Thrashing on Thursday
Our load-and-go at home was a bit more leisurely, since Mark was picking up the Penske that morning instead, and I arrived at the hotel a little before noon. In distinct contrast to last year when we could start unloading a little earlier than our official pickup time, this year was a mess. The ballrooms were still in use, and the ongoing renovation activity upstairs had everything jammed up on the high-side docks ... part of which apparently included a whole lot of new beds. |
Somewhere post-noon I peeked into the back of the ballroom and saw a bunch of suits sitting quietly around tables and a setup of A/V gear still running. Evidently it was some kind of conference for bankers from Santander, and they weren't even close to done yet. The kicker was that they *knew* they were running overtime and simply forked up the necessary penalty/bribe to the hotel to stay longer instead of doing better planning in the first place. The new kid on the financial block around these parts, but backed by plenty of that historical one-percenter arrogance that tells them that the little people who load trucks and reset function rooms don't matter. Have I ranted about corporate gigs and the flagrant *waste* that goes on around them? Another fine example of that here, and impeding *our* progress. And we had scheduled deliveries coming, too. It would be totally unfair to make our vendors wait for the same surprise reason, but I suppose rental houses like ALPS are used to that sort of thing. |
Artshow and the low-side had already unloaded, and our trucks were parked in tandem out of the way. [Nice "butt sniff" backing job, somebody!] Fortunately the bankers wrapped it up fairly shortly, and then their outside A/V contractor had to strike and load out -- thus taking the one remaining high-side bay [and in the meantime, the second mattress semi had swapped in]. After that our truck could get in but still had to dance around the vendors when they showed up and vacate long enough for them to drop off. | |
I saw very little of this process, actually.
I couldn't unload yet either, and it was time to go fetch the third
"thermally sensitive" load from Storage.
Mark hopped in the Enterprise and I grabbed crew to ride shotgun in my
car, the only extra seat since it was still fully loaded, and we went
over to wrangle the rest.
It was a fairly short load, and the high-side bay was finally clear when
we got back so the last gear got zipped into the ballroom pretty quickly.
Then I headed to the Aloft to check in and figure out where to put the car -- turned out there was plenty of room in the lot a block away, for not a huge financial burden, so I went for it and they conveniently added that right onto the room bill. Some people apparently didn't like the relatively compact "euro" style of the Aloft rooms, but I found ours perfectly functional even if appointed in a somewhat millennial-trendoid feel. And because I opted out of daily bed changes, they kept throwing $5 food coupons under the door. Tilting back to tech All this kept me off-site for more of the afternoon than in previous years, which was actually convenient relative to the build timeline. When I finally wandered in, tech things were well under way and the truss rig was close to finished, which I mostly stayed clear of unless someone had a specific question or a piece of gear I needed.
<rant> Kinda too bad, really, because Daniel had done up some really beautiful drawings to work from along with matching pipe tape to make it a smooth process. [Having a link to the final versions thereof would be nice, ahem] |
I then quietly busied myself with the intercom system, starting with the
usual three long shots over the door woodwork [and got the pin directions
right this time].
I changed the layout a bit this year, moving the headend and wireless
base to under the stage on the "bullshit power" circuit instead of back by
video, and this actually simplified everything a little.
The system power supplies tend to have multiple outputs and effectively
constitute a three-way splitter, so with that and a handful of other
splitters and Ys it went together in a fairly nice star topology with
minimal pack daisy-chaining.
[Full resolution: il02.png] | |
An important improvement was indicating *how* to label the various
cable ends, especially when final hookups would be done on a nosedive
crawl under the stage.
I spent some bit of time under there, getting this together and also
constructing the general "rehearsal bus" to include power, intercom,
Daniel's lighting control network, a video monitor feed, and a voice-of-god
mic [which never happened, they used a wireless].
Heck, might as well add chilled water, compressed air, and propane
lines while we're at it.
The complexity over by video turned out to be simpler than shown -- with
the consolidated switch gear, there was no longer the second table behind
the director/switcher station.
The comm system was once again generally quiet, except for a bit of a mysterious hum at the end of that video chain -- which I didn't hear anywhere else in the system, it seemed to be localized somehow but not getting back onto the rest of the audio bus. It also wasn't particularly loud so we decided to just live with it, and I never solved what that problem was. One minor problem came up, with an easy fix: at one point I found that the "signal" functionality of the B channel wasn't working -- not that we actually use it in practice, but observing its action is a good quick test for proper DC presence and line termination when hooking things up. By knowing the system layout, diagnosis didn't take long -- turned out someone had plugged the green intercom lead into the XLR "Mic" input on the back of the crawl camera, and that loaded the line in some way that didn't make it go totally dead [or worse, short its audio or power]. Moral of the story: don't plug intercom into anything other than *our* known intercom gear, even if some other random thing says "intercom" on it which some of our cameras very well might. It's almost guaranteed to be incompatible. |
Lose the shoes!
Footwear and lack thereof has been a contentious topic over the years, which is especially ludicrous considering the environment of Arisia and its core values. I and several colleagues, who enjoy a lifestyle of freeing our feet and letting them work their best for us in the same way as our hands, have run into sporadic discrimination about this now and again. After hearing about harassment going on around some areas of the hotel last year and of people bickering over what to "do about it", I vowed that I would work to fix this problem forever -- not one of bare feet, but the fact that anyone around Arisia would ever get hassled over it. It is important to understand the background of this and why I've dedicated a long section to it here. There are some long-standing myths to debunk, and comprehending this can benefit anyone's life and relationship with others, independent of their own personal choices. Those who really can't be bothered to read and inform themselves can skip to the end of this inset, against my strong recommendation to just keep reading. |
Many Arisians want the barefoot preference to cease being some kind of "issue", because frankly it's simply *not* an issue. It's a healthy and harmless part of who some of us are, both within and outside of the convention. To that end, over the summer I pursued some ideas for bringing better education and visibility to anyone interested. This included creating a batch of badge ribbons as a grassroots token of support, using the same awards company that all of our other ribbons come from. I also reached out to some known stronger sympathizers to try and bring them on board with the effort, at the possible risk of boring them silly with my long-winded verbiage [callously denigrated as a "manifesto" by some, apparently]. It was a pleasant surprise when a side discussion came up at the first concomm meeting, *not* started by me, to the effect that we all desperately wanted this to be a non-problem on all fronts. | |
We've had a very positive working relationship with the Westin and its
staff, for eight years now -- they seem to really like us and the con.
We tip handsomely, we don't destroy their building but rather try to leave
it better than we found it, and we bring them a full weekend-plus load of
business in one of their darkest times of year.
Part of how they welcome us has included immediate acceptance of our
working preferences even while in the infrastructure bowels of the hotel,
where so much of what we accomplish gets done -- back hallways, service
elevators, and cold loading docks.
For the most part our *feet* have never been any point of contention --
on the contrary, sometimes the subject of admiration from hotel
staff we encounter as we stride across a Fargo Street that can be
as cold as Fargo, ND.
On rather rare occasions some lower-echelon hotel staffer has accosted an
attendee around the lobby area or the like to insist on some "requirement"
for shoes, but to my understanding these encounters have been quickly
defused.
There's no point to them, as barefooters are inherently doing no wrong.
Ironically, some of the worst situations over time have been instigated
by *Arisia members*, which is absolutely inexcusable.
Last year's rumors were one of several personal triggers to become more activist about it, along with doing a lot more shoeless hiking over the summer, corporate outreach, and joining up with various enthusiast groups including the venerable Society for Barefoot Living. With my own perspective of almost 40 years barefoot whenever possible, I could see how pervasive the unfounded prejudice is still in so many people and decided to add some more energy to helping turn those lies around -- even in settings where no specific "turning" should have ever been necessary. Interest and support for living unshod is unquestionably growing, however slowly it may be, fueled in part by the real facts about it being findable all over the internet. |
That, in fact, was a great theme for the Photo Booth which was right next to us. I didn't pay much attention to it as it seemed to mostly be about costumes, but then some of their people offered "want a picture?" and I happened to spot the completely appropriate sign among their selection so I went for it. Doing the one-foot thing again, as I've taken to doing frequently when I'm just standing around, just for the balance practice. It took a while post-con to eventually find the shots, somewhere on Page 18 of the set, which seems to be a bit chaotic and span multiple years. That's probably Flickr's fault. The best of the lot seemed to be this one, but needed a bit of fix-up in post so my rework is the thumbnail and larger image shown here. |
Other supporters
Another unidentified [but possibily identifiable] div-head swung by later, and already had one of my ribbons attached to the official credential. The juxtaposition of these two was simply awesome. I was also pleased by how my chosen ribbon color coordinated so well with this year's badge art -- total coincidence, I had no idea. | |
The Staff Den heads for this year were on board with the effort too,
a nice turnaround from the dysfunctional nonsense that went down in
2014,
so a static spread of the various sheets got taped prominently to a wall in
the room where people could read it when they were up getting food.
I figured that the folks passing through there could easily figure out
where to come get ribbons if they wanted them.
We didn't manage to stick a ribbon onto the convention chair, but we got close. Another advocate wrote in:
We even were able to distribute a ribbon to the highest echelon!
Laura, the mother of this year's con-chair, in fact.
[I] was talking with her at the Tech party, and happened to have a BF
ribbon in my hand.
At one point, I offered it to her, and she immediately put it on her badge.
It was just plain cool that the conchair had his family in for the con, so
they could get to watch their offspring taking pivotal and challenging
leadership roles among his peers.
|
Sources
Here are some supplemental materials used in construction of the kits. The picture here expands to a graphic representation of the "attractor" page, designed to sit under the larger signs and briefly explain the purpose of the whole setup. On the printed copies, a real ribbon was taped onto the bottom instead, to a> show what they look like, and b> prevent the sample from walking away. The brown (footprints) OK signs come from source graphics I host on Out Barefoot, which Staples was happy to print onto some nice 100-weight card stock for me. | |
The half-sheet "myths" document began as a simple
HTML page, a shortened version of a
similar document at Outbarefoot, with a reduced-size
copy of the Massachusetts health-department affirmation letter from
barefooters.org
on the flip side in case anyone ran into issues with food purveyors.
[High kudos to SJS for the radical slashing of my voluminous babble to
get it to fit reasonably onto a convenient half-page size!]
A few of the "myths" handouts had some relevant excerpts from Marriott's diversity statement on the back side, which seems refreshingly broad and would definitely be useful in any discussions with hotel associates. Since the Westin is now pretty much a Marriott property, it clearly applies.
* Creating an Inclusive Environment
And heck, let's remember that we hold this convention
on Martin Luther King weekend.
'Nuff said.
We believe our strength lies in our ability to embrace differences and
create opportunities for all employees, guests, owners and franchisees,
and suppliers. Marriott's core value of putting people first includes
our commitment to diversity and inclusion, a company-wide priority
supported by our board-level Committee of Excellence.
...* Guests
Our commitment to welcoming all customers includes engaging with
diverse groups, creating inclusive guest experiences, and supporting
key diversity initiatives. Recent efforts include:
(... long list ...) We believe embracing differences makes Marriott a great place to work, conduct business and stay. |
A sketchy view of Saturday
Ironically, that was another total failure to take pictures.
I was so busy trying to get things together and then work the show
that I didn't even think of it -- I think the camera was stashed in
the Depot someplace anyway.
Bottom line was, what I wanted for Bellydance had not really been
set up in the Ion light board yet, and even though I'd tried to study
up a little before the con I wasn't sure how to get that together.
The thing that saved me was getting out the
RokBoxes
and setting them up as side footlighting on the stage wings.
I put that together quietly while Masq rehearsals were going on, tucked
it all under the stage during the intervening Hawking run, and then
popped them into place during the next changeover.
I got David to fix the patch and bang in a few basics to make them work
the way I wanted, and even though I was missing control over some parts of
the rig I was pretty much ready to go and had Samara's cue-sheet in hand.
I was actually rather pleased with how Bellydance turned out; if anything the Rokboxes were throwing more light on the dancers than the main rig, and looked a whole lot better than boring old tungsten warm/cool. The low "shinkicker" angle was also entirely appropriate, for a dance style traditionally illuminated from fires on the ground, and the dancers were sort of framed by their own imposingly tall shadows out at the edges of the cyc. I could also get plenty of punchy color on them, because that's what multi-emitter LEDs are great for. By dumb luck, perhaps, a reasonable stage picture, and since nobody else seems to have captured any of it either, the only record I would likely ever have would be the video once it got processed and released. I still wanted to get a better handle, so to speak, on setting up the board. I had another event coming up where I'd need to do more things on the fly, and wanted more of the rig immediately functional to do that. An in-depth chat with Daniel later that evening gave me some good ideas. |