On the importance of Worldcon

I realized that the main reason I've gone to Worldcons is because they're such an important part of the shared history of fandom.

Then I realized that "being a part of history" isn't really a selling point for a science fiction convention.

So lemme tell you the REAL boggling part of this story:

Some of you may have heard that there is a building under construction in London, 20 Fenchurch St, whose curved surfaces focused the sun onto a parked car and melted bits of it. There are a number of stories about it -- I'll let you Google it yourself, because the different stories all have different details -- one has a person explaining how the entire side of his dashboard melted, including burning a hole in his energy drink bottle; one has a nearby shop owner talking about how it set his welcome mat on fire; one has pictures of the melted wing mirror on a Jaguar. The building has been called the "Walkie-Talkie" because of what it looks like, but it's being re-named to the "Walkie-Scorchie." (I'm assuming that "Talkie" and "Scorchie" rhyme in at least one London dialect. I mean, there are a LOT of London dialects.)

Okay, designing the sunward part of your building as a parabolic reflector is just simple incompetence. But that's not the AMAZING part of the story. No, the AMAZING part is that the architect, Rafael Viñoly, previously designed the Vdara in Las Vegas. Which did the EXACT SAME THING. It is ALSO a parabolic reflector which aims a concentrated sunbeam at the pool deck, causing a dangerously hot "Death Ray" which moves across the pool area as the sun moves.

Designing ONE Death Ray building is incompetence. But designing TWO is just boggling.