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Long weekend at WisCon. Mostly good. Some frustrations, some fun bits. Got to meet a bunch of cool folks. If I counted right, there were at least 17 of our fiction authors there, at least three of whom (I think) I hadn't met in person before; sadly, I'm less good at keeping track of our contributors in other departments, so I'm not sure how many of them were present. Also plenty of people whom I have little doubt will eventually be among our fiction authors.

I could regale you with tales of panels (I signed up for too many and didn't attend enough), meals, Tiptree winners, hanging out in hotel rooms and lobbies, parties, saris, awards ceremonies, guest-of-honor speeches, desserts, flyers, compliments on my software docs, Big-Name Authors (I'm still enough of a fanboy that I tend to steer clear of even the most accessible such on the grounds that I won't have anything coherent to say), Karen & Pär & Jeremiah's lovely house, long drives from Madison to Chicago (chauffered by the fabulous Ms. Mohanraj), ridiculously long waits in the allegedly quick-and-easy electronic-ticket checkin lines at O'Hare, and so on; but it's late, and I've got some editing to finish up and a bunch of email to sort through, so all that will have to wait. Also in the "will have to wait" category are the photos, though I suspect some of them have already leaked onto the web.

I will continue this entry long enough, though, to note in passing that we really need a better communication system for conventions. It's too easy for one person to not happen to hook up with their friends during a night of parties, leaving them not only not having fun, but with the certainty that their friends are off having fun without them, and that's just no good (especially if several people are each convinced that all the others are off having fun without them); I haven't liked it when it's happened to me, and I don't like it when it happens to my friends. I'm in favor of cell phones, but they're not exactly foolproof. Maybe we need to get a bunch of those walkie-talkies? Alternatively, always-on wireless head-implanted Internet connections would do the trick nicely, I think.

Right. More later. Tomorrow night, perhaps.

4 Responses to “Home”

  1. Leah Bobet

    Practically speaking: does WisCon have a messageboard? Whenever I’m in a large group at a con, we tend to note our migratory patterns on said messageboard for the rest of the crowd.

    If not, cellphones are usually good, although you’d want to make sure a signal is to be had in the building. Walkie-talkies, not so good; con staff tend to use those, and get unhappy when other people butt in on their channels.

    (Sorry, I’m still in convention brain!)

    ~L

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  2. Jed

    Yeah, WisCon does have a message board, but I think most people aren’t used to using it to update their own whereabouts—you’d have to go down to the registration area and change your specified location every time you moved, which I’d expect would put a damper on spontaneous relocations. But it sounds like you’ve used this approach effectively; can you say more about how you do it? I’m guessing you use it more for things where the group will be in one place for a while (“We’ll all be at lunch at Restaurant X from noon to 2”) than for things where the group is drifting (“We’ll be at the Ratbastards party from 9 to 9:13, and then even though it’s obviously the coolest party around we’ll inexplicably decide to wander around and drop in on other parties ’til 9:32, and then we’ll wind up in J. and Z.’s room chatting for half an hour while they change clothes, and then we’ll head down the street to a cafe…”)

    Cell-phone signal weakness in buildings is definitely an issue. I get very poor signal on the 2nd floor of the Concourse. Also, lots of people don’t carry their cell phones (if they even have them) to parties, and parties tend to be loud so you may not hear your phone ring even if it does.

    Do all walkie-talkies use the same channels? I honestly don’t know. I was thinking of those sets of hiking walkie-talkies I’ve seen; I had the vague impression those could use any of several channels, but maybe they’re the same channels that con walkie-talkies use? Dunno.

    There’s also various text-messaging systems, of course, but I don’t actually know anyone who uses one.

    …It seems to me that the main advantage of systems like cell phones over using the message board is that the person who’s not with the group can initiate contact; the message board requires the group to remember to update their whereabouts. But there are clearly drawbacks to all these approaches.

    Oh, I forgot another good option: telepathy. Unfortunately, some telepathy systems require line-of-sight, which isn’t much help in a con.

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  3. Celia

    Well, the telepathy could work if you could manage to just pass the message on to someone you could see, and them on to another and so on. Like *cough* the crowd scene in Crocodile Dundee, only silent. Of course, in a party, it would probably end up more like a game of telephone, with the added benefit of stream of consciousness noise. 😉 “Everyone’s going to the Ratbastard’s party, and oh my god, would you look at the abs on that guy, could you meet them in the hallway in 15 minutes?”

    I use text messaging, but just to annoy a friend of mine, never for communicating at a con. 🙂 We trade messages, usually involving intentionally mangled song lyrics. We’re special like that.

    Me, I tend to take things like not being able to find friends as fate. If I needed to find them, I almost always did, even at Dragoncon. If I couldn’t find them, I’d just sit somewhere and read for a while and then get up and look for them elsewhere. I’m always positive that people are off somewhere having fun without me, but I’m also not that fond of crowds and such, so it balances out. I look, if I can’t find them, I know they’re some place crowded and loud, and I’d be making myself hoarse yelling “what?” repeatedly, or I could sit in a nice quiet corner and read. And if you sit and read, nice people come up and talk to you sometimes. That’s always interesting.

    Okay, done making this all about me and rambling. I need to not reply to journal entries after midnight or so. Bad enough that I write them after midnight, but to go around commenting incoherently is just…well, bad. Hmmm. Sleep good.

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  4. Leah Bobet

    Jed, yeah; it’s mostly for places we’re sure we’ll be for a while. We definitely leave a message before heading out of the area (hotel) or making evening plans (ie: going to the Masquerade, dance, trolling parties) just to give a general idea of where we’re at. The other thing we usually do is on the Friday of the con, we all crack open our schedules together and highlight/note the things we definitely want to see. It gives us a vague idea of the shape of our weekends.

    The other way we use the messageboard is to post things like: “All people from this group meet up here at this time”, usually before a meal or something we’re all going to want to see. So if someone gets lost, we can at least regroup our roving packs once or twice a day.

    As for the walkie-talkie channels, I think they default to a certain set of “public use” channels. We had an incident where a group brought walkie-talkies to Anime North this year to keep in touch with each other, and it (mistakenly) ended up all over the Security channel. Needless to say, Security was not pleased, and apparently they couldn’t find another unoccupied channel for use: some group of staff was using each of the public channels.

    It’s mostly cellphones for us. Mine does have a vibrate option, so I can usually tell when someone’s calling, and the outside-in thing you mentioned is definitely a factor.

    As for the telepathy, well…one could always use an area effect telepathy, but might not be advisable. Who knows what lurks in the minds of fanpeople… *dum dum dum!*

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