Newsletter Week of 14 August 2020
Science fiction conventions are in transition. The pandemic has made in-person conventions impractical; many cons are moving into virtual space. The results have been varied, which isn't surprising—after all, in-person convention culture has been developing for 80 years. We can't expect virtual con culture to emerge full-blown in less than 6 months.
Sooner or later in-person cons will return. However, there's a growing consensus that virtual cons won't—and shouldn't—go away. The future of cons will be a fusion between in-person and virtual elements. The possibilities are endless.
But that's not what I'm writing about at the moment. I've been pondering the future of in-person cons, and I fear that a huge change might be in the offing.
On the far side of this pandemic, the landscape of the hotel business is going to be different. Many hotels—chains as well as individual operators—will go out of business. The business-travel market will probably be a fraction of the size it is now. We can probably expect that in the future there will be fewer hotels.
Which is going to have an effect on cons. Already, many hotels don't like having cons. Most hotels make the bulk of their money from catering and other food sales, not from room rentals. Cons seldom utilize catering (with the possible exception of one official banquet during a weekend) and congoers are less likely to eat at the hotel restaurant(s), preferring cheaper alternatives.
In an era with fewer hotels, will it be even harder for cons to find hotels that will host them? And if so, what alternatives are there? Fandom should be considering these questions now.
- Ripped 7 more DVDs to mp4
- Legion of Super-Heroes website: installed new theme; cataloging July 1998 comics
- Added 300 words to my memoir
- More work on the next gay erotic short story
- 250 words on Hunt for the Dymalon Cygnet
- Great Kitchen Renovation: added kAppleTV box (our third!)
Our hamster, Covid, is getting bigger. He's about 11 weeks old; we've had him a month now.
The other day, I said that one possible silver lining fo this pandemic is that it's forced many of us into the virtual plane, something that we should have been doing a decade ago. A friend countered that digital tools like Zoom didn't exist then; we'd have wasted time learning to use YouTube and other tools—so it's good that we didn't.
I've been hearing similar arguments most of my life. Thirty-five years ago, I tried to convince my Library system to start using newly-installed Apple IIe computers for wordprocessing and such (we were still in the era of typewriters, carbon paper, and index cards). The administration declined, arguing that there was no point to learning the Apple programs when in a few years we'd be getting a state-of-the-art IBM mainframe with wordprocessing software. (Spoiler: by the time the promised IBM system arrived, the microcomputer revolution was well underway; by the end of the decade PCs were in wide use.)
This reluctance to adopt new tools is counterproductive. New tools and platforms keep coming, but this inertia keeps us from taking full advantage of them. Most of us only adopt new techniques when we're forced to.
I suspect that this feeling stems from a person's first experience of learning to use software. There's generally a steep learning curve; the experience is often a painful one. The idea of learning something new is so overwhelming that people resist.
Of course (and you're way ahead of me, I imagine) that's a mistaken impression. Once you've learned to use (say) a wordprocessing program, learning the next one is easier. Learning each successive new one is even easier. I've lost track of how many different wordprocessing systems I've used (and learned) over the past 40 years, mainly because adding another has become a trivial experience.
We throw around the term "lifelong learning" with abandon, but less often practiced. Nowadays, change comes so quickly that we all have to be prepared to learn new things constantly. The days of "getting an education" as a finite process that ends with a degree are over.