wombat_socho | Entries tagged with diversicon

I suppose I could also describe this as a report on the state of my fandoms, and it will probably wind up on the Substack in somewhat altered form...

"In the beginning, there was the Word." So it is with me; I have always been an avid reader, preferring SF, historical fiction, military & naval history, and biographies to other genres, though I did go through a stretch where I was reading a lot of mainstream fiction. Gave up on it because most of it was depressing and/or tales of awful people doing awful things or living awful lives. (See Bright Lights, Big City or The First Deadly Sin.) I still do a lot of reading and have the Kindle and physical libraries to prove it.

Reading SF eventually (inevitably?) drew me into science fiction fandom. I attended conventions in the Baltimore/DC area and elsewhere from 1974 (Discon II, the Worldcon in DC) until 1983 when I got married and moved to Minnesota. There I became more active in traditional fanac: I pubbed a perszine, joined and dropped out and rejoined Stipple-APA, became involved in media fandom thanks to Space: Above & Beyond and the 59th Ready Reserve Squadron, went to a few Minicons, more Convergences and Diversicons and Arcanas, volunteered and served on staff for some of those, and eventually became heavily involved with anime fandom at Anime Iowa, so much so that I was one of the founders and chairmen of Anime Detour, which I remained on staff with until I left Minnesota for Virginia in 2007. I returned to Anime Detour (and continued to volunteer there) after moving to Virginia and Las Vegas, but eventually the staff there did my son dirty, and I severed all connections with them. I'll be going to Anime Fusion in Minnesota this year for my son's 40th birthday, but purely as a spectator. I dropped out of Stipple-APA after descending into abject poverty in Virginia, but after moving to Las Vegas in 2015 I became involved with the National Fantasy Fan Federation (N3F), sporadically contributed to N'APA, and eventually became treasurer along with wearing a few other fezzes. I am currently the chairman of Son of Silvercon, a small relaxicon in Las Vegas that aspires to become a mid-sized regional convention.

Fandom led me into historical boardgaming/wargaming, which was a big thing in the 1970s and 1980s before TSR bought SPI at bankruptcy and gutted the hobby. I was a D&D dungeonmaster and a Traveller referee; I was also interested in several other RPG (Twilight:2000, Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green) but never actually played them. Wargames are still around, but it's a lot harder to find opponents, and games, like everything else, have become a lot more expensive thanks to inflation and the fact that it's a niche hobby now. Mostly I play video games like Civilization and Hearts of Iron IV, which have some of the flavor of the old monstergames. I used to be involved with EVE-Online as part of Goonfleet, and was there when we broke Band of Brothers, lost Delve and fled to a new home, reorganized under Commissar Mittens and grew to be a great power in the game again, but I don't remember clearly when I stopped playing. Probably in 2018, when I got horribly sick and was homeless for a couple of months. Everyone I used to know in GF is out of the game now, and I don't feel any strong urge to go back. Aside from the aforementioned strategic video games, I also play Fate/Grand Order and Azur Lane on my phone, the former more than the latter because Azur Lane's story is confusing and silly by turns. Played Cookie Run for a while but it wound up being more grindy than cute, and Girls Frontline just didn't hold my interest. I should probably get out and play more Ingress because the walking would be good for me.

I came very late to baseball. As a kid, I was a fan of the Washington Senators, who moved to Texas in 1972 and took my interest in baseball with it. My now ex-wife was a Twins fan, though, and between her interest and Rotisserie baseball, I got back into it. For a few years I scored games at home for STATS, Inc. and published a newsletter on the independent minor leagues (which caused some road trips to towns like Aberdeen, Austin, Duluth, Fargo, and Madison) but that fell victim to Anime Detour, which pretty much ate my life from 2003-2007. I played fantasy baseball on Yahoo for a few years but dropped out of that; I was also involved in a Pursue the Pennant league until it fell apart in 1992. Nowadays, I casually follow the Nationals, Twins, and Red Sox, and am managing the Senators in a Dynasty League Baseball league run by fellow blogger Pete (Da Tech Guy), but Major League Baseball's current commissioner has alienated me with his woke stupidity, and I'm not much interested in seeing the A's when they move from Oakland to Las Vegas in a couple of years.

I don't watch a lot of TV or movies. Used to watch a lot when I was married, but that went by the wayside in favor of watching anime, and these days I watch very little because Hollywood isn't making a lot of stuff that interests me, and I find video games more rewarding. Someday I'll probably finish watching Fallout, because it's on Amazon Prime and the first five episodes, which I saw while visiting Stacy McCain this spring, seemed pretty decent. People tell me I should watch The Expanse, and maybe one of these days I will. Webcomics fall under this heading; I was really really interested in Girl Genius, Megatokyo, Erfworld, and a couple of other webcomics, but I fell out of the habit of following them (probably around the same time I stopped playing EVE-Online, for some of the same reasons) and I can't think of any webcomics I follow at all, with the exception of Terminal Lance, Clinic of Horrors, and occasional postings by Merryweather Media.

Not sure where this really fits in, but thanks to my Dad's final assignment with the JCS, I acquired an interest in nuclear weapons and power, which has led me to a seat on the board of the Nevada Security Site Advisory Board, a group of citizens who provide oversight to the Department of Energy's ongoing cleanup and monitoring work at the former Nevada Test Site. I don't get paid for it, but they do reimburse me for my travel expenses, which is nice, and the work is interesting, with a lot of callbacks to some weird history. For example, they're currently demolishing & cleaning up Test Cell C, which is where testing of NERVA rockets and Project Pluto went on during the early 1960s. Coincidentally, there's some discussion of nuclear rockets again in connection with Elon Musk's ambition of going to Mars.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Tangerine Dream - chronozon

I read with some interest and not a little schadenfreude about the kerfluffle over programming at Worldcon this year. I'm not going into the details, but suffice it to say quite a number of people are being hoist on their own politically correct petards, and now the poor bastards doing programming have to jump through their asses to redo panels with less than a month before the convention. Welp.
( Would you like to know more? )
That having been said, I don't envy them their task. Next to running consuite, programming is probably one of the most thankless jobs on con staff, mainly because as George Brett once said when asked who should be voting for the players in the All-Star Game said "I don't know, because I don't know who the game is for." And so it is with programming. I have worked on programming for two very large conventions, and who programming is for is a question that doesn't seem to get asked very often. There is an assumption that panels and other events are there to entertain the membership, but there are also panels that are purely informational (Balticon and Convergence both have science tracks, for example) and panels where the filthy pros talk about their latest work, general trends in the field, or whatever. I don't know about Balticon, never having been on staff or been a volunteer there, but both Anime Detour and Convergence depend heavily on input from the membership to suggest (and staff) panels*. Apparently this wasn't done at Worldcon, because quite a few of the obscure Hugo nominees -which is to say, virtually all of them - felt snubbed by not having enough panels, and there was much anger that people who had suggested panels found that they'd been passed over for those panels in favor of people the head of programming thought would be a better fit for said panels. It was at that point the fewmets hit the fan, much screeching ensued, and the aforementioned overhauling of panels commenced.

That process is just part of the headache, sports fans. You have to figure out -sometimes based on previous years' numbers, sometimes not - which of the limited number of rooms a panel is going into (this is sometimes made easier by reserving certain rooms for particular programming tracks) and when during the weekend the panel is happening, which will affect attendance - needless to say, panels that don't/aren't expected to draw well are going to wind up on Friday and Sunday afternoons before most people show up. I myself have had panels drop in attendance by an order of magnitude when they were moved from Saturday during cosplay to Sunday just before closing ceremonies. You have to coordinate with Guest Relations and the guests themselves to keep from burning out those guests by asking them to do too much in not enough time, and this can be its own can of worms if attending professionals are not designated guests of the convention and just happen to be attending.

So it's a lot of work, and if you do everything right, nobody notices because the panels & other programming go off without a hitch and without any complaints. When stuff goes sideways, as it almost always does, suddenly everything is your fauilt. Like I said, it's a thankless job.

*Usually if you suggest a panel, you're expected to find people to be on it with you. Obviously this is going to work differently at Anime Detour, where the vast majority of panels are for and by fans, than it will at Convergence or Diversicon, where a lot of local authors show up and usually want to sit in on a couple of panels.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Big Country - In a Big Country

This is sort of a follow-on to my previous post about anime fandom. You may want to go back and read that; it might make this more understandable.
( Read more... )
Comments solicited and appreciated.

Current Mood: thoughtful

I feel marginally better this morning than I did yesterday, although a lot of that is probably the DayQuil doing what it can with the crud. Still achy and tired; my sinuses are still congested as well. I'm beginning to think this isn't going to go away until after Arcana, and maybe not even then if they haven't dealt with the mold in Bandana Square.

Decided to get out and go to the Diversicon 12 post-mortem, about which more in another post.

phoenixalpha was bored and unhappy with the proceedings, and we left after an hour to do grocery shopping before going home and collapsing. Recovered somewhat after dinner and decided to watch Passion fo the Christ despite its obvious unsuitability as a bedtime movie; review follows in another post.

I expect today to be interminable, boring and several hours longer than it needs to be, but that's life.

Current Mood: tired

Once again, New Guy Alex gets to hog the upload files, which means I may do about 15 minutes of productive work today in between long bouts of trying to look busy, interspersed with trips to the can, lunch, and extended breaks. The weather is still unseasonably cool, my knee still hurts like hell, and I missed the bus this morning. Just another day in the Fourth Circle of Hell.

Most of last night was spent making pasta for myself and putting the Diversicon schedule into an Excel spreadsheet so I could send it to

marainsanity, who is pinch-hitting for Anne Waltz on the anime panels this year. Then I came to my senses and realized it would make more sense to just post the damn thing on my personal website and then post the links on the

mnsf and

animedetour LiveJournal sites as well as in the Anime Detour forums. So I did.

Current Mood: bored
Current Music: Salubrious Invertebrae - No. 2

Spent the afternoon yesterday at the Diversicon meeting. Pre-registrations are up to 85, which is encouraging, but only 6 rooms got booked, which led to the hotel trying to pull a fast one with the function space in the short term and the committee talking about finding other space for next year in the long term. Much discussion of hotel issues, but the bottom line is that Diversicon (like Arcana) has always been too small to do more than just pay for the function space and give its handful of ootie/partying members a price break on the room. Diversicon is changing slowly - it used to be mainly a sercon literary/film-oriented convention, but it has been expanding somewhat into anime and filk the last couple of years so that it resembles a smaller version of Minicon. There's talk about three-four room parties at Diversicon this year, which will be something not seen for a few years, and this could be a sign that things are on the upswing.

After the meeting I took the console boxes down to the storage area and dropped the back seats in the Kia. Too bad they don't lay flat, but you can't have everything...it'll make loading everything out for Diversicon easier, if nothing else. After that, I picked up some groceries at Sam's Club and headed home, where I poked around online looking for Traveller stuff and then burned a 100% Canadian Content CD (my first remix CD) before turning in.

I'm thinking Friday is going to be a pain in the butt. I have ten cases of soda, a refrigerator, and a couple large boxes of T-shirts that I need to lug over to the hotel (and that's not even talking about the AD room party stuff or personal gear), so Melody better get her butt home from the farm by Thursday night. I don't fancy trying to do all this by myself, even with a big bottle of ibuprofen on hand. Meanwhile, New Guy Alex is in FOCUS training today, so I'll actually have something to do today. Time to get up and get rolling.