Arisia 2019, part 3

  Friday

	Breakfast was from the obvious on-premises Starbucks; they had fairly reasonable sandwiches as well as the required coffee.  The convention hadn't even really started yet, but the place was super-busy already.  Our hotel liaisons had made sure to warn the store management of the pending onslaught, and over the course of the weekend they handled it pretty well.  We got our comestibles and took it all upstairs to the ballroom to chow down and chat about the day's tasks.  I looked down and sort of misread this as "roast Hobbit", which would have been an apt description despite the previous night's sleep.  I actually took the pic because the receipt happened to have spelled my preferred name representation right, with the asterisks.
A minor negative came up later in the weekend when one of our tech crew ran down to "*$" quickly to grab something, didn't bother putting shoes on to do it, and had some front-line lackey yell at him over it.  I grabbed a few of the 5-myths sheets and headed down there to kick some managerial butt on his behalf.  The supervisor on duty was actually quite apologetic, said that they'd had some other problems with the offending employee in the past, and that there would be no further discrimination at that location.  Said she was something of a barefooter herself, out of work context, and completely understood why some of us make it a lifestyle.  She took a couple of the sheets and said she'd pass them along to the regional, too.  Many of the people tending the store that weekend apparently love fandom in general, and were really intrigued by the con being there. In general, the hotel personnel seemed quite tolerant of feet too, and like last year at the Westin there were many happy bare ones running around convention spaces and the back-of-house halls alike without incident.  Perhaps hotel workers had been briefed, as I had suggested doing in a somewhat one-sided email thread to our assigned conference-services guy more than a month prior.  I didn't know for certain, as the CSM didn't have the professional courtesy to actually respond to his email, and I didn't see any of my flyers pasted up around staff hallways.  As usual, people try to just ignore the whole thing if they can, which in a somewhat sideways manner helps normalize bare feet as being no more noteworthy than bare hands.  I only heard of one other incident of hotel-sourced harassment, directed at one of our Logistics crew, and although that encounter was reported as fairly uncomfortable she defended herself without my help.

Build work proceeded onward, here with solving a minor problem of keeping cables off the entry-path floor.  Ironically, these upstage trees were made to function but never actually used in the show, because all the drape went in at incompatible positions which blocked the light.  Again, we never really had a full room and stage plan that took all these spatial interactions into account.  Fortunately, we also had some downstage sidelight trees tucked behind the main drape, and I used those quite a bit.

	Load-balancing was made easier in places by using *my* 3-phase breakouts instead of the hotel's twistlock stringers.  I had built these a long time ago, *specifically* for the Park Plaza, and still had them squirreled away.  They're referenced in my 2004 tech writeup, well before the days of pictorial stories, which helps place when they got put together.  Since the cable I had on hand was 10/4, their grounds are run separately, and there's an extra bare-end ground wire in case an additional bond was needed.  We had found that the center pin contacts in the hotel twistlocks weren't entirely trustworthy.
The hotel's long breakouts generally only bring out *one* 30 amp leg to all of the [20A rated!] outlets in it, and pass the other 2 phases on to another twistlock on the end.  The expectation is to daisy-chain another stringer on that breaks out a *different* circuit if needed, presumably color-coded by how the boxes get painted.  Since they've got like 5 different colors of the things, who knows what you get?  It's not to code and it's not consistent, but they've had that setup for years.  What's nice is how they just leave plenty of stringers around, without trying to micromanage how clients use power in the ballroom.  That's because it falls under hotel engineering, *not* PSAV.

In the process of clearing the stage a bit more, it was decided to remove the Genie lift that had been left on it.  These are designed to be movable over small obstacles, but they're bloody heavy and take several people to wrangle.  This would also be a good load test of the almost ADA-compliant ramp that the hotel people had *just* built for us, replacing the steep "cheese grater" ramp seen in my preliminary-tour shot.  It would also be an "action shot capture challenge" for me.

The best moment was probably the "oomph!" lift to bring the thing safely upright again, which was tricky because it was quite close to the opposite wall at the bottom of the ramp. Now, not that it would have helped in this situation, but why hadn't the hotel carps made the ramp with a removable or hinged bottom section?  The lower part was constructed right in the way of the storage cage, which didn't seem like great planning.  I overheard some of the PSAV folks later, positing that the whole thing was probably going to be knocked apart and taken out again fairly soon after our weekend.

As the Genie operation was completed I looked down, and realized that I was standing on a windowsill right over a pile of elevator parts!  These were for the one-story ballroom elevator, visible to the right here, that had been taken offline in honor of our event, haha.  Given the type of stuff staged here, it was clearly a major rebuild.

I unpacked all the gear and my diagram, which I'd fortunately had time to put together in advance of the con, and delegated sections of the layout to different people.  It was kind of a rework of the Westin rig, laid over a combined base of my old 2006 diagrams, the new documentation from PSAV, and Tom's rework for the video plan.  The big difference here was to show what was on balconies or floor, and all the up/down jumps which added about 15 feet for every hop.  The important thing for people to do, as usual, was good labeling of the major runs.  I had a couple of folks new to the methods, who wound up flag-labeling both ends of some ten-foot cables -- can't hurt to know at a glance, I suppose, but that takes up more time than may be truly warranted.

The Colorblazes got pulled out and addressed and laid in a neat row in front of the back traveler, and I was pleased to find that even with the fullness, it took light quite nicely.  Because the narrow spread from the LEDs shot straight into the folds, it yielded a nice texture without any obnoxious shadows.  Suggesting to use this instead of our usual flat cyc was a bit of a guess on my part, but as soon as I saw this I decided it was a good one. The two four-foot units at each end turned out to be a little brighter than the longer ones, but I later compensated them down to about 75% in the blue and green submasters on the board.  The reds all seemed to match fine at full.

Our first event was the first Mrs. Hawking play, and our not-flat backdrop looked fine behind that too.  I had just barely enough configuration banged into the light board by that point that Bernie could run with, and he handily took the reins to improve on that and set up all his scenes.  That show went up on time with everything it needed, and even Video was up and running enough at that point to send a switched shoot into the hotel's TV system.  Despite all the load-in obstacles, Tech [as well as every other Arisia department!] had somehow pulled all this together and built their parts of an operational convention.

[Pic credit:   sjs]

In fact, "Arisia TV" had cut its early teeth in this very space, 15 or more years prior.  As noted in the surveys, the piece of dual-coax cable we'd pulled from backstage to the upper floors was *still in place*, and now we happily used it to send modern digital signals that were almost unheard of when it had originally been installed!  The headend is behind this somewhat amusing door, in a room which is basically straight above downstage-right in the ballroom.

[Pic credit:   ppk]

[Pic credit:   ppk]

A couple of shots from our December site visit reveal the mysteries behind the door -- basically, a couple of satellite receivers and a nest of distribution amps, and the guy from engineering who was touring some of the folks around that day.  It all goes into a big scary hole in the wall and down through a service chase, half the contents of which are probably ancient legacy whose functions have long since been forgotten by now.

  Saturday/Sunday

We got started bright and early the next morning, with an entirely satisfactory breakfast in the Green Room, helped by the fact that its staff had finally gotten most of their required stuff!  [They had been creatively using the outdoors as extra refrigeration, since the suite had a door opening onto a roof deck.]  Then we attacked setup for the Masquerade rehearsals.  This felt interesting because I hadn't actually done Masq runtime for a couple of years.  It's a commitment of many hours, where most of the run-crew people have to be in position through all of the rehearsal time and then the whole show.  This is why, with the advantage of the four-day con, rehearsal blocks were now split across Saturday and Sunday to give people shorter shifts.  I was good with doing all that; it would be relatively sedentary, giving my leg a rest, I was the logical person at this point to have fingers on the light-board for cueing, and just being back in that lovely ballroom and designing a show felt pretty great. After a couple of fits and starts with cue-block structure and playback on the board, rehearsals flowed fairly well.  Since I kept my intercom mic hot most of the time so Joel and I could natter about looks, he could tell from the background noise of my keystrokes when I'd saved something and was ready for him to usher the entrant offstage so they could try their full run.  I was really glad that I'd studied up on the board -- I didn't want lighting to be the big schedule delay factor as it's often been in the past.  I still had to battle some subtle quirks and, as boomed out to the room over the VoG at one point, beat the board into submission -- these issues are noted in the external document about it. We did have one nagging problem with intercom itself on the first rehearsal day, in that the audio level across it kept mysteriously dropping way down amid strong 60hz hum and then coming back a while later, seemingly at complete random.  With a lot of people active on the loop I kept asking who might have changed *anything* about their wiring, or even moved a particular way, right when the transitions occurred.  We later found the problem, almost by chance, while striking the front table setup -- in one bad cable that had been daisy-chaining two packs in the temporary hookup there.  It wasn't one of my cables, it was a spare short XLR out of the wireless kit that had a partial short between pin 3 and ground.  Something like that can easily take out the whole system, as it's a simple shared audio bus.  My first clue should have been the fact that the "call" lights weren't working on the "A" side, which usually indicates either no power or excess loading in the DC domain.  With the offending cable gone at the second rehearsal block and through the rest of the events in the room, the system remained relatively clean and quiet.  The most noise was had, as is typical, when the conventional lights moved through the midrange of dimming where the worst-case dimmer switching hash occurs.

The PMRP radio show was Saturday night, and an opportunity for a little more play with the backdrop lights -- it was a Star Trek takeoff, and they mentioned intent to have the evil Klingons on one side of the stage and the Terrans on the other.  So the appropriate color gradation to program was semi-obvious, similar to the "red shift" setup we'd done back in '08.  Apparently this gave video minor fits as far as white-balance, as they swung back and forth to pick up people at different microphones. Looking at this, though, I have to wonder if I got the mapping backwards.  Then again, it's a *radio show* ...

	I did manage to get some ordinary walk-around and social time, and was pleased to see just how *normal* everything looked by now as I wandered the con.  All of the incredible frenzy of the past two days had delivered an event that by now looked on the surface like any other Arisia, with over 3000 people happily gaming, looking at art, watching shows and concerts, swordfighting, dancing, going to panels, eating, exploring the 3-D maze of stairwells, and socializing [when not absorbed in their phones].  Nothing unusual to see here, even with the completely different hotel.  Again, the people behind the scenes, even the skeptical ones, had really come together, made the sausage, and pulled the whole thing off.
My first solid hint that we'd succeeded came as early as Friday night, in fact, when I saw the attendee registration line stretched *all the way around* the Mezzanine.  I looked at that and it hit me -- Arisia was certainly not dead yet, despite how horrendous things might have appeared on teh intarwebz.  Setbacks aside, the con was happening, and people were showing up for it in healthy numbers.  Social-mediocrity tends to bring a very biased view of how "the masses" feel about something, because the professional whiners spew a lot more hate than the supporters can offer props in defense.  This is one of those unfortunate consequences of human nature, I suppose, where it's so much easier to say "your <whatever> is bad" instead of "I'll commit to helping build a better one". To apply a bit of a forward time warp here, I have permission to quote an email that Phi sent out post-con, shortly before the Debrief.  When I read this, and imagined Phi's voice speaking it with all the passion and gratitude that he poured into it, I was just about tearing up, and knew that it had to be included right here: From: <phi@arisia.org> Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2019 12:14:28 -0500 To: Arisia Corporate Member Discussion List Subject: Hotel Search Committee debrief In October, facing the prospect of canceling Arisia, I thought of Wicomicon in Baltimore.  I figured that if we canceled, the community would likely come together to throw a replacement event, and that if you were going to do that then I -- and Arisia Inc -- owed you whatever support we could give. So I picked up the phone and called the Boston Park Plaza.  I was expecting to hear that they were booked for a wedding, or that even if they had function space there wouldn't be enough guest rooms, or some other reason why we wouldn't be able to hold a con there.  I figured this was a half-hour conversation at most.  Two and a half rather disorienting weeks later we had an impossible contract.  Pulling a convention together in two months was impossible.  Fitting into 3/4 as much space was impossible.  Bringing in brand new division heads at the last minute was impossible, and so was working with gaping holes in the org chart that were never filled.  Loading into the convention without benefit of elevators or working trucks was impossible.  But we did six impossible things, and we did them before breakfast.  This convention is a legend and you are why. This wasn't supposed to work.  But you made it work.  Thank you.  I have never felt so inspired as you have made me feel.       -/phi This just totally said "build a better one" on so many levels.

We even had the usual tech party Saturday night with the usual trimmings and the usual secret-cabal side discussion ... resulting in Tom's amusing surprise at being named as co-Tech Guest of Honor.  Because he'd really busted his ass throughout the year on several fronts, primarily video.  Kristin, the other recipient, was downstairs working somewhere; the more difficult question would have been, when was she *not* working??  She was everywhere at all hours, it seemed. The minor problem noted with the TGoH thing is its one-shot nature -- as more techs keep getting added to the not-really-so-secret cabal, the process becomes unsustainable because once you run out of candidates among those who *haven't* been TGoH yet, what's the field of selection?  Eventually the tradition may run out of feedstock.

More normalcy could be seen in the event staffing assignments done at the meetings; our typical big post-its had landed on the back airwall of the ballroom, for lack of a better location that everyone could check back into easily.  The idea of using the Terrace room, allocated only for storage this year because of access difficulties, wasn't really amenable to a "tech office" since it was so out of the way and only reachable via the back-of-house maze.  At least one meeting did occur there but in general it was easier to round up more of the tech staff from right there in the ballroom instead.

	While the balconies were generally marked off as tech-only areas, we didn't have a convention-facing tech-desk or "depot" as such this year.  But there had been an excellent sign made up for it, never used but entirely appropriate.  Painful memories of all the dust-up from October/November had sort of melted away for the time being, because Tech was here to work, not obsess over personal relationships or [non-electrical!] power dynamics.
The greater attendance, however, appreciated the "reconciliation" track added for this year, in which the handling of safety and behavioral issues was extensively discussed, future plans were outlined, and ongoing feedback requested.  This was all part of rebuilding community confidence, now nicely integrated into the *running convention* that so many believed would never happen.

	What with staffing the Masq and making sure other shows and their operators had a sensible setup to work with, my workspace was right here, so I didn't do too much else of a tech nature around the con other than a little debugging and strike in the dance-tent.
Part of that was hilarious, actually -- working on a suspicion that some fancy-ass blinky device downstream of the lighting board in Dance was in the wrong mode and sending its own DMX over the loop, I pulled the XLR plug out of the back of the board and tasted the pins.  Sure enough, I could feel a little bit of changing voltage, telling me that something else was actively driving the wire and conflicting.  I don't think the offending device was ever actually found, because the dance-tent folks never seemed to get an opportunity to work on it.

The Masquerade itself went off pretty much without a hitch, and many kudos later rolled in for Antonia, this year's MC, who has a truly excellent voice and delivery for it.  [Can we keep her??]  Joel called the show-run from this little table, about the only place left in the balconies that wasn't crammed full of lights, video racks, or piles of wire.  As the judges exited and the halftime singer came up, I left a slow-moving "rainbow" of gentle pastels running across behind her -- playing with some of the built-in effects stuff on the Element.  This was actually pretty easy, with the cyc fixtures set up as LED personalities with color attributes.  It would have been a bit more cumbersome to program if the cyc had run as conventional channels.