Kevin Standlee (kevin_standlee) wrote,
Kevin Standlee
kevin_standlee

Winter Road Trip Day 12: SMOFCon Sunday

With way too little sleep this morning, I grabbed some yogurt from the Con Suite and went to the one panel on which I was a panelist (other than ex officio due to chairing Westercon 74): a discussion of the WSFS Business Meeting and the governance of WSFS. This was a very lively discussion that could have gone three hours instead of one, but I'm so zonked that I don't feel confident in trying to summarize it.

Immediately following this was a panel discussing the evolution of various Worldcon traditions. A lot of things we may take for granted as long-standing permanent traditions of Worldcon simply were not part of earlier Worldcons, and some of them are relatively recent additions.

Lisa and I went to lunch with Linda D and other fans, returning to the same sushi place we've been before, and we lingered over lunch — too long as it happens, as I'd mis-remembered the session of fan tables, which I thought was 2:30-4:30 but was in fact 1:30-3:30. We were thus an hour late setting up, but it wasn't exactly as though people were beating down the doors. We did, however, sell three more attending memberships to Westercon 74, meaning that including Loscon we've added 22 new attendees (some of whom are conversions from voting). I turned over the registration material to Linda D and Lisa and I folded up the Westercon 74 tent and several people helped us carry the gear down to the Astro.

The final item of programming was the Feedback Session, which was in the room where SMOFCon programming was also being streamed via Zoom, so we had remote participants in the meeting as well. Again, I'm not going to even try to summarize the feedback, although one item I agreed with: we needed larger type on the membership badges. Despite the fact that SMOFCon is something of a conrunner family reunion, it would be nice for people to be able to read each others' name badges at a distance.

With programming over, Lisa and I went to the hotel room and I started trying to upload the video from last night's Fannish Inquisition. We wanted to edit the video so it was more neatly arranged, but feedback from the meeting seemed to say that people wanted the raw video right away even if it included cuts right in the middle of people talking or should logically have been split into multiple segments.

I have uploaded the SMOFCon and Worldcon/NASFiC main inquisition to a 2019 SMOFCon Fannish Inquisition playlist on the Worldcon Events Channel.

The Westercon mini-Inquisition was split across two segments with an abrupt cut in mid-word on account of the camera, which has a file-size limit per segment.

Westercon Fannish Inquisition at SMOFCon 37, Part 1

Westercon Fannish Inquisition at SMOFCon 37, Part 2

We made a final expedition to the sushi place south of the hotel for dinner. With the convention over and our work mostly complete, we could relax and spend a long time over dinner. Our group of seven people were the largest party they had there this evening, and they weren't crowded, so they did not seem to mind us lingering over dinner.

Returning to the hotel, I fussed with video a bit more before returning to the Con Suite. Around the time we arrived, Con Suite head Tara Oakes announced that while we were free to stay as long as we liked, she was going to bed and would the last person out the door turn out the lights and close the door behind them.

We hung around for a while longer, with plenty of entertaining conversation. We did have one final errand, however, that awaited the return of Janie Shea, leader of SMOFCon 38 Montreal. Jannie had driven to SMOFCon and would be driving on to Montreal next year, so she agreed to transport the Probability & Statistics Seminar props (gaming tokens) to Montreal. Those things are heavy and do not travel easily by air, so this is a great load off of my mind. Fortunately, Janie had the parking space opposite ours, so it was trivially easy to transfer the load.

With our final commitment fulfilled, we bade the last few of our friends in the Con Suite good night and turned in for our final night in Albuquerque. We still had video work to do (trying to to take advantage of the hotel's internet connection, which is much faster than our home connection) and get to the point where we could get some sleep. I have to be up at 5:30, but Lisa can sleep in a few hours more if possible.

I love attending SMOFCon, but I'm really tired. I hope Lisa gets that extra rest and can get some sleep tonight so she can drive tomorrow as we begin the drive for home.
Tags: smofcon
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