A grand spectacle of a SciFi/Fantasy convention held at the Westin Waterfront Hotel in Boston, January 13-16. I offer my humble reflections on an event far too complex for a single blog.
Last year I bitched about the Green Room. It was broke, and they fixed it. This year the food was excellent (loved the beef stew!), the volunteers were friendly and helpful, and the room was kept tidy and appealing. So, credit to the organizers for doing it right. (And the souvenir book is pretty darn awesome, too, thanks to GsOH Phil and Kaja Foglio and Gareth Hinds!)
This year’s finger of shame points at the hotel which, in an act of jaw-dropping bad judgement, booked non-Arisia guests on either side of Barfleet. You know this would not end well, and it didn’t.
I missed Barfleet altogether – didn’t even have a chance to sample the Horta – because I had panels scheduled opposite the start of the party. By the time I got out, the guano had already hit the nacelle. Complaints of noise were registered by the non-Arisia guests and hotel security showed up to shut the party down. Captain Bhagczech grabbed the Horta and got it to safety before it could be confiscated. The hotel took all the rest, and left an awful lot of people very, very unhappy.
According to my informant, Will “uses his power for good and not evil” Frank, the Hotel, the Convention, and the UBS Shameless got together and discussed the matter with their respective legal advisors, then negotiated a truce of sorts, details still to be settled, but the Barship got its booze back. Lessons were learned all around from this incident, including don’t trust the hotel not to do something really stupid. It takes several hours to set up a Barfleet party, so they couldn’t just move to another suite once the complaint was lodged (and they had plenty of offers). In the future precautions will be taken before set-up to make sure there are no uptight mundanes flanking the party suite.
Read more about parties, panels, promotions and people at this year’s Arisia.
One thing you learn if you’re involved in cons — no matter how awesome, wonderful and helpful the hotel is, they are the ENEMY. They kind of have to be, because their focus is on putting bodies in rooms. We could have probably completely filled the hotel — look how many people ended up in the overflow hotel! But they booked another convention at the same time as Arisia, and then put Barfleet on a floor with non-party-floor non-Arisia people.
[...] showing on many fun panels. For a more comprehensive review, check out these blogs by my buddies, Justine Graykin, Kendra Saunders, and David [...]
SO great to meet you and have fun at Arisia. Can’t wait to see you at a future con or Broad Universe event.
-Rachel