It turns out that I adopted the right tactics about Registration. I went back in the afternoon and there was no queue at all for my line. I still haven’t got to the bottom of what went wrong, but it seems clear that the Reg staff made some daft decisions about splitting lines without taking into account which letters of the alphabet were most popular for beginning names. Also they may have been slowed down by lots of people being surprised and/or offended that they were required to present photo ID to attend a Worldcon. It was a graphic demonstration of how far Security Theater has become embedded in the psyche of anyone running an event.

The convention center is huge, and membership is pretty low (I have heard suggestions of 3,500) so the convention looks lost. I would love to be able to stage Finncon here, but Worldcon looks very thinly spread. This isn’t helped by the fact that the Exhibits people don’t appear to have anything much except the standard traveling Worldcon exhibits. The one exception to this is the Technology of Reading exhibit where Colin Hinz has done a magnificent job of providing examples of mimeo technology and printing. The actual mimeograph appears to be in good condition, so I’m very hopeful for Sunday.

My best laid plans of attending Opening Ceremonies were waylaid by getting invited out to dinner by the Locus folks. More of that in a separate post. They also sidetracked me from my intention to attend the Friendly Scandinavians party, though Gary Wolfe made up for that by offering me a sample from his bottle of Akavit, which turned out to be very nice.

Kathryn Cramer has posted photos of Peter and Elizabeth having fun at Summer Camp. It looks like a very good excuse for not being here.

The program is pretty uninspired so I have been spending the morning blogging. This is just as well as it has proved to be a very busy day on SF Awards Watch. And we have the Chesley Awards to come tonight as well.