My Arisia, part one.
Jan. 20th, 2003 01:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xiphiasArisia is the biggest science fiction convention in Boston. This year, there were something like 2,250 people.
Arisia has lots of tracks, lots of different things you can focus on. You can spend the weekend doing television stuff, anime stuff, roleplaying game stuff, board gaming stuff, movie stuff, writing stuff, science stuff -- all sorts of things. I've spent years where I focused on music, or shopping, or going to parties. . .
Arisia is a fan-run convention, meaning that nobody gets paid for doing this stuff. Ever since I started going to Arisia, about ten years ago, I've always tried to do at least a little volunteering, along with going to panels, parties, games, and shops. It's easy to be a "gopher", someone who just does a little bit of stuff when it's needed. But, if you know that the focus of your convention is going to be volunteering, you may as well talk to people a couple months before, and actually be "staff". Now, as staff, you can theoretically still fit in a few panels, parties, filks, some shopping, and a game or two, but volunteering becomes the main thing you're doing. (That is, at the lowest level of Staff, you can do other things. There are plenty of people with staff ribbons who don't leave their posts from two days -- or, maybe, months -- before the con starts to the day after it finishes.)
So, last year and this year, I was staff. See, they sent out a mailing last year saying that they wanted to start up a new department, "Staff Support Services." This department would be tasked with maintaining the sanity of the other staff members. We're also called "Massage Den." So the call went out last year asking for people who were willing to give massages to staff members, and people who had massage tables. Lis and I have a massage table, so I volunteered.
Last year was basically a shakedown year. Most of the time, there were only two people working in Massage Den,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
chaiya and me, although a few other people did chip in and really help out a whole lot -- but most everyone else had lots of other responsibilities. She did an amazing job last year, and, this year, was (rightly) tapped to run Massage Den again, and I also volunteered again. And this year, we got more people! arib and someone named Erika whose lj-name I didn't get both volunteered and put in lots and lots of hours. And, again, other people chipped in and helped out.
I managed to do Real Cheap Con, because I had a comped membership (you give twelve hours to the con, and they give you next year free!), and slept in Massage Den, and ate the food they had in Staff Den (they feed you, too!) I spent seventeen dollars on a game, and we paid for parking, and that was about it.
So: other than giving lots and lots of nifty people massages, what else did I do? I got massages a couple times, which was great, because my back's been in terrible shape for a long time -- and now, after a weekend of working with my body, it's better than it was to start with.
What else did I do? Friday night, they showed an episode of Star Trek in the film room, one I'd never seen -- "Spock's Brain." It was amazing. I think that seeing it in a big room with lots of other fen made it much better. "You are not morg or eyemorg; what are you?" After that, I went off to see a performance by "i Sebastiani: The Greatest Commedia dell'Arte Troupe In the Entire World" -- who, honestly, may be. Commedia is a performance form from late sixteenth and early seventeenth century Italy, in which there are stock characters (the lecherous old man, the really stupid servant, the really smart servant, the love interest, and so forth), and the "script" consists of a list of scenes and the goals each character has in each scene, and the rest of it is improvised. Really, really fun.
I wandered around and talked to folks, and hung out and stuff, and then went to a panel run by one of the guests of honor, Andrew Looney. The Looneys did a presentation on their game "Chrononauts", and talked about why they made the historical events connect the way they did, and talked about some of their ideas for expansions. They took ideas from the audience, and Lis had some good ones -- if they do an expansion set in the 19th century (which they're thinking about), something about avoiding the Trail of Tears would be nice.
The next morning, I watched a couple minutes of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius, while Lis went to a writing workshop. Then I went to see a Higgins Armory Museum demo, and I've got to leave now, so I'll pick this up later on. . .
Arisia has lots of tracks, lots of different things you can focus on. You can spend the weekend doing television stuff, anime stuff, roleplaying game stuff, board gaming stuff, movie stuff, writing stuff, science stuff -- all sorts of things. I've spent years where I focused on music, or shopping, or going to parties. . .
Arisia is a fan-run convention, meaning that nobody gets paid for doing this stuff. Ever since I started going to Arisia, about ten years ago, I've always tried to do at least a little volunteering, along with going to panels, parties, games, and shops. It's easy to be a "gopher", someone who just does a little bit of stuff when it's needed. But, if you know that the focus of your convention is going to be volunteering, you may as well talk to people a couple months before, and actually be "staff". Now, as staff, you can theoretically still fit in a few panels, parties, filks, some shopping, and a game or two, but volunteering becomes the main thing you're doing. (That is, at the lowest level of Staff, you can do other things. There are plenty of people with staff ribbons who don't leave their posts from two days -- or, maybe, months -- before the con starts to the day after it finishes.)
So, last year and this year, I was staff. See, they sent out a mailing last year saying that they wanted to start up a new department, "Staff Support Services." This department would be tasked with maintaining the sanity of the other staff members. We're also called "Massage Den." So the call went out last year asking for people who were willing to give massages to staff members, and people who had massage tables. Lis and I have a massage table, so I volunteered.
Last year was basically a shakedown year. Most of the time, there were only two people working in Massage Den,
chaiya and me, although a few other people did chip in and really help out a whole lot -- but most everyone else had lots of other responsibilities. She did an amazing job last year, and, this year, was (rightly) tapped to run Massage Den again, and I also volunteered again. And this year, we got more people! arib and someone named Erika whose lj-name I didn't get both volunteered and put in lots and lots of hours. And, again, other people chipped in and helped out.I managed to do Real Cheap Con, because I had a comped membership (you give twelve hours to the con, and they give you next year free!), and slept in Massage Den, and ate the food they had in Staff Den (they feed you, too!) I spent seventeen dollars on a game, and we paid for parking, and that was about it.
So: other than giving lots and lots of nifty people massages, what else did I do? I got massages a couple times, which was great, because my back's been in terrible shape for a long time -- and now, after a weekend of working with my body, it's better than it was to start with.
What else did I do? Friday night, they showed an episode of Star Trek in the film room, one I'd never seen -- "Spock's Brain." It was amazing. I think that seeing it in a big room with lots of other fen made it much better. "You are not morg or eyemorg; what are you?" After that, I went off to see a performance by "i Sebastiani: The Greatest Commedia dell'Arte Troupe In the Entire World" -- who, honestly, may be. Commedia is a performance form from late sixteenth and early seventeenth century Italy, in which there are stock characters (the lecherous old man, the really stupid servant, the really smart servant, the love interest, and so forth), and the "script" consists of a list of scenes and the goals each character has in each scene, and the rest of it is improvised. Really, really fun.
I wandered around and talked to folks, and hung out and stuff, and then went to a panel run by one of the guests of honor, Andrew Looney. The Looneys did a presentation on their game "Chrononauts", and talked about why they made the historical events connect the way they did, and talked about some of their ideas for expansions. They took ideas from the audience, and Lis had some good ones -- if they do an expansion set in the 19th century (which they're thinking about), something about avoiding the Trail of Tears would be nice.
The next morning, I watched a couple minutes of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius, while Lis went to a writing workshop. Then I went to see a Higgins Armory Museum demo, and I've got to leave now, so I'll pick this up later on. . .
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(no subject)
Date: 2003-01-20 10:44 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-01-20 04:03 pm (UTC)Word is that the cast laughed their way through that one, and not in a good way, either.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-01-21 06:20 pm (UTC)It was an old 35mm film of the episode, which had degenerated over time. A little girl who was sitting next to me, who was about eight or ten, asked me why everything was red, and I explained that the film was old, so that the green pigments had faded over time. She said, "Oh, so it used to be in all the colors but now it's just mostly the red." Which is, to the best of my knowledge, precisely correct. My theory about talking to children is that one just talks to them as if they were adults with slightly smaller vocabularies, and one is prepared to back up and make more basic explanations if one's first go engenders a blank look.
Which is, come to think of it, about how I deal with most people. I like dealing with children because they're more likely to actually give the blank looks instead of going off and acting on information they don't understand. . .
Also, the vocabulary and grasp of background concepts of an eight-year old one meets at a science fiction convention is slightly larger than the vocabulary and grasp of background concepts of an adult one meets elsewhere.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-01-21 12:35 pm (UTC)How did Jimmy Neutron look? I tried to get my kid brother to see it with me, but he wouldn't go for it, and I forgot about it after that.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-01-21 06:26 pm (UTC)Jimmy Neutron looked like fun. I watched the bit where the kids in the neighborhood strap rockets onto everything movable in an amusement part in order to build a space fleet, and started giggling as I realized that the soundtrack music for the scene was Kim Wilde's "Kids In America", which worked disturbingly well.