Media West - further practical details
Jun. 4th, 2012 02:44 pm![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
franzeskaSome of the things that make cons the most annoying the first time around are also the ones people forget to leave out of con reports (and also ones the MW website fails to cover well). I enjoyed the con overall, and I encourage everyone to go, but what you'll find in this post are petty annoyances, things that perplexed me, and bitching about how things like the con suite were run:
* Airport - It's tiny, but it's easy to deal with and not far from the hotel. (No need for a group van like if you're going to Escapade from LAX.)
* Cabs - I wasn't sure if I'd have to call a cab or if there would be cabs waiting outside the airport as there usually are at larger ones. The answer is: yes, there are, but they're those solid-color minivan-looking ones that are harder to immediately identify. Wander out to the center island looking confused and the drivers will ask if you need a ride. I think it came to $34 for a shared ride to the hotel.
* Hotel shuttle - This technically exists. It's a lot easier to take it from the hotel to the airport than vice versa though. I don't remember if there's a charge, but you can make a reservation at the front desk. They were running every hour on the hour on Monday.
* Walkability of the neighborhood in general - The street in front of the con hotel has both sidewalks and crosswalks with lights. There are a couple of convenience stores right by the hotel.
* Overflow hotels - Pray you don't need these. But, yes, the "Dads Inn" (a former Days In with one letter in the dingy sign replaced with an obviously new one) looks like it would be easily walkable if you're ok with walking at all. I didn't go in, but other people have said it reminds them of those episodes of SPN with the super sketchy motels full of mysterious stains.
* Food that doesn't suck - Lots within a 5-minute drive. Nobody was walking to anything.
* Hotel restaurant - Creepy oversharing staff, bad food, and slow service. I liked their pie though. There were lots of things for ~$10.
* Room fridges - Present by default, but they're the super tiny ones that barely fit anything. Ours froze everything regardless of what part of the fridge it was in.
* Groceries - Supposedly, there was a shuttle to a couple of nearby stores, but it was running on Wednesday, early in the day Thursday, and during morning panels on Friday (so mostly useless to people flying in on Thursday like me).
* Room lottery - A moronic practice that is still in effect. OTOH, I signed up way late last year and still got a reservation by fall (the con is at the end of May). If it continues to be run like that, it shouldn't be a huge impediment.
* Hotel reservations - I couldn't figure out how to make them online. I hate calling hotels. >:( I revised my reservation from one bed to two, and there were no problems. I did have to re-tell them my roommate's name, and I checked in for both of us, so I don't know if they ever got it right.
* Key cards - There was drama with the key cards on Monday, but it seems to have just been a computer glitch (it locked us all out ~11:30, new cards didn't work, and they had to have housekeeping let everyone in to collect their luggage). However, the cards do get intentionally turned off when someone checks out--potentially a problem if you're sharing a room and aren't careful.
* Sharing rooms - They're a decent size. I dislike sharing with more than one other person, but if you wanted to save money, you could comfortably fit more in the beds or on the floor. The fridge and desk/table type surfaces in the room are more appropriate for 1 person though.
* Alarm clock - Yes, it sounds silly, but I'm giving the hotel a rave review just for the damned clock. Every other hotel, I have to flounder around and then the clock turns out to be 12 hours off so my correct alarm is now incorrect or it's woefully unclear which button actually sets the alarm. Not so here: their alarm clock was really easy to use.
* Cleaning staff - Prone to bellowing in the hallways at obscene hours of the morning. Precautionary 'do not disturb' signs highly recommended. (Well, ok, maybe more like 9am, but still. I don't expect cleaning staff until at least 10.)
* Booze - I was on medication, so I didn't investigate. I didn't see any drinking at the room parties I was at (though I wasn't really looking either).
* Hotel internet - Atrocious beyond belief. It's usually slow during cons, but I and a number of other people had trouble connecting at all. One time, it would work; five minutes later, it would repeatedly fail.
* Room tvs - Large but I hear they were too old and were hard to hook up to things? The Real Ghostbusters room party had trouble with their DVD player cords or something. Since I am a total dunce at connecting things to TVs, I do not remember the details, but this worries me from a room party perspective.
And now some more detailed thoughts, also whiny:
People start arriving at the hotel or in the area as early as Wednesday, maybe even before. Tons of people have arrived by Thursday afternoon. However, while we were supposed to be able to put up flyers starting Thursday afternoon, this got postponed until 9am Friday. BIG BIG MISTAKE. If that's a hotel policy, the con needs to negotiate. If that's going to be the policy in general, I would have appreciated advance warning. In addition to making me have to arrange my schedule differently so I could find space for my flyers, it made it much harder to find anything to do Thursday night. Room parties and room dealers often put up flyers. Most people didn't get around to decorating their doors until Friday. Most people weren't just hanging around with their doors open, and for a con with so many people, there were very few in the public areas on Thursday unless you lurked near registration. The social experience, especially for a new person would be GREATLY improved by:
1. Allowing us to get our nametags and programs starting Thursday afternoon.
2. Printing the programs some time BEFORE panels started on Friday. (They were really, really late. Dealers had theirs delivered to the dealers' room well after it had opened for business. WTF!)
3. Printing paper versions of the PDF schedule available online.
4. If the programs are going to take that long, printing out separate maps of the hotel and making them available Thursday.
5. Putting up signs listing the con suite and having the con suite open on Thursday, preferably by early afternoon
For a huge con known for room parties and for taking over the hotel, it was a surprisingly lonely experience a fair amount of the time. More than once, I wandered around and saw almost no one, found no one hanging out chatting in a public space, virtually no one in the con suite, and nothing going on in the video room. It seemed like a lot of people were ill and spent the time they weren't at a specific event/panel resting in their rooms or else they were driving to dinner. I mostly hung out with people I already knew. Next year, I think I'll have to decorate early and keep my door open Thursday night or something.
The con suite was underwhelming as was the party suite. This isn't necessarily a problem with how MWC is run either. Many of the slots for the party suite were unfilled. I'd have liked to see more people signing up to run things, but--like me--they probably knew they wouldn't have a car or any way to get party supplies. I did go to part of the Pros party (friendly, well run, nice conversations) and part of the H50 one (shave ice!). I wandered by a few other times, but there either weren't parties going on or I found them... unsocial. A well-run party suite party needs somebody playing host to spot lurking newbies and try to draw them into the room and into conversation. I walked in a couple of times and left again once it became obvious no one was going to look in my direction or say hi. It was worse in the con suite. I don't mean anyone was giving me the silent treatment or trying to ostracize me or anything; I just noticed that some of the parties and most of the groups of people in the con suite weren't producing a very... social, party-ish atmosphere.
One thing I appreciated about the Pros party was that there were vids playing, but they weren't so loud that you couldn't also talk, and no one was acting offended if you didn't stay glued to the tv. (But, on the other hand, they provided a nice distraction or topic of conversation if things were slow.) The con suite seemed to have a bunch of movies scheduled, which is absolutely deadly for socializing. I don't even much enjoy drunken MST3K group viewings, but having a full episode or movie on in the middle of the afternoon makes a space non-social by default. I would much rather have seen the video room used more effectively as the place to go hide and watch something when you didn't want to deal with people and the con suite used to promote conversation. There weren't many people hanging out in the con suite either--chicken or egg? I know what other people have said about the BASCon con suite, but I found that one really friendly, and Escapade was great. VVC and SHareCon are different in that the small amount of dealers' room stuff they have is in the same space that functions as a con suite (but because of that, I found both friendly but also full of distractions if I wasn't sure how to approach people).
When I walk into a con suite, I expect there to be someone in charge of minding it. I expect to be able to tell who that person is, and I expect them to acknowledge my presence. I do not expect to stand around awkwardly for five minutes before deciding I don't want to glue myself to what's on the tv and leaving again without speaking to anyone. I have no idea if anyone was in charge in there, but there was certainly no one making an effort to be friendly most of the times I wandered by.
The Meet & Greet would probably have been better, but I ended up finding someone to interview as soon as I arrived (oops--my own fault I missed it, but the interview was worth it). I'd have liked to have seen more activity of that variety over the course of the weekend. Yes, most people have been going to the con forever, but it's a big con, and membership does turn over to some degree: attendees can't possibly all know each other.
I guess part of what I'm noticing is the focus older types of fan-run cons have on dealers' rooms (and particularly zines, of course), the art show, and other things that I personally think of as boring shopping that takes time away from what is actually good about cons: face to face socializing.
I spent time in the dealers' room at first since Deb Walsh had kindly offered me the use of her table. It was very sweet of her! But once I'd found some interview subjects, I mostly avoided it for the rest of the weekend unless I spotted people I wanted to talk to through the door. I took one turn through the art show. There were some nice pieces on display that showed vastly more skill than I've got as an artist, but there wasn't anything I felt compelled to spend much time looking at. (Read photorealistic portraits of Sherlock and other current fan favorites but little with a design sensibility that excited me.) Most portrait art in zines bores me to death for the same reason. I'd rather see a less skilled plot-related illustration than a well-drawn but boring portrait. That's why, even though the art show is as much a display and an entertainment as place to bid, it felt like just more boring shopping to me.
I'm hoping to get more vid-related stuff going next year. I can read zines at home since I do that alone anyway. Vids, however, even vids I've already seen, can be new and fresh again when I watch them with other people.
The vid show was great. I bitched a lot about having to make DVDs, but it ended up being really fun to figure out what I wanted to put on mine. Figuring out how to make them, NOT SO MUCH. iDVD is a wretched program. Luckily for me, I was mostly bringing vids I made after switching to Final Cut Express, so I just opened my various projects, copied everything onto a single timeline (adding credits and black space), and exported as a single 20-minute video. (Yes, I made people sit through 40 minutes of my vids. What?) For some reason, I had a hard time finding the setting I wanted in iDVD even though it is dead simple. Either I was googling the wrong thing or... I don't know. I kept finding descriptions of how to make menus, which I didn't want or need (plus the default options are vile), and how to make an autoplay DVD from your camcorder. There's a third option to make an autoplay DVD from a video file, but it took me forever to figure out it was right there in the menu with the camcorder one.
I was worried since autoplay DVDs automatically loop. If I'd had more time and/or had had the slightest idea what I was doing, I'd have preferred to make something with a slick menu that wouldn't loop and that would have tracks, which are often a benefit when you don't know the equipment your DVD will be played on and being able to skip one part may be the only thing that makes it play at all. Other vidders who'd sent their work mostly did have slicker DVDs than mine, but the show is, overall, so non-slick that I didn't feel too awkward. The person running it just turned off my DVDs when the opening credits showed up again. (I know that's rather vague and judgmental terminology, but I'm thinking of the difference between, say, the Festivids panel at Escapade where I took suggestions and everyone got to see my ugly desktop in between me playing the vids and the official Escapade vidshow where everything is burned on a DVD ahead of time by the VJs and it plays as one scheduled block of entertainment. With the endless oldschool switching in and out of different people's DVDs and much laxer attitudes about talking and leaving the room, the overall effect of the MWC show is less intimidating and semi-pro seeming. At least that was my reaction.)
There was one DVD that wouldn't play. I'm sorry I never did make it to the reshowings where I hear a working copy was played. I'd have liked to have seen the smaller audiences' reactions to my stuff too, but the schedules were posted on the door to that room and not all that long ahead of time, so I kept forgetting. Being more of the vidshow than the vid contest type, I was much more interested in the first showing on Friday, naturally, since that's the one that most closely resembles the way Escapade, VVC, etc. do things. I was disappointed so few people attended the vid review though. It was nice to meet most of the other vidders (there really weren't many of us), but the one non-vidder who attended had much more interesting things to say and questions we could answer. With so few vidders total, I didn't feel that comfortable offering an opinion. Everybody's stuff was pretty fun and pretty technically accomplished. We all mentioned a couple of things by other people that we'd particularly liked. At that point, you either need more points of view or it's time to start more hardcore critique or you have nothing left to discuss. We ended up moving on to some general vidding discussion, which was cool, but I'd love to see panels explicitly on those more general topics and explicitly welcoming a wider audience.
Huh... you know... I was saying in an e-mail that it would be fun to do a vidding-themed room party. I've also been complaining that the room parties were mostly on Saturday night and mostly conflicted with each other. A Friday night post-vidshow vidding-themed room party might be just the thing, especially since nobody knows ahead of time exactly how long the vids will run (as in, the total has varied by multiple hours over the course of the con's history) so it's hard to schedule anything in a group space.
Anyway, it's a huge-ass con for a fan-run one, and it's over a three-day weekend on top of lots of people getting there early. If I could lure more vidders into going with me, we could make it a really awesome con for vidding. (Or should I say make it a really awesome con for vidding again.)
* Airport - It's tiny, but it's easy to deal with and not far from the hotel. (No need for a group van like if you're going to Escapade from LAX.)
* Cabs - I wasn't sure if I'd have to call a cab or if there would be cabs waiting outside the airport as there usually are at larger ones. The answer is: yes, there are, but they're those solid-color minivan-looking ones that are harder to immediately identify. Wander out to the center island looking confused and the drivers will ask if you need a ride. I think it came to $34 for a shared ride to the hotel.
* Hotel shuttle - This technically exists. It's a lot easier to take it from the hotel to the airport than vice versa though. I don't remember if there's a charge, but you can make a reservation at the front desk. They were running every hour on the hour on Monday.
* Walkability of the neighborhood in general - The street in front of the con hotel has both sidewalks and crosswalks with lights. There are a couple of convenience stores right by the hotel.
* Overflow hotels - Pray you don't need these. But, yes, the "Dads Inn" (a former Days In with one letter in the dingy sign replaced with an obviously new one) looks like it would be easily walkable if you're ok with walking at all. I didn't go in, but other people have said it reminds them of those episodes of SPN with the super sketchy motels full of mysterious stains.
* Food that doesn't suck - Lots within a 5-minute drive. Nobody was walking to anything.
* Hotel restaurant - Creepy oversharing staff, bad food, and slow service. I liked their pie though. There were lots of things for ~$10.
* Room fridges - Present by default, but they're the super tiny ones that barely fit anything. Ours froze everything regardless of what part of the fridge it was in.
* Groceries - Supposedly, there was a shuttle to a couple of nearby stores, but it was running on Wednesday, early in the day Thursday, and during morning panels on Friday (so mostly useless to people flying in on Thursday like me).
* Room lottery - A moronic practice that is still in effect. OTOH, I signed up way late last year and still got a reservation by fall (the con is at the end of May). If it continues to be run like that, it shouldn't be a huge impediment.
* Hotel reservations - I couldn't figure out how to make them online. I hate calling hotels. >:( I revised my reservation from one bed to two, and there were no problems. I did have to re-tell them my roommate's name, and I checked in for both of us, so I don't know if they ever got it right.
* Key cards - There was drama with the key cards on Monday, but it seems to have just been a computer glitch (it locked us all out ~11:30, new cards didn't work, and they had to have housekeeping let everyone in to collect their luggage). However, the cards do get intentionally turned off when someone checks out--potentially a problem if you're sharing a room and aren't careful.
* Sharing rooms - They're a decent size. I dislike sharing with more than one other person, but if you wanted to save money, you could comfortably fit more in the beds or on the floor. The fridge and desk/table type surfaces in the room are more appropriate for 1 person though.
* Alarm clock - Yes, it sounds silly, but I'm giving the hotel a rave review just for the damned clock. Every other hotel, I have to flounder around and then the clock turns out to be 12 hours off so my correct alarm is now incorrect or it's woefully unclear which button actually sets the alarm. Not so here: their alarm clock was really easy to use.
* Cleaning staff - Prone to bellowing in the hallways at obscene hours of the morning. Precautionary 'do not disturb' signs highly recommended. (Well, ok, maybe more like 9am, but still. I don't expect cleaning staff until at least 10.)
* Booze - I was on medication, so I didn't investigate. I didn't see any drinking at the room parties I was at (though I wasn't really looking either).
* Hotel internet - Atrocious beyond belief. It's usually slow during cons, but I and a number of other people had trouble connecting at all. One time, it would work; five minutes later, it would repeatedly fail.
* Room tvs - Large but I hear they were too old and were hard to hook up to things? The Real Ghostbusters room party had trouble with their DVD player cords or something. Since I am a total dunce at connecting things to TVs, I do not remember the details, but this worries me from a room party perspective.
And now some more detailed thoughts, also whiny:
People start arriving at the hotel or in the area as early as Wednesday, maybe even before. Tons of people have arrived by Thursday afternoon. However, while we were supposed to be able to put up flyers starting Thursday afternoon, this got postponed until 9am Friday. BIG BIG MISTAKE. If that's a hotel policy, the con needs to negotiate. If that's going to be the policy in general, I would have appreciated advance warning. In addition to making me have to arrange my schedule differently so I could find space for my flyers, it made it much harder to find anything to do Thursday night. Room parties and room dealers often put up flyers. Most people didn't get around to decorating their doors until Friday. Most people weren't just hanging around with their doors open, and for a con with so many people, there were very few in the public areas on Thursday unless you lurked near registration. The social experience, especially for a new person would be GREATLY improved by:
1. Allowing us to get our nametags and programs starting Thursday afternoon.
2. Printing the programs some time BEFORE panels started on Friday. (They were really, really late. Dealers had theirs delivered to the dealers' room well after it had opened for business. WTF!)
3. Printing paper versions of the PDF schedule available online.
4. If the programs are going to take that long, printing out separate maps of the hotel and making them available Thursday.
5. Putting up signs listing the con suite and having the con suite open on Thursday, preferably by early afternoon
For a huge con known for room parties and for taking over the hotel, it was a surprisingly lonely experience a fair amount of the time. More than once, I wandered around and saw almost no one, found no one hanging out chatting in a public space, virtually no one in the con suite, and nothing going on in the video room. It seemed like a lot of people were ill and spent the time they weren't at a specific event/panel resting in their rooms or else they were driving to dinner. I mostly hung out with people I already knew. Next year, I think I'll have to decorate early and keep my door open Thursday night or something.
The con suite was underwhelming as was the party suite. This isn't necessarily a problem with how MWC is run either. Many of the slots for the party suite were unfilled. I'd have liked to see more people signing up to run things, but--like me--they probably knew they wouldn't have a car or any way to get party supplies. I did go to part of the Pros party (friendly, well run, nice conversations) and part of the H50 one (shave ice!). I wandered by a few other times, but there either weren't parties going on or I found them... unsocial. A well-run party suite party needs somebody playing host to spot lurking newbies and try to draw them into the room and into conversation. I walked in a couple of times and left again once it became obvious no one was going to look in my direction or say hi. It was worse in the con suite. I don't mean anyone was giving me the silent treatment or trying to ostracize me or anything; I just noticed that some of the parties and most of the groups of people in the con suite weren't producing a very... social, party-ish atmosphere.
One thing I appreciated about the Pros party was that there were vids playing, but they weren't so loud that you couldn't also talk, and no one was acting offended if you didn't stay glued to the tv. (But, on the other hand, they provided a nice distraction or topic of conversation if things were slow.) The con suite seemed to have a bunch of movies scheduled, which is absolutely deadly for socializing. I don't even much enjoy drunken MST3K group viewings, but having a full episode or movie on in the middle of the afternoon makes a space non-social by default. I would much rather have seen the video room used more effectively as the place to go hide and watch something when you didn't want to deal with people and the con suite used to promote conversation. There weren't many people hanging out in the con suite either--chicken or egg? I know what other people have said about the BASCon con suite, but I found that one really friendly, and Escapade was great. VVC and SHareCon are different in that the small amount of dealers' room stuff they have is in the same space that functions as a con suite (but because of that, I found both friendly but also full of distractions if I wasn't sure how to approach people).
When I walk into a con suite, I expect there to be someone in charge of minding it. I expect to be able to tell who that person is, and I expect them to acknowledge my presence. I do not expect to stand around awkwardly for five minutes before deciding I don't want to glue myself to what's on the tv and leaving again without speaking to anyone. I have no idea if anyone was in charge in there, but there was certainly no one making an effort to be friendly most of the times I wandered by.
The Meet & Greet would probably have been better, but I ended up finding someone to interview as soon as I arrived (oops--my own fault I missed it, but the interview was worth it). I'd have liked to have seen more activity of that variety over the course of the weekend. Yes, most people have been going to the con forever, but it's a big con, and membership does turn over to some degree: attendees can't possibly all know each other.
I guess part of what I'm noticing is the focus older types of fan-run cons have on dealers' rooms (and particularly zines, of course), the art show, and other things that I personally think of as boring shopping that takes time away from what is actually good about cons: face to face socializing.
I spent time in the dealers' room at first since Deb Walsh had kindly offered me the use of her table. It was very sweet of her! But once I'd found some interview subjects, I mostly avoided it for the rest of the weekend unless I spotted people I wanted to talk to through the door. I took one turn through the art show. There were some nice pieces on display that showed vastly more skill than I've got as an artist, but there wasn't anything I felt compelled to spend much time looking at. (Read photorealistic portraits of Sherlock and other current fan favorites but little with a design sensibility that excited me.) Most portrait art in zines bores me to death for the same reason. I'd rather see a less skilled plot-related illustration than a well-drawn but boring portrait. That's why, even though the art show is as much a display and an entertainment as place to bid, it felt like just more boring shopping to me.
I'm hoping to get more vid-related stuff going next year. I can read zines at home since I do that alone anyway. Vids, however, even vids I've already seen, can be new and fresh again when I watch them with other people.
The vid show was great. I bitched a lot about having to make DVDs, but it ended up being really fun to figure out what I wanted to put on mine. Figuring out how to make them, NOT SO MUCH. iDVD is a wretched program. Luckily for me, I was mostly bringing vids I made after switching to Final Cut Express, so I just opened my various projects, copied everything onto a single timeline (adding credits and black space), and exported as a single 20-minute video. (Yes, I made people sit through 40 minutes of my vids. What?) For some reason, I had a hard time finding the setting I wanted in iDVD even though it is dead simple. Either I was googling the wrong thing or... I don't know. I kept finding descriptions of how to make menus, which I didn't want or need (plus the default options are vile), and how to make an autoplay DVD from your camcorder. There's a third option to make an autoplay DVD from a video file, but it took me forever to figure out it was right there in the menu with the camcorder one.
I was worried since autoplay DVDs automatically loop. If I'd had more time and/or had had the slightest idea what I was doing, I'd have preferred to make something with a slick menu that wouldn't loop and that would have tracks, which are often a benefit when you don't know the equipment your DVD will be played on and being able to skip one part may be the only thing that makes it play at all. Other vidders who'd sent their work mostly did have slicker DVDs than mine, but the show is, overall, so non-slick that I didn't feel too awkward. The person running it just turned off my DVDs when the opening credits showed up again. (I know that's rather vague and judgmental terminology, but I'm thinking of the difference between, say, the Festivids panel at Escapade where I took suggestions and everyone got to see my ugly desktop in between me playing the vids and the official Escapade vidshow where everything is burned on a DVD ahead of time by the VJs and it plays as one scheduled block of entertainment. With the endless oldschool switching in and out of different people's DVDs and much laxer attitudes about talking and leaving the room, the overall effect of the MWC show is less intimidating and semi-pro seeming. At least that was my reaction.)
There was one DVD that wouldn't play. I'm sorry I never did make it to the reshowings where I hear a working copy was played. I'd have liked to have seen the smaller audiences' reactions to my stuff too, but the schedules were posted on the door to that room and not all that long ahead of time, so I kept forgetting. Being more of the vidshow than the vid contest type, I was much more interested in the first showing on Friday, naturally, since that's the one that most closely resembles the way Escapade, VVC, etc. do things. I was disappointed so few people attended the vid review though. It was nice to meet most of the other vidders (there really weren't many of us), but the one non-vidder who attended had much more interesting things to say and questions we could answer. With so few vidders total, I didn't feel that comfortable offering an opinion. Everybody's stuff was pretty fun and pretty technically accomplished. We all mentioned a couple of things by other people that we'd particularly liked. At that point, you either need more points of view or it's time to start more hardcore critique or you have nothing left to discuss. We ended up moving on to some general vidding discussion, which was cool, but I'd love to see panels explicitly on those more general topics and explicitly welcoming a wider audience.
Huh... you know... I was saying in an e-mail that it would be fun to do a vidding-themed room party. I've also been complaining that the room parties were mostly on Saturday night and mostly conflicted with each other. A Friday night post-vidshow vidding-themed room party might be just the thing, especially since nobody knows ahead of time exactly how long the vids will run (as in, the total has varied by multiple hours over the course of the con's history) so it's hard to schedule anything in a group space.
Anyway, it's a huge-ass con for a fan-run one, and it's over a three-day weekend on top of lots of people getting there early. If I could lure more vidders into going with me, we could make it a really awesome con for vidding. (Or should I say make it a really awesome con for vidding again.)
no subject
Date: 2012-06-04 09:39 pm (UTC)I guess part of what I'm noticing is the focus older types of fan-run cons have on dealers' rooms (and particularly zines, of course), the art show, and other things that I personally think of as boring shopping that takes time away from what is actually good about cons: face to face socializing.
I remember loving dealers' rooms at Norwescon and the like in high school and anime cons in undergrad, it was a high point. But it was a lot harder to get stuff at the time--getting anime stuff usually involved hunting down eBay auctions by Japanese importers, and there just wasn't as much fandomy stuff in shops. The odd Hot Topic shirt was about it. Now it's everywhere, and anything you want to buy you've already got off the internet, so the dealers' rooms aren't as much of a thing.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-04 10:53 pm (UTC)Now, I'd probably want to hang out with people or watch AMVs.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-15 12:18 am (UTC)Hotel shuttle -- I called ahead of time to schedule a pick-up from the Amtrak station, and was surprised they actually had one to send (not so in years past). Then when the train was seven hours late into Chicago and the van they put me on got in at 4:30am... they still had someone available to come get me. No charge, although a tip is probably expected.
oh god, did I tip him? *headdesk*Room fridges -- there's a dial in the fridge itself that sets the temp. If it's working you can reduce the freezing to just the freezer area. Most people don't know this, though; I worked at a hotel.
Groceries -- newbies won't know, but just ask anyone you strike up a conversation with if they know anyone going to Meijers and word will get out. Most people who get there Wed/Thurs make one run, then find someone else going later in the con and hook up for additional supplies.
Room lottery -- Yeah. Ugh. Huge discussion about this going on elsewhere, doesn't look like it'll change anytime soon. It's completely unnecessary and confusing, imo and a lot of other's. You're quite possibly right that it won't be an issue for upcoming years if they don't change the way they do things.
Hotel reservations -- Now that it's a Best Western maybe their central reservation system will work for outside the block, after the block is released (I think they block the entire hotel at first, but I'm not entirely sure).
Key cards -- It wouldn't be MediaWest if there weren't key card issues.
Cleaning staff -- Again, from working at a hotel, cleaning staff is usually up and running by 9am, because they have to have rooms done and ready for new people by check-in time, and all rooms done by, say, 5pm. That's an insane amount of work for very little pay, all told. I've cleaned rooms, I know it's hard. If you tell the front desk what time you want service, they usually will pass it along to housekeeping. But people do misread charts, forget, or knock on the neighbor's door loudly anyway (and that's not to wake everyone up but to make sure the room is empty and someone's not in the shower instead -- I've walked in on naked people before who didn't hear me knock, yay. /o\ )
Booze -- People do drink, but we're all getting older and apparently hangovers just aren't as easy to recover from at our ages. Usually we just fall asleep while talking. XD
Hotel internet -- We must have been lucky, because I rarely had any issues at all. Placement of routers is a big cause of interruptions, as well as use of microwaves and where they sit in relation to you and the router.
Flyers -- Usually flyers were out on Thursday, but this year there was a teacher conference that ran into Thursday, so hotel management (such as it was) didn't want them up, I understand. (Management this year was fairly abysmal, but you take what you get, there's no control over it.)
I agree with your five suggestions regarding printing of schedules and the like. And I echo your feeling of loneliness if you are new or don't know that many people. Fortunately for me, I'm an introvert and can use the down time to recharge. But that's not everyone. MW is becoming/has become a bit closed over the years, with everyone knowing everyone (yes, it apparently is possible) and hooking up with them privately instead of in social spaces.
The con suite has always seemed unorganized and somewhat uninviting to me, three attendances in. Again, it's not intentional, but I believe the clique-ish nature of decades of attending has begun to take away from either remembering what it is to be new, or caring about new people more than conversing with old friends. For more than a few people this is their fannish moment of the year, their connection to people who grok them, and their focus is not on the strange face looking bewildered because, frankly, they're probably thinking "who is that, and do they know my fantastic fandom?" Instead of "how can I help this new member to want to come back next year?"
I love Media West. Even from just three cons, I feel very much home when I go. But I'm fearful for the future of it because an overwhelming luddite closemindedness seems to be taking hold. Hopefully it can be overcome, gently and inclusively. We'll see.
Please come back!
no subject
Date: 2012-06-15 12:29 am (UTC)have forgottenneed to know next year, and the next person who wanders by will probably be wondering the same things. :)I think the answer for me is to host more room parties! MW has a lot of potential, but--yeah--I've seen those Facebook discussions and... yeah... Any improvements I'd like to see will have to come from me or other attendees on an unofficial basis, I suspect.