23 thoughts on “Third Day of Worldcon 75”

1. I was also disappointed about the livestream, but… c’mon. I’ve seen Blizzard screw up livestreams before and I’d hazard a guess that Blizzard’s budget is very, very much larger than Worldcon’s. Tech fails. It happens. Livestreams are still very hit-and-miss.

   The Hugo Losers Party looks amazing. 🙂

2. Love the Hugo ceremony outfits!

3. I feel like the livestream not working is traditional. If there isn’t a con problem, I have a problem. I’ll be quite shocked if it works one year

4. ticky

5. So who is Jonathan Crowe that we should care about him making an ass of himself? If the Worldcon had any use for galley slaves I’d suggest making him one, so he can see a fraction of the effort that putting on such a circus takes.
   I’ve known Worldcon Tech to miss other goals — but I also have some idea how reluctant a lot of them are to say no, and I’ve done just enough tech traveling to know how massively difficult drop-in tech is.

6. The railway workers have their peculiar way of saying goodbye to Worldcon attendees in Helsinki … by going on strike starting Monday, 6 pm.

   Traffic congestion is to be expected, so adjust your plans accordingly if you are still in Helsinki on Monday.

7. @Chip Hitchcock–“So who is Jonathan Crowe that we should care about him making an ass of himself? “

   Well, according to his website he is a “Book reviewer, cat photographer, fanzine editor, map blogger, snake whisperer”. And, if the universe is just, the new head of the people responsible for the live-stream.
   Actually, I have this vision of the coming year with his twitter/Facebook/website/etc. full of people asking him if he’s going to be in charge; thanking him for volunteering to be in charge; assuming he’ll be in charge; announcements that he’ll be in charge; you get the idea.

8. The Losers’ Party was a nice consolation prize. It was crowded and loud, though; the Hugo Reception (held for two hours before the awards ceremony) was a better place to meet and chat with famous people.

9. I expect that what he (and to be fair, most people) do not understand that Worldcon is a brand new million-Euro start-up convention every year. This isn’t an ongoing event in the same place with the same people with years to have worked out all of the bugs in the system. It’s a one-shot convention that has never been held in that space before with that combination of people and equipment, and with no possibility of a do-over.

   I’m relieved that the CoverItLive coverage worked, but even it is subject to trouble — last year, the connectivity in the hall was so hall that neither the primary or secondary connections worked. There was a third option, but I didn’t know what it was until after the ceremony was over.

   It’s like an elaborate musical production where you don’t get any rehearsals and where Opening Night is also Closing Night. Under the circumstances, the miracle is that we manage to pull off anything at all.

10. The big purple winged spiked hat is specifically Girl Genius cosplay.

11. Kevin

    I assume that it’s my incompetence when I can’t make my iPad work, and I’m completely right on that; expecting other people to do a hugely complicated tech thing as a one-off is, in my view, immensely silly. I’m still trying to find Red Wombat’s Hugo acceptance speech, but that’s me, not Worldcon.

    Part of it comes back to the the belief that there’s an all-powerful guy who runs the Hugos and will put them on in Kuwait next year if the price is right; you just need to acquire an underground volcano and a white cat and everything will be fine…

12. Stevie, no sign of the ceremony coverage being put up yet, but I’m pretty sure someone will mention it once it is.

13. I was a little surprised about the livestream difficulties at the Hugos because they have been streaming the business meeting and other panels successfully. Between a livestream from some audience member, the live captioning, and the text CoverItLive comments I got a pretty good idea of what was happening though. I’ll just skim to the highlights of Worldcon’s recording when it appears.

14. In addition to the “Shame!” chanting (of which I was a proud participant), in response to three Hugos arriving at once, someone yelled “They’re traveling in packs now!”

15. Stevie, I listened to the Hugos on the Chinese feed, and as best as I could tell trying to listen behind the translators, Oor Wombat’s Hugo acceptance speech was a slightly pared-down version of what she posted on Twitter a few weeks ago.

    I don’t have a Twitter account (I lurk, basically) and I don’t really know if this will work, so apologies if this link doesn’t work right, but if I’m doing it right the story starts about here:

    https://twitter.com/UrsulaV/status/890786066189344768

    (Non-twitter-users, if a dialogue box pops up asking you to join or sign in, you can just close it and read.)

16. Too late to edit: The Hugo speech ended (if memory serves) on a more positive note with little gardens of sea-life on the deep sea-bed flourishing years and years after the whale carcasses had disappeared from macroscopic notice. And I don’t think the digression about cow bones was included. <grin>

    But the tweets should give you the gist of the whale-fall acceptance speech, anyway.

17. @Harold Osler: that’s a lovely vision, but given his attitude I figure he’d be a Trump-style manager (i.e., a blowhard who orders people to do what he can’t and blames them when they fail at the impossible — I never thought I’d feel a drop of sympathy for not-reelecting-Obama-is-more-important-than-fixing-the-Bush-recession McConnell, but I’m drifting that way.)

    @Kevin Standlee: that’s a bit of an exaggeration; even within fandom there is a growing pool of experience with dropped-in shows, not to mention recurrent use of facilities. (Sometimes that experience gets ignored; after the monster lines hours before Spokane opened, I’m … unclear … why Helsinki expected to ramp up gently.) But you’re right that a lot of people don’t understand the constraints of drop-ins — particularly when they involve rented equipment, too much of which may come from the lowest bidder.

18. Annnd, of course I accidentally unfollowed the latest threads & have to ticky again….

19. ISTR that the livestream from KC was okay last year. Not many glitches in Spokane, either.

    Dot’s vun schvell hat! Iz gud plan!

    Rick and Morty Hugo cabal!

20. lurkertype on August 12, 2017 at 3:47 pm said:

    Rick and Morty Hugo cabal!

    I feel like them being that organised is not wholly in the spirit of the show.

21. Yes MAC2’s stream was fine except for ads at inopportune moments. Spokane was past my bedtime so I don’t know.

22. I missed MAC2’s stream for reasons but Spokane’s worked fine for me. (The playback, not so much, but the original stream was fine.)

23. Cassy B: Thank you so much for the link to twitter–loved not only the whale speech but comments on works in progress! LOVES!

Comments are closed.