hazelchaz | ...Do you remember, baby, last September, how you held me tight each and every night?

Catching up with November. The conclusion of my Loscon 35 (2008) report. (Other sections: part 1, part 2.)

Loscon has a strong party floor. That is, a lot of groups and individuals will have open room parties. Some of them have strong drink, some of them have strange snacks, some of them have imaginative decorations... they're all different. You may even be able to get a silly ribbon at some of them. There are so many parties, in fact, that all of the suites on the 18th floor (and they're all suites, on the 18th floor) are in such demand that the convention has to give preference to people who'll be running parties both Friday and Saturday night in them.

I've done convention publicity at other conventions, starting with when I was chair for Loscon in 2001 -- no, actually, starting in 1995 when I was running Fan Publicity for L.A.con III. The default approach for s-f con publicity is to have a fan table by day, and a party by night. You don't get as many people stopping by the parties as you do at the table, but it's a different group of people. So, if you're not in a position to do both, doing just the table is the way to maximize your exposure.

At Loscon, we had the table all three days, and one party night (Saturday). Because of our sponsorship arrangement (which I talked about last time), we were able to get a suite without having a party on Friday.

I've talked about my Minions. Melissa De Mello, my Head Minion (right), wanted to use loscon as a training ground to try out the proto-minions and see how they work out, and also to do a little training on the radiophones ("Boost" phones, which we've nicknamed the nextels).

Some of the proto-minions were able to come to Loscon -- Steven, David, and Mindy. In addition, I had summoner_lenne9 and aramina. We didn't know how the others would work out, but there were at least four of us that could get things done.

When I arrived at the hotel Friday morning, Melissa and Sarah were already there, and Daniel Jones was hanging around with nothing to do. We shanghaied him into our crew. "Bored? We'll give you some interesting work!" (left)

So by noon, we'd started unloading Saltine and hauling everything up to the party suite. The package in the corner of the picture is a multi-pack of Hersheys Chocolate Milk boxes. (right)

We're having a "Peanut Butter & Jelly Party" with a food theme of "comfort food." So "juice boxes" work for some people; chocolate milk for others; and combined would be a pure win.

You can see that I've got most of the infrastructure you'd need for a party, ready to go -- the "Picnic Supplies" bin is where you'll find all the disposable plastic cutlery and paper plates, the "Clean-up" bin has the trashbags and zip bags, and so forth. I've got about half a dozen crockpots, a similar number of coolers of various sizes, three or four folding tables and a dozen folding chairs that I can draw on any time I need them. The trick is getting them all there in one trip, so I have to figure out ahead of time what I actually need rather than bringing the whole garage.

Once we had everything out of the car, I left Patty and Melissa (left) to take charge of getting things in the room stored and squared away, and I headed downstairs to work on the table.

As I recall, we had sour gummy worms on the table, postcards for animelosangeles, and signup sheets. We also had our recruiting packet, with printouts of job descriptions for staff positions we needed volunteers for, and a few staff registration forms.

Melissa and Patty assembled the wire cubicles, one chunk of them in an arrangement in the parlor (right) and another bunch in the prep room. That is, the bedroom -- they'd be sleeping in it, too.

I hadn't given a single thought to how things would be stored, or how much storage would be needed. I was delighted with their solution. (left)

I think next time we should either take most things out of the boxes (unless the boxes are keeping them from spilling out, like the granola bars at the right end of the third row from the top) and set the empty boxes aside; or, label the ends of the boxes, like drawers in a dresser. And we could have used a 4-unit-wide arrangement. The heavy things are on the bottom row -- the spiced cider and the lemonade concentrate, water to mix up the lemonade and big cans of fruit, but the chocolate milk is actually on top of the case of iced tea in front of the storage unit.

So either we need to pack 15" square pieces of cardboard or something else to turn the the wire mesh into more-solid shelves; or we need to pack some labels. Nametag labels, like on the middle box of the second row, would do fine, as would a sheet or two of those 10-per-sheet Avery labels.

Ever since I bought the storage system, I've been impressed how useful they've been. Originally I was thinking in terms of merchandise display, so we could put the t-shirts on the table at Anime Expo last summer. (right)

At Anime Expo, we also used them to store everything, so we wouldn't have just a massive pile of boxes behind us; and we used the extra cubicles for a place where people could stash their bags.

We did that at Loscon -- Melissa and Patty made me a little two-by-two unit to have at the fan table. You can see it next to divine_sage here. (left)

On Friday night, I suggested all of the minions should check out the other parties. Starting with the Executive Suite's three-way party, which had Keith Kato's chili (right), Elst's wines and cheeses, and their friend's dessert party, we all went party-hopping the full length of the hall.

Melissa and Patty's conclusion, after seeing all the parties: they wanted a budget to come up with some kind of door treatment, because many of the other parties had some kind of fancy doorway arrangement. (not shown)

On Saturday, the two of them went off-site, and brought back some tinsel garland to prettify up the doorway. They got red and gold, to match our logo colors. (left)

After we shut down the table for the day Saturday, we went up to the room. We wanted all of the decorations up, all of the posters and signs, all the food staged and ready. Here you can see Sarah and Steven getting one of the posters ready to hang, while Mindy gets the toaster ready and Patty heads to the next room. (right)

Putting up the posters on the wall is the easy part. We prioritize the posters, and put the more-important ones up first. And fill in with wall scrolls until we've completely covered every wall. (left)

I had promised Patty Wells, renoin2011 Worldcon Bid chair, that I'd get her some kind of help with her party. We dubbed her "Reno Patty" to distinguish her from aramina. Melissa took Reno Patty shopping for cookies, soda, and so forth Saturday -- her party theme was "Cookies and Milk" -- and David, Steven and Mindy helped her get the room together. It went quickly, and she didn't need help manning the party itself.

We broke for dinner (right) then caught most of the Masquerade and went back up to work on the room some more.

We had a lot of food to serve. Everything that might conceivably fit our "comfort food" theme -- graham crackers, marshmallow creme, et cetera, et cetera. (And people have different traditions regarding graham crackers. For some people the cinnamon flavor grahams have deeper meaning for them.)

We knew we wanted the hot food up front, on good solid stable tables, and we wanted the peanut butter and jelly station (and the toaster) there too. That meant that just about everything else went further in the room. Here you can see the parlor table overflowing with snacks, during a not-very-crowded moment. We may have gone for a little too much variety! (left)

We had a problem, although we didn't realize it when we staged the food: people standing making themselves a sandwich or serving themselves some of the hot food contribute to the congestion in the front half of the room, and it can be hard to get into the rest of the room. Therefore a lot of people who got something to eat in our room never made it to the table in front of the couch.

The room looked a lot different 24 hours before, when it was empty -- it's hard to visualize what the crowds will do to your design for the space.

Another problem has to do with signage. We brought two coolers to use in the parlor. One of them held the water bottles and the soft drinks. The other one had the carton of milk, the chocolate milk boxes, and the jug of pink lemonade. This means, we need signs for them to tell which one is which! So, hand-written signs, as you can see on the wall next to Rick Moen here. (left)

I'd prefer us have our good-looking matching signs, which means either we need to plan better, we need to have all possible signs printed and stuck in the kit so we can pull out just the ones we need, or we need to have someone not too far away able to print them up on demand during the day when we're setting up.

Some signs we ought to be able to predict. If you look past Pearl Newton and Aimee Hoff, you can see we have three signs on the wall -- "No food beyond this point" and "NO GLASS beyond this point" plus another one in Japanese. (right)

I mentioned we'd sent out postcards to promote "Animé Los Angeles Day at LosCon 35." They had art, done by the amazingly talented le_moose, which showed our mascot Ala, dressed Roman-style, reading a copy of Zoe's Tale. A poster blow-up of that postcard art graced the most prominent picture frame in the room. (left)

Zoe's Tale is the latest book from John Scalzi, LosCon's writer guest of honor, and it's about a 16-year-old girl. I thik Ala and Zoe would get along like a house on fire, if it weren't for the fact that they're both ficticious characters... You can see the Hello Kitty toaster and a crockpot full of stewed pears on the table next to John.

The great thing about hosting parties is so many nice people come and find you at your party. For example, "Mina Murray" from The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (colleency) and "Jessica Rabbit" (missmea) came by. (right)

Colleen had helped with the Masquerade, as one of the judges. She took one of our "Ala" temporary tattoos. (Maria already has a permanent tattoo, but it doesn't show.)

She came back about three hours later and had a late-night snack: a sandwich with marshmallow creme, Nutella, and Cocoa Puffs. (left)

Will Shetterly and Emma Bull also stopped by our party for a little while. I think of them as Minneapolis people, but they lived in Los Angeles for a while before ended up in Arizona. Anyhow, we helped them come out to LosCon, for the first time in several years. (right)

It was a successful party, due in large part to the work that the Minions put in. For some people like Kurt Miller (left) it was the place to stop and stay the whole evening. He was there at least two hours, possibly as long as four.

It was interesting to compare the Saturday night party scene, vs. our Peanut Butter & Jelly room at Pacific Media Expo. We were open a shorter time (about six hours), but much more crowded. We had a lot of leftovers. Partly because we had purchased so much in the first place, of course, and weren't open as long, but also because the LosCon crowd wasn't starving compared to the fans at at a con with no con suite like pmx.

We win the hearts of fans at PMX because we have food, period. (And we're going to be open three full days next time -- I'm checking in the day before PMX and checking out the day after.) We were one of the happening parties at LosCon because of what food we had, including the spiced cider and the stewed pears wafting a hot cinnamon smell out into the hall. One of these days I should break out the roaster oven and bake cinnamon pretzels again...

That's it for November. I'm off to Gallifrey One tomorrow, and in my free time (as I have no actual duties at the convention) I'll work on my Animé Los Angeles report.