What I Did With My Weekend

[jducoeur]

So, this is the spot where there should have been an Arisia '22 post. Unfortunately, the timing of Omicron was almost perfectly bad, so the Chair Team had to cancel the convention on very short notice, after negotiating things with the hotel so that we don't get sued out of existence.

(Reminder for future-me reading this, years down the road: Omicron was the "tidal wave" variant of Covid-19 that swept the world in early 2022. It currently looks to be a little less deadly than the more "traditional" forms, but is vastly more contagious, with the result that a large fraction of the people in the Northeast currently have it. It's a bad time to hold a mass gathering. Anyway...)

With less than a week before runtime, there was no way we could move to a full-scale v-con the way we did for A'21; besides that, the Remote Team for A'21 was still a little burned out, having collectively put in thousands of hours of work creating that experience. It was great, but it was also hard.

But it would have been mournful not to do something, so Gail basically did an impromptu, "Let's build a barn!" for those who were willing. Arisia was formally cancelled, but in its place we held ACOG, the Arisia Community Online Gathering.

tl;dr -- that didn't suck.

Having so little time, ACOG wasn't remotely as ambitious as A'21; indeed, we didn't even call it a v-con. But in practice, it kind of turned into one.

They already had a Discord server partway set up for A'22, so that got repurposed for ACOG, as did things like the SignUpGenius account that Gaming had been planning on using, which wound up getting used to set up things like Help Desk and Moderators. Discord became the centerpoint for ACOG, much as it had been for A'21, and that was helpful: some of the better innovations from A'21 fell right back into place, including the #at-the-westin quasi-LARP (narrate what you are doing right now at the convention that doesn't exist) and #ten-forward (the 18+ channel where you could order e-drinks and snacks from the friendly local @bartender-bot, and mind the occasional animated coyote falling through the ceiling).

Gaming was, of course, very active -- the Minecraft server that had always been part of the A'22 plans was front and center, and a lot of online games sprang up. (Not least, because that is Gail's thing.) Streaming wound up a fairly major deal this year, with a bunch of sessions on Twitch and multiple excellent dance parties. (Not least, because that is Anna's thing, and she was very much Gail's partner-in-crime in pulling this together. And note to myself: DJXero spins a really great dance party.) Hobbit decided that there should be a music track, so he went off and built a separate Discord server specifically optimized for that, and gradually enticed folks over there to do some singing.

As for me, it was a surprisingly mellow weekend -- since there was no A'22, there was no Press, which means that I was not on-duty all weekend the way I usually am. (And, sadly, no Renaissance Ball outside of #at-the-westin.)

But I was part of the Remote Team (just not running it this year, and not doing any coding), so Gail asked me to help keep folks apprised of what was going on. We had "On the 50s" -- announcements of what was coming up, ten minutes before the start of each hour -- but she asked me to do a twice-daily "What's New" to supplement that.

As is my wont, I looked at it and said, "Sure, I could just list things -- but that's boring. We should make something chattier, that gets folks excited about stuff to come. And we could include news about what's going on around ACOG, and announcements and such. Andandand... I've just reinvented Clear Ether, haven't I?"

Hence, my main focus for the weekend was writing and editing The Erisian, the newsletter for the "con". I turned on Enthusiasm-Brain and went into Publicity Mode, which I haven't pulled out in quite a while but used to be quite good at.

It was rather fun, and over the course of four issues wound up being a sort of loose historical record of the event -- incomplete, but covering most of the highlights of what was going on. If you're curious, check it out!

(Frankly, it was enough fun that I'm tempted to get involved with the running of Clear Ether when things go back to normal. I've been doing Press Liaison forever, and could use a change.)

Anyway: what could have been a depressing weekend wound up being a rather fun one. It was more of a low-intensity relaxacon than the firehose of activity that is Arisia proper, but there was still constant chatter, things to do, and people getting to hang out and get their weird on. It was only maybe a third the experience of A'21 -- but was under 10% of the effort, so the bang for the buck was pretty good.

So -- one for the win column. Hopefully next year, circumstances will allow us to hold Arisia for reals...