I guess that actually I did do some Worldcon prep today. Part of the tidying involved repacking the Match Game boxes. I'm glad we have a new sponsor, Night Shade Books, coming on line at Denvention 3, because we finally seem to have exhausted the supply of books donated from Emerald City's review bin.
I also posted a message to SMOFS outlining the way I expect we'll handle a particularly complicated situation involving two competing versions of a proposal covering the same general area. They can't both pass because they both are trying to amend the same portions of the constitution, albeit in different ways, so the best way to handle it will be to treat the second proposal as a substitute for the first. So the initial question before the meeting is "Which one of these proposals will survive the Preliminary Meeting to go on to the Main Meeting for debate?" This seems to be a difficult concept for some people to grasp, I've found. They tend to assume that whichever proposal passes the initial round has won and must be passed on to next year for ratification, and are confused when the surviving proposal turns up for more debate the next day. "Didn't we already vote on this?"
"No, we only voted on which version we found preferable. We never voted on whether we want to pass the proposal." The important thing here is that even people who don't think we should make any changes at all should stay engaged in a discussion between alternative proposals. One of them, in some form, is going to come forward. Even if you plan to vote against whichever proposal passes the first round, you have some interest in deciding which of those proposals it is.
One school of thought says that if you oppose any changes, you should work to pass the version you think will have the least support in the next round. A variation of this is attempting to amend a pending proposal into an unwanted form. But this is a risky strategy -- what if it backfires? You might end up with the worst of all possible proposals (from your point of view) passing. Personally, I think it's better to work for the proposal you think the least obnoxious, so that if it does pass, there will be (from your point of view) less harm done.
After dinner, I managed to get out for a 5 km walk around my "regular" Quarry Lakes loop for the first time in a long time. It was a cool and overcast evening, but I like it that way, and so did my blood sugar when I tested it.
Finally, I spent much of the afternoon and evening copying episodes of The Goon Show from CD to cassette tape so that we can listen to them on the drive to Denver. I don't have a CD player in the van, you see, and Lisa doesn't like CDs anyway, much prefering to work with cassette tape.
Everyone else was either out enjoying themselves or working much harder on Worldcon-related stuff than I was. For me, it was just the calm before the storm, for in a couple of days, I must finalize the question list for Match Game and print some more posters for use at Denvention. Oh, and I do have to get my paying work done and a project brought to a point where I can hand it off by the end of this week. I foresee a couple of late nights on Tuesday and Wednesday.
