RogerBW's Blog

I went to the Worldcon in Dublin. With images; cc-by-sa on everything.

Some things went well; others didn't. The venue was the convention centre in Dublin, the largest in Ireland – and while it can manage 8,000 people in a single hall, 5,500 people wanting to move from room to room were really rather too much for it. The staff did their best, and once they took over running the queues from the convention's volunteers things started to work, but that was on the second day of the five day convention.

It is notable that Worldcon-going fandom, en masse, is too stupid to let people out of a small room before crushing forward to get into it. Then, having been told to use the stairs rather than crowding the lifts and escalators, they crammed forward into a stairwell completely full of people, rather than stepping to the other side of the lifts and using the entirely empty one. Hey ho.

But in spite of that – and the split site, with several things being a 15-minute walk or a tram ride away from the main venue in a cinema complex that was still being built – it was great fun, because of the people.

The building frontage makes me think of a pint glass coming down over a spider I'm about to throw out of the house.

But the important things were available at the hotel. (Bacon was on plate number 2. And 3.)

This was the only supplied guide to what was where in the building. I ended up passing around a samizdata map of the rooms which I'd extracted from a pre-release version of the programme guide. (And even then one of the pages was upside down.)

Network access tended to fall over a lot, not helped by (by my log) 77 APs all bellowing over each other into the same space (when planning a wifi installation, don't believe the guy who gets a commission for each AP he sells you), but mostly it was the uplink that failed and timed out. I've seen this done much better.

Full moon over the Liffey.

The Finns were there.

Why aren't the drains working? I wonder…

Artemis Starship Bridge Simulator, quite well dressed up even if I read that logo as "USS Cuckold". Still vulnerable to the Kaufman Retrograde.

The Boxed Set of Tolkien's Laundry Lists.

Important things.

Nearly as important things. (All the food we had in Dublin was excellent.)

Liffey sunset.

"Dear Auntie Squark, I am doing a dominance display but that other bird is just ignoring me. What should I try next?"

The actual, original, Enchanted Duplicator, found and restored to something like working order.

Stickers for dogs.

On the ferry back. Even after I'd eaten it I couldn't tell what it had been. (Couscous, apparently.)

I put my card into this petrol pump in Holyhead and it rebooted…

The Hugos happened; results, voting details. Of the six categories in which I voted, my first choice won four, so yay me I guess. The one that really surprised me was Short Story; if I'd been placing bets I'd have expected Clark, Gailey or Pinsker to win, and a more even split than actually happened.

I'm glad Martha Wells declined nomination for two of the three novellas of hers that were picked. As it is she's disadvantaged by the format (the whole of Murderbot Diaries is one story and really ought to have been nominable in Novel, where it might have had a chance, or Series, where it definitely wouldn't have); splitting the vote would probably have cost her the win. On the other hand the novella considered as a stand-alone rather than as part of the series perhaps isn't all that great...

Good for AO3, I guess, though it really doesn't fit comfortably in the same category as actual books by a group of people who all worked on the thing. But that's what happens when you have an "everything else" category, and I'm not going to start going to the business meeting and proposing a Best Non-Fiction Book Hugo.

I keep meaning to read some of Malka Older's work and not getting round to it.

I may start reading some more magazines in the hope that they print stories more interesting to me than Apex did or Clarkesworld currently does.

This year's Novel nominations (and the rest of the written fiction, really) felt like a pretty weak batch overall; there were entries I liked, and one I liked rather a lot, but I think nothing that would be in my all-time top 50 if I were daft enough to compile one. I'm not at all convinced that any of them will even be among my favourite books of the year. Still, nothing else published in 2018 that I've read so far is noticeably better…