Norwescon 29

W00t, that was wacky. But good things happened, and some lameness, and some crazy - a little more of the crazy than you'd usually expect, maybe. See, basically, the rooms we were supposed to start getting on Sunday for move-in staging? Mostly didn't have walls then. We got a couple of them on Tuesday(!) and didn't get the rest until Wednesday(!) around 3pm. This raised holy hell with move-in, like you'd expect. I kept getting blocked on stuff - I do the daily newsletter - and ended up working the art show setup, office setup, set up the blue flyer boards and helped wrap the hotel columns for posters (I even got a Transportation Thug ribbon! I'm so proud. Seriously, they work harder than anybody), and fanzine library, and a bunch of other little things as I could find things to do, too. By Friday, it already felt like day four of a five day con, and we had two and a half more days to go.

Did I mention it was crazy?

Oh, and by "we got the rooms," I do not mean to imply that the rooms were finished. They were merely inhabitable, more or less. The ground floor hallway of Wing 7 - which is to say, the Olympic Rooms, which is to say, convention office, volunteers, food prep, Hospitality, Fanzine Library, Quiet Hospitality, security, dispatch - was a mix of bare wallboard and spackled-and-primed wallboard. The best part of this was the hotel let us draw on them.

I wired the piano for explosion. This probably-not-worksafe nude got the better drawings going. Emo Killer. Here's some attractive calligraphy. More nice drawing work. Survivor's Wall. I was the one who said we had to turn this hallway into an asset. It wasn't my idea to let people draw on it, which was brilliant, but I did suggest the name. I had this idea of decorating it with deathtraps, but didn't have time. ^_^

My main job went really well. RUN!!, this year's at-convention newsletter, became the first Norwescon daily 'zine ever (as far as I know) to put out a real fifth issue. (An earlier one I did, MR.CRANKY'S DISRUPTIVE NEWSLETTER, had a sort of a fifth edition on Sunday afternoon, but it was only 200 copies.) People were submitting so much material that we needed a Saturday afternoon special edition just to keep up. That's never happened before, and it roxx0red. I put up PDFs here, if anyone is interested. The funny content was pretty high, particularly in the later issues. kathrynt and cafiorello are both owed contributor's copies - Cathy for headings, Kathryn for half of the horoscope entries and some banner heading ideas - and yes, I did snag some extras to bring home.

I actually sang at Saturday night's Klingon Kareoke. I'd never done that before. The host Klingon decided he'd do "Breakfast at Tiffany's," and when he heard me and mamishka doing harmony at a nearby table, ordered us both up to the other mikes. Later, I did "Fly Me to the Moon" on my own. He said I did a really good job, particularly given that I'd never sung kareoke before.

The new fanzine library librarian, Erica, had some slick ideas. She had theme categories that used our now-rather-reasonable fanzine collection well, and brought in all the 'zines, leaving the ones not on the shelves accessible to the convention membership in sorted file boxes. But the idea I liked best was the Norwescon 29 Fanzine, which is a single-copy hand-made write-in-it-to-contribute one-shot fanzine about the convention. Contributions were solicited from the membership at large. I drew in this:


Cheer Up, Emo Satyr; It's Not So Bad

That was when windbourne and I got together and drew a bunch on Sunday afternoon. We do that every Norwescon, Usually, spazzkat organises it and is there too, and a couple of other people, but this time it was just us. The theme turned into Emo Satyrs, kinda. Here's another one I did:


Emo Satyr Collects Dead Flowers

Downsides: hospitality isn't as nice in the Olympic rooms as it was in the Cascade rooms; it's further away and smaller. But they took the sinks out of the Cascades, so I don't know what we'll do about that. Programming, I'm afraid, did not impress me this year. Most of the panels I went to were, well, kind of more underdisciplined than usual and people just in general seemed less prepared. I don't know what was up with that. The post-construction fumes were nasty and I had to take antihistamines, tho' at least I was able to keep the doses small. Erica may not be able to do the library again next year, which would be too bad; I hope she can.

That's about it for notable events. Oh, I can say one really good thing about the remodel: the new beds are amazing. Maybe it's just that they're new and of good quality, but that's the first time I've run across a conventional mattress-type bed that I prefer to my futon. I slept like a stone; annathepiper did too. If we had the money, we'd be asking them what mattresses they bought and ordering one tomorrow.