Anticipation Montréal 2009 Worldcon's Journal
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Anticipation Montréal 2009 Worldcon's LiveJournal:
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| Monday, March 1st, 2010 | 11:25 pm
[ant_mediarel]
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| | Wednesday, December 30th, 2009 | 12:02 pm
[stu_segal]
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Hugo Awards Ceremony Video???
I'm still looking for a tape or DVD of the Hugo Awards. I noticed some "official" looking videographers recording the Hugo Awards Ceremony. Does anyone know anything about who was in charge of the videotaping, and whether there are copies available? Thanks . . . Stu | | Tuesday, December 29th, 2009 | 11:11 am
[kevin_standlee]
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Paying It Forward
The co-chairs of Anticipation were at SMOFCon 27, the annual conrunners convention, and appeared before "The Fannish Inquisition" to make a presentation of Pass Along Funds to their successors. Every Worldcon is an independent entity, with no financial or legal ties to its predecessors or successors (sort of like Olympic Host Committees); however, since 1989, most Worldcons have participated in a voluntary arrangement whereby they agree to divide at least half of any surplus funds they may have among the next three Worldcons that also agree to participate in the program. Conventions may opt out of participating, but if they do so, they also don't receive any pass-along funds from their predecessors. | | Friday, November 27th, 2009 | 1:31 pm
[steverogerson]
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Beer in Montreal
An article about the bars I visited in Montreal has been published in Nottingham Drinker. You can download a copy here: http://www.nottinghamcamra.org/notDrinker.htmIt is issue 95 (Dec 09/Jan 10) and is on pages 32 and 33. There is also an article about Halifax in Canada on pages 30 and 31. | | Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 | 11:51 am
[nessagg] |
Pictures
I am sorry I did not post this before but I just found out about this. Thanks a lot to everyone - I had the best time of my life. Hope to see many of you next Con! http://picasaweb.google.ca/vgiovanna/HowIStoleNeilGaimanSPen?feat=directlink Current Mood: creative | | Monday, October 5th, 2009 | 1:08 pm
[johnnyeponymous]
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2010 TAFF Race has begun!
The 2010 TAFF race has begun!We have two excellent sets of candidates. Anne KG Murphy and Brain Gray (running as a pair) and Frank Wu. The ballot is available at http://taff.org.uk/ and the deadline is Midnight PST on December 22nd. Full details are available on http://taff.org.uk/. Thanks Chris | | Monday, September 28th, 2009 | 11:36 pm
[stu_segal]
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Hugo Awards Ceremony Video???
I noticed some "official" looking videographers recording the Hugo Awards Ceremony. As some of you know, my son won a Hugo this year (YAY!), and I would really like to have a video of the ceremony. Does anyone know anything about who was in charge of the videotaping, and whether there are copies available? Thanks . . . Stu | | Sunday, September 27th, 2009 | 11:41 am
[dinogrl]
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ART SHOW
Does anyone have any idea when artists will get their checks from the art show? Or are they stuck in customs too? Sigh. Signed, Waiting To Be Paid Current Mood: broke | | Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 | 3:00 pm
[cmdrsuzdal]
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Art show checks
Does anyone know if the art show has sent checks to the artists yet or what the schedule is for that? | | Monday, September 14th, 2009 | 1:46 am
[salanth]
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Oh boy. It's NOT science fiction, eh?
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/atwood-have-i-ever-eaten-maggots-perhaps/article1284530/What the book absolutely is not, she insists, is science fiction – a statement she has made repeatedly since the 2003 publication of Oryx and Crake, a novel that shares the same future as Flood and some of the same characters.
Science fiction takes place “somewhere in space, far, far away in a distant galaxy,” she explains. “That's where hell and heaven went after Milton, escaping literarily.”
On Planet X, you can still have voices speaking out of burning bushes and “strange creatures with bat wings and horns on their heads flying through the air – dragons, of which I'm very fond.” But “speculative fiction” of the sort she writes deals strictly with things people can experience on Earth “without being stoned,” she says. “It has to be based on real technology, real science, real possibility.”Good grief. Current Mood:  aggravated | | Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 | 1:08 pm
[salanth]
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No respect!
http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/692716It sounds like something out of a sci-fi novel. Solar power plants orbiting the planet, each the size of 700 Canadian football fields, beaming clean energy down to Earth 24 hours a day so we can run our factories, charge our gadgets and keep our home appliances humming.
[...]
A reality check, however, came from power developer Wael Almazeedi, who warned of the legal, financial and regulatory challenges the plan would face, as well as the difficulty of "promoting a concept based on science fiction."All I can do is sigh in exasperation. It is so annoying seeing the mindset that science fiction means ivory towers. Current Mood: annoyed | | Tuesday, September 8th, 2009 | 8:57 pm
[kallisti]
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Spider Robinson needs your help.
I'm a big fan of the writings of Spider Robinson, if you are as well, please read the rest of this post I recently found out that his wife, Jeanne, has cancer, and that they are running out of money due to the cost of medicine and other needed care that is not covered by the Provence of British Columbia's medical system. If you can't afford to kick in some money, then at least help spread the word. Here is the announcement from Spider's website: http://www.spiderrobinson.com/index2.htm l HELP JEANNE STAY HEALTHY Earlier his year a brilliant surgeon, Dr. Andresz Busczowski, helped Jeanne Robinson beat back a rare and virulent form of biliary cancer. But it’s so rare even he can’t say how much time he‘s bought her, how soon it might recur—and her latest blood tests have been so discouraging they’ve now decided she needs to start chemotherapy as soon as possible. Besides the prescription drugs to counteract the chemotherapy, she needs special therapies and supplements, counseling, and extensive diet and lifestyle changes, to reduce her stress level and the strain on her liver to as close to zero as possible. All those things are expensive...and like many artists today the Robinsons were already running on fumes financially. But Jeanne, a Soto Zen monk, has been spreading love and kindness in all directions for a long time. So her Buddhist sangha in Vancouver, her neighbors on Bowen Island, and friends as far away as Florida have all spontaneously come together to raise funds to help keep her around as long as possible. Your participation is welcomed. A Bowen benefit concert, “WE DREAM FOR JEANNE,” will be held at Cates Hill Chapel at 7:30 PM on Friday Sept 18 details here; goods or services can be donated for eBay auction (such as rare Babylon 5 scripts and other SF memorabilia) by contacting Jan Schroeder at <dreamforjeanne@aol.com>, and PayPal donations can be sent to http://wedreamforjeanne.blogspot.com/. Another way to help would be to buy our books from Amazon by clicking-through from this site http://www.spiderrobinson.com/books.html, so Jeanne and I can get the affiliate commission. We promise you an entertaining read. You can read Jeanne’s recent blog entry, The Third Act, to get a sense of how she’s feeling at http://stardancemovie.blogspot.com/. Jeanne and Spider both warmly appreciate your help, support, prayers or just good thoughts. So does one of the newest visitors to this planet: | | Monday, August 31st, 2009 | 5:22 pm
[kevin_standlee]
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2009 Site Selection Business Meeting Video Posted
The video of the 2009 Site Selection WSFS Business Meeting held Sunday, August 9, at Anticipation is now online. If you have difficulty viewing the video through Vimeo's online viewer, you can download the video (WMV format) to your machine using the link in the lower right corner of the video's web page. This meeting received the official results of the 2010 NASFiC and 2011 Worldcon Site Selection and received the first reports from the newly-seated committees. In addition, the meeting held Question Time for the 2010 Worldcon, Aussiecon Four and a short presentation from bids for the 2012 Worldcon. This is the third and final video file of the 2009 WSFS Business Meetings. The earlier recordings are the Preliminary Business Meeting and the Main Business Meeting. This information is not secret. Feel free to pass it along to anyone else you think might be interested. You can quote this message entirely if you wish. Current Mood: accomplished | 1:25 pm
[pale_chartreuse]
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Worldcon vacation, the end
The last panel that I was on was listed as children's programming as "The Future of Energy". I was listed as moderator. Of the other two panelists, one did not show up. For the audience, no actual children showed up (smofs take note). Of the five total people in the room; I was the only female, and quite possibly the only person under the age of fifty. Most of the guys really wanted to discuss the future on nuclear energy. Especially fusion in general and boron fusion in particular and whether the US government's involvement in this research was a good idea (some having a preference for private development). For anyone that is interested. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PolywellIn all, not the best experience of the con, but I rolled with it. Thanks to my fellow panelist for rolling with me. We were able to come to some agreement on the idea that energy scarcity is essentially a price-point issue. We never really got to a good resolution on alternative energy capital costs vs long term operational costs. I ended the panel with a plug for Smart-grid technology as the best option that might have some hope of actually being real anytime soon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_grid | 4:03 pm
[steverogerson]
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| | Sunday, August 30th, 2009 | 6:04 pm
[karenjeane]
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Photo op.
Thought I would share my Flickr photo set on here - I have 58 pictures from the event and our stay in the city. Enjoy! Current Mood:  good | 1:01 pm
[justeps]
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More Photos
Guest of Honor Neil Gaiman introducing the
Coraline screening on the 5th floor of the Palais
des congrès de Montréal
The day before I was to leave, a friend handed me a disposable
35mm camera, and told me to "take pictures."
Immediately realizing that 27 exposures couldn't possibly do
justice, I bought another (different brand, lower speed).
I could have done much better with anything even vaguely
resembling decent equipment, but I played along anyway. Enjoy.
(entire
collection) | 10:31 am
[kylecassidy]
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ebannings
can one of the moderators ban the ebuying001 - ebuying005 accounts that are following up spam to every post? I've had to delete a dozen in posts i've made. Of course, the real solution would be to find the owners of ebuying.com and maroon them on [insert name of appropriate scifi wasteland]. | | Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 | 1:29 pm
[pale_chartreuse]
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The City of the Future panel
City of the Future I was thrilled to get to be on this panel! This is one of the few panel types that I see on programs at science fiction conventions and at architectural conventions (the other is “The Kitchen of Tomorrow” SMOFs and programming people take note).. the other folks on the panel were a landscape architecture professor from MIT, the environmental consultant form my previous sustainable panel, pnh, mechanical engineer and the moderator (who was awesome). The moderator started us off with: Utopia or Distopia, are cities evil? Not seriously, just trying to stir the pot. Most of the panelists before me wanted to take a tone of Moderation on this one. The idea that Natural design can be design based on nature, use of landscaping and scale to keep the city on a inviting warmth and scale. I certainly agree with this, and I thought that several panelists made great comments about how humans are social animals and thrive in a group situation. But I decided to take a stand (don’t want to be boring, it’s an SF panel for heaven’s sake). So I said that a city is not a natural environment. It is a human-made, complex web of human social contracts. So how you feel about utopian/distopian societies tends to reflect more about how you feel about your neighbors than any real reflection the actual state of any given real life city. (I was ready to go into the Zombie Apocalpse if necessary, but it wasn't needed). This gave me a chance to plug “The City in History”, by Lewis Mumford. This was written in 1961 and won a National Book Award. Mumford gets into the co-development of agriculture and cities. He suggests that, once humans are living in such tight quarters, that water rights become a driving force in social organization. He even goes to the point of saying that water rights issues directly lead to legislation and complex governmental systems (beyond basic tribal organization). I also got to recommend “Collapse”, Jared Diamond. I had mentioned this in one of my previous panels as a good source for a writer to find environmental disasters and societal collapse to write about. But here I was using it for a different purpose. I wanted to emphasize that the building codes that shape a city are usually written in response to recent disasters. So the shape and material of a city can tell you something about the history of the city on an immediate level. For example; The Great Fire of London caused the rebuilding of the city to be done in stone and brick. No combustible materials allowed. Also, the Fire put Robert Hook (inventor of the microscope) in charge of re-laying out the city to a more comprehensible plan. The panel then got into a good discussion of City structures and infrastructure. How the city is made up of water systems, sewer systems, garbage disposal, power grid, transportation systems, the invisible things that make a city work. So change in a city environment can often happen in a way that most people never even notice. Pnh brought up the great example of Montreal’s rent-a-bike system. He was using it during the con, and was clearly having a lot of fun with it. The professor from MIT took up the concept of resilient cities. She introduced the idea that change and adaptation in cities is normal. This sounds obvious to some, but some folks in the audience indicated that they find the process can be distressing and weird. To wind up the panel, the moderator asked us what our highest concerns were for the future of cities (on this planet). Several of us mentioned Water; sea walls for climate change weather patterns, potable water crisis due to loss of watershed, drought, more violent weather patterns, and overdevelopment. I gave the example of Atlanta, GA. Two years ago the city was down to only a 30 day water supply, and yet people were still complaining that they weren’t allowed to water their lawns. Pnh gave the example of Phoneix AZ, where overdevelopment and lack of local water supplies has bordered on critical several times. Best question from the audience; is the future of the city the urban slum? My answer, no. governments and authorities are complicit in the creation of such structures, they are created because someone is benefitting from them and these go away when they endanger more than they benefit (re: Fire of London). Example; the under-the-bridge pedophile colony in Miami. Best question after the panel; how do you feel about urban farming Economics of shipping food by water has very large economies of scale vs trucking even from a 500 (i.e. local by LEED standards) mile radius. Shipping by water was economical even in the 17 and 18th centuryl. The argument for urban farming seems to assume that this has become uneconomical. (I’m not talking about farms near or inside cities, I’m talking about building farms into high rise structures). This, for me would suggest a world where climate change has made the seas too dangerous for this use. If that were to become the case, then the cities on the coasts of the world would already be unlivable. Urban farming, to me, is a great specialty market like organic and farmers market and localvore stuff (which I am part of), but I don’t think that it is going to become a necessary part of our urban fabric due to a collapse of the transportation network unless other catasrophes have already happened. | | Monday, August 24th, 2009 | 1:25 pm
[kevin_standlee]
 |
2009 Main Business Meeting Video Posted
The video of the 2009 Main WSFS Business Meeting held Saturday, August 8, at Anticipation is now online. If you have difficulty viewing the video through Vimeo's online viewer, you can download the video (WMV format) to your machine using the link in the lower right corner of the video's web page. Vimeo limits users to uploading 500 MB/week, although once uploaded, the files stay up there and new files do not displace them. I plan to post the Site Selection Business Meeting next week. The Main Business Meeting dealt with amendments to the WSFS Constitution pending ratification after having received initial passage at the 2008 Business Meeting in Denver. The Main Event was the debate over the removal of the Semiprozine Hugo Award. Also on the agenda: The Graphic Story Hugo Award and the explicit expansion of Hugo Award eligibility to electronic (web-based) publication. This information is not secret. Feel free to pass it along to anyone else you think might be interested. You can quote this message entirely if you wish. Current Mood: accomplished |
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