L.A.con IV - 2006 World Science Fiction Convention

Is anyone from Sacramento or thereabouts going to Comic Con in San Diego (July 26-29)?

A female friend of mine is hoping to go but can't afford to fly, and is interested in carpooling with anyone going who doesn't mind and has the space for another. 

Also, does anyone know if there is a LJ community like this for Comic Con?

Each entry in the LACon IV masquerade was supposed to get a copy of the official video. I've learned that they've apparently been sent to most everyone. Except me.

I've tried various email addresses for the MD Martin Jaquish, with no response to date. Can someone help me to get in touch with him, or tell us who else we could be contacting about this?

We were also hoping to get our documentation booklets and sound CD back, but I fear that's a lost cause.

--Julie Zetterberg
"Sterilized with Fear"

Under the topic "Pets", who or what is "Rusty's Pal"? [5 letters]

I appreciate the help offered so far
and I stumbled across an issue of "Picofarad" with most of the answers,
give-or-take a few misspellings (Conana the Barbarianne ;)

As for the rest
across 63 Connie Willis -- cinematic guilty pleasure (answer: Spiderman)
note: I should have had "Calvin" for Down 41 Asimov robot investigator

across 114 James Gurney guilty pleasure (answer: chocolate)
note: for down 101, I should have had "ILIAC" [ENIAC, UNIAC,_____)
and for down 115, I should have had "Howl" (reference to the poem and the moving castle)

across 204 James Gurney's dog (answer: Happy)

across 234 Furry puppet show (answer: paw pet show [must be a furry term, I guess)
and down 226 Deer's water source? (answer: Hartwell)

down 123 Realtor, general contractor, loan officer and shopkeeper (games people play) (4 letters)
answer: Nook (from the game "Animal Crossing", evidently from the Japanese "tenuki")

down 134 Secret danger imprisoned him (answer: Number 6 [ouch])

down 145 Wolheim ref: 20 legible, 20 illegible, 10 smears
(answer: "hecto" but I would still like to know the reference)

163 leet speak: really bad (suxxor fits, but seems odd)

176 ???-holic (anime/manga) (answer: xxx)

194 neopets: cute goal (answer Ixi)

205 leet speak: totally dominated by (six letters, maybe ending in "r")

207 has license to hit and run (answer: "Bart")
209 Rusty's pal
223 Obi-Wan rode one up a cliff (answer: varactyl)
231 ID the language: Do Contest With 'pencil' (answer "DBASE")
243 Stephen King's cat came back (answer: Church)

a few other odd comments:

It seems that down 1 should be "yiff"
down 135 "lollerskates" (too funny?)
down 241 "Entei" (Pokemon legendary dog)

I am also a bit confused about the sehlat/ichigo confusion

Given all this information, my current guesses are:

http://pics.livejournal.com/capybaron/pic/00002g96


(see comments for some of my guesses)

Hi! I'm posting to follow up and see if anyone has any ideas about getting a con dealer to respond to me. I purchased two t-shirts from Pegasus Publishing at LAConIV. One was out of stock in the size I wanted, so he said he'd send it to me. He told me if I hadn't gotten the shirt in a couple of weeks, to email him.

I emailed. I left messages. It's now been almost 4 months, and I've never gotten a response and still don't have the shirt. Is anyone aware of this dealer having problems or something that would prevent responding? The website hasn't been updated since the summer. Does anyone know him?

Gee, I got to have fun all weekend in Reg, and get money for it??

Thanks for the reimbursement guys!

Karen

This weekend at loscon, we will have an laconiv thank-you party in the con suite on Friday and Saturday nights at 9pm.

If you attended the Worldcon or if you volunteered at it (or both) -- stop on by! Or stop by anyway. Party runs until the food runs out...

Chaz

Hi there. I was a member of PanGalactic Express (Newszine Distribution Crew) and unfortunately ordered my denim LACon shirt on the last day of con. It's mid-november, almost loscon and I still don't have it. Who do I talk to regarding this?

Thanks in advance.

If you're going to LosCon, please come by the TAFF auction on Saturday at 4:30. If you've got stuff you'd be willing to donate to the cause, you can get it to me up here in and around San Jose before Tuesday afternoon, or you can find me and drop stuff off at Con. Books, Tuckerizations, fanzines, t-shirts, autographs, monkey paws, rare unsigned copies of Jay Lake books, it's all available!

If you want more info, garcia@computerhistory.org
THanks
CHris

Anyone going to GenCon (in Anaheim) this weekend? And if so, does anyone have any floor space in their hotel room (or home?) that I can crash on just late Friday night?

Thanks,
Stephanie

agrathea has posted our L.A.con IV photos (I took some of them and requested others).

Here's what she said about them in her LJ:

Secondly, a tremendous amount of photos from Worldcon in LA. Something around 650 or so. I will post them in their entirety for now and trim them down later to the best quality photos for those of you who are somewhat interested, but not really interested in a thorough recounting of the convention.

If you would like to use any of the photos for a fan piece of any kind, or if you are a subject of a photo and would like me to send you a higher res version, just e-mail me. I just ask any materials using photos from this collection give me credit and that I know it is being used (and I do have quite high res versions that are ideal for print).

I apologize it isn't much easier to navigate, there are just too many images and the processing of the photos thus far has already taken me more time than I really should have spared.

Here's Photos from L.A.con IV

( For L.A.con IV, I put together an exhibit of Unofficial Ribbons at L.A.con IV. These 170+ ribbons were on display or were donated for the exhibit by the end of the convention... )

Not every unofficial ribbon handed out at the convention ended up in the exhibit. If you have one of the missing ones that you can spare, I'd love to add it in.

Footnotes

1. The LASFS table had blank white ribbons and colored pens to make your own ribbons.

2. Erik V. Olson handed out blank grey and black ribbons, as a joke about hard-to-read and "officially blank" ribbbons.

3. Glenn Glazer produced ribbons in Japanese. Basically they say "I'm going to in Yokohama in 2007."

4. The line between official and unofficial ribbons was fuzzy at L.A.con IV. Some department heads personally paid for ribbons that related to their department, with or without the official rocket/starburst logo, such as the several styles including CHAOS RULES! FNORD and Prop Master that Jerome Scott gave out in conjunction with various exhibits. Some other departmental ribbons were official but didn't have the logo, such as www.laconiv.org which I gave to people who helped with the convention's online presence. And finally, the convention paid for some ribbons that were downright silly (or were an in-joke from the Exec Committee meetings) such as Dry Snacks and bright & well-read. Some of these will be in whatever official exhibit gets put together somewhere down the line.

5. There were a few ribbons that didn't get handed out to any members even though they were donated into the exhibit. I believe Beefcake and Runs with Scissors are in this category.

6. A number of ribbons had duplicates in different styles, but they had the same meaning or purpose. For example, Lawrence M. Schoen had Buffalito Wrangler in different colors; Menolly at the Information desk had fancy italic flexible ribbons as well as plain standard-typeface all-caps FLEXIBLE ribbons. We have one sample of each in the exhibit. (compare to note 7)

7. There are two "Eric in the Elevator" ribbons in the exhibit because they have two different meanings. One color is for cast/crew, the other for guests on the show: people who've wandered into the elevator during the taping of a show. (compare to note 6)

8. There were five memorial ribbons circulating at L.A.con IV. Apart from the rich brown ribbon, the 9,000 Ice Teas No Lemon ribbon was in memory of Michael Mason, What Would Joe Do? was for Joe Mayhew; and the convention issued Frankie and Howard ribbons.

9. The Fan Gallery exhibit didn't get set up. I had these to hand out, but only distributed one or two FAN GALLERY HELPER and see me in the FAN GALLERY ribbons.

10. Kim Kofmel had several other Friend of Kim ribbons in this series, such as SIG.Shop and SIG.Evil; these four are the only ones we have in the exhibit.

11. Even though the convention announced that we'd be using horizontal-format ribbons, a few of the ribbons at the convention were in the vertical format. I collected these four: CLUE, I DONATED TO LOCKS OF LOVE, STAR TREK 40TH ANNIVERSARY, and WORLDCON BID COLUMBUS 2008. (The ribbon that says VERTICAL was in horizontal format.)

EDIT: corrected notes about Cheescake and TUCKERIZED (again).

EDIT: Corrrected note about SelinaWoman.
Added BWB, Gryffindog, HUGO LOSER, LOVELY PARTING GIFT, Solar Spice & Liquors Co. 2006 and VERTICAL.

Cross-posted to hazelchaz and laconiv

Continuing from my last announcement... I have sorted more than 90% of the photos. We now have just 63 pages of unclassified photos, and that number will continue to drop over the next 48 hours. I've set myself a goal of this weekend to have everything sorted into subalbums. I've dealt with every large group of pictures except pictures from the Exhibit Hall (Dealers, Exhibits, Space Port Lounge).

I've been considering how I would run this kind of department if I had the chance again; I was in charge of official photography for Loscon a few years back, and I think I'd like to do something like that again. If you're curious about my thoughts on the subject, I'll be writing them up in my own LJ.

Getting back to the official L.A.con IV photo website, I've decided that turning pictures right-way-up is a lower priority than sorting them out by category. You'd rather see a dozen pictures that you need to tilt your head for, than five hundred pictures of other things you don't care about at the moment. Right?

A follow-up to my previous announcement. I've set up sub-albums on pix.laconiv.org, and I've sorted about half of the photos into sub-albums.

(Does anyone have any pictures taken from inside the arena of the Lux After Dark half-time show from Masquerade night?)

Here's how the photography project went. A bunch of photographers contributed photos. They went into folders organized by day with sub-directories by photographer. Susan Gleason ("Dr. Arizona") went through and moved selected photos from the by-photographer directories up to the by-day directories, and put together a powerpoint slide show of those selected photos.

The intent was to show the slide show in the main hall as a pre-show, before the opening ceremonies, GOH speeches, Masquerade, Hugos, and Closing Ceremonies. But that part of the project didn't come off.

So after three days of editing down the photos collected to a smaller bunch to show, she abandoned that (since nobody was seeing the results) and just accumulated them in the by-day/by-photographer subdirectories.

For the days that she went through and weeded out duplicates, those photos have been uploaded; for the rest of the week, all of the photos have been uploaded.

This is why there are so many duplicate photos from Hugo night in the galleries.

There are about 12000 photos overall; I'm not sure I need to upload the rest of the raw take, at least not before I get the first five thousand photos sorted out.

EDIT: I've adjusted the pages to show 15 per page instead of 9. This is because the "move photos to another sub-album" screen shows me 15 at once. I might change it to more later, but for now we've got a 5x3 format. If I figure out a way for you as a visitor to fine-tune how it presents them, I'll let y'all know.

ANOTHER EDIT: Dinking the main album to 5x3 didn't change the sub-albums -- they were still 3x3. I've changed all of the sub-albums to display a smaller size of thumbnail, in 5x4. So there will be 20 pix per page on the sub-albums and 15 per page on the main album.

L.A.con IV official photographs are starting to go online.

Have the answers to that fiendish crossword puzzle been posted somewhere?

Or was it left an exercise to the fans?

I'll be posting similar postings shortly to other convention-related communities, so I apologize if you see this a couple of times.

Awhile back, I started working on the idea of applying social networking technologies to the world of convention-goers. Think a mix of MySpace and LiveJournal, with a lot more functionality specific to people like us, and made specifically for con-goers and the like (conventions, dealers, artists, etc...). The idea has me pretty excited, and we're looking to have everything wrapped up for our "Version 1" release at ChattaCon, just a few months away (Version 2 is scheduled for release at Frolicon, over Easter Weekend of 2007, and Version 3 is tentatively scheduled for release at Dragon*Con, over Labor Day Weekend of 2007).

If you'd like to take a peek at what we're doing, our teaser website is up at www.conheaven.com, and has a lot of information on what we're up to, and what we do for convention organizers, con-goers, dealers and vendors, groups of friends, and even convention "roommates". More than anything, we'd love to have you around to give your input on what we're up to - and in exchange, you get the opportunity to help make ConHeaven into the best site possible - your home away from the con, if you will. ;)

We also have forums up and running (just opened them up to the public) at www.conheaven.com/vbulletin - they're kinda quiet right now, and we'd love to have your help in fixing that! =)

Anyways, I look forward to hearing your feedback and to seeing everyone soon!

-Chris

I need to reach someone in Membership/Registration, but all of the department email addresses for LACON IV have been disabled. Can anyone tell me how to reach someone? Is the S.C.I.F.I. PO Box address still active?

I took some time and got the pictures I shot of the masquerade (from the audience) up in my gallery. They're shot available-light from half-way back. A few of the entries didn't shoot that well, but most are reasonable.

I've uploaded the footage of the Closing Ceremony that my wife, Lisa, shot with a hand-held camera from the front row of the audience. Bandwidth warning: it's a fairly large file -- about 500 MB.

Hey there!

I passed out lots of Buffalito Wrangler ribbons at the convention, but sadly I neglected to take any photographs of the people wearing them.

I'd like to put together a photo gallery of wranglers for a new website. If you have a photo of yourself (or someone else) that you'd like to donate to the cause, please contact me at this link.

Thanks!