Lessons of a BayCon Gofer: Jill of All Trades

May 16, 2015| cometary| 0 Comment | 2:49 am

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In 2014, BayCon had its traditional four days to work with, and Friday was an ease-into-the event day. This was a great time to turn up at the Gofer Hole and ask if they needed help. “Yes!” being the inevitable answer. Warning: if you try this, there ARE forms! If you are a kid, there are parental signatures required. So I signed away liability for the horrific injuries and possible death that might occur as a result of my participation in the duties of a fetch-and-carry helper in a nice hotel constructed to meet modern building codes. More likely: infection by a zombie virus, but ha on them, they didn’t mention zombie viruses in the release form.

The reward for filling out forms: my first badge ribbon of the Con. Yes, this means I am Gofer #18. Shades of Caddy Shack.

Meet Gofer #18

So what does a Gofer do? Take a deep breath, plunge in. Oh, it is soooooo difficult.

Job #1: Go to the Big Ballroom, to help set up for some event tonight. No idea what the event is. The person who called for help? He’s not there. No one knows what he wanted done. But the guy hanging lights at the Art Show needs an assistant.

Job #2: Help hang lights at the Art Show. Now, actually hanging the lights is a Skilled Job, not a Gofer job. My job is to hand cable ties to the exhausted electrical tech, whose ladder-climbs for the weekend have already gone into the triple digits. And to help spot weak links in the chain of power-strips and extension cords feeding electrons to the downlamps positioned to light the display boards for the art. Artists are already checking in, placing their work, jockeying for prime display spots in the venue. Still, we proceed up and down rows with a stepladder and a bundle of cable ties.

Job #3: The original person who wanted help is back. He needs a banner snapped onto a big framework thingy. It’s a multi-gofer job that takes some cooperation, especially amusing as none of us assisting with this thing have any idea what it’s for. My engineering brain helps with figuring out the layout itself, and we get the fabric stretched out nicely, but my partner gets to actually do most of the actual attachment, since there is a power element to the task.

Job #4: Hang around in the Gofer Hole, being On Call. Seriously, being available counts as working. Yes, indeed, this is even better than counting billable hours in my consulting practice. Dang, if only I could bill clients for time I’m home & my phone and email connections are working. There are snacks here—bagels, mmmm. And electrical outlets, so I can plug in my netbook & work on a Messy Monday project.

Job #5: Schlep groceries for a party. Some longtime VIP staffers are having a private party. Their goodies for the party are stowed in the Gofer Hole. We On-Call Gofers have the hugely easy job of carrying the goodies a hundred feet down the hall. [Hint: helping with a party does entitle one to partake of the party. Generally speaking. I did not take part, having a prior engagement with a soda machine.]

Job #6: Load sodas into the Charity Soda Machine. This is a magical device in the Games Room that converts geeks’ need for carbonated sugar- or aspartame-water into monies for this year’s charity fundraising. I was briefly concerned that I would run into difficulties with my limited weight-lifting capabilities. But the job soon devolves into a three-stage process free of excessive lifting:

Stage A: Wander about looking for the Keeper of the Soda-Machine Keys.

Stage B: Wait for the Individual Authorized to Use the Humungous Hand Truck

Stage C: Leave when Keeper of the Machine appears and disavows any need for help

Job #7: Build a LARP set. Someone has created a live-action role-playing version of a card-based game called “Kill Dr. Lucky”. This is a game I have never heard of, but someone has gone to great lengths to build an accurate, room-sized playing field that live humans can walk about on as if they are playing pieces in the game. Our mission: assist this charismatic lunatic by moving chairs out of the way, laying out the sheets his friend has carefully marked out with lines and labels, getting each in proper orientation to the other and smoothing out the boundaries with tape. By the time we are done, I’m determined to show up and try out this LARPing thing.

And by this time, I’ve put in totally enough time as a Gofer for one day, while the activities I’m least interested in on the program are conveniently over.

My Very Own Ray Gun

I have time to dash up to the DIY room before dinnertime and make myself a cool ray gun by artistically decorating a plastic gun with gold and silver and red and purple and green Sharpies. It is my favorite toy already. So shiny.

And I wouldn’t want anyone to think one has to devote the entire day just Gofering about. I did skip an hour of possible On-Call credit for a panel on the relative merits of James Bond and Doctor Who. And regretted it. There is no contest. Doctor Who is way, way cooler than James Bond, but the panel was mostly a bunch of guys keen on car chases in movies.

Finally, yes, I did get to play Kill Dr. Lucky. It was super fun, and while I cannot claim to be the One Who Did the Deed, the evil Dr. L was indeed assassinated. Here is our team’s creative enactment of the impending demise of the successful assassin.

Let’s Get Doctor Lucky’s Killer

Gofer Lesson of the Day: Sign up early & there will be lots of easy jobs to do while the con is barely getting started. There’s never a dull moment, or if there is, you can get credit for working by napping while On Call. And don’t leave home without a suitable weapon.

Have Ray Gun, Will LARP

An Update: Time-Travel to 2012An Update: Time-Travel to 2012

So I’m watching the fake Late Late Show (forever fake, now that Craig has left) & suddenly Replacement Guest Host is doing make-your-own-comet with a Guest Astronomer. I’m wondering if I could charge them with stealing my work, but, well Derrick Pitts probably doesn’t need to be getting ideas from the Invisible Blog of Doom. On checking back to my own posting from late 2012, I find the following:

1) Mine has decent classroom-management tips and includes explanations of why each substance is being added in, and theirs does not. Plus, they use Coca-Cola, which isn’t a such good idea for a school science demo. (Wayne Brady does demonstrate exactly what students will do with a can of soda.)

2) Mine is totally missing its visuals. I took photos the last couple of times I did this demo. Where are they? Aaaaagh!

Four days later, I’ve found the missing files, carefully stored on a clearly-labeled DVD backup disk in a plastic box in my office. Under another box. With a scattering of old DVD’s, mending, receipts, and old concert tickets on top of that. Plus dust.

A comet-building group at a Lyceum of Silicon Valley workshop

And, ta-da! My comet project update is complete. I’ve even learned how to embed a link to the Late Late Show’s YouTube channel on the appropriate blog post. Time-travel to here and have your own cometary fun. Remember to keep things safe but still keep the fun in science.

Translations In the Real World
(Photo by Tflanagan at KSU, Saudi Arabia,
Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0)

One of the first things people ask me when they read certain of my stories is “What’s the right way to pronounce all these weird words?” My stock answer is: “However you like! It’s all made up, whatever sounds right inside your head is fine by me.”

Starting the process of doing an audio book for All That Was Asked has forced me to face the fact that, well, really there is a “right” way. For one thing, the story centers on language–in fact, the working title of the book was “Translations by Ansegwe.” In general, for the stories where I have a made-up culture with their own language or an “evolved” culture that’s grown from more-or-less familiar cultures but uses a language other than English as their root language, I do know how those words should be pronounced. I’m that wonky sort that blows off an entire afternoon at Worldcon to attend a linguistics workshop, so, well, that’s where I’m coming from.

In the real world, I know French pretty well, I watch a lot of foreign-language TV (though of course I’m relying on subtitles), I live in place where I hear Spanish and Russian regularly, and I have technical-world acquaintances with a great variety of language “homes” from India to Europe to Africa to both Chinas. I’ve struggled to learn a smattering of my culture-base language–Gaelic. And I grew up being hauled around to various places in the U.S. and England. I even still “hear” (and alas for spell-checkers, spell) most English as Brit-style. End result: I love the interplay of languages and the way everyone talks. I do not claim to be a polyglot, but I’m a diligent researcher and I just love all those sounds.

In my writing, most of the problematic words are names, because I think of such stories as having been “translated” from the alien/alternate history language set. Names tend to get left over after a translation, because even if I’m translating a story from French to English, I wouldn’t change “Tourenne” to “Terence” or “Gervais” to Gerald, because a) the names aren’t really the same and b) the sounds of names add the flavor of a language without requiring a reader to actually know a foreign tongue directly. Spoiler? My current work-in-progress has characters named Tourenne and Gervais, and they live in a francophone culture that doesn’t exist anywhere in the real world.

In the made-up language base for All That Was Asked, I have lots of names for people, place-names from more than one country in the alternate-universe world, and a few name-based terms. (The academic types in the story have dreams of winning their version of the Nobel prize, so they talk about it a lot. The Nobel prize is named for a person, but . . . it’s a thing.) I wanted the central names to make sense, to have relateable sounds, and to have some commonalities. For instance, in English we have a lot of names that end in ‘-y’. I selected some sound elements that would fit into different names and tried to make them sound like they came from a distinct self-contained culture–except for a few names I made up specifically to sound like another culture, in the same world.

I decided on a family-personal naming order that made sense for the culture–Family first, Personal second, and most people refer to each other and address each other by their personal names, because everyone knows what family everyone else belongs to. And I made names longer than we’re used to in English. In our culture “power names” tend to be short, in theirs, most people have multisyllable names, and powerful people tend to have longer names.

For other sets of words in this story, ones that are “translated” to English, I “hear” the words in British/European English rather than American English, because that fits better with the social style of the people and gives it a little bit of distance for American readers. It may sound really fussy–especially for such a short little book–but I think having a clear auditory sense going into it helped me with building the alien culture. I just have to hope it carries through to readers and listeners–not a burden to cope with but an added feature of the story.

In my next post, I’ll give you a blow-by-blow pronunciation guide for All That Was Asked, with a few background bits to liven it up a bit.

The pre-midnight roll-out

One thing about the global economy…it’s January 31st in some places already. Barnes and Noble has the paper editions as well as the Nook version ready to go.

Get it at Barnes and Noble

Meanwhile, Amazon is lagging behind, with just the Kindle version and it still is tagged as “preorder” . . . in the U.S. C’mon Jeff, don’t you want more money for your rocketship project? UPDATE: Amazon is up, in Kindle and Trade Paperback editions.

But you can download it from Amazon’s sites for the UK or India.

And it’s up at Canada’s Biggest Bookstore, !ndigo.

And in Australia at Angus & Robertson.

No problems at Smashwords, either.

And you can use Paper Angel as a home base, plus a place to read the sample or order a signed copy direct from the publisher.

My favorite, though, is the listing on Rakuten-Japan. Though of course it’s on “regular” Rakuten, too (i.e., Kobo).

Lessons of a BayCon Gofer: Jill of All Trades

You might also like to read:

An Update: Time-Travel to 2012An Update: Time-Travel to 2012

What’s with the weird words?What’s with the weird words?

. . . GO! “All That Was Asked” is out, now!. . . GO! “All That Was Asked” is out, now!

The pre-midnight roll-out