Bill Roper's Journal

So here I am at Vidcon for my third day (of four), although the first day was mostly just finding registration and taking care of that. But I'm here in the huge Anaheim Convention Center and thinking of having been here in the past for Worldcon. And there are some good things being done with space allocation that I've noticed.

The ginormous main space of the main floor of the convention center is almost entirely open. There are four main stages (one small, two medium, one large, although all are large by some measure) along various walls of the space, along with a massive section that's cordoned off for pre-ticketed (but free!) meet and greet, where you can get professional photos taken with various Internet personalities that are uploaded and sent to you with a link. We're all tracked by RFID chips in our wristbands (which accompany our badges), so matching the photos to the recipients is easier than you might otherwise expect.

The center of the space is the exhibits area. It is chock full of vendors in booths of various sizes. Some of them will sell you a product right there. Some of them are technology vendors (like DaVinci Resolve, which was handing out cards to direct you to their website to download the free version in the hope of selling you the not-free version once you need more capability). NASA is here and advertising their support for content creators. Disney is here, plugging an upcoming Descendants movie. Minecraft is here. (Of *course* Minecraft is here...)

There's a Festival Stage outside, but it is in the next county near Registration (which was, sadly, in the next county, but in a big enough space there for all practical purposes). I am not going to see much that happens at the Festival Stage, because I am doing enough walking without going there.

There are food trucks outside (two lunches of bulgogi so far), but there are also convention center booths selling food in the exhibit area and in a patio area inside which seem to be *slightly* better priced than the food trucks. I may investigate this tomorrow. There are also convention center food sales in the foyer.

There's a shortage of places to sit, other than the big stages in the hall. But places can be found if you are sufficiently old and determined. I am both.

Oh, and each of the big stages has a video production crew at the back of the hall so that the activities on the stages can be projected on a huge screen behind the panelists. Expensive? Probably. Necessary? Very.

And the panelists are usually sitting on comfy couches (which I have seen occasionally at Worldcon) and working with multiple wireless handheld mics. It's a good arrangement, much better than sitting in an uncomfortable chair at a table.

People are constantly moving through the huge open exhibits space. Some of them are even watching where they are going. I was walking toward a woman today and desperately looking for some form of eye contact so I could guess which way she was going to go so I could avoid walking into her. I'm not sure what she was looking at, but it clearly wasn't me. I avoided the collision anyway...

I'm thinking that if you have this kind of space (which not all Worldcons do!), this is a good way to arrange things. The only area requiring heightened security is the Art Show, which would fit nicely into the secured meet-and-greet space. And then there are four events programming areas at the periphery of the exhibits area, which is both exhibits and dealers. There are plenty of breakout rooms upstairs for smaller programming items.

I don't recall this sort of space allocation at the last Worldcon I was at in Anaheim (2006!), but my memory may be faulty. Certainly dealers and exhibits were in separate spaces and large programming wasn't mingled with them.

But it's nice.

If you have the space. And the money. :)

I got moved into the Dealers Room for Chicon today, then walked across the Loop to Ogilvie Station to catch a commuter train home. This was a *lot* of exercise, all things considered.

Tomorrow, Gretchen will drop me off in the morning so that I can open the table at noon. Then she'll get the kids after school and head down to check in.

I am expecting that my legs will be less sore after a good night's sleep. :)

I had intended to get a good bit of the packing done for Worldcon today, but that didn't happen. On the other hand, Gretchen managed to get some help from K, so the kitchen table is clean enough that I have a space to *do* the packing in.

I will just have to get this done tomorrow. :)

I'm taking a new tack on one of my projects at work that's been making me crazy. I think that will help, but I'll know more early next week.

Meanwhile, we have arrived at the weekend. Ruby the Dog found a hole in the fence and went for a nice lie down on the neighbor's deck. Fortunately, the neighbor likes Ruby. The hole in the fence has been mended, but I need to find an opportunity to do a *lot* of fence work soon.

Worldcon is rapidly approaching and the delayed CD reorders need to go out this weekend since I've now used up enough of the available slack to be annoying.

Now that the old bed has been removed, Gretchen requested a smaller chair for the bedroom, so I found one in the basement and it has now come upstairs. We'll see how it works out.

And three boxes of old bedding went off to Goodwill today, which is a good thing. The great towel sort is scheduled to follow soon.

Oh, and the clothing that Gretchen was wearing during Skunkfest 2022 has made a trip through the washer, so that should improve things in the house. Actually, things were pretty good on that front, the house having been open for two days, but I decided to close back up and turn on the A/C because I was sick of the high humidity.

Right. Time to change the small filter in my CPAP too, because every night when I put my mask on, I smell skunk.

Trying to keep up with everything around here is a full time job, I think...

I see folks are talking about awards. So let's start from the smaller end of the spectrum and work up toward the larger one and see where I get to.

I'm a filker. I've won three Pegasus Awards (although I've always credited my joint win with Clif far more to him than to me; I was simply swimming in his wake) and been nominated a number of times. And I appreciate every one of them and I thank everyone who has ever nominated and voted for me over the years. I find that -- and I suspect this is no different from most people -- the affirmation is always a positive thing, win or lose. So thank you all again.

Of course, the Pegasus Awards are nominated by a small, self-selecting pool of people. There's no fee required to nominate, although the committee does try to make sure that the nominations are restricted to members of the filk community, because it would take very little for a small, outside group to massively skew the nominations. (Sound familiar?)

And I know there are various log-rolling efforts that have occurred over the years. I've pushed Juanita Coulson and her song, Chess, for a long time, because I consider it one of the seminal filk works that broke out of the more usual mode of filk a long time ago. And I was gratified when Juanita won a Pegasus Award for Best Writer/Composer a few years ago, as she'd never won one for anything over the years.

On a different note, I consider it a crime that Barry Childs-Helton has never won the Best Writer/Composer Pegasus. I could go on at length, but would you just listen to his body of work? Heck, just check out Dream of a Far Light. Consider that log pushed down the slope again. :)

Of course, the level of log-rolling above is pretty minor. (In my opinion. :) ) There've been more coordinated log-rolling campaigns, some that I've heard of, no doubt some others that I haven't. These things happen.

And all of this occurs for the Pegasus Awards, in an area where a "career" being affected by winning is a pretty unlikely concept.

So it pretty much has to be worse for the Hugo Awards.

Understand that the Hugo Awards don't have much truck with filkers. I still remember back when whatever Worldcon committee that it was decreed a category for the Watchmen Hugo so that they could get it the heck out of the Best Novel category. Of course, they had to find some other things that might in theory populate the category, so they declared that filksongs were eligible there too.

In the year that they were first performed. Not in the year that they were actually set in tangible media so that a larger group could hear them, but when they were first sung in a circle.

Thanks loads, guys. Well, at least they made their intentions pretty clear. A song that might have been heard by 50 people got to compete against publications with runs in the hundreds of thousands. I mean, you couldn't have expected the playing field to be level, but this one was pretty much vertical.

But I digress.

I do not have a lot of time to read SF lately. I'm lucky to read a half a dozen books in a year. I used to read every issue of Analog when it arrived at my home. But that was a long time ago.

And the SF field is much larger now. I'd have a great deal of trouble trying to keep up with what's out there even if I had the time to make the effort.

So I don't nominate for the Hugos since I dropped off the Worldcon circuit. I barely nominated in the years before I dropped off and a fair number of those were for people who suggested to me privately that maybe I could nominate their work.

(And no, I am not going to name any names. The names are not important. Please, please, please do not assume that any particular individual was engaging in this sort of private log-rolling because of my statement, because you are entirely likely to be wrong. Just take it as a fact that it happened -- and remember that I'm not exactly the most politically connected guy out there in fandom. :) )

How are people going to find things to nominate in a world with so much SF and fantasy out there that we can't consume the entire stream from the fire hose? Well, sometimes people make recommendations. Depending on who they are, their recommendations are going to carry more or less clout. That's not a great surprise either.

And sometimes, a group decides they don't like the mass of things that are on the Hugo ballot and that they need to make some recommendations of their own. And they're pretty aggressive about it. (In relative terms.)

And you get Sad Puppies.

Now my first opinion about this year's results is pretty straightforward -- I refuse to believe that one individual wrote three of the best five stories in a particular category in a particular year. Or at least I find it pretty unlikely.

Of course, I also found it unlikely that Best Dramatic Presentation: Short Form should be dominated by Doctor Who episodes. And that went on for years.

So if you ask me what the first thing to do to fix the process is, I'd say that you should limit nominations for an author or a TV series to one per category.

But the second thing that I think is that the Sad Puppies have actually created a useful working model.

The SF fire hose is too big for almost all of us to consume.

In the world that we live in, a recommended and well-publicized set of nomination suggestions from people whose opinion you trust is invaluable in telling you what to go read and consider nominating. Whether you call them Sad Puppies, or slate-makers, or curators, or reviewers, this sort of slate can perform a valuable function.

In fact, it's even useful if you disagree with the opinion of the people who put together the slate. As Spider Robinson long ago observed, a book reviewer who you disagree with 100% of the time performs a valuable service for you. If he likes it, you don't want to read it. :)

So it may be that the best way forward for the Hugo Awards is for there to be a lot of trusted slate-makers out there giving you their recommendations -- because if they don't, you just end up drowning in the fire hose and you don't find the stuff that you like so that you can nominate it on a timely basis.

I could be wrong about this, of course.

qnofhrt called my attention to some lovely pictures of Julie at Worldcon that Kristine Smith posted here.

And now you can see them too. :)

Katie and Julie have been dropped off for a half-day of school each in advance of Worldcon. daisy_knotwise will pick them up, while I head down earlier with catalana and Steve to open up the tables.

See some of you there!

The CDs are in the car. Well, except for one order that is apparently held up in customs. And a couple of other orders that were never acknowledged and probably aren't coming at all.

I'll pack clothes shortly, as they go down tomorrow to minimize the Thursday luggage transport.

The inventory list is updated, the new albums are ripped to the iPod. The directions to the hotel are printed out (and possibly accurate).

Tomorrow, I walk Katie over to school and then we dive into the van and start the fun.

Wish us luck. We'll probably need it. :)

It was good that we went to the pool yesterday, because it rained all day today and was not fit for swimming. Unfortunately, not a lot of progress was made as both Katie and I are feeling a little punk.

With any luck, Katie will feel good in the morning, as it's her first day of kindergarten.

And I'll feel good by Worldcon. :)

Well, I thought that I had all of the information that I needed to submit the e-book version of Win Some, Lose Some, but it looks like our printer didn't change the ISBN internally when converting the file to an e-book and -- if I understand correctly -- we need a different ISBN for the e-book in any case.

So we'll try this again...