Bill Roper's Journal

I have finished filling out the Dodeka tax forms, which means that I just need to print out the packets for the Federal and Illinois tax filings, assemble them, put them in envelopes, and mail them. I still need to get all of *our* information to the accountant, but that is tomorrow's project.

In other news, my passport has arrived, which means that I am officially good for the trip to FilkOntario. :)

And I'm back from Capricon.

This is a slight exaggeration, because I commuted to Capricon this year, living about 15 minutes from the hotel and having discovered that there were no rooms with two beds available in the block when I was looking to reserve a room. (The hotel would rent me a king room in the block or a double/double outside of the block. Neither of those would have been particularly helpful.) Anyway, the result was that I was commuting to the con with a whole passel of kids.

The good news is that sales at this year's Capricon were better than the sales at my last pre-COVID Capricon back in 2020. That is largely because the sales at that previous Capricon were abjectly terrible. (Pulls up old tax paperwork to check. Yes, terrible.)

Looking at the tax paperwork causes me to realize that what I paid for two tables and a membership this year was the same as I paid for three tables and multiple memberships back in 2020. This is not a complaint that's unique to Capricon. *All* of the general-interest SF cons that I go to have boosted their table prices substantially post-COVID at the same time that their membership has gone down noticeably. This is why I no longer attempt to deal at Confusion -- there's just no prospect of making enough sales there for it to make any sort of economic sense.

Now, I understand that conventions are trying to get enough income to survive. I have worked enough cons over the years for that to be clear. But it doesn't *appear*, for instance, that the rates that are being charged to artists are a lot higher than before. (I can't speak exactly to the amounts that the artists are paying for hanging space, but that 10% commission is the same before and after COVID, to the best of my recollection.)

When I questioned the rate increase for the tables at Windycon, I was told that this is what other nearby cons charge and I *think* that referred to anime and possibly furry conventions in the area that have more members than Windycon or Capricon. I could be wrong about which cons they were referring to, as I didn't feel like it was even worth trying to make an argument (and I am *on* the Windycon concom).

All that said, my sales at Capricon were definitely ok. They were a bit less than at Windycon and I have no idea what the actual attendance at the con was like, because you couldn't divine it from the badge numbers. Maybe it was announced at Closing Ceremonies, but I was busy knocking down the table. :)

I just feel like the cons are going to price too many dealers out of the market. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe other dealers are doing a lot more volume of sales than I am, but that's not the impression that I get. I will make money on Capricon this year, but only because I commuted to the con and am only charging one membership against the table. (Which is fair, because I was really the only person who worked the table, which meant I was pretty tied to it.)

This is not a complaint about Capricon. The folks who ran the Dealers' Room were nice and competent and good to me and I *appreciate* that. This is a complaint about general-interest SF cons in general. It would be good if they were not trying to balance their budgets on the backs of the dealers, because having a large and diverse selection of dealers is an asset for a convention, IMO. And if I am going to spend all of my daytime during a convention sitting behind a dealer table, I need to be making my nut or the IRS is going to wonder what I am doing -- and so am I. Witness that I don't try to deal at Confusion any more. :)

Ok, all of that rant out of the way, I had a good time at Capricon. I had some nice conversations. I enjoyed the two panels that I was on. It would have been nice to have a concert, but that didn't work out for whatever reason. Maybe next year. The art auction was a lot of fun and it is great to have K there auctioning beside me and Dr. Bob and Mike. And K's friend from school and Julie ran art along with Lisa and did a fine job. I had fun at the open filking on Saturday -- I was too tired on Friday and had to get back early to open the dealer table (there is a recurring theme here :) ).

The new hotel seems workable, although the restriction on taking things out of the con suite was a bit of a problem when you're a dealer. It is, in any case, in the suburbs, which means that it is much easier for me to deal with. And being able to do move in on Friday made a *big* difference for me.

So I am happy to be back at Capricon for the first time since the remote con in 2021 which was the last time where I ran filking for the con. :) My perfect attendance run is well and truly blown by 2022-2025 and that's ok.

We'll try it again. :)

I am asymptotically close to being packed up to go to Confusion. Since Sam and Bonnie are running a bit late, I should manage to be ready when they get here. :)

See you later!

I had a wonderful time at GAFilk. The van, maybe not so much, as it became somewhat insane about starting in random ways while on the trip. This made the 14 hour and 45 minute drive home more exciting than it would have been otherwise, but happily, I managed to get the van to start on all occasions and -- actually! -- after leaving the hotel parking lot, it started correctly every time.

The van has an appointment at the dealership on Wednesday. I suspect that there is a computer issue underlying all this, but -- then again -- I would. :)

Anyway, I had a wonderful time at the con, got to talk to a lot of people, sold some CDs, got to make some music. All good.

Even if I didn't get enough sleep last night because there were unknown melodies running through my head...

It is December 23rd and all of the Christmas gifts are wrapped, unless we missed something. This may be a new record. Mind you, if Gretchen and the kids hadn't agitated to get it done, I would still be dilly dallying.

Having had to poke around in Square, I took the completed inventory from the basement, combined it with the Square inventory, and have now made a good start on the 2025 taxes. There is still a lot to do, but they are *started*. Our sales are up this year, largely on the back of having issued two new CDs. This is not a trick that I can do every year, so we need to figure out some more ways of boosting sales, which may -- in the current environment -- be impossible. The number of titles on the table that appear to have sold zero copies in the last year is distressingly large. And that's distressing to me as a seller of CDs, but also as a maker of CDs among other makers of CDs who would like me to buy some more of their stock because there's really a limit to the amount of insulation that they need in their garage, it's *also* a bad thing. Sales are driven by new products, but the folks making CDs are doing a better and better job of capturing more of the retail sales, which is admittedly good for them, but bad if you're trying to move product for them in places where they aren't.

There's also streaming, which is good for the artists if they can manage to capture some revenue from it, but not a solution for keeping the dealer table running. And figuring out how to capture revenue from streaming is a black art, I think.

Ah, well. This is not a problem that will be solved tonight.

Instead of finding a solution to this problem (which probably wouldn't have worked anyway), Gretchen and I watched "Thunderbolts", which turns out to be yet another Marvel movie that I was just as happy to have watched from the comfort of my living room rather than paying to watch in a theater. This is a problem for the theater owners that is remarkably similar to my problem with the dealer table...

This is Chris Conway's fault. Sort of.

Chris has been working on his new album and has been posting about the various things that he has been doing to "Song 13". I finally asked him if that was the title of the song, or its position in the track list, or what. It turns out that it's "what", in that it's the thirteenth track that he's been working on in succession for the project.

I had an ulterior motive when asking: it seemed like "Song 13" was sort of a good title for a song. I wasn't sure exactly what the song would end up being, but it was a good title for a song. :)

And now I have a song to attach to the title, which you will find just below. Some things just get numbers, I guess. For Love Potions, it's Number Nine. Or maybe Ten...
( Lyrics inside... )

It has snowed a lot here today. A ruler in the back yard carried by younger child measured in excess of six inches at around 6 PM. It is still snowing now. Happily, the snow is supposed to clear out by 6 AM which means that the roads should be clear for K to take her bus back down to Ball State for Monday classes. All I have to do is get her to the pickup site before noon. Assuming that I can get out of the as-yet-unshovelled driveway...

The tree was purchased and placed in its stand yesterday. Late today, the lights and ornaments were added and it is very pretty. We are not sure what Calvin the Very Hungry Dog is going to make of the tree, but I am sure that we will find out. I really wanted to get this done this weekend, because I wanted K to be able to help decorate and I didn't want to wait to get a tree for another two weeks. And so it is done. :)

The news came down the line yesterday that Leslie Fish was very ill and in home hospice, followed today by the news that she had passed. I was never particularly close to her for a wide variety of reasons, none of which were particularly anyone's fault. Nor was I likely to have ever agreed with her politics in general, although I might have agreed with one thing or another at one time or another. This is somewhat akin to two blind squirrels discovering the same acorn.

But there was music. So *much* music! And when Off Centaur Publications was being a tremendous force in the filking community and being built on the contributions of so *many* different people, well, to filk Kipling, "It was Fish, Fish, Fish." And that made a difference in my life and that of many other people. She wrote a lot of songs and some of them were great ones.

Maybe that's not a bad way to be remembered.

So it went like this...

The new baby gate arrived this morning. I dropped the old baby gate off at UPS over lunch and it is on its way back to Amazon. After work, I decided that I would see if I could quickly install the new gate and it turned out that I *could*, having figured out all of the problematic parts with the previous gate. The gate is now installed on the stairs and should, I think, prevent Calvin from coming upstairs. It does not *seem* to prevent Gretchen from coming upstairs, although it doesn't make the whole process any more pleasant. And Julie needs to see how to operate the gate so that she does not tear it down accidentally. I have called Julie and suggested a demonstration, which she has declined. I worry about this.

Meanwhile, the new Thunderbolt 3 adapter card for the Apollo 8 unit that I bought arrived from Sweetwater. It had come via USPS and the notice said that it was in the mailbox. This seemed unlikely and it was, as all of the mail had been left on the porch, because that box had no hope of fitting in the mailbox. I brought everything in and it was now time for dinner.

We have been keeping Calvin on an extra-long leash to keep him in the family room when he is not in his kennel, but after dinner, I decided we should let him roam free on the first floor and determine whether the new baby gate would keep him off the second floor. This cost us one wooden cooking spoon that had been used for dinner and which Calvin found while counter surfing. Ruby took it from Calvin and it died while I tried to take it away from Ruby without breaking it.

And then a little while later, Calvin went and laid an enormous load in the middle of the living room where he has been previously guilty of doing so. Great.

By now, I am *really* unhappy. I head back into the living room to turn on the lights and clean up the mess.

And I trip on Julie's suitcase, which is still sitting in the passage between the hallway and the living room where it has been for over a week since Windycon. I had been thinking that this stupid thing really needed to go upstairs. I had thought correctly.

Trips to the floor: one.

Swearing and shouting ensued, because I was unhappy with pretty much everyone in the house at this point, including myself. Happily, I don't seem have done any major damage to anything, so I was able to pull myself up on the stairs, get up, and clean up the pile of poop. In multiple trips to the toilet, but no more trips to the floor.

I had thought to drag Calvin to the living room and rub his nose in it, but he was having none of this, so I exiled him to his kennel. Then when I was done cleaning things up, I dragged the kennel full of Calvin to the living room, where he will remain until morning in exile there.

And then Gretchen and I finished watching our TV show. After that, I went to the basement to install the new Thunderbolt 3 adapter into the Apollo 8 unit. This is easier when the unit has not already been installed into the rack so that it can only be accessed from the floor.

Trips to the floor: two, but with more planning this time.

Taking the card out requires a lot of playing with a teeny, tiny Allen wrench (which I only dropped once). Then I discovered I couldn't lever it out with my fingernails, but I got Julie to come in and hand me the bit of metal that had once covered a expansion card slot in the back of a computer. That tool did the job nicely. The new card was installed, the screws put back in, the Thunderbolt cable that needed to go to the computer which I had carefully identified and rerouted was plugged into the Apollo 8, and -- as long as I was on the floor already -- I moved the rest of the cables on the assumption that this was all going to work.

I levered myself off the floor, walked through the procedure for registering the used Apollo 8 unit to my account, and all of that worked. Now, the only thing that needed to be done was to use the new, short Thunderbolt cable to connect the Apollo 8 unit to the Apollo Silver unit.

I called Julie to do this, because it has to be done underneath the console. She plugged the cable in and went back to her computer.

The Apollo Silver unit and the Satellite refused to pop up on the list of devices.

Ok, there is no reason this shouldn't be working, unless Julie has somehow plugged the cable in incorrectly. This means that I will need to inspect the cable install.

Trips to the floor: three. Once more with feeling.

Thunderbolt cables are finicky beasts and it turns out that Julie had twisted the Thunderbolt cable so that the lighting bolt was face up on the Apollo 8 and face down on the Apollo Silver. In her defense, I hadn't removed the cable wrap from the new cable and that was the way that it *wanted* to be plugged in. It was just wrong.

I unwrapped the cable, plugged it in correctly, and stuck my head out from under the console. Three devices were now present in the display. Yay!

I crawled back up into my chair, fiddled with things a bit more, discovered that all of my plugins were now recognized, and declared victory. I fired up Cubase, pulled up a recent project, and hit the playback button.

Everything sounded good. Very good. Probably better than before, which is what one should expect from the newer unit with the better converters.

So this project was a success.

I am going to go take some Aleve now.

I will be off to Windycon shortly, right after I get the dogs into boarding for the weekend.

Gretchen will follow when school is out.

See some of you there!

Cubase 15 has dropped, which means that it is time to pay the annual Cubase tax for the upgrade. This is ok, because I expect it and I get a stack of new features.

Among the stack of new features is the AI vocal synthesizer. It's still in beta form, but it allows you to construct male and female vocals from a melody line. It includes full automation capability so that you can dial the various parameters around to create expression.

Overall, I think I'd prefer to have my friends singing along with me.

In any case, I won't be looking at this until *after* Windycon.