Pixel Scroll 8/22/18 If All The Pixels At File 770 Were Scrolled End To End, I Wouldn’t Be At All Surprised

(1) WORLDCON 76 ATTENDANCE. Kevin Standlee blogged this first-cut attendance figure on Monday:

A tentative membership count (subject to clean up after the convention) of warm bodies on site for Worldcon 76 is 5,440 individual human beings who attended the convention at some time during the five days of the event. There are a bunch of other numbers I have, but I’m waiting for the post-con clean up before reporting them to the WSFS Formulation of Long List Entries (FOLLE) committee.

(2) PLANE SPEAKING. How did Cat Rambo convince TSA to let her on the plane after she lost her wallet and ID’s? She showed them this – her Walter Day trading card.

(3) TOLKIEN MENTIONS AT W76. Kalimac reports on two Worldcon panels with Tolkien in them”:

The two best panels I attended at Worldcon 76 were both relatively sparsely attended, perhaps because they lacked famous names at the table. Instead, the panelists were young writers unfamiliar to me, representing a variety of ethnicities and gender/sexual identities. They were as articulate and interesting as any more famous names would have been, probably more so. The topics were intriguing, which is why I was there….

Details at the link.

(4) MOBIS AT CONVENTIONS. Seanan McGuire complimented Worldcon 76 on the number of mobis they arranged. She passionately argues for accepting them in convention space here.

(5) FIVE SEVEN FIVE. John Hertz shared his unpublished submission to the Worldcon daily newzine:

Science, fantasy
Joining, jostling, we’re here to
Commune if we can.

(6) BOBBLEHEAD. Major League baseball has Game of Thrones nights.  The Texas Rangers have capitalized on the name of their second baseman Rougned Odor with a new bobblehead that portrays him in a scene from the series: “The Rangers’ new Game of Thrones bobblehead for Rougned Odor will bring back painful memories”.

Martin Morse Wooster adds, “The Orioles’s Game of Thrones promotion was one with pitcher Kevin Gausman riding a dragon.  Mr. Gausman was unable to be present for his bobblehead, due to his employment by the Atlanta Braves…”

(7) AS OTHERS SEE THEM. At Poore House, Cormac’s “Hate Speech: Perceptions and Responses in the SCA” models the reasons for different levels of obliviousness, denial, engagement, and hate in connection with a Society of Creative Anachronism coronation where the king and queen wore swastika patterned garments.

…Interactions

Each of these three groups have connections to the others, and discussions quickly became heated. Team Trust felt attacked by Team Vigilance when the latter accused the organization of institutional racism, and they grew frustrated by Team Familiarity’s refusal to recognize the dangers of public perception. Team Familiarity felt that Team Trust’s outrage was driven by ignorance of historical design, and that Team Vigilance was fueling the controversy due to unfounded oversensitivity. And Team Vigilance saw Team Trust as complicit for turning a blind eye to the warning signs, and they hold Team Familiarity guilty of normalizing and defending the display of hate symbols.

Some in each group became so frustrated that they walked away from the discussion, and from the organization. Members of Team Trust felt disillusioned at what the Dream had become, and stopped showing up. Members of Team Familiarity retreated to their research, and looked for more historically accurate organizations with whom to spend their time. And members of Team Vigilance turned their energies to letting as many people as possible know that there were white supremacists in the SCA, including reporting us to the Southern Poverty Law Center….

[Thanks to Chip Hitchcock, Mark Hepworth, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Mike Kennedy, Carl Slaughter, rcade, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Matthew Johnson.]

90 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 8/22/18 If All The Pixels At File 770 Were Scrolled End To End, I Wouldn’t Be At All Surprised

  1. I’ve had the same experience as Cliff re: handing over a credit card at check-in, whether or not a company or I have paid in advance (as with some places where they charge your credit card when you make the reservation). It’s so routine I generally have my card ready when I step up to the desk. Apropos of not much, I was a front desk clerk throughout college and tend to be both picky and appreciative when interacting with hotel front office staff.

  2. @Kendall – glad you liked it.

    @Rob Thornton/@Joe H. : Thanks – I’ll check those sites out to find the Tolkien recording I’m looking for.

  3. @ P J: It’s called INport Deluxe, and I got it back in 2007, so ghod knows whether it’s still available. I did a full review of how it works here. I have a big boombox with CD and cassette players that I was using for my source.

  4. Update: While The Poppy War starts to get darker around the 50% mark, it gets positively grim (not to say horrific; but most definitely not grimdark) at around 75%.

  5. @Lee
    Thanks! I see the Large South American River has it available. (I’m not entirely sure it will work with what I have available to feed it, but I can try.)
    And the radiation people rescheduled Monday morning from 8 to 7am. Which means getting up at way-the-fuck-too-early to make the bus connection to get there on time (10 or 15 minutes to the bus, minimum of half an hour on it, then another 15 or 20 minutes at the other end).

  6. @Lenore Jones
    The other option was 6pm or later. Which, from my viewpoint, is even worse. I don’t mind early quite so much; I just hate getting up that early, especially after having to do it for years (I was catching a 6:25 train at the same station).

  7. site gave me an error message about couldn’t find the page, then didn’t show the previous comment….

  8. @Charon: As you know, I had SJW creds in my room at the Marriott, and they were really nice about everything, for less money. They were polite and helpful, be it the front desk, the restaurant, even the coffee and gift shop. And randos wandering to our door going “Kitty?!” They got a mite testy about the con suite but were quickly pacified and didn’t tell us to be quiet or stop eating.

    I really don’t think anyone should patronize the Fairmont unless they’re filthy rich and then maybe they’ll treat you decently. There are a LOT of hotels there — pick any other one. The Westin St. Claire is historic and stuff, one of my friends was in the Hyatt across the street from the convention center… plenty of options.

    @Soon Lee: Not forgetting the previous one in that thread, which was a nice warm-up. Must admit I read the second one first, with no idea what was going on, and when I got to “You don’t care much for hippos, do ya” the penny dropped and I read it with musical accompaniment and LOL.

    @Lee: I think that’s how Consonance got its nice new hotel too.

    @rcade: Some people probably think Picacio did a political thing just by being and bringing in Mexicans. I don’t recall him being political. Unless inclusivity is political, which it is to certain assholes I thought we got rid of. (Did I say hi to you at the con?)

    @Andrew: Bravo, and a humming fire lizard choir to you.

    @PJ: Insult to injury, I sez! Inflict your mighty Hulk powers on the scheduler if you get them. I hope not to hear anything this bad happening to a friend soon, and when I’m feeling down, I’ll think “At least I’m not taking buses for over an hour to get irradiated at 7 AM Monday.” I hope it’s worth it. I shall be Extremely Peeved with the universe if this doesn’t lead to full remission.

  9. I’m sorry to hear about the sad direction the SCA seems to have taken. I was a member for several years during my college days over (eek!) 40 years ago. I met my husband at an SCA event, and I remember the campus-based group as laid back and welcoming. I do remember having some reservations about the – I guess INTENSITY would be the word – that some members seemed to have for their version of the Middle Ages. I hope they’ll find a way to corral their Eurocenticity. I was mostly interested in the costuming, and I remember the absolute delight my friends and I felt when a Japanese group showed up at one of the meets in what they assured us was authentic Japanese medieval dress. Stunning!

  10. @Lurkertype
    I wish I were surprised at the issues with the Fairmont, but I’m not, not really.

    When I was at the Fannish Inquisition in Helsinki and heard that the San José party hotel would be the Fairmont, I whispered to my Mom, “Uh-oh. I can’t imagine that going well, cause Fairmont is a pricy rich people’s luxury chain. Remember the hotel from the 1980s TV series ‘Hotel’? That was the original Fairmont. And now imagine that place meeting a WorldCon.”

    Coincidentally, I’m also not a fan of Swisshotel, which is part of the Fairmont group. After they took over CP Hotels, which owned the traditional Hillmann hotel in my city, they changed the traditional name to Swisshotel, refurnished the whole place in an ugly modernist look and closed the shopping arcade on the ground floor, because it was bothering their exalted guests.

    Meanwhile, the sort of people who actually go for luxury hotels (as translator, I meet such people on occasion) all tend to stay at the other luxury hotel in town, the Park Hotel.

  11. @Kendall: FWIW, at the time of the 1999 Fairmont San Jose encounter I mentioned upthread, the front desk staff tried to insist we sign lodging contracts and provide credit cards for purposes not limited to incidentals: The contract would have entitled the firm by law to charge any hotel cost to us personally.

    I smelled a rat (not to mention disliking their extremely bad attitude and insulting manner), so I eschewed the pleasure entirely. (The hotel staff didn’t bother to claim ‘We’d of course never charge your personal cards for anything but incidentals’, but I wouldn’t have trusted that even if they had, given the contract’s terms.)

  12. @Lurker — True, the Marriott was cred friendly, but I’m still upset at that particular chain because their restaurant was closed for renovation during Baycon. I picked the Fairmont because they were the alleged “party” hotel, but as it turned out, Kahuna isn’t really a party animal. In any event, I’m not sure I’ll be attending a convention near a Fairmont for a while. Although if Kahuna and I are still around for 2025 in Seattle we’ll road trip up there and throw another luau.

  13. @Charon D.: In fairness, fandom’s had a perfectly OK experience at many other hotels in the Fairmont chain. E.g., ISTR that the Fairmont Chicago Millennium Park was the party hotel for a couple of Chicons, and I believe everyone was happy with it.

    As a place to stay, if one is willing to expend the (considerable) dosh, the Fairmont chain can be perfectly competitive with InterContinentals, Conrads, Four Seasons, JW Marriotts, Ritz-Carltons, Grand Hyatts, The Peninsula Hotels, and Mandarin Orientals. But, admittedly, as you might gather from that list of names, they’re certainly not a natural fit for fannish conventions.

  14. Meredith Moments! Some recent Tolkien (Children of Hurin and Beren & Luthien) are currently $1.99, as is Daughter of the Empire, the first in Janny Wurts & Raymond Feists’s Empire trilogy.

  15. @Lurkertype: “(Did I say hi to you at the con?)”

    I didn’t attend the con. I follow along from home and obsess over it.

  16. I was in the Fairmont, as a result of clumsily getting a room in the wrong Marriott and not noticing until it was too late to get into anywhere closer. My personal opinion of the hotel was “pleasant enough, and for that price it bloody well better be”, but all I did there was sleep and have breakfast. At checkout the desk went over my incidentals and a good thing they did, they were going to charge me for one day’s parking, and I didn’t bring a car.

  17. (6) Just popping in from an especially busy period at work to say that I love baseball, but Rougned Odor is the actual worst, represents so much about what’s toxic in sports culture at a time when baseball is trying (if not always succeeding) to do better about these things, and I hate the Rangers with the fire of a thousand suns for enabling his childish, violent behaviour. Except Bartolo Colón: I don’t know how you can be mad at that guy.

  18. Just popping in from an especially busy period at work to say that I love baseball, but Rougned Odor is the actual worst, represents so much about what’s toxic in sports culture …

    As a Texas Rangers fan, I think you’re making too much out of a couple brawls he got into in a sport that has on-field brawls a couple times a month. If brawls are “toxic” they’re a lot less so than they used to be. Baseball brawls are mostly theater in this era. None of the multi-millionaires wants to get hurt so they pair off and wrestle a little.

    Odor is also one of the more active Rangers in charity these days. Yes he threw an epic punch at Jose Bautista, but so did Nolan Ryan at Robin Ventura. Ryan threw about 10 of them. Nobody called him the worst of sports culture for it.

  19. Ryan’s career was over 25 years ago, and today standards about what’s acceptable are different, but yeah, he was a great pitcher and also absolutely an asshole.

    Baseball brawls are mostly theater in this era.

    That’s not an excuse. But: Odor was also a notoriously dirty cleats-up slider prior to that punch, and the Rangers didn’t care in the slightest. He spent months after the incident revelling in the positive attention he got from Rangers fans (and there was a *ton* of it) basically saying he’d hit Bautista or any other player again if he felt upset enough on the field before some Rangers PR flak finally told him to shut up and say he made a mistake. That is absolutely the worst of sports culture. It’s a sport with only one acceptable moment of contact between players (the tag), and violence has zero place in it.

  20. Ryan’s career was over 25 years ago, the standards of acceptable behaviour were different then. They changed *for good reasons.* He was a great pitcher, but yeah, he was also an asshole.

    Baseball brawls are mostly theater in this era.

    That’s not an excuse. But: Odor was also a notoriously dirty cleats-up slider prior to that punch, and the Rangers didn’t care in the slightest. He spent months after the incident revelling in the positive attention he got from Rangers fans (and there was a *ton* of it) basically saying he’d hit Bautista or any other player again if he felt upset enough on the field before some Rangers PR flak finally told him to shut up and say he made a mistake. That is absolutely the worst of sports culture. It’s a sport with only one acceptable moment of contact between players (the tag), and violence has zero place in it.

  21. Raising hand! Yes, rcade, I did and do use Nolan Ryan as an example of the worst in baseball, at least. (Don’t really follow other pro sports.) You can ask my husband, cause any time Nolan Ryan shows up (even just his name) I am remarkably consistent in hissing, booing and complaining at or about him. On behalf of Robin Ventura, I can carry a grudge and then some!

  22. I always thought that Robin Ventura took that beating because, as he was running to the mound to confront Nolan Ryan, he realized that history would not be kind to the player who punched Ryan.

    It’s a sport with only one acceptable moment of contact between players (the tag), and violence has zero place in it.

    When pitchers are still getting away with intentionally hitting batters, I think there’s still a place for occasionally charging the mound.

    You don’t like rough slides. That’s another place for the occasional scrum.

    I would be troubled by violence in baseball if it was as bad as it was in the 1970s when I started following the sport. We’re not in that era any more. Brawls are fading out on their own.

  23. Baseball brawls? Baseball?

    Come on now. Used to be the only reason to go to a hockey game was to catch the fights!

    Games been ruined by getting rid of the violence. Heck, players are actually wearing helmets! Buncha wimps. In my day…..

    🙂

  24. Humph. We Americans only like hockey brawls because we don’t understand the sport. Humph. (My husband was American, but grew up in Canada. I inherited a few opinions without the knowledge to back them up.)

  25. P J Evans and Lee: I am sorry for the pain and exhaustion you will be going through. But I am hopeful that these treatments will restore your health and make life better for you in the long run. If there is anything I can do to make the process easier, please e-mail me.

    I will be sending positive vibes and healing thoughts your way. 🙂

  26. As irritating as the Fairmont was, in practice it was the only hotel where we could have done “social” functions. The other close-in hotels simply didn’t have enough room. And considering what it cost for what we did do in the McEnery Convention Center, I shudder to think of what a “Fan Village” a la Loncon 3 would have been like, although I found Callahan’s Place a great place to sit down and eat and drink and meet people. Indeed, nearly the only time I was able to engage with people other than in my official capacities was while eating meals at Callahan’s. (I spent an inordinate amount of time either running errands for the WSFS division or up in my hotel room dealing with WSFS Business Meeting video processing/uploading.)

  27. I wish you didn’t have to spend all that time while at the con. It seems a shame. Not that we don’t appreciate the high-res video!

  28. Lenore Jones / jonesnori on August 27, 2018 at 11:19 am said:

    I wish you didn’t have to spend all that time while at the con. It seems a shame. Not that we don’t appreciate the high-res video!

    Thanks, but I couldn’t figure any other way to do it. I had to first set up Adobe Premiere to digest the files from the Panasonic camera (which are high-resolution professional format files) into MP4 and set that to running. I could then leave that to run for an hour or three while I went back to the convention. Later I could then upload the files to YouTube, which would also take several hours. I would have preferred to do this last part overnight, but the Hilton wi-fi was on a 24-hour cycle that would timeout sometime overnight and require you to sign back in, killing the uploads! Even the very fast wired connection we had in the business meeting, while excellent for the “video thumbnails” (MP4 files generated by the “proxy card” that Detcon 1 bought for us), still took more than an hour to upload the higher-resolution files, even though they’re only 480 SD MP4 files.

    At least once I got the hang of it I could leave the computer to do work while I went back downstairs to the convention.

    Oh, and the reason I didn’t leave it until after I got home was that (1) I know people would much rather watch the higher-resolution longer files than the lower-resolution 10-minute segments and (2) If I’d had to depend on my 0.6 MBPS uploads on my home DSL connection instead of the much faster hotel room connection, we’d still be waiting today for the first file to finish if I had started uploading it when I got home last Thursday, and I need my internet connection for my Day Jobbe.

  29. Yeah. I thought about suggesting you wait, then remembered how I feel when I get home from cons and didn’t. The internet is a factor I had forgotten.

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