bobquasit | Jan. 14th, 2007

Jan. 14th, 2007

65% disaster, 35% good. And about 70% too small.

Okay, warning to newcomers: this is probably going to be a whiny post. Correction: there's no "probably" about it. I'm in a fuckload of pain, and was all weekend, and I had waited all year for Arisia - it's the high point of my year, in many ways - so you'd better believe that I'm whining about it. But having warned you, I'll throw some of this stuff behind a cut.

Second warning: I'm going to say some negative things about the hotel. Some people seem to take criticism personally, and I've had my ass flamed medium-well more than once by people who've felt that anything negative about the hotel or the con was a personal attack. Relax, okay? I know that most people were doing their best, the situation was out of our control, etc. etc. etc. I'm not trying to kill anyone's baby, and there are few people who love Arisia more than I do. Which sounds really weird to say, actually.

Third warning: I'm going to repeat some rumors I heard. I will label those clearly as rumors. I like to gossip, okay? It's not a crime.

I'm sick, sick, sick. Why the fuck do I have to get sick SO OFTEN right around Arisia? That's the one time in the year that I really want to be at my best and enjoy myself...and instead, I actually got sicker than I was before I got there.

My back is really bad, at least partly because it got worse when I got dizzy and fell through part of someone else's costume in the Masquerade Green Room and destroyed it. They were able to repair it, but you can just imagine how totally shitty I feel about all that. I don't even want to talk about it right now.
( Possible TMI health cut )

As for the hotel...oh my god. It's simply not meant for conventions, and I mean that literally. At the con I called it "Arisia bonsai", but "Arisia in Chinese foot binding" might be more accurate. And the elevators!

If you haven't been to the Park Plaza, Arisia's old hotel, let me tell you about it: everyone considered the elevators there a disaster. There were eight of them, and each of them could hold a maximum of ten to twelve passengers.

At the Hyatt, there are FOUR elevators - glass ones. But believe me, there's nothing great about them^*. Each of them can hold no more than seven people, and if more than seven people get on...the elevator breaks. And has to be repaired. One of the elevators was already broken when we got there, and stayed broken the entire weekend. Another of the remaining three was broken for most of Saturday. Yet another was mostly dedicated to express runs to the top floor.

So there was one elevator that could hold seven people for a convention of over 1,000. The hotel, incidentally, has 16 floors; and with my back in the state that it was, there was simply no way to take the stairs up.

Oh, I have to talk about the Elevator Bitch. She was an adult, somewhere from 30-45, who was in the elevator going up when it stopped at our floor. Just to be clear, we weren't on the elevator - we were waiting for it outside, on the 11th floor. A guy and a girl (not together) were waiting there with us. We were all waiting for a down elevator, but since there was space for one person, the girl shrugged, said she might as well go up to go down, and stepped into the elevator. I was about to say that that probably wasn't a good idea, when -

"No, no, no!" said the Elevator Bitch firmly, and grabbing the girl's arm, thrust her bodily out of the elevator. The girl gave up and took the stairs down.

That's not so bad, and probably doesn't earn that woman the title "bitch". What did earn her that name was that moments later the elevator stopped on the way back down...and there was the Elevator Bitch. Yup, she'd gone up to go down herself. The guy with us yelled at her, but she basically told him to fuck off as the doors closed - because, of course, the elevator was now full.

Through many hallway and elevator conversations throughout the weekend I discovered that almost everyone knew the Elevator Bitch, remembered her from previous Arisias (though I didn't), and that she was generally viewed as human waste material.

On Saturday someone's cloak got caught in the escalator from the 1st to the 2nd floors. The escalator broke, of course, and couldn't just be repaired - state law requires that it be inspected before reactivation. So it was down for hours.

To get to the Green Room, you literally had to walk through the buffet or the dining area - a crowded space.

The function space itself was pitiful. Right now, I can't even stand to talk about it.

As for gaming panels, there were nine of them. But that was for tabletop gaming, LARPs, card games, and computer games combined. In other words, there were far, far fewer game panels than in previous years.

My own panels went quite well; I was really pleased with them, although one of them - genre fiction for children and young adults - surprised me by being assigned to the Fast Track (i.e. children's) area. As I expected, it was mostly parents who were interested in that panel. We had fun, but attendance was poor, probably because the panel really should have been in the Literature track instead. One thing that was a big surprise: the other panelist was the Young Adult librarian from our own library! The funny thing is that many times over the years when I passed him in the library I thought I recognized him from the con. But I never worked up the nerve to say "hi". I will now, of course.

The LiveJournal panel on Friday night went great, I thought. The room was packed; there were fifty people in the audience at least. I felt that I was on top of my game, and got at least three good laughs. The biggest one was when one of the other panelists was saying that she seemed to be some sort of chaos attractor, and I said "Actually, it's "Weirdness Magnet". It's a Disadvantage. You probably got some character points for it."

The RPG 101 panel was poorly attended - for one thing, it was in a panel room near the gaming area, which was totally away from the rest of the con and therefore had almost no walk-by traffic - but I thought it went well. There were about ten people in the audience at midpoint, not counting babies.

I made sure to tell the audience members at all three panels to check out the forum for that panel on the Arisia site. I later found that those forums will possibly be deleted after three weeks of inactivity, so there will still be some use for the

gateway_sf community that I created last year - and if it seems necessary, I may create a "RPG 101" community, too. There was definitely quite a bit of interest at that one.

I'll have some work to do to put stuff up on the three forums. Given how well they went, I wish that I'd been on more of them. As for the rest of the con...apart from the aforementioned disaster in the Masquerade Green Room (and I really don't want to talk about that now), the con was actually not bad for me...except that I didn't get to see much of it. No art show (except the little we could see outside our hotel room window; the Hyatt's architecture is bizarre, to put it mildly), no dancing, no dealer's row, no dealer's room, no other panels (apart from a few for Sebastian), no other events...nothing. I was simply in too much pain. And considering I've been waiting for the con for a year, that really, really, really sucks.

I'd be more upset, but somehow I seem to be too old to get that upset any more.

Oh, Sebastian stayed with my parents both nights. He came over for a while on Saturday afternoon. We got him to wear the Link costume that Teri had made. She thought it looked awful, but even she had to admit that Sebastian looked absolutely great in it. To be honest, I was stunned. Unfortunately I have no photos, because I left the camera in the car and was in too much pain to go get it, but I'm going to put him in the costume and take some photos soon. We're the only ones who saw him in the costume, by the way. He absolutely refused to wear it outside the room, although I'm not sure why.

He did several Fast Track events, and begged to stay with us Saturday night (which had been the original plan). Teri was leaning towards sending him to my parents, but I was hoping that he'd stay. But when he saw two of the costume contestants - one was Mr. Freeze from the animated Batman cartoon, and the other looked like a vampire magician - he suddenly got that scared look and decided that he really wanted to spend the night with my folks.

Next year, I'm thinking that he's not going to have that option. He's going to stay with us for the whole con.

Rumor: In the hallway, someone told me that the reason that the Park Plaza had dumped Arisia at the last minute was that the owner had seen something about the Fetish Flea or the fetish crowd at Arisia, and was offended. I also heard that the replacement convention they'd booked for that weekend (whatever it was) had cancelled at the last minute, leaving the Park Plaza empty. That sounds a bit pat to me, but I hope it's true.

But even more, I'm hoping that after next year Arisia ends up back at the Park Plaza, or at a hotel which has a decent amount of function space. I'm honestly wondering how long Arisia can survive at the Hyatt. Not more than three or fours years, I'd guess.

* - Will anyone realize that I'm talking about Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator? I wonder.