Conventions

I volunteer for local SF/F convention Norwescon, and occasionally go to other cons when I can.

Weekly Notes: March 17–23, 2025

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  • ♿️ Busy week at work. The biggest success there was launching an “Accessibility Liaisons” initiative, looking for volunteers across campus to learn more about digital accessibility to assist others in their area. Sent out a campus-wide email about it, and got the first four volunteers within an hour, and were up to twelve by the end of the day. Promising start!
  • 🚀 This weekend was the all-staff meeting weekend for Seattle Worldcon 2025. Friday afternoon I joined in person and got to put a few faces to names I’d only seen online until now; Saturday I stayed home and Zoomed in, since there was less that day that I needed to be present for, and then Sunday I joined the group for a tour of the Seattle Convention Center Summit building where the majority of the convention will be happening. The new convention center building is huge, and really nice. Going to be a great location for Worldcon!
  • 🎻 After the tour, my wife and I went to the Seattle Symphony’s performance of selections from the Fantasia movies, played live as the film clips were projected on a screen. Really enjoyed the performance, and it was fun to see how they synced the performance to the video.
  • 🚀♿️ Had a nice bit of success in crossing the streams between my paid and volunteer work. One of the pages we’d just set up for the Seattle Worldcon site (page not linked, because it’s not fully public) included a drop-down menu that revealed more information on the page, changing depending on which item in the menu was chosen. While working my way through the Trusted Tester training materials, I realized that the current implementation would fail the testing process because those page changes weren’t being announced to assistive technology. A bit of digging, experimentation, and testing, and I figured out how to properly implement an ARIA live region so that the page passes testing.

📸 Photos

A red Chevy Sonic being strapped onto a flatbed tow truck.

Not the best start to Tuesday morning. And it didn’t get much better from there; a failed water pump had led to the car dumping its coolant and cracking the radiator and coolant reservoir. A lot of money and a few days wait for repairs, that turned into a few more days when the wrong part got shipped to the service shop. Hoping we’ll have it back on Monday.

A wide-angle shot of a huge convention center ballroom, with maroonish side walls and a high ceilig with a pattern that's formed by hanging planks of wood.

The main ballroom of the convention center Summit building is huge. I mean, I know these spaces are big, but standing in it while it’s completely empty was impressive. I spent a couple moments trying to estimate how many times I could fit my entire house in there (stacked vertically as well as arranged horizontally) before just going with “lots” and giving up.

A concert hall filled with people; on the stage are seats for an orchestra below a large screen showing the logo for Disney's Fantasia.

It was good to be back in Benaroya Hall for the Seattle Symphony. The last time we were here was one of the last Messiah performances before the pandemic kicked in and shut everything down.

📚 Reading

  • Read Requiem by Kevin Ryan and Michael Jan Friedman.
  • Started Polostan by Neal Stephenson.

📺 Watching

Started NCIS: Origins. It’s pretty standard NCIS, but the ’90s setting makes for some entertaining music choices, and we’re being pretty impressed by the casting for younger versions of known characters. Also been doing a lot of Antiques Roadshow, because it’s soothing.

🎧 Listening

A few months ago I’d pre-ordered Ministry’s latest album, The Squirrely Years Revisited, where they update a bunch of those early synth pop tracks that Jourgensen has practically disowned for decades. So far, first impressions are good. While a lot of recent Ministry hasn’t done much for me, as they’ve moved more towards straightforward metal over industrial, they’ve done a really good job of blending the original synth pop tracks with their modern sound, landing in a place that works well for me. Glad Al decided to admit that these tracks are part of his history!

🔗 Linking

  • Assuming the old plugin (last updated in 2008) I found still works, this site will be participating in CSS Naked Day on April 9.
  • Robert Alexander, RSS blogrolls are a federated social network: Something for me to dig more into when I have time.
  • Chris Dalla Riva, The Greatest Two-Hit Wonders: “But if one hit is a miracle, then two hits is a near impossibility. Two-hit artists sit in a weird space, though. Pop stars a remembered because they are very famous. One-hit wonders are remembered for the opposite.”
  • Anand Giridharadas, The opposite of fascism: “The best revenge against these grifters and bigots and billionaires and bullies is to live well, richly, together. The best revenge is to refuse their values. To embody the kind of living — free, colorful, open — they want to snuff out.”

Weekly Notes: Mar 3–9, 2025

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  • 🏚️ Ah, the joys of owning a 30-some year old house. We finally got around to having the bathroom fan replaced. We’d said to each other that we didn’t really think the fan that was there actually did much of anything (other than make noise), and the contractor had the same opinion, describing it as a “toy”. Now we have a new fan that’s larger, quieter, actually moves air, and vents into an insulated vent hose instead of the uninsulated one that was dripping condensation back into the bathroom during last month’s cold snap. Improvements have been made!
  • 🕺🏻 Made it out to The Mercury on Saturday night for some stompyboot üntz-üntz gothclubbing time. A slow night, with some faces I recognized but not really anyone I knew, but the music was good and I got some good floor time in, so it was worthwhile.
  • ⌚️🥱 Insert my biannual (semiannual? twice a year) rant on the evil that is daylight saving time, how much I hate the time change, and how frustrating it is that Washington voted to get rid of the time change years ago, but did it the wrong damn way, so it did no good. If we could just ditch DST and stay on standard time, this would all be done with.

📸 Photos

Me sitting in our living room holding my iPhone in my right hand and my iPad with my left hand, and with my MacBook on my lap, as I take a selfie with the latest book I read to blog about it.

From my wife, amused by my lap full of Apples as I took the selfie to go with the blog post about the book I’d just finished.

A skeletal ribcage, head, and arms, with tattered bat-like wings, lit all in red, against blue- and amber-toned bits of ceiling in the background.

Decor at the Mercury.

📝 Writing

📚 Reading

📺 Watching

  • 🇺🇸 We did not watch Trump’s State of the Union. Masochism just isn’t my thing.
  • We started Alone: Australia, where people with far more outdoor skills than we have get dropped in the middle of the Tasmanian wilderness to survive as long as they can. Because, yes, this is totally something normal people do.
  • We’ve also come back to season three of Evil. I kinda want the pop-up books (and love the way what’s essentially an opening sequence gag keeps getting worked into the action of the show).

🎧 Listening

We’re starting to get requests in for the Norwescon dances, which is always a fun way to be introduced to music I don’t know. So far, I’ve added the following to my collection:

🔗 Linking

  • April 9 is CSS Naked Day, which I should get in on: “The idea behind CSS Naked Day is to promote web standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of HTML, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good old play on words. In the words of 2006, it’s time to show off your <body> for what it really is.”
  • Mozi: An interesting looking, privacy focused app to coordinate with friends for real-world encounters. An “I’m going to be in [place] at [time]” sort of thing. Currently iOS only, Android maybe in the future.
  • Well, bummer: The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest has ended after a 42-year run.
  • Priscilla Page, Mad Max: Fury Road: Excellent essay on the best of the Mad Max films. There was so much good analysis and commentary on this film in the months after it came out; diving back into that from a more recent perspective was a pleasure.

My Norwescon 47 Schedule

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Promo image with art by Wayne Barlowe of an orange-tinted alien landscape, and the text, Norwescon 47: Through the Cosmic Telescope, April 17–20, 2025, DoubleTree by Hilton Seattle Airport, SeaTac, WA.

Norwescon 47 is coming up quick, and this year, in addition to my usual behind-the-scenes duties (website admin, social media admin, Philip K. Dick Award ceremony coordinator, assistant historian) and visible duties (Thursday night DJ, Philip K. Dick Award ceremony emcee), I’ll also be paneling!

Here’s my (tentative, but should be pretty solid) schedule for the con; any time not listed here when I’m not sleeping, I’ll likely be found wandering the convention, hanging out with people, getting into ridiculously geeky conversations, enjoying the costuming, and generally seeing what’s going on:

Thursday, 4/17

  • Thursday night dance setup (7–8 p.m.): Making sure the noise goes boom as it should.
  • Introduction to Fandom Dancing (8–9 p.m., Grand 3): Teaching people how to do things like the Time Warp, the Rasputin, the Thriller dance, and so on.
  • Thursday Night Dance: Star Trek vs. Star Wars (9 p.m.–1 a.m., Grand 3): I DJ. Noise goes boom! People boogie.

Friday, 4/18

  • A few Philip K. Dick award related things during the day.
  • Lifetime Dinner (5–7 p.m.): Munchies and chatting with other lifetime members, the guests of honor, and the Philip K. Dick award nominees.
  • Philip K. Dick Award Ceremony doors open (6:30 p.m., Grand 3): Welcoming all to the award ceremony.
  • Philip K. Dick Award Ceremony (7–8:30 p.m., Grand 3): Featuring readings of selections from the nominated works (read by their authors if attending) and the presentation of the the award.

Saturday, 4/19

  • Basics of Accessible Documents and Websites (7–8 p.m., Cascade 10): Aimed primarily at authors, especially if self-publishing, small publishers, but also for anyone distributing writing online. An overview of digital accessibility and tips on how to make sure that what is being published can be read by everyone, including readers with disabilities.

Weekly Notes: Getting Started

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So I noticed Cygnoir do one of these, and I really liked the template, and thought (as she did) that it might be a good way to help me reboot my blogging habits. So here we are! My thanks to Cygnoir (and to Jedda for inspiring her) for the template and inspiration!

  • 🌨️ This week’s weather meant that we ended up with one full snow day and two late-start half days…with an end result of the week just being weird and not feeling as productive as usual.
  • ♿️ I’ve gotten started on my Section 508 Trusted Tester certification training. In theory, you have 180 days to finish this program; I’m approaching it as “180 days or until the current administration gets around to pulling the plug” and doing my best to get through as quickly as possible. Hopefully because this program is hosted under Homeland Security it won’t be in the crosshairs as soon as others, but we’ll see….
  • 🚀 Norwescon and Seattle Worldcon 2025 planning continue to move right along.
    • We’re just about two months out from Norwescon, so this is when website updates start to ramp up, I start spending more time making sure my laptop music library is ready to go, and I make sure everything is set for the Philip K. Dick Award ceremony. There’s always something to do.
    • Worldcon is still about six months out, and I have less to do there, but there’s still a pretty reasonable constant stream of stuff, with website updates and queuing up posts for the con’s blog once they’re edited and signed off on.

📸 Photos

Not much of a week for photos. But since this is my first time doing one of these weekly notes, here’s a simple one from last week, showing my current set of laptop stickers.

The top of lid of a MacBook Pro with six stickers: A rainbow A11Y, the United Federation of Planets seal, Norwescon, a classic ranbow Apple logo, Seattle Worldcon 2025, and Gothic Pride Seattle.

That’s an A11Y (accessibility) sticker I got at this year’s Accessing Higher Ground conference, the seal of the United Federation of Planets, Norwescon, a classic rainbow Apple logo that I’d had stashed away for probably close to two decades (maybe more, I don’t know when they stopped producing these), Seattle Worldcon 2025, and Gothic Pride Seattle.

📝 Writing

📚 Reading

📺 Watching

  • Evil: We’re just starting season three, and continue to really enjoy this show. Smart, creepy, funny.
  • RuPaul’s Drag Race: About midway through last season, and so far Dawn’s my favorite, though I don’t know if they’ll win. Q’s costuming skills are impressive, and Plain Jane is a strong all-arounder (but I can’t stand her attitude).
  • Scrubs: We’re early in season five in our rewatch. When we started the rewatch we were pleasantly surprised at the solidity of the first few seasons; by this point, the show’s pretty much settled into its groove and is generally pleasantly amusing, but not as strong as when it started.
  • NOVA: “Dino Birds”: Neat look at recent science exploring the evolution of birds, their ties to dinosaurs (they are dinosaurs), when flight entered the picture, and so on.

🎧 Listening

  • I now have tickets to see Underworld in May and Nine Inch Nails in August (the night before Worldcon starts). Really looking forward to both, and kind of wishing I could time travel and tell my nin-obsessed 20-something self that it would take 30 years, but I’d finally get to see them live.

  • For Reasons™, I’ve recently added the Chipmunks’ The A Files album to my collection, where they cover a bunch of vaguely SF-themed songs.

    They do a cover of “The Purple People Eater” that I swear sounds like it could have been produced by the same team behind The Rednex’s “Cotton Eye Joe”, and they’d probably mix together disturbingly well.

    “Cotton Eye Joe” is always something of a guilty pleasure (except that I’m not fond of the “guilty pleasure” thing, and prefer to just enjoy things I enjoy without guilt, however cheezy they are), and now I’m sitting here being amused at how catchy The Chipmunks’ “Purple People Eater” is. If you’re into goofy ’90s technopop, it’s better than it has any right to be.

Linking

  1. WSDOT: Brick-by-brick: The quest to get a custom Lego model on a ferry

    Local artist Wayne Hussey is a lifelong Lego lover and architect. One of his creations now lives aboard our ferry Issaquah. Getting it aboard was also quite a puzzle.

  2. Blogroll.club: A categorized list of blogs, in something of a throwback to the “old school” days of blogging. I like that there’s a single RSS feed that aggregates posts from all the blogs in the lineup, and have subscribed to that for a daily selection of posts from random (to me) people. I’ve also submitted Eclecticism to be included whenever they get around to it.
  3. Culture, Digested: Neil Gaiman is an Industry Problem

    Even taking into consideration their years of exploitation and abuse, Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer remain models of artistic success in the 21st century. Gaiman created an extremely sellable brand — affable, “oh goodness,” harmless Britishness wrapped up in a “I have read a lot of books” kind of storytelling — and the publishing industry used that not only to sell a lot of his books but that of his friends as well. Amanda Palmer has crowdsourced her way into a perfect little Patreon pyramid scheme, where all money flows to her and she gives back vibes and requests for domestic labor. This is the ideal artistic arrangement these days, where stars receive 95% of Patreon/Substack/other crowdsourced forms of income and everyone else competes for scraps. Both are reliant on a dedicated, servile audience, willing to turn over their time and bodies and cash to get a piece of that bohemian existence that only millionaires can manage these days. It’s the bohemianism not of Weimar, which Palmer constantly references, but the bohemianism of contemporary Burning Man, full of tech billionaires wearing the worst outfits you’ve ever seen in your life.

Norwescon Thursday Dance Sneak Peek

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Video still showing Star Trek's Enterprise behind graphics of audio being played.

My Thursday night dance at Norwescon is going to have a “Star Trek vs. Star Wars” theme, so I put together a video to play behind me of starship shots from the movies. I alternated clips between franchises, and most of them have been in the 10-20 second range; a few as short as 4, a few as long as 40.

In my alternating, when I made it up to the refit Enterprise reveal in The Motion Picture, you may be surprised to read that I restrained myself, and did not just drop the full eight-minute sequence in there.

Cutting out Kirk and Scotty’s reactions and some shots that are mostly spacedock scaffolding got it down to two minutes, fifty-one seconds.
I’m biased, and I’m not even sorry about it. 😆

Here’s a two-minute sneak peek (originally posted to Facebook, and so is silent so as not to run afoul of their automated audio copyright bots; feel free to listen to whatever audio you wish as you watch) of my background graphic setup for the Norwescon Thursday night dance. This will be playing on the big projection screen/video wall on the stage behind me.

The background video is 2 hours and 12 minutes of mixed Star Wars and Star Trek spaceship and battle shots (space and space ships only, no on-the-ground battles, so no Hoth or Endor). Two hours of that goes back and forth between Trek and Wars, but the last ten minutes is all Trek, because I was only pulling from the theatrical films, and there are two more Trek films than there are Wars films.

The “vinyl” platters at the top left and right automatically update with the cover art for whatever track is being played, and rotate as if they were actual turntables.

The waveform display at the top is live waveforms of the audio being played; the top waveform is the left turntable, the bottom is the right.

The title and artist of the currently playing track at the bottom automatically update.

The graphics on the t-shirt that the mini-cartoon-me is wearing randomly change every few seconds, with a selection of mostly (but not entirely) Trek or Wars themed images.

Some slightly more technical details for those who may be interested:

All the elements are assembled in OBS, and when I’m DJing, I’ll be pushing that video stream out to the the on-stage screen behind me.

The turntables and audio waveforms are pulled from djay Pro using OBS’s window capture feature, cropping down to the elements I need, playing with the color levels, and adding an alpha channel to turn dark/black pixels transparent. Cover art with dark/black pixels that become transparent is accounted for by placing the turntable graphics over PNGs of black circles to act as “platters” and black out the background video.

The “now playing” text also comes from djay Pro; in this case, djay Pro automatically creates a “now playing” text file, and I tell OBS to read and display that text file.

The Norwescon and DJ Wüdi logos are simple static PNG files.

The cartoon me is a static PNG file with a plain black shirt. I point OBS to a directory with small square white-on-black images that it randomly picks from on a five second rotation to create the “print” on the t-shirt.

Year 50 Day 335

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Me at my desk at home, next to two stacks of Star Trek books, including all the James Blish logs, some of the photonovels, and near complete sets of the TNG and DS9 YA series.

Day 335: I always take the Monday after con off so that I can rest and recover. I got a full normal night’s sleep plus an extra couple hours after my wife left for work, unpacked my suitcase and did laundry, made some con website and social media updates, and processed and posted the audio from the Thursday night dance. A nice low-key day to transition from the con world back into my normal routines.

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A Peek at Norwescon Through Apple Watch Data

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Just for fun, here’s a little peek at going to (and being rather heavily involved in the production of) Norwescon as recorded by my Apple Watch.

For each graph, I’ve set it to display a month’s worth of data to make the variations nice and visible.

Overall Activity

An actvity graph showing fairly consistent movement, exercise, and standing trends for most of the month, nearly doubling for the past four days.

My standard goal for a day is 400 calories burned through movement. Most days I at least get close, many I go slightly over. I more than doubled that goal for each of the four days of con.

My exercise goal is 30 minutes, which, admittedly, I haven’t been regularly reaching for quite some time (though that’s something I intend to work on now that the weather is improving again). Hit that easily all weekend without even trying, and more than doubled it on one day.

My stand goal of 12 hours is one I usually hit pretty easily, but though not as visible, there is an increase here as well.

Flights Climbed

A graph of flights climbed over the past month, showing regular spikes on Sundays, dwarfed by the jump over the past four days, with the highest day reaching about 37 stories climbed.

I live in a three-story condo, so I do get a few flights of stairs climbed every day, and walking around the college campus where I work, which is on a hill and where I do intentionally take stairs fairly often, helps. But at Norwescon, I get a room on the third floor of the tower, and as the elevators are often quite busy and I’m still fairly able-bodied, it’s usually faster and easier to take the stairs. Looks like I hit about 37 flights climbed on Friday this year!

Sleep

A graph showing very regular sleep trends until this past weekend, when there is a sudden shift to much later bedtimes and slightly later wake up times.

Most of the time, my wife and I are on a pretty set schedule. Since we both work a pretty regular 8-5 schedule, we get up between 4:30 and 5 a.m., go to bed at 8 p.m., and turn out the lights at 9 p.m. (I joke sometimes at how disappointed 20-something me would be at 50-year-old me…but 20-something me was working swing shifts during the week and DJing dance clubs on the weekend, so it’s not really a fair comparison). At con, though? Somewhere between 2 and 3 a.m. to bed, and though my body tried to keep my 5 a.m. schedule in the mornings, I’d stubbornly doze as long as I could. Most days I hit my goal of a minimum of 5 hours of sleep, supplemented by one or two naps during the day (without which I would not be able to function).

Steps

A step graph for the past month, usually around 5,000 steps per day, but hitting between 11,000 and 17,000 steps for each of the past four days.

I’m not particularly sedentary (most days), usually getting around 5,000 steps per day. Could certainly be more, but it’s okay. And then suddenly I’m getting a minimum of more than 10,000 steps, peaking at somewhere above 17,000 steps (and that was on Wednesday, as I was packing, arriving, moving in, and then helping with setup). Norwescon weekend is a pretty constant “go” weekend, and I’m always on the move.

So there’s a bit of a data-driven look at the past four days. I’m definitely ready to rest now, but I’m also looking forward to doing it all over again next year. :)

Year 50 Day 331

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Me wearing a t-shirt with a parody of the famous Joy Division image, this one says 'Nimoy Division' and the imge shows a Vulcan salute. I'm standing on a stage in front of a large screen with graphics showing turntables, wave forms, and my DJ Wüdi at Norwescon logo.

Day 331: Norwescon day one is done! (So done, in fact, that I’m actually posting this on Friday morning, though I’ll backdate the post so it shows up on the right day on my blog.) Most of the day was running around, socializing, and helping out where I could, and then the evening was me DJing for the Thursday night dance. The dance went well for a Thursday night (since it’s the first night and still in the work week, it’s always a little more sparsely attended), and as always, I’ve recorded the full thing and in a few days will have it posted for anyone who wants to listen to four hours of music (with only a few fumbles).

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Year 50 Day 165

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Me, wearing a Jack Skellington t-shirt and black facemask, standing in a hotel meeting room with a number of other people sitting at tables and chatting with each other behind me.

Day 165: Today was this month’s Norwescon planning meeting. Our theme for the meeting was Halloween, so I wore my Jack Skellington shirt, while other people had pointed witch’s hats, Pikachu onesies, a corn costume, an Alf mask, and probably other things that I missed or aren’t remembering. Lots of good progress being made — but lots to do over the next few months as well!

Year 50 Day 130

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Me, wearing a black cap, mask, and t-shirt with the Norwescon logo in green, in a hotel conference room with other people sitting around a number of round tables.

Day 130: Today was the first ConCom (Convention Committee) planning meeting for Norwescon 46. It was good to get back into the planning mode with this group of friends, and I feel like we’re off to a good start. Once again, it looks like my job lineup this year is webmaster, social media manager, Philip K. Dick Award coordinator, and Thursday night DJ. Just six and a half months to get everything planned and ready to go!