Another year, another Arisia, and another monster writeup!
As usual, most of my purview is behind-the-scenes stuff that the majority
of folks enjoying the convention remain blissfully unaware of.
I didn't get nearly as many pictures as I might have if I'd been thinking
more about it ... but judging from how nobody else seems to have captured
some points of interest I've noted either, we must have been so heads-down
in our work that photojournalism for its own
sake didn't cross our minds that often.
Still, after a year's worth of scattered notes and pics are all pulled
together there's a surprising amount of material worth reviewing anyway,
so this comes split into three parts for a little more reader sanity.
So first, some obligatory background... |
Summer fun with the Vidiots
If a bunch of geeking about video and electronics doesn't interest you,
you can
skip this section and jump to the convention run-up.
Arisia owns some number of older video cameras and support hardware to go with them, such as camera control units [CCU] and power supplies and cabling. This was all fairly high-end gear in its day, but decidedly obsolete now despite still being mostly functional. It's what we have, obtained over the years for minimal to modest outlay. We ran the last couple of cons on a different set of much newer borrowed equipment, but now facing the unavailability of that for 2018 and being back on the old gear, we needed to ramp up efforts to get it working better and adapt it to a new digital switching system. So over the summer there were a handful of informal work-party gatherings we called "Vidicon", to really dig in and understand the equipment and get it into the best shape possible. |
A relatively relaxed run-up?
The Relaxacon
came and went, and aside from scattered work parties for video and artshow
there didn't seem to be a lot of other activity over the summer.
In the interest of smoother future logistics and as half-promised at
the end of my
2017 rundown,
I made it a project to pull all my collected knowledge and hints into
one document on the staff wiki
[requires login; snapshot copy
here in wiki-markup format]
and sent the link around for review.
Things started moving a little more in September, when staff hotel
reservations opened up [with the usual difficulties convincing the
"PassKey" site about the shoulder nights; some year they'll get
that right].
The first convention committee meeting was then held, which felt more
like a superficial overview rather than any detailed planning.
Otherwise, it was all largely crickets well into October, and I was
starting to get a little worried about that.
No feedback had been offered on my logistics checklist, little else was
moving forward on the tech side, and the spiffy new-to-us group
collaboration/chat tool called "Slack" that the IT people were all proud
of seemed to remain mostly dead.
[Argh, I thought, yet another communication resource I had to learn
about, along with how to make GoToMeeting work on an Android tablet.]
Then the surprises started to roll in, thick and fast, around mid-November when everyone would rather have been thinking about large family meals. The person who originally fell on this year's Logistics sword had to suddenly resurrect and flee the stage due to family events, at least temporarily, and an alternate and eminently qualified candidate was barred from taking over due to specious administrative disagreements. So less than two months out, we had nobody to head up Logistics, and desperate appeals for someone to please step up were sent out. [I knew better than to offer, despite having been asked on occasion...] Then some even more profound news came down: on fairly short notice, the Westin was taking three entire floors of guest rooms *offline* for renovation. Their rationale for this is even though we pack their building with a full load of business for one weekend in January, winter is an otherwise fairly slow period for them and it's about the only chance they get to have fewer rooms available for a few weeks. So there was a huge scramble to transfer over a hundred reservations to the Aloft down the street, with the Innkeepers pleading for volunteers. I was one of the first to pipe up for that, since a quick stroll along D street isn't a particular hardship for the able-bodied even in the cold. At least some of these events jogged people into getting more serious about convention prep, even though some of them wound up getting ratholed in small details like appropriate signage for universally occupant-neutral restrooms [here's my flip answer] and where Tech was going to get ballroom power-distro equipment from. Lisa eventually shouldered the Logistics job, and gear-tagging parties were scheduled. Meanwhile my own plans to be out of state for most of a month were on track, and I wound up participating in some share of conference calls from down south or even on the road while holed up in a motel with hopefully fast internet. I tried to remotely research non-sketchy truck parking options in the area in case we'd need it, particularly for Monday night. The tech crew wanted to talk about pre-assigning certain key roles for events, and how to better handle runtime signups without having to beg for people to take positions. And somehow the fact that nobody had bothered to put in a scaffolding order completely fell through the cracks. With everything suddenly feeling so far behind, I scooted my butt back northward right after Christmas to be around and help wrangle some of it. Right into the single-digits cold snap of early January, which made everything even more fun. |
There was another tech conference call in early January, and it still felt like so much was being done last-minute. I could safely report to them that Logistics was more or less together at that point and success on that front would just be a matter of work factor. There was a lot of uncertainty about when our various vendors should deliver, such as the ALPS rental and the scaffold order which had finally been put in, and even when our own trucks would unload. There was no coherent tech timeline yet, other than a vague guideline from last year's version which didn't entirely match. Fortunately, it wasn't going to be significantly different this year. I was given a couple of events to contact the organizers of and get their tech preferences as far as lighting, thus implicitly pre-assigning me to be the fingers on the board whenever those slots would occur. Overall, though, the usual flow of gear-lists and design documents and other paperwork that people usually sent in around this time was sluggish to nil. |
Rollin' ...
The fateful Wednesday morning arrived once again, when it was time to put aside our various millivolt geekery and managerial infighting and go play Responsible Grownup with the Big Toys. This particular morning always brings a little bit of that butterflies feeling; it's when we really commit to getting a lot of stuff done in one or two days and hope to hell nothing major goes wrong. I was expected to help wrangle trucks again, and since Lisa and Mark and I all live in the north burbs she decided it would be convenient to rent one of them from the Enterprise up in Woburn. Meanwhile, Rick would pick up another truck from the Penske in Medford and bring it to NESFA, and then join us at Storage afterward. The ancillary idea was to bring one of the trucks back out of town, once loaded, to park overnight in a local Wal-Mart lot. So in the morning I left my car at said Wally World and got picked up to continue on to Woburn. [*Note for future years: print off copies of our ST-2 sales tax exemption forms to bring along when filling out rental paperwork, instead of trying to rely on someone being able to look it up online.] |
It was a gorgeous day -- the deep-freeze had
finally broken,
and we had a whole bunch of volunteers slated to meet us at the various
load points.
As our truck was warming up and getting its pre-trip inspection,
Lisa went out front and took a
quick shot
with her phone, a crop of which would then become a new profile picture on
the twitter feed.
That photo was missing certain information, though, so I had her go back
out and take the *real* shot shown here.
Nobody at the rental shop had made any particular comments; perhaps
the transportation industry is learning that leaving shoes out of the
equation really does make for safer driving.
Lisa took quite a few pictures that day, viewable here, including close-up detail on what remained behind *in* Storage. Plus, the Monster Beanbag Hamper of Doom. |
[ Pic credit: Lisa H.] | ||
Rick rolled in with the Penske a while later, but had to leave
right away to go put out other administrative fires so he handed me
the key to do the secondary back-in.
It's a little trickier than going straight into the dock, and I didn't
get in quite as close as in previous years but it was good enough.
The thing to note is that the two asphalt surfaces tilt toward each other,
so the truck boxes are closest at the top.
Then it was time to cross-load the NESFA low-side gear into the Enterprise, an operation traditionally called "truck sex" because it was often done in the past by backing the trucks up to each other and transferring bodily contents directly between the boxes. This two butts side-by-side approach at the dock takes less time and external maneuvering and allows normal loading to continue at the same time, so I suppose it's more like consensual masturbation. Either way, it's another step in routing to get things onto the right hotel-side truck and depends on things at NESFA getting loaded in a particular order. |
The Penske finished loading around 5pm, and the plan was for me to drive it back out to the Wal-Mart and swap to my car to head home. It had been given to me with almost no fuel left; the whole operation through NESFA and over here didn't include a fuel stop, I suppose. And now it was the peak of rush hour -- here I was stuck in the slow crawl out McGrath toward 93. Right at the top of this hill, at the railroad bridge, the "low fuel" warning started blinking. Instead of getting on the highway I went past the on-ramp from Mystic, swung around in a convenient parking lot, and pulled into Mr. C's and threw $50 worth of fuel in. *Note: The diesel pumps here are around back of the store, and attended rather than self-serve. While not really what we'd call a full-featured "truck stop" like on the interstates, it's relatively handy to Storage and the Penske rental place and is fairly easy to get a 26-footer in and out of. A full-size semi had pulled in through the far island and seemed to have no trouble maneuvering, but of course those guys know what they're doing. |