Geekery

This week was all about Norwescon! Well, Monday and Tuesday were normal workdays, but from then on, it was all con, all the time.

• Wednesday: Day zero of con is load-in, setup, and generally getting things ready. I spent the morning at home packing up all my stuff, and at noon drove to pick up my wife from work, then she dropped me off at the hotel and headed home for a quiet weekend on her own. From there, it was a lot of wandering around and helping where I could help until I could check into my room, then more of the same.

• Thursday: Day one of con starts with more helping with setup, plus a lot of general wandering around, saying hi to people, socializing with friends, and so on. I had two official duties for Thursday:

  • 8 p.m.: Introduction to Fandom Dancing was my first time paneling at a convention…though rather than the usual “sit at a table and talk”, this was “play music and help teach people how to do dance”. We concentrated on the Time Warp, the Rasputin, the Macarena, and Thriller, plus encouraging people to just have fun and get out and move and not worry about what you look like.

  • 9 p.m.: Immediately following that was the Thursday Night Dance: Star Trek vs. Star Wars. Unfortunately, I had some technical issues that made the first 20-30 minutes really dodgy, with a lot of starting and stopping and apologizing as I tried to figure out why my headphones weren’t working, making it impossible for me to pre-cue and mix upcoming tracks. Everyone there understood that these things happen, and once I figured out a solution (though I still need to go back and experiment to really nail down what was going on so it doesn’t happen again), I got a good three-hour set in, going until 12:30 a.m., which is pretty good for Thursday night. I was a little frazzled from the clumsy start, so many of my ideas for what I was going to do disappeared from my brain and I know I didn’t play a lot of the tracks I had planned, but people danced and had fun, which was the important part. I recorded the set, and will have it processed and uploaded to my MixCloud page as soon as I can get around to it.

• Friday: Friday morning I had free to wander and socialize, but the afternoon and evening of day two of the con was all about the Philip K. Dick Award.

  • 3 p.m.: All About the Philip K. Dick Award is held on Fridays to give people a bit of a history of the award and introduce the attending PKD nominees and let them talk about their work for a bit. This year we had three attending nominees, Bora Chung, Tara Campbell, and Subodhana Wijeyeratne. Normally this panel is moderated by award administrator Gordon Van Gelder, but travel difficulties had him delayed, so I stepped up to moderate instead. I was a bit nervous, having only done one panel before (the prior night’s dance panel, where I mostly played DJ) and never having moderated, but I’d sat in on the panel enough to have a pretty good idea of what Gordon usually said. Between myself and a little assistance from audience members asking questions, we had a very nice conversation with the nominees.

  • 4 p.m.: The Philip K. Dick Award social is a private event for the nominees to spend some time meeting and chatting with each other. I got them set up in the room, hung around and chatted for about half an hour, and then left them on their own as I headed down to my room to change.

  • 5 p.m.: The Lifetime Member dinner is another private event for Norwescon’s lifetime members (a group I was inaugurated into two years ago) along with our guests of honor, PKD nominees, and charitable partner representatives. I had a table with all of the PKD nominees and their plus-ones, so we were able to continue the conversations from the prior couple hours as we ate. I left about 6:15 to head to the next room over to do some final setup, and then it was time for…

  • 7 p.m.: The Philip K. Dick Award Ceremony! This was my third year as ceremony coordinator, and after first-year jitters and second-year “we’re switching the room the ceremony is held in three hours before the ceremony” scrambling, this year went off smoothly and without a hitch. Our three attending nominees read selections from their nominated works, readers read for those nominees who were unable to attend, and it all went well. This year’s winners were Brenda Peynado for Time’s Agent and Adrian Tchaikovsky getting the special citation for Alien Clay, and though neither winner was in attendance, a good time was had by all.

  • At that point, I was done for the day, and spent the rest of the evening bouncing back and forth among the dance, room parties, and general socializing as I came across people.

• Saturday: Day three of the con is normally a free day for me that I can spend doing whatever seems right in the moment. However, this year I was giving a presentation panel in the evening, and though I’d had “finish the presentation materials” on my to-do list for months…well, yeah. Sometimes procrastination bites us in the butt, and I ended up spending nearly my entire Saturday holed up in my room getting everything finished and ready to go. And so, finally, I emerged, got some socializing in, and then it was time for…

  • 7 p.m.: Basics of Accessible Documents and Websites. This is essentially an adaptation of the kind of thing I do for my day job all the time, and a variation on a panel I gave at last winter’s SMOFcon and will be giving at Seattle Worldcon 2025 in August. For SMOFcon and Worldcon I aim it more at “why/how your convention can make your materials more accessible”; for Norwescon, I tweaked it a bit to be aimed more at authors, especially if self-publishing or marketing, and publishers. While I only had five attendees, all of them were interested and engaged with good comments and questions, and as this was the first time trying this out, with a somewhat niche interest, and programmed at 7 p.m. on Saturday against the masquerade, I’m counting it as a success, and hopefully will be bringing it back next year as well.

  • After the panel, it was another evening of floating among the dance, parties, and chatting with whomever I came across as the evening rolled on.

• Sunday: And finally, it was Sunday, day four and the final day, with nothing on my schedule except packing up and loading out. I took the day slow, got packed up, and headed home just after the closing ceremonies. With that, another con was done!

📸 Photos

A few more photos are available in this Flickr album.

🔗 Linking

• Radek Sienkiewicz: Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?: “The fluidity and warmth of human-centered thinking through the use of circles is perhaps the most elegant way anyone has ever described making a logo that resembles an anus.”

• Jeremy Reimer at Ars Technica: An Ars Technica history of the Internet, part 1: “In our new 3-part series, we remember the people and ideas that made the Internet.” I actually haven’t read this one yet, but want to remember to do so and continue on through the series.