tired
I'm glad we registered yesterday, because at about 11:15 AM, the registration queue stretched back from Registration to a set of stairs...
To an overflow queue at the top of the stairs that doubled back on itself. I heard quoted wait times of 90 minutes. Painful. However, I did see that they did eventually clear that queue and later in the day it wasn't that awful.
I attended the Opening Ceremonies, which were entertaining; alas, I had a terrible time understanding what most of the people were saying, and I don't think it was just the accents. The amplification distorted things a lot, and most people don't know how to use microphones.
After Opening Ceremonies, I headed into the Fan Village, the "heart" of Loncon 3.
The WSFS banner hung near the main entrance.
There were few people in costume present, but one of them was this lovely Ms. Marvel. She had accessories (like her handbag) that matched the uniform, and amazing blue eyes. I told her how much I appreciated her wearing a costume, particularly on the first day with relatively few people doing so. She seemed to appreciate it.
After grabbing lunch with Lisa, I went off to the Introduction to WSFS panel, which actually had a decent turnout. Mark Olson, Linda Deneroff, and I went through the basics of WSFS procedures and tried our best to de-mystify the meeting. I hope it helps.
Loncon 3 very generously printed an entire WSFS Special Issue of the convention newsletter, The Pigeon Post with all of the early WSFS Business News. My thanks to
flick to volunteering to do this when the amount of WSFS news I submitted ran to being able to fill six columns.Lisa spent time sitting at the SJ in 2018 bid table when I was off at panels and at the WSFS Mark Protection Committee Meeting, which was scheduled for South Gallery 33, but when it turned out that the door was locked and nobody was available to unlock it (and hiking over to Program Ops was impractical), we commandeered room 32 next door, which wasn't in use, and held one of the longer MPC meetings. There's a lot of stuff going on, but most of it is actually covered in the MPC's report that is on the Loncon 3 web site. The MPC this past year helped with the defense of a serious threat to the Hugo Awards, with the work of Loncon 3 at the forefront, and some extensive financial help from SCIFI (using up the last of the L.A.con IV surplus and then some) and CanSMOF (spending Anticipation surplus funds) to pay approximately $15,000 in legal fees. I haven't said much about it because we've really not wanted to publicize it until we were relatively confident in the results.
In between the Intro To WSFS and WSFS MPC Meetings I attended a CanSMOF board meeting — Worldcons being one of the few times we can muster a quorum of the CanSMOF directors.
I did not go to the Retro-Hugo Awards ceremony, instead having an unrushed dinner. After dinner, we returned to the Fan Village, where the evening parties were in full swing.
Tiki Dalek made it to Loncon, and collected quite a crowd of admirers.
Lisa and I spent several hours individually mingling and talking at the Fan Village. It was fun, and I was glad I did so; however, it means it was after Midnight by the time we got back to the hotel, and I still hadn't posted the 1939 Retro-Hugo Award Results or updated the 1939 Retro-Hugo web page, not to mention posting the photos I took today and writing up the first day's activities.
As always, there was far more than this to write about (such as my successful deliveries of difficult-to-get-in-UK things to Cheryl and to Flick that I'd been carrying with me from the USA), but this is all I can manage, because it's very late and we have to be up early in order to be in place for the 10 AM WSFS Business Meeting, where Lisa is recording and I am "performing" as the reporting member of two WSFS/Business Meeting committees and the lead proponent of a large proposed amendment to the WSFS Constitution. Despite sleeping 14 hours last night, I need some sleep tonight.