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I finally made it to a Westercon! It’s been years since I’ve been to a general science-fiction/fantasy convention. The last one was WorldCon/LACon IV in 2006, but I was distracted by a summer cold and lots of DayQuil. Before that was the last Loscon I attended in 2002. So while I remembered how this sort of event is usually run, I wasn’t sure what to expect.

A Bit of Background

Westercon is a fan-run convention that travels around the western United States and Canada, similar to WorldCon on a smaller scale. It’s usually held during the Fourth of July weekend. This year it was held in Pasadena, California, and combined with the filk convention ConChord 23 to form WesterChord, Westerconchord, or simply Confirmation.

I’ve been to a couple of Westercons, but not anything you’d call recent. I remember attending one in San Diego and one in Anaheim, having a dinosaur-themed T-shirt from one year, and picking up a particular issue of The New Teen Titans in San Diego, so I think the two I attended were San Diego in 1986 and “Conosaurus” in Anaheim in 1989. Yes, it’s been twenty years since my last Westercon!

Location

I had no trouble finding the Pasadena Hilton, but getting inside was a little tricky. The entryway was under construction, so they were routing people through one of the ballrooms, which had been set up for some sort of banquet. (More about that later.) The hotel was vaguely familiar from my memories of Loscon in the 1980s, but has been remodeled to add a coffee shop and a restaurant in the middle of the conference center. The Starbucks was most welcome, though the con was good at making sure pitchers of water and plastic cups were available in each panel room and the main hall.

Since I was only there for the day, I didn’t explore the area looking for restaurants or other activities. I just relied on Starbucks and the ad-hoc pizza, sandwich, pastry and salad counter that had been set up across the way.

Anyway, I found registration easily, but the onsite sign-up forms were on a table behind a planter. I wasn’t the only one who walked straight past them.

Impressions

It was a much smaller convention than I’ve become used to in years of attending the big comic-book events like Comic-Con International, WonderCon, and Wizard World. Even Long Beach Comic Con pulled in 6,300 people its first year, but I’d count the attendance here in the hundreds.

Attendees were also older than Comic-Con on average, mostly 50+ rather than mostly around 30. Certainly there were plenty of younger fans at Westercon, and there are plenty of older fans at Comic-Con, but there does seem to be a generation gap of sorts between the two types of conventions, at least in the southern California area. At least this con seemed more alive than the last few Loscons I attended — and a lot less bitter!

Maybe it’s the literary focus. LASFS has always been very book-oriented, and there were a lot of writers among the con guests. One of the book dealers even had an entire shelf set aside for books by authors who were guests at the con.

Continue reading →

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We went to Laguna Beach last night for the fireworks display, starting with dinner at Ocean Avenue and moving down to the beach at sunset. They shoot the fireworks out over the bluffs, making the beach a prime viewing spot. We could also see the fireworks from Dana Point and Newport Beach lighting up the cloud layer.

It was crowded as usual, and I managed to get my legs soaked when I was standing out where I thought I was safe from the waves, but even with the cloud cover and offshore breeze it wasn’t too cold after nightfall. (Yes, it cools down at night even in July next to the ocean.)

Last year I experimented with the fireworks setting on my camera. This year I just braced it, pointed it roughly in the right direction, and hit the button every once in a while and just watched the show. I ended up with about a dozen photos worth sharing.

Afterward we stopped at Dolce Gelato for ice cream, where I learned that cookies and cream does not always mean Oreo or chocolate wafers (they make theirs with Italian crostatas), but plain cream gelato goes really well with berry sorbet!

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Most cities in Orange County have banned the sale and setting off of fireworks to and by the general public for safety reasons. Of course, fireworks are an Independence Day tradition, so most cities also put on professional displays on the Fourth of July.

But a lot of people like the hands-on experience of setting off fireworks themselves. This leaves them with three choices:

  1. Go somewhere where setting off your own fireworks is legal.
  2. Shrug it off.
  3. Sneak around and hope you don’t get caught.

#1 is getting harder all the time as more cities clamp down on fireworks. #2, I imagine, is unsatisfying. #3 is stupid, because chances are pretty good that you’ll either get unsafe fireworks, or use them unsafely (because you’re trying to hide the fact that you’re setting off explosives), and end up burning someone, or burning their house down, or starting a 75-acre brush fire because you went out into the boonies in hopes that no one would catch you, but didn’t think about the fact that you were surrounded by dry grass.

So here’s my proposal:

If you’re going to ban fireworks, instead of banning them outright, set aside a designated area where people can set them off themselves.. Fairgrounds and/or large parking lots would be good for this. The Great Park, perhaps? Keep fire crews on standby. Limit the number of people so that you can evacuate safely if something goes wrong. Limit the types of fireworks people are allowed to bring in so that it’s hard for them to bring in homemade crap that’s more likely to blow off their hands than make a nice show.

It will never happen in today’s litigious society, of course. The first time someone broke the rules and someone else got hurt, people would start suing the city because it should have been safe! Even if it was a private company running the event, they’d get sued, along with the property owner for allowing it to happen, and the city for allowing them to run it in the first place.

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I am so tired of “critiques” that boil down to one of the following:

  1. I have no use for or interest in this, therefore no-one does or should.
  2. Pop culture was so much better during my formative years than the crap they put out today.

These are, to put it mildly, a load of bull.

1. So you don’t have a use for it. Other people have different interests than you do. They also have different needs than you do. You might not need a roto-rooter, but a plumber is going to find it very useful.

This one really infuriates me when it comes from supposed techies. So you don’t have a use for a touchscreen with your giant desktop setup with a wall of six monitors. That doesn’t mean touchscreens can’t be useful on, say, handheld devices, or a small wall unit in the kitchen. There’s a reason this xkcd strip rings true.

2. There was plenty of crap back in the day, too. You’ve just had time to forget the mediocre, while the good stuff has stood the test of time. Not everyone who wrote plays during Shakespeare’s time was a great playwright, and not every movie produced before Star Wars was a great work of art.

Plus, y’know, they were your formative years. Of course you’re going to like stuff from that era better, because that’s what shaped your tastes.

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The parking lots at The District in Tustin, and the streets that run through them, are just plain horrible. They’re bad enough, in fact, that the last time we were there*, it wasn’t clear at first that the reason traffic was moving so slowly was that it was working around a car accident.

As I slowly drove past the crashed Lexus, we both looked toward it…and burst out laughing.

I felt awful for it…but the license plate was DIMWIT1.

Bonus in-joke: Katie asked me where the other two were.

*June 13, for the record.

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Firefox has been testing a new release that detects and closes crashed plugins (instead of letting them crash Firefox entirely) for several months, carefully making sure everything was working before they released Firefox 3.6.4 last week.

Within days, they released an update. I couldn’t imagine what they might have missed in all the beta testing. Katie wondered if the beta testers hadn’t been testing the limits.

You want to know what convinced Mozilla to issue an update so quickly?

Farmville.

Apparently Firefox was detecting Farmville as frozen and closing it. It turns out that on many computers, Farmville regularly freezes up the browser for longer than 10 seconds, and its players just deal with it and wait for it to come back. Mozilla decided that the simplest thing to do would be to increase the time limit.

What this tells me is that the type of person willing to beta-test a web browser these days is not likely to be playing Farmville — or if they are, it’s likely to be on a bleeding-edge computer that can handle it without 10-second freezes.

In more practical terms: Mozilla needs to convince a wider variety of users to help test their software!