the con, a lot of time was spent at the beginning ironing out technical difficulties. Tabletopia turns out not to play well with Chrome, for instance. I was using Firefox, but ran into a problem where I couldn't dismiss a popup which was too big for my screen insisting that I sign up for a free trial.

One thing that struck me about both boardgaming platforms from yesterday was that where Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds are constructed with an eye to being an aid to players by implementing some of the rules in code, Tabletopia and such are conceived more as a simulation. You get a 3D representation of your gaming table and the ability to move your point of view around. You also get some work to mimic real-world physics, which can work both for and against you. For instance, when you're trying to return a resource counter to its stack, it would be neat if it just snapped back into the stack, whereas it was possible to not put it back precisely on top and have it fall to the table.

"Dice Questions Answered" presented the results of some experiments on dice rolling and fairness. The main question it answered was "Are your dice cursed?". The answer was, your d20s probably are cursed. The majority of d20s tested were biased, and more were biased toward low numbers than high numbers.

What biases them seems to be imprecise tolerances, a problem that gets worse as you move to dice with smaller and smaller faces. While the float test is useless, a good pair of calipers turns out to be the quickest and easiest way to tell if your die is going to be fair or not. Also, sharp corners work better than round ones.

The second game of the day was Planet Unknown on Sovranti, another space-themed game which turned out to also involve polyominos, but with wholly different mechanisms for allocation and scoring. I liked this one a lot, probably because I'm attracted to crunchier gaming systems and this one was significantly crunchier than Cosmic Colonies. It was the sort of game where none of us really fully grasped everything that was going on until a few turns in, yet managed to have fun anyway.

Sovranti, which turns out be pronounced like "sovereignty", is a downloadable app rather than a browser-based platform, and currently in beta. It adds avatars to stand around the virtual table (not customizable, though with a long list of varying ethnicities to choose from), but it falls closer to the "aid" end of the spectrum than Tabletopia. Rules were implemented in code, with a robust undo mechanism. One feature missing in comparison was the ability to select a board and zoom in on it, but our GM, who was one of the developers, assured us that that was on their shortlist of features still to be implemented.

Pacific Pie of the day: classic chicken. Very classic. I'd forgotten how good their chicken pie was. Wild Bill's soda of the day: vanilla cream. Possibly the best vanilla cream soda I've ever had, in that it tastes like actual vanilla and cream rather than just sugar.

Worldcon's Masquerade happened, all by pre-recorded video. A fairly small number of entries, which would be normal for a Worldcon outside North America, but all good. My favorite would probably be "The Pirates of New Zealand", all adorned with native NZ birds rather than pirates.

This was also the day that the site selection result was announced. To the surprise of practically no one, Chicago romped home with over 90% of the vote. The Jeddah committee will be trying again for 2026. In the traditional SMOFfish manner, they are now being recruited to help out with the next couple Worldcons.

Props to the nine people whose first-choice vote was a write-in for "Free Hong Kong", both for the sentiment and for setting up the additional write-in of "Moderately Expensive Hong Kong".

A lot of people stopped by the bid channel afterward to offer their condolences to the Jeddah chair and wish him Eid Mubarak. While it is well understood that the bid was a nonstarter (and that the odds for 2026 are not great right now either), few people want to crush the spirits of such an enthusiastic and committed bunch of young fans.

"Great Worlds in SF" was mostly about the mechanics of worldbuilding and how it is communicated to the reader-- the map in the front of the book and so forth. Fewer recommendations for specific great worlds than I was hoping for.

"My Favourite Anime" was the last thing I made it to for the day. Always good to see a bunch of people getting to enthuse about anime at an sf con, and many recommendations were made. It suffered from one problem that tends to occur on any open-ended anime-related panel, though, which is that very little of what was talked about was less than about 15 years old.

This panel also set a record for the number of feline interruptions. One panelist was plagued early with recurring appearances of a tail in frame with her, while another had a cat hanging out in his background grooming itself for a while, which eventually decided to come up and demand lap time and scritches.

I spent the morning posting here, hanging out on various con-related Discord servers, and getting myself signed up for the boardgaming platforms I would need to use for Gen Con. I also checked out the CoNZealand art show and exhibit hall.

Pie of the day: beef and mushroom stout. I also remembered that the SO had just gotten a 12-pack of assorted sodas from a vendor we first came across at last year's Portland Retro Gaming Expo. Their black cherry soda is decent, but I think Boylan's has them beat.

I had the beginning of the CoNZealand day blocked out since someone had asked in the staff lounge for volunteers to play the part of Hugo finalists in a rehearsal, but heard nothing more about on the day, so I had a low-key afternoon/evening of Discord and panels. We also squeezed in the weekly shopping trip right after lunch.

Also there was the Retro Hugo and Sir Julius Vogel Awards webcast, the latter part being a recording of a genuine in-person get-together. All the Vogel finalists were able to attend a small ceremony where the trophies were handed out, with the results being kept quiet until the the ceremony was streamed. I had not known that my co-panelist from the day before, Andi C. Buchanan, was a finalist (but maybe they mentioned it in their introduction at the panel and I was too nervous to pay enough attention).

"Money and Currency for Fantasy Authors" was another of those topics where there are practically no good examples to point to. A couple that were mentioned: the Wheel of Time series for the author noting that the different polities in it make significantly different coins, and the Pern books, where such commerce that exists uses wooden tokens (the precious metals being far too precious to use as coinage).

"Stunts in SF Films and TV Shows" was a one-man presentation by NZ stuntman Peter Hassall, and easily the best program item I've been to so far, definitely worth checking out on the "Watch it Again" feature if it shows up there. Lots of information ranging from the latest in safety gear to a terrifying story about how some of the EVA scenes in 2001 were filmed.

I don't know if I'll be able to blog every day, but Gen Con doesn't start until tomorrow, so I have nothing better to do this morning.

Worldcon kind of started for me Monday night (Pacific time, that is-- Tuesday afternoon NZ time) when I stopped by the main con Discord to say hi to people and hang out by the info desk and staff lounge for a bit.

Actually, things started ramping up over the weekend, making sure I could get into all the various tools being used by con staff:

Gmail
the "Crew for CoNZealand" site, built on BuddyBoss, providing the equivalent of an organizational intranet
When I Work, used to let staff members sign up for shifts
A staff-specific Discord server
Staff channels on the main Discord server

I'd committed to signing up for a couple info desk shifts, but people signed up so quickly that I wound up with only one. On the other hand, that meant I was free for random other pick-up tasks, like when someone asked for some test subjects for a Hugo tech rehearsal.

I kicked off the trip to virtual New Zealand by having a lamb pie for lunch. Then I went to the first official event, the opening reception for the dealers with virtual coffee and doughnuts. Actually I had a real doughnut, having picked up a box of them on last week's grocery run, with a vague thought that maybe I could simulate the experience of going to con parties a bit.

Right after that was my one info desk shift. The main questions were (1) how do I get to the dealers' room, (2) when does it open, and (3) how do I access the opening ceremonies. Things were quiet enough that I was able to watch the opening ceremonies.

Then I had an hour to eat dinner (the SO had gone out and gotten KFC), put on a nice blouse, settle in and do my final pre-panel panicking for "Accessible Magic". All three panelists left on the schedule did turn up, the room was open on time, and... I think it actually went okay. Useful information was shared, interesting questions were asked, the audience seemed appreciative, and as far as I know, no one was hate-tweeting it in an attempt to blow up Twitter (one of the scenarios I have spent way too much energy imagining the last few days).

After that I felt like I could truly relax. I watched most of "Running Conventions: A Worldwide Perspective" while lounging on the couch and eating a slice of chocolate hazelnut bourbon pie, then puttered around and did evening chores.

To finish the day, I was on "The World of Independent Board Games", and here is where I finally came face-to-face with technical difficulties. The room did not open at the appointed time, and I never did find out why, but it was a simple matter to pop into the #programme-ops channel and alert them. The panel got underway about 10 minutes late with a couple last-minute personnel changes, but a good time was had by all.

At one point, I read out my list of boardgame platforms from Origins Online, adding Sovranti, and someone in the audience promptly mentioned yet another one in the webinar chat: Yucata.

I got to recommend a few games I love, but I was left with a feeling like the games I was recommending weren't indie enough.

Yesterday the SO and I picked up a stack of New-Zealand-style meat pies from Pacific Pie Co. so that we can pretend to be in NZ a bit during Worldcon. It was the first time we'd been to downtown Portland since mid-March.

I am still incredibly nervous about the "Accessible Magic" panel, not helped by a second person self-rejecting off of it. At least it's my very first one, the first day of the con, so I'll get it over with and then be able to relax.

Speaking of downtown Portland, there is nothing that has captured the mix of horror and absurdity this week like this Washington Post story on the arrival of leafblowers as a protest tool. On the one hand, how ridiculous is it that the feds in their military getup have had to rush off to the hardware stores to buy their own leafblowers to play, as I've seen it described, "tear gas tennis"? And on the other hand, bits like this:

CS gas, or 2-chlorobenzalmalononitrile, has been classified as a chemical weapon. Its use is banned on the battlefield by nearly every country in the world, including the United States. But it is legal to use domestically by police and federal agents to disperse crowds.

In my own neighborhood, it is hot and eerily quiet. No sounds of baseball games over at the one nearby school, or the Sunday morning cricket practice in the field behind the other one. The only signs of regular summer activities are the occasional smell of charcoal smoke and the sounds of kids splashing and arguing in a wading pool in some nearby backyard.

The CoNZealand schedule is up! Here is where I begin living in fear until 1pm Wednesday New Zealand Time that someone on Twitter preemptively decides that the "Accessible Magic" panel is going to be all kinds of horrible and tries to start a firestorm about it.

Adding to my anxiety is that I sent out messages to my fellow panelists on the two panels I'm moderating a couple days ago, with the usual moderator stuff plus a request for them to let me know how they want to be addressed. (Since on Zoom you can't get away with "Could the panel please introduce themselves, starting from the far end?", you have to call on everyone by name.) I've only heard back from two people and one of them said they were trying to get removed because they didn't feel qualified to be on that panel.

I've just gotten my final schedule for CoNZealand, now with 50% more panels! Thankfully I don't also have to moderate the new one.

Note that times are local for New Zealand (UTC+12 at this time of year).

Accessible Magic

Wednesday July 29, 13:00-13:50, Programme Room 3

How does a person with a speech impediment handle magical incantations? Dyslexic sorcery: scrambling runes a hazard? Is the autism spectrum an advantage if spellcasting requires visualizing complex shapes? Let's mash mastery of magic and differently abled people together and see what we get.

Andi C. Buchanan, Elizabeth Moon, Taiyo Fujii, Geneve Flynn, Petrea Mitchell (M)

The World of Independent Board Games: Beyond D & D

Wednesday July 29, 15:00-15:50, Programme Room 4

Just about everyone has rolled a 12-sided die at one time or another, but there's a whole new world of indie games like....

Ed Fortune, Petrea Mitchell, Max Gladstone, Queenie Chan (M), Amal El-Mohtar

The Decade in Anime

Saturday August 1, 14:00-14:50, Programme Room 1

The highlights, the lowlights, and the unforgettable moments of 2010s anime.

Martin Wisse, Petrea Mitchell (M), Takeshi Ikeda, Amanda Arthur-Struss

Despite all my posting about Gen Con, Worldcon does remain my priority for the days it's being held. There just hasn't been much to write about. Yesterday morning, though, I attended a Zoom training session for program participants.

CoNZealand program items will be held in webinar mode, which means the audience will not be able to engage in Zoombombing. There will be both text chat, for the audience to talk among themselves, and a Q&A feature for questions to be submitted to the panel.

The most important piece of information for me as a moderator is that every panel room will have host, separate from the panelists, who will be there to iron out technical difficulties and help block abusive or spammy comments or questions. Given that a Worldcon can have twenty program items going on at the same time, this is a huge commitment of volunteer time, and one I've very grateful that they're making.

For those new to Discord, CoNZealand's programming department has set up its own server for participants to try out.

1. CoNZealand has sent out draft schedules to program participants, over a month before the con. I am impressed. I don't normally expect to see my schedule more than about three weeks ahead of time from a settled regional convention, or more than two weeks ahead for a travelling con.

Things may change, but for now it looks I'm on two panels, both of which I get to moderate, and both of which I originally suggested, so really it's going to be all my fault if either of them suck.

2. As for the other con that week, Gen Con has corrected the date for the start of signups from June 13 to July 13 and sent out a survey cautiously inquiring what-all people actually expect to do at an online convention. It has also explained that while registering for the con is free, individual events may have a modest fee for participation. The SO tells me that this is how it used to work back in the day for people who didn't pre-register.

3. One of the questions on the survey was about which other online conventions people are attending. Options included Spiel Essen, THE event for people who are into Eurogames. I had not known that it was going virtual this year too. There's another semi-checkmark on my bucket list of cons.

The ideal trip to Essen someday would be in a year where it doesn't overlap with the Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival. That's the case this year, but no signs yet that Sitges is moving online.

Gen Con is moving online for this year too. It's where the new Pathfinder Society season gets kicked off every year, so these days I have actual reasons for wanting to attend.

The fact that even the online version is up against Worldcon is a problem, though... OR IS IT?

Gen Con will be running on Central Daylight Time. Worldcon will be on New Zealand time. I'm in the Pacific Time Zone. The bulk of Worldcon programming with start at 3pm my time and run late into the night. I know that sounds absolutely perfect to some of you, but I'm a morning person. In the middle of Northern Hemisphere summer, I'll be waking up before 6am without the aid of an alarm clock.

Gaming all morning and then panels and virtual con suite in the afternoon/evening sounds doable. It wouldn't be the first or even the second time I've been to two conventions simultaneously.

Now that there are conventions on my schedule, I need to actually get ready for them. First up: PaizoCon is being held on a variety of virtual tabletop systems. For RPGs like Pathfinder, there are two main ones, Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds. Roll20 is faster to learn and set up, but you have to do a lot of things manually. Fantasy Grounds gives you a ton of help executing things according to the rules, but the tradeoff is a longer setup time.

The high-level game I've signed up for is on Fantasy Grounds, which is how I wound up spending two hours this morning entering the details of my level 10 wizard including all 156 spells in her spellbook.

I have my second-edition wizard signed up for a couple of 2-hour quests, one of which is listed for Roll20 and the other on the popular new entrant, "Unknown virtual tabletop product".

For AmazingCon (and later Worldcon) I need to find an appropriate Zoom background and either locate my standalone webcam (my laptop doesn't have one built in) or get a new one. Which I'd better do soon, given how slow delivery is these days.

There's nothing specific I absolutely have to do ahead of Origins Online other than to register, but I have a reminder set for when registration opens a few days hence because I've decided to sign up at the limited edition T-shirt level.

Now that the conrunning world has had time to regroup, online cons are popping up everywhere. My schedule for the summer so far:

May 30-31: PaizoCon Online, for all things Pathfinder. Actually starts the 26th, but the way the schedule is organized the only sessions I can make it to are on the weekend.

June 12-14: AmazingCon, where I'll be on a couple of panels (schedule currently being finalized and should be available soon).

June 19-21: Origins Online, another gaming con, one I never had plans to attend in person, but they're trying some interesting things so what the heck.

July 29-August 2: Worldcon! Which I am taking days off for, and have volunteered to be a panelist at.

Although we do not know what the state of international travel will be in July, the Worldcon organizers have understandably decided that they can't wait to figure out what they're doing, and so Worldcon is going virtual.

I'm weirdly excited about this. I should be disappointed that all my plans for the trip to New Zealand are now impossible. But I guess the new shiny thing is enough to distract me. This'll be fun! Plus, I got a program participant survey just before the announcement, which is always exciting.

Oh well, that's more money and time we have for a grand trip to next year's Worldcon, because this should all be sorted out by the summer of 2021, right?

I still owe the SO a trip to Peter Jackson's airplane museum, though.

Well, sort of. Mari Ness's wheelchair got damaged on the way to Dublin, then Aer Lingus lost track of it, then it turned up again "repaired" with not entirely compatible parts. Some of this saga made it into the Irish Independent in a roundup of travellers' woes.

It is often observed that stuff expands over the course of a trip, so that your perfectly packed suitcases somehow become unable to accomodate everything on the way back. I hardly even bought anything on my Worldcon trip and still experienced this. On reflection, though, I did still accumulate a fair amount of extra stuff...

Lots of people had a staff badge and a regular badge, but how many got two different spellings of their name, huh?

The one time I needed the early entry card, I didn't have it yet and got past the convention center person guarding the stairs with my staff badge and a hopeful look.

Ribbon notes in order of acquisition:

Site Selection falls under the WSFS Division.

From the Amazing Stories table in the dealers' room.

Given out at the WSFS Business Meeting.

From the fanzine lounge.

From the Chengdu fan table.

I saw several of these before encountering a person at Strolling With the Stars whose badge simply read, "Trouble". I asked if she was the one giving out those ribbons. The answer was one of those ribbons.

From a guy who had a box full of all sorts of ribbons and really really wanted to give out one to everyone.

Everyone on the Site Selection staff got some of these concession vouchers (or "groats", if you want the technical term) for each day we worked. I believe the EK refers to the chair's nickname of Evil Kevin. (I presume

kevin_standlee is Good Kevin.)

As an Amazing Stories blog contributor, I was handed a copy of the new magazine and a copy of the David Gerrold/Trey Boyle comic A Doctor for the Enterprise, both of which seem to have gotten lost in the unpacking shuffle. Also this pin.

The Santa Clara County library system had a fan table, where they gave out assorted rewards for three-word book reviews. This was for Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin-- "Her funniest book."

There was a pile of these, free for the taking, in the fanzine lounge.

Speaking of zines, I've finally checked "Contribute to an APA" off my bucket list. The World Order of Faneditors is compiled at Worldcon every year. This year's editor was Guy H. Lillian III. I contributed a page about the life, death, and resurrection of a hotel much beloved by Portland fandom.

Someone sent a series of boxes full of random books to the staff lounge with orders to help ourselves.

Next year's Worldcon, Dublin 2019, had a program item where people could suggest program items for their con. I implored them to remember that morning people exist in fandom, and mentioned a few morning events that I've enjoyed, including Orycon's "Cereal and Cartoons", which got a surprisingly enthusiastic reaction from the audience. At the end, they gave out swag bags to people whose suggestions had gotten the most applause.

Contents included a notebook and gel pen...

...power brick and cord with a carrying pouch...

...bookmarks, keychain, badge ribbon, mini-buttons, and stickers.

The last thing I went to before closing ceremonies was a beading workshop where we all got a nearly-complete beading kit. (The missing thing is a piece of felt or somesuch to lay unattached beads out on; the workshop had those but they were reclaimed at the end.) I clearly need lots more practice, but I feel like I've gained an actual skill!

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petrea_mitchell

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