Aussiecon 4
Oct. 20th, 2010 05:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dormouse1953Aussiecon 4 registration actually opened on the Wednesday, and I went along before going on the pub crawl, but all I got was a badge - no clip or lanyard - and a voucher for the rest of the stuff, which wasn't available till Thursday morning.
The pocket programme book had the unusual feature that the alphabetic list of programme items included definite and indefinite articles in its sort, so the panel on The Fermi Paradox was listed immediately after The Fantasy Plays of William Shakespeare, but 40 pages after Far Futures: Where Fantasy meets SF.
As I was waiting for the opening ceremony to begin, I got my camera out to prepare to take some pictures. The camera jammed and refused to take any pictures. What brilliant timing. I replaced the batteries, which enabled to do some stuff, such as retract the lens and look at pictures I'd taken in Sydney. In fact, I could now do everything with the camera except to take pictures.
I went to a number of panels, and they were usually interesting. I didn't go to the masquerade, as Worldcon masquerades are now so long I get bored. Ironically, I'm told that this year's masquerade was very short. I didn't get to see the off-colour comment that led to a brouhaha later. However, the next day I did see someone wearing a Hero badge. I asked her what she'd done to get that. Apparently, she'd turned up as a volunteer to gopher on the masquerade and ended up directing it. As she explained it, the planned director of the masquerade had resigned a month before the convention - I don't know the details - and nobody was willing to take on the job at a month's notice. Perry Middlemiss, co-chair of the convention and head of the Events Division, feared he was going to have to do it himself, but this woman who turned up on the day seemed to be getting things done, so they gave her the job.
I went to both the Australian Awards ceremony and the Hugo Awards. The former had a curious mixture of seriousness and fannishness, as if the Novas at Novacon had got mixed with the Hugo ceremony. I can't imagine a Hugo award being introduced for Best Fannish Cat any time soon.
The Hugo ceremony circumvented two of the major technical problems that can occur. Firstly, they showed a video right at the start of the ceremony of the year 2009 in SF, including clips from major films and TV shows, pictures of nominated books and authors and the like. So, when it came to the Dramatic presentation awards, they did not show clips of the nominees. And, when the winners were announced, they did not attempt to display the name of the winner. It only takes someone being over eager at pressing the button to ruin the surprise and reveal the winner too soon.
When Sean McMullen read out the list of nominees for Best Novella, he stumbled over the name "Palimpsest", and of course that was the title which won, so he had to say it again. Congratulations to Charlie Stross. And then, in the Best Novel category, there was another nominee called Palimpsest, but Kim Stanley Robinson knew how to pronounce it by now. When he started to announce the winner with the words "Statistical anomalies do occur..." my immediate thought was that Palimpsest was the winner here, too, but he instead announced a tie between The City & The City and The Windup Girl.
I don't know what happened to the planned parties. They were supposed to be on a floor of the Crowne Plaza Hotel (which under a different name was the main con hotel back in 1999) but most of Thursday I was hearing about how the hotel were not going to allow this now, and no food or drink was to be served in the function rooms. Furious negotiations seemed to be going on behind the scenes so that parties were allowed in some of the function rooms, and extra negotiations led, I'm told, by James Bacon, meant that the London in 2014 parties had not only beer supplied by the hotel but whisky and Pimm's brought over expressly for the parties.
Still, when I went to the first party on the Thursday night I thought there may be problems. Two of the so called function rooms were open plan areas of a mezzanine floor above the hotel reception. The main access to this area was from an escalator, but it was also on the access route to the lifts to the rooms for hotel residents. Coming up the escalator you had to go through the gap between the two parties, which was OK, but if you had bulky luggage you didn't want to try and carry up the escalator there was another lift which opened out inside the party area. At some point during the party I was surprised to see a number of air crew struggling to push large suitcases through the middle of the party.
The London parties not only had alcohol, they also had British food: battenburgs, bakewell tart, shortbread. I was not so much worried I'd get drunk as I'd have a sugar high.
After the closing ceremony, there wasn't much to do. Fans hung around the foyer area of the convention centre until it was time to go off and eat. Someone recommended to me and Philip Chee an all you can eat buffet restaurant in the nearby casino so we investigated that, but there was no official dead dog party to go to afterwards, so I went back to my hotel to pack and watch TV.
The pocket programme book had the unusual feature that the alphabetic list of programme items included definite and indefinite articles in its sort, so the panel on The Fermi Paradox was listed immediately after The Fantasy Plays of William Shakespeare, but 40 pages after Far Futures: Where Fantasy meets SF.
As I was waiting for the opening ceremony to begin, I got my camera out to prepare to take some pictures. The camera jammed and refused to take any pictures. What brilliant timing. I replaced the batteries, which enabled to do some stuff, such as retract the lens and look at pictures I'd taken in Sydney. In fact, I could now do everything with the camera except to take pictures.
I went to a number of panels, and they were usually interesting. I didn't go to the masquerade, as Worldcon masquerades are now so long I get bored. Ironically, I'm told that this year's masquerade was very short. I didn't get to see the off-colour comment that led to a brouhaha later. However, the next day I did see someone wearing a Hero badge. I asked her what she'd done to get that. Apparently, she'd turned up as a volunteer to gopher on the masquerade and ended up directing it. As she explained it, the planned director of the masquerade had resigned a month before the convention - I don't know the details - and nobody was willing to take on the job at a month's notice. Perry Middlemiss, co-chair of the convention and head of the Events Division, feared he was going to have to do it himself, but this woman who turned up on the day seemed to be getting things done, so they gave her the job.
I went to both the Australian Awards ceremony and the Hugo Awards. The former had a curious mixture of seriousness and fannishness, as if the Novas at Novacon had got mixed with the Hugo ceremony. I can't imagine a Hugo award being introduced for Best Fannish Cat any time soon.
The Hugo ceremony circumvented two of the major technical problems that can occur. Firstly, they showed a video right at the start of the ceremony of the year 2009 in SF, including clips from major films and TV shows, pictures of nominated books and authors and the like. So, when it came to the Dramatic presentation awards, they did not show clips of the nominees. And, when the winners were announced, they did not attempt to display the name of the winner. It only takes someone being over eager at pressing the button to ruin the surprise and reveal the winner too soon.
When Sean McMullen read out the list of nominees for Best Novella, he stumbled over the name "Palimpsest", and of course that was the title which won, so he had to say it again. Congratulations to Charlie Stross. And then, in the Best Novel category, there was another nominee called Palimpsest, but Kim Stanley Robinson knew how to pronounce it by now. When he started to announce the winner with the words "Statistical anomalies do occur..." my immediate thought was that Palimpsest was the winner here, too, but he instead announced a tie between The City & The City and The Windup Girl.
I don't know what happened to the planned parties. They were supposed to be on a floor of the Crowne Plaza Hotel (which under a different name was the main con hotel back in 1999) but most of Thursday I was hearing about how the hotel were not going to allow this now, and no food or drink was to be served in the function rooms. Furious negotiations seemed to be going on behind the scenes so that parties were allowed in some of the function rooms, and extra negotiations led, I'm told, by James Bacon, meant that the London in 2014 parties had not only beer supplied by the hotel but whisky and Pimm's brought over expressly for the parties.
Still, when I went to the first party on the Thursday night I thought there may be problems. Two of the so called function rooms were open plan areas of a mezzanine floor above the hotel reception. The main access to this area was from an escalator, but it was also on the access route to the lifts to the rooms for hotel residents. Coming up the escalator you had to go through the gap between the two parties, which was OK, but if you had bulky luggage you didn't want to try and carry up the escalator there was another lift which opened out inside the party area. At some point during the party I was surprised to see a number of air crew struggling to push large suitcases through the middle of the party.
The London parties not only had alcohol, they also had British food: battenburgs, bakewell tart, shortbread. I was not so much worried I'd get drunk as I'd have a sugar high.
After the closing ceremony, there wasn't much to do. Fans hung around the foyer area of the convention centre until it was time to go off and eat. Someone recommended to me and Philip Chee an all you can eat buffet restaurant in the nearby casino so we investigated that, but there was no official dead dog party to go to afterwards, so I went back to my hotel to pack and watch TV.
