Archive for the ‘shows’ Category
Hey, I just got my panel schedule for VCON 40! The concert is 7pm on Friday – exactly where I don’t yet know, because some things are apparently still in flux. Otherwise, here’s where I’ll be:
I hope you’re coming, it’s always a lot of fun in Vancouver. ^_^
Norwescon 2016 (the 39th Norwescon) is spinning up, and projects are well underway. I’m not part of it this year, but the festival I started – nwcMUSIC – absolutely is, and needs all the people it can get. I’ve talked about this before in some depth, of course, but in short form, it was time for me to step away and hand the reins to someone else, so that’s what I’m doing.
Now, they’ll be dividing my job up into many nice bite-sized pieces, so you don’t have to go all in at once. They’ve filled a couple of positions – daytime programming director, for example, which is a big one – but are without doubt still looking for more. The first all-hands meeting is September 19th, just eight days away, in SeaTac. It would be really great if anyone and everyone interested would show up. Or, if you’re interested but can’t make that meeting, let them know that, too.
Also, as I’ve said before, I will totally dump information at you. I will be a resource. I have a lot of institutional knowledge and I want to share it in order to keep this thing going. So, hie thee off to Norwescon and volunteer with Programming (for daytime events) or Special Events (for concerts and other large event items). Opportunities are available now.
To speak honestly: while it is definitely time for me to step away from the organisational side for a while, I’ve had some amazing experiences building nwcMUSIC, and met a lot of awesome people running events at Norwescon. It seems pretty damn likely you will too. Give it a shot, and find out for yourself.
Hey, music people! And, for that matter, anybody else interested in being an Attending Professional or Performer! NOW IS THE TIME TO CONTACT NORWESCON! Right now as in today – this week is in fact last call.
Here is the direct link to the contact form. There’s also a separate page for suggesting programming items, and you don’t have to apply as an attending professional or performer to suggest panel ideas, those are generally welcome.
So, yeah! Now’s the time. Go, now!
Some photos of the more interesting displays at PAX. The Mister Handy is really video fodder – he was articulated, animated, and talking. I need an easier place to put video of things like that because I have some video of that, but not the time to deal with it right now.
I’d write up a report, but I don’t really have a lot to say. It was nice, Fallout 4 didn’t have playable beta so WHAT EVEN IS THE POINT, I discovered that the classic Mutant League Football game is getting a reboot by the original creator who was there and I got a flyer autographed for Minion Paul. But while everything was gorgeous, nothing actually present really grabbed me the right way.
Oh, I did win a tiny prize for the time trials on Duke Nukem. I didn’t realise they’d started timing yet, I was just screwing around and not trying for speed. I guess my regular play on old-school FPS is pretty quick. XD
Anyway, pictures!
Bigger on Flickr, like usual.
We had a pretty bad windstorm up here at the Lair; we didn’t even plan this one, or any part of it. For once. We’re back online now, but I spent a bunch of time Sunday evening getting webservices back together – don’t ask – after the power and network outages, so I’m my post on E Pluribus Hugo will have to wait another day.
What won’t wait are thanks to the people who came out to the shows in Tacoma on Saturday, despite the storms that pummelled Portland, smacked around Seattle, lashed the Lair, and vitiated Vancouver to the point where they had to pull an emergency evacuation of their zoo because the grizzlies’ pen got blown open and things were about to go all Jurassic Park on their clientele. Hilarious, but not good for repeat business.
Somehow, through all this, Tacoma was sunny and fine. I don’t think it even sprinkled. I don’t understand it either. We even did a short encore outside, when the festival had to shut down the stage because time, because we decided that we were not done. I’d link to a picture of that, but the only one I know of is friendslocked to the poster on Facebook.
I may have some video. I hope so, anyway. We’ll see. Right now, we seem to have a little break; next up is VCON, the first weekend of October! I’m looking forward to it already. 😀
Rehearsal last night for the shows in Tacoma this weekend; we’re going to have two more, one as Leannan Sidhe, and one as Crime and the Forces of Evil, probably on different days since rehearsing two bands’ worth of material in one day is a wee bit of a pain in the ass.
(I say that particularly since Leannan Sidhe gave me like nine new songs like two and a half weeks in advance, one of those weeks to be spent at Worldcon. But she only does things like that because she knows I’ll do it.)
So I spent a lot of that Worldcon week repeatedly listening to the new material and working on some of the more amusing chord changes. I rather suspect power-A to G#m to F#m to C#m in beat succession is easier on guitar than on zouk. But! I can be taught. And I was able to charge right through it just fine each time in rehearsal today. So, yeah, go me.
Now I just need to get a better grip on a couple of these new harmonies…
So, other than that whole Hugo thing, yeah, there was a convention! And I went to it. This is the post where I talk mostly about that.
On the way there, we took Route 2, which I don’t usually do when heading east. It’s a more interesting drive than I-90, at least until you hit the 150 Minutes Of Driving In A Straight Line, with occasional five-building towns off to the side where they won’t distract you. Seriously, that part is like Desert Bus. But before that part, the geology is amazing and worth it.
We stopped at Leavenworth for food. Now, Leavenworth is a weird little town, because it decided some decades ago that it was going to be German. Before World War II, lots of little Cascadian towns were a little like that – North Bend was Norwegian, and Norwegian was the common tongue, and so on. But Leavenworth decided to go all out after the war, and some of the fans who had flown in via Seattle saw it and were more than a little fruck out. So just to share that experience, here’s Leavenworth for you:
Even things like Wells Fargo and Safeway are this style.
We could already smell the fires, though. That was a portent of things to come. As was this hazy sky on the way east, and, well, the evidence of earlier fires, no longer active.
As you can imagine from the previous post, I spent a lot of time in the business meetings. Normally there are three, and they’re not incredibly long; this year, there were four, and they were all very long. I’ll talk more about those in another post, but since it was such a large part of my convention experience this time, I couldn’t leave it out entirely.
I think the short form is that yes, they are dull, in a way? But in a way they are also not dull. Kevin Standlee is a good parliamentarian, and kept things moving and in good order. The way we were able to get through acres of other business on Sunday when it looked like we’d end up being there until 5pm or so was pretty impressive.
Opening ceremonies was pretty entertaining – you had a native tribes storyteller talking about the meaning of story and truth, and telling some good stories. Plus, Fishy finally got to unveil the Hugo base he’d designed for this year’s Worldcon! I found it evocative of some of the geology that Anna and I had just driven through, compressed and attenuated basalt columns, also evocative of rocket exhaust – a really nice job:
I like the Spokane convention centre complex. Parts of it were built back in 1974, but there are significant additions and renovations since then. We kind of had another hint about the smoke that was to come, though, that first night. I mean, when you can take pictures of the sun with a cellphone camera, it’s dark.
Then, of course, on Thursday you got the Broken Sky, which I posted photos of already.
Anna spent a huge chunk of the convention in the Dealer/Exhibit Hall, helping run the NIWA booth, so it wasn’t a programming-heavy convention for us. I did a little daytime performing and some playing in the evenings, of which I of course lack any photos because I was kind of busy with the actual playing. But I ran into a lot of people I’ve known via fandom for a long time (hi Rod! Hi Cheryl! Hi Jay! Hi Alec! Hi WOW I TALKED TO LOTS OF YOU!) and finally met TJ Burnside-Clapp in person, who I’ll be GoH-ing with at Conflikt this coming January.
okay, gotta admit, seeing your own name on this kind of flyer is a little weird. XD pic.twitter.com/3vNZ4LOIUw
— Solarbird (@solarbirdy) August 22, 2015
And I’m gonna say it: seeing your own name on one of those flyers in that way? More than a little weird. There’s a little moment of “…but you want people to come to your event, how is that going to help?”
Like I said: weird.
But! Back on track. I did get to a little other programming. I quite liked David Gerrold’s GoH speech. A bit on the old-school side, but, well, he’s a bit on the old-school side himself. And the Match Game SF game show went off well, like usual:
Plus, since I wasn’t officially working this show, I got to go to a masquerade again! It had been a while, and this was a fantastic one to come back to see. I went wearing Earth Kingdom Korra (just as a hall costume) and there were … 46 entries? An awful lot, with a really high standard of overall workmanship.
Torrey finally entered her Amidala costume – the one she did all the hand dye work on – at the Worldcon level, and picked up a couple of prizes for it. (All her kata practice really stood out – her lightsabre moves were just super-fluid and nice.) There was a gigantic Drider costume that was part of a larger set, and which may have been the largest costume effect I’ve seen put on an amateur stage. And I got to look at the Best-in-Show’s backpack time machine later, just wandering around – so much more detail to it than you could see from the audience. It was just a lovely piece of mechanics on top of everything else.
Tom Smith’s concert following masq was apparently the largest room he’s ever played – but you wouldn’t’ve known it from his performance. It’s one of the few times I’ve seen a masquerade halftime show that really entertained the crowd, which I’m just going to say is difficult to do.
I took a couple of hall costume photos, but not many. First, a No-Face:
And second, a couple of really nicely done Vault 101 wastelanders from Fallout 3. Check out the Pip Boy! It overexposed a little in my picture and I couldn’t bring it back in, but I promise you, it didn’t look blown out like that in real life.
Now, funny(?) thing about that outdoor shot – notice how much the light looks like the light in the actual Fallout game? That’s not good to be in. I didn’t know how bad it was, while I was out there for 45 minutes helping them get costume shots while the light was right. Here’s a view from the consuite:
And here’s the notice they posted while we were out in pretty much the very worst of it. That’s not “Dangerous for people with respiratory issues,” that’s DANGEROUS FOR ANYONE THAT BREATHES AIR, DO NOT GO OUTSIDE. It hasn’t been this bad since Mount St. Helens blew in 1980. That’s how bad the fires are. Heck, the business meeting’s Sergeant at Arms had to leave early because her horse farm got Class 1 fire alert and she had to evacuate her horses.
The biggest restaurant find had to be the Suki Yaki Inn. We were actually on our way to a different restaurant (about which I had my doubts) and stumbled across it. It’s one of those clearly-built-in-1962-and-untouched-since places, with that terrible “oriental” script that’s somehow supposed to be evocative of brush strokes but isn’t even a little bit. And Anna – bless her – said – “let’s try that!”
Now, she’s not normally the sort of person to go for dives of that sort, but I thought “oh, what the hell, why not?” And wow, was that the right decision.
I like the second-tier sushi bar they built when the first one was too small. It's like the heckling section. #fb pic.twitter.com/EuRKe8QAVt
— Solarbird (@solarbirdy) August 19, 2015
YES THE HECKLING SECTION IS OURS m/ ENGAGE MAXIMUM STATLER AND KICK UP THE WALDORF THREE! MORE! POINTS! pic.twitter.com/PJiCPmIQkb
— Solarbird (@solarbirdy) August 19, 2015
And here’s the thing: it was fantastic. I mean, the first clue we’d had that something was up were the mixed drinks; they served them in beer glasses. We were like Merry and Pippin.
Fishy wasn’t even sure drinks that big were legal, because they were not skimping on the alcohol, either. But even aside from that – they were good! And the sukiyaki was correct – basically, they had all their broths and sauces right, and once you do that, you’re well on your way in Japanese cooking. Okay, sure, the second time we went, the room we were in had apparently suffered some damage caused by somebody putting someone else’s head through the wall. But I’m pretty sure that’s ancient history at this point, so don’t let that stop you. So tasty.
Helsinki winning the 2017 Worldcon did not overly surprise me. It might’ve, a little, going in – I’ve been out of that whole conversation for a while, and Finland is very far from here – but once at the convention, the party flow made it pretty obvious. I voted for Japan and bought a pre-support (in that order, because sure, that’s how you do it) just to help them cover their bid costs. The only shot DC had was if they’d had a huge bloc of pre-convention voters, and, whelp, turns out no. Anna became a supporter of Dublin in 2019 and New Zealand in 2020 bids, and I’m considering pre-supporting New Orleans in 2018.
On the parties – well, going to the early-morning business meetings, I didn’t do as much party as I would normally have done. But I liked New Orleans (see above), Japan’s bid party, and most of all, the Babylon 5 party, in no small part just because it was there. B5 STILL HAS A POSSE, apparently, and that is a good thing.
Oh, and check out this PARKADE, about 10 minutes from the convention centre. Does this look like a Captain Scarlet set piece or what? It looks even more like one in person.
It’s right at that perfect stage of mid-modernism when they still expected everyone to come downtown, park, and then walk around like they did before cars. It’s brutalist in the right ways, it has this totally epic spiral ramp on the back of it with a huge cylinder in the middle that demands to be some sort of launch facility for an underground rocket base. Plus the in-and-out ramps are also in that era of we-aren’t-quite-sure-how-to-do-this-yet-but-this’ll-work that I love. I took more pictures but none of them really get it right. Plus: elevated retail level. MID-CENTURY AWESOMENESS ENGAGED!
I’ll have extra photos up on Flickr, like usual.
So, yeah, that’s not all, but it’s all I’m writing for now – this is too long already. I’ll post about the business meetings later – I didn’t want this week to be all about Hugo awards and politics. There was in fact also a convention, and a good bit of fun was had, by most, if not necessarily all. If I left you out, I’m sorry – pop in in comments and say hi!
After being an active participant at the World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting all five days of this worldcon, I will be posting a fair bit of commentary. However, probably not today, and tomorrow is a travel day. But it will be coming. Until then, the entire meeting is on youtube or will be very soon, and you can watch it there.
eta: Two posts going up tomorrow, Tuesday. First one on Sasquan in general, around 8:30 Pacific time. Second on the Hugo awards themselves a little later.
I wasn’t going to post from Sasquan, the Worldcon, but I kind of had to, the sky is just… broken. It’s nuts.
I had to do some colour manipulation to try to get these skies in these photos at least closer to the colours I was seeing. They’re still not right, but they’re at least in the neighbourhood. Keep in mind this is like 4pm, not sunset or anywhere near it.
It’s because of all the brush fires in the Cascadian east right now – it’s really bad. In the north central part of Washington State, they’re evacuating entire towns. On the way here, we took route 2, and we saw several areas where fires had come right up to the road this summer.
Separately, the geology along the west-central part of Route 2 is really, really neat. Hopefully I’ll have some photos of that, later. I haven’t had a chance to go through those, I’ve been busy playing! But more on that later.
If you’re here, say hi!
Which means I’m at Sasquan! SMILE I CAN SEE YOU
Poke me on the intarwebz if you want to do a thing! Like, idk, dinner. We’re heading to reg now.
THE NEW SINGLE
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