A belated Arisia write-up
Jan. 30th, 2019 05:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drwexI can't believe Arisia was more than a week ago. In the interim I've done some household maintenance, done a lot of transition things (about which I'll write more soon, I promise) been sick AF for about two days, and wow, it's been a week.
Past me wrote "eight inches of snow followed by rain followed by a hard freeze won't be AAAANY problem, right?" Past me is mostly an idiot but boy was Past Me right about that. Monday I came home before the rest of the family to find 6" of fine light powder covered by a 2" thick sheet of frozen snow that had no problem holding my weight. Getting up the driveway to get to the shovels wasn't amusing, nor was the 90 minutes of hacking it took to clear enough space that I could get my car into the driveway. I would've done more but I did something nasty to my left forearm and I declared myself done before I caused a serious tendinitis flare.
The temp and wind walking from the BPP to retrieve the car from under the Commons was so bad I literally cried from the pain of it hitting my face and then had to clear tears from my glasses so I could see to drive. So _that_ was fun. I have no idea how any of the Arisia Logistics on Ice crew managed it; they are tougher humans than I.
Arisia was about 25% smaller in attendance this year, but mostly didn't feel like it. It had all the things I've come to expect from the convention and we managed to fit many things more or less well into the new hotel space. That can be improved with experience. I'm also discovering I missed seeing a large number of people even though the Con never felt overcrowded to me or like I was missing out.
We arrived earlier than usual Friday in order to do the training for the Incident Response Team (IRT). This is the IRT's second year of formal existence as the organization responsible for taking reports at con of incidents. Training was led by BARCC mostly, with some additional stuff from our team leads that related to specific things, like how to make sure we had table coverage for all required hours.
The BARCC trainer had worked with Arisia folk to customize their training for this particular audience and convention. It also helped that the trainer was a geek and dropped at least one comment about "GMing" that cemented him as One of Us.
My personal interest is not so much being on IRT - that's not my strong suit and I'm not likely to do it again. However, as an Eboard member, I'm at the receiving end of incidents and I have to understand them. Being part of the training, and then taking a couple shifts to be a report recorder, gave me a clearer picture of the kinds of things that happen and how and why incidents get reported. We pay a lot of attention (usually rightfully) to the big important criminal-type things. But the majority of incidents aren't like that and context is a good tool for me in understanding. I think the IRT team was very good, our leaders were excellent, and having a much more visible presence at the convention was important.
We did end up being a surrogate Info Table for con-goers who were lost or mistook us for something else but that's also good, imo. If people see the IRT as "like us" then we are going to be easier to approach when someone has to disclose something problematic. I deliberately chose to wear one of my Team Arisia tee shirts during my shifts.
We acquired our teen-for-the-weekend (TftW) from their nervous parent mid-afternoon, got set up in the hotel room, and started in on the Con itself. Thing 2 arrived late in the afternoon, courtesy of Classmate Parent Transport. Thing 1 actually missed Arisia this year, the first time in her entire life, because her college classes started early. So TftW and Thing 2 had the sofabed in the outer room of the suite and Pygment and I had the king behind the closable door. We did have to walk through to get to the bathroom, but this set-up beat almost every other hotel situation we'd had where four of us had to share.
We also brought enough food that we were able to eat reasonably for most meals in the room. The fridge was too small, but we managed.
Friday evening was mostly quiet - I did some Web work - until it was time to dress for the Art Show Opening. I packed a lot of dress-up clothes this year and wore almost none of them, about which I still have lots of stupid feels. Art Show was excellent this year and I re-learned that the reception is great for talking to people and terrible for actually seeing the art. Fortunately we had time to come back later.
I can't actually remember what I did Saturday morning, which is silly because among my regrets this year is that I was too occupied to make it to several programming items I wanted to see. I saw several people once or twice in passing in hallways and then not ever again. If one of them was you, sorry about that.
Saturday after lunch I was one of three hosts of the poly meet-up, which was generally excellent. Last year I stopped in briefly to that year's meet-up and it felt sparse and too quiet. This year it was crowded and noisy, which made our conversation circle a bit challenging. Programming changed up the descriptions of the meet-ups this year and we instituted a "no photos in meet-up space" policy and I think both changes helped increase attendance. Loved it, would absolutely do it again.
We tried doing the Dealer's room afterward. Unfortunately, one of the major compromises of fitting into the BPPH was cutting Dealer's significantly. About 1/3 of dealers were asked to take a year off and bless their hearts they agreed. The room was still crowded and has access challenges that will need to be solved. I was fatigued by that point and kind of got shoved into nappage, which was wise.
Saturday evening I did the "Gaming and Consent" panel, which had two very good panelists, me, and a mediocre moderator. I liked her, but she didn't do a lot to direct the discussion. The other two panelists were primarily LARPers, leaving me sort of on my own for tabletop things. Best parts of this were tweeting out neat ideas I got from my copanelists (with permission) and increasing my desire to do more gaming panels next year.
Then we went to dinner with the GOHs, which was cold and slow but fun. Got back in time to do some Con parties. House of Toast was fun - I hope they come back next year with the full deal they do at other conventions (I've now seen pictures). Friends party was good for the friends I saw and the conversations. Then I tried to go to the dance and... sigh. I like the Arisia DJs as people. And it's cool they were raising money for BARCC. But the music selection and the DJ skills just weren't there. I also didn't take the time to dress up because everything took longer than expected and I was already tired. I wanted things to be different than they were - oh well.
Sunday was my busy day. We started early with the Corporate meeting, which went better than expected. I want to write up more about that and not stick a large blob in here, but the big deal was that we got quorum (not at all a certainty - there were calls being made to get people out of bed at 10AM on an Arisia Sunday just so they could show up and be counted for quorum) and with that quorum we got the Corporation to approve the Board spending money on lawyers and renegotiating hotel contracts, both of which are essential things at this point.
I went from that into my IRT desk shift, actually taking a couple reports but mostly giving directions to people somewhat lost in the new hotel's layout. As noted, it's a thing I'm very glad I did but am unlikely to do again.
That led into the Geeky Parenting panel. Interesting in that I have geeky teenagers, another panelist had middle-schoolers, and a third had toddlers. I am not so much caring what the kids see in Saturday morning cartoons anymore, but it was good to have a spectrum of experiences.
We had scheduled to go listen to the artist GOH review her art, a thing I love to do at Cons, but Something Else seemed more important to do at that time so we did the Something Else instead. (Damned if I remember now what it was.)
After dinner was the OPC Workshop, which turned out to be very small and not at all what I had intended, but quite interesting and worthwhile despite those things. Like a lot of Reconciliation programming at Arisia this year, people seemed happy to know that this existed and that people were working on the important issues, but generally they came to the Con to have fun, not to work on serious stuff. I think that's a good thing.
I did make it to some of the "Let's Actually Talk about Sex" panel, one of the things I always want to do that I'm not on and sometimes actually make it, but I had to leave early because there was a meeting of the Board and Chair team to review what feedback had been gathered during Fri/Sat/Sun and prepare for Monday's "State of Arisia" panel. The worst part of that meeting was that it started at 11:30 on a Sunday when we were all exhausted already. The best part was when someone asked "Who's going to run this?" I pointed at Person 1, who in turn pointed at Person 2, who pointed hesitantly at Person 3 who noped out and then Person 2 turned around and pointed back at himself. So, yeah, we were all a lot punchy.
I tried going dancing again once that was over, with encouragement from my besties. But my heart wasn't in it and I wasn't dressed up like I wanted to be and was too tired to go change clothes and the DJs were the same and just not inspiring. I was asleep approximately the minute my head hit the pillow.
Monday's session was also very lightly attended. When we scheduled a "State of the Arisia Community" session, we were half-convinced people would show up and lob rotten fruits at us. As it was, we talked to a lightly attended room, nobody lobbed anything bad, and that was that. In future I think we will keep doing things in the style of reconciliation - it's going to take more than a few months and one convention to heal the damage and people who didn't feel safe coming this year are going to come in future years and want to be heard. But I think it'll be more integrated with the rest of the convention and we'll all be a lot less panicked about it. I think the best thing about this is that we did it. We put some of our money where our mouths were and we'll keep leaning into that as long as we have the community's support.
Then I was exhausted and wanted to go home, so we packed the room and I trudged out into the OMFG cold and that's where I started this entry so I'll stop here.
Past me wrote "eight inches of snow followed by rain followed by a hard freeze won't be AAAANY problem, right?" Past me is mostly an idiot but boy was Past Me right about that. Monday I came home before the rest of the family to find 6" of fine light powder covered by a 2" thick sheet of frozen snow that had no problem holding my weight. Getting up the driveway to get to the shovels wasn't amusing, nor was the 90 minutes of hacking it took to clear enough space that I could get my car into the driveway. I would've done more but I did something nasty to my left forearm and I declared myself done before I caused a serious tendinitis flare.
The temp and wind walking from the BPP to retrieve the car from under the Commons was so bad I literally cried from the pain of it hitting my face and then had to clear tears from my glasses so I could see to drive. So _that_ was fun. I have no idea how any of the Arisia Logistics on Ice crew managed it; they are tougher humans than I.
Arisia was about 25% smaller in attendance this year, but mostly didn't feel like it. It had all the things I've come to expect from the convention and we managed to fit many things more or less well into the new hotel space. That can be improved with experience. I'm also discovering I missed seeing a large number of people even though the Con never felt overcrowded to me or like I was missing out.
We arrived earlier than usual Friday in order to do the training for the Incident Response Team (IRT). This is the IRT's second year of formal existence as the organization responsible for taking reports at con of incidents. Training was led by BARCC mostly, with some additional stuff from our team leads that related to specific things, like how to make sure we had table coverage for all required hours.
The BARCC trainer had worked with Arisia folk to customize their training for this particular audience and convention. It also helped that the trainer was a geek and dropped at least one comment about "GMing" that cemented him as One of Us.
My personal interest is not so much being on IRT - that's not my strong suit and I'm not likely to do it again. However, as an Eboard member, I'm at the receiving end of incidents and I have to understand them. Being part of the training, and then taking a couple shifts to be a report recorder, gave me a clearer picture of the kinds of things that happen and how and why incidents get reported. We pay a lot of attention (usually rightfully) to the big important criminal-type things. But the majority of incidents aren't like that and context is a good tool for me in understanding. I think the IRT team was very good, our leaders were excellent, and having a much more visible presence at the convention was important.
We did end up being a surrogate Info Table for con-goers who were lost or mistook us for something else but that's also good, imo. If people see the IRT as "like us" then we are going to be easier to approach when someone has to disclose something problematic. I deliberately chose to wear one of my Team Arisia tee shirts during my shifts.
We acquired our teen-for-the-weekend (TftW) from their nervous parent mid-afternoon, got set up in the hotel room, and started in on the Con itself. Thing 2 arrived late in the afternoon, courtesy of Classmate Parent Transport. Thing 1 actually missed Arisia this year, the first time in her entire life, because her college classes started early. So TftW and Thing 2 had the sofabed in the outer room of the suite and Pygment and I had the king behind the closable door. We did have to walk through to get to the bathroom, but this set-up beat almost every other hotel situation we'd had where four of us had to share.
We also brought enough food that we were able to eat reasonably for most meals in the room. The fridge was too small, but we managed.
Friday evening was mostly quiet - I did some Web work - until it was time to dress for the Art Show Opening. I packed a lot of dress-up clothes this year and wore almost none of them, about which I still have lots of stupid feels. Art Show was excellent this year and I re-learned that the reception is great for talking to people and terrible for actually seeing the art. Fortunately we had time to come back later.
I can't actually remember what I did Saturday morning, which is silly because among my regrets this year is that I was too occupied to make it to several programming items I wanted to see. I saw several people once or twice in passing in hallways and then not ever again. If one of them was you, sorry about that.
Saturday after lunch I was one of three hosts of the poly meet-up, which was generally excellent. Last year I stopped in briefly to that year's meet-up and it felt sparse and too quiet. This year it was crowded and noisy, which made our conversation circle a bit challenging. Programming changed up the descriptions of the meet-ups this year and we instituted a "no photos in meet-up space" policy and I think both changes helped increase attendance. Loved it, would absolutely do it again.
We tried doing the Dealer's room afterward. Unfortunately, one of the major compromises of fitting into the BPPH was cutting Dealer's significantly. About 1/3 of dealers were asked to take a year off and bless their hearts they agreed. The room was still crowded and has access challenges that will need to be solved. I was fatigued by that point and kind of got shoved into nappage, which was wise.
Saturday evening I did the "Gaming and Consent" panel, which had two very good panelists, me, and a mediocre moderator. I liked her, but she didn't do a lot to direct the discussion. The other two panelists were primarily LARPers, leaving me sort of on my own for tabletop things. Best parts of this were tweeting out neat ideas I got from my copanelists (with permission) and increasing my desire to do more gaming panels next year.
Then we went to dinner with the GOHs, which was cold and slow but fun. Got back in time to do some Con parties. House of Toast was fun - I hope they come back next year with the full deal they do at other conventions (I've now seen pictures). Friends party was good for the friends I saw and the conversations. Then I tried to go to the dance and... sigh. I like the Arisia DJs as people. And it's cool they were raising money for BARCC. But the music selection and the DJ skills just weren't there. I also didn't take the time to dress up because everything took longer than expected and I was already tired. I wanted things to be different than they were - oh well.
Sunday was my busy day. We started early with the Corporate meeting, which went better than expected. I want to write up more about that and not stick a large blob in here, but the big deal was that we got quorum (not at all a certainty - there were calls being made to get people out of bed at 10AM on an Arisia Sunday just so they could show up and be counted for quorum) and with that quorum we got the Corporation to approve the Board spending money on lawyers and renegotiating hotel contracts, both of which are essential things at this point.
I went from that into my IRT desk shift, actually taking a couple reports but mostly giving directions to people somewhat lost in the new hotel's layout. As noted, it's a thing I'm very glad I did but am unlikely to do again.
That led into the Geeky Parenting panel. Interesting in that I have geeky teenagers, another panelist had middle-schoolers, and a third had toddlers. I am not so much caring what the kids see in Saturday morning cartoons anymore, but it was good to have a spectrum of experiences.
We had scheduled to go listen to the artist GOH review her art, a thing I love to do at Cons, but Something Else seemed more important to do at that time so we did the Something Else instead. (Damned if I remember now what it was.)
After dinner was the OPC Workshop, which turned out to be very small and not at all what I had intended, but quite interesting and worthwhile despite those things. Like a lot of Reconciliation programming at Arisia this year, people seemed happy to know that this existed and that people were working on the important issues, but generally they came to the Con to have fun, not to work on serious stuff. I think that's a good thing.
I did make it to some of the "Let's Actually Talk about Sex" panel, one of the things I always want to do that I'm not on and sometimes actually make it, but I had to leave early because there was a meeting of the Board and Chair team to review what feedback had been gathered during Fri/Sat/Sun and prepare for Monday's "State of Arisia" panel. The worst part of that meeting was that it started at 11:30 on a Sunday when we were all exhausted already. The best part was when someone asked "Who's going to run this?" I pointed at Person 1, who in turn pointed at Person 2, who pointed hesitantly at Person 3 who noped out and then Person 2 turned around and pointed back at himself. So, yeah, we were all a lot punchy.
I tried going dancing again once that was over, with encouragement from my besties. But my heart wasn't in it and I wasn't dressed up like I wanted to be and was too tired to go change clothes and the DJs were the same and just not inspiring. I was asleep approximately the minute my head hit the pillow.
Monday's session was also very lightly attended. When we scheduled a "State of the Arisia Community" session, we were half-convinced people would show up and lob rotten fruits at us. As it was, we talked to a lightly attended room, nobody lobbed anything bad, and that was that. In future I think we will keep doing things in the style of reconciliation - it's going to take more than a few months and one convention to heal the damage and people who didn't feel safe coming this year are going to come in future years and want to be heard. But I think it'll be more integrated with the rest of the convention and we'll all be a lot less panicked about it. I think the best thing about this is that we did it. We put some of our money where our mouths were and we'll keep leaning into that as long as we have the community's support.
Then I was exhausted and wanted to go home, so we packed the room and I trudged out into the OMFG cold and that's where I started this entry so I'll stop here.
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Date: 2019-01-31 01:18 am (UTC)Glad we got to go back to the art show, and wander the dealer room a bit, and get some other time for us. Thank you for being willing to be shoved into napping. You really needed it.
I don't know what you did Saturday morning (maybe put out fires, you had a couple of those during the weekend you didn't mention) but you came and joined me at the art show late morning. I'm also glad you came down to the dance Sunday night with me for how little you were there and sorry my foot wasn't up for it Saturday night.
You decided that Talking about Future Planning of STUFF with RS was more important at the moment than going to see the artist's slide show and then we grabbed teenager, met up with other folks, and had REAL MEAL before we headed off for your workshop.
Re: Comment Catcher: A Dollar a Question
Date: 2019-01-31 03:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-01 01:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-01 03:23 am (UTC)