Last Year I Tried to Volunteer at the Hugos

Last year a buddy of mine mentioned a big convention happening about 30 minutes from where I lived. I knew nothing about it, except that it was a big Geek thing. I study videogame culture, but Geek culture mixes with it a great deal. In some cases you hardly know where one starts, and the other begins.

This wasn’t my usual thing where I came in months ahead, and got contacts, and information to plan things out. In fact, I would have to start going the very next day to help set up. A quick email, and some info was all I had, and that enough for me to find the place, and try to get in. I should have realized something was up when they told me they didn’t validate parking. Then they said I had to come back because my slippers were not work approved. Before you ask, yes, I wear slippers when moving 600 pound arcade machines. I politely asked what there was to do that didn’t involve heavy machinery. They told me to come back with shoes on.

“This is not the place to start burning bridges,” said one lady.

So I went back home, put on shoes, and tried to sign up again. Then they told me I owed them money. If I wanted to attend the convention, I owed them $140. Now they were willing to reimburse me about $100 after the show was over for the hours of service I was about to help them with, but this caught me with a lot of shock. One of the reasons why I volunteer is it gets me into places without me having to pay. The more I did the math, the cheap easy convention I was expecting was not appearing. I had others I needed to save up for, and this one was a sudden thing.

The first thing I helped out with was move electric scooters to their needed spot. There were about 80 of them, which was a big surprise for me. We had to ride them, and then park at a specific spot on the convention floor. One of the people who delivered the scooters asked what was going on, it seems someone yelled at her for being unsafe. I was trying to pop a wheelie, or do some sliding with mine. Sadly they would sooner just throw you off. We joked that there should be a scooter race at the end with bananas and stuff.

I then helped out making frame boards for an art show. These were the stands for the show, not just the wooden frames around the art. It was all pretty ingenious and cheap to make. It took ten people to put all of the stands up, strap things properly together, and then put up lights. The major problem was the frame boards had to be properly placed so they were straight, which is hard using zip ties and PVC pipe to hold them up. We talked about why we were there, and I ended up sitting with one of them for lunch.

She was a history major who specialized in Constitutional history. Her thesis was on a very narrow subject because of how much writing there is on the subject. I had to theorize a lot with mine because of how much there wasn’t written about it.

I had a hot dog, because that was about as much as my food voucher allowed.

Then we helped move items for the big feast that was going to happen that night. The cook was told there would be 200 people attending this meal, and he hadn’t really been told until right then. He was pretty pissed off.

We moved the food to a single hotel room which got more and more crowded as items came in. There was no refrigeration, because very little had been expected beforehand. It was heavy work, and we moved giant wheeled items through a hotel lobby, up elevators, and to the room.

After it was set up, I went home, and looked up the show.

Guess what? It was the freaking Hugos! I’m not joking, I had just walked into the huge mess without really knowing. I looked up the awards for emails, and caught some glimpses of something the day before, but thought it couldn’t be that bad.

The next day I helped out with setting up two booths, and the Hugo awards. A friend of mine was really jealous of the whole thing. I got to handle the Hugos. More precisely, I got to unwrap them, and put them up on display. Instagram and Twitter were full of people that felt in awe of being in their presence, and I got to touch them.

The problem is, I unwrapped them. The Hugos are a rocket cylinder shape going back to the olden days of how we thought of space exploration. I had to shake them slightly to get them out of the wrapping, and carefully cut the tip sometimes. This was probably the hardest thing to not laugh at.

One guy told me how each one was designed. One of the awards had an actual part of a NASA spaceship on it. Others were designed to reference the country of where the award was being presented. The Japanese Hugo was a giant robot.

My web search from the night before made me realize that this award was the one authors were getting into huge fights over. Apparently a new group started to introduce new ideas, and forms for the show, and the old stalwarts didn’t like it.

I got a hint of it in conversations around me. People kept saying that there were people voting that really shouldn’t, or that they were attacking the heritage of the award. Only certain people knew the truth of the show.

I helped with the art some more, and then tried to talk to the heads about why I needed to pay for admission? They told me it was all volunteer run, and that everyone paid. It was hard to find the right folks because balding middle aged man was describing half the population. Saying they could lose a few pounds did not help any either.

I didn’t have the money, so I walked away. I found out about awards being given to the “not true fans” that were in the shape of sphincters, and the official awards gave them nothing.

This was especially sad for me, because so many people seemed kind and wonderful. I was given water, and many of them honestly loved helping out.

What I caught, was that most of the people were stuck in their way a bit. One person said she didn’t know how to run Windows, because she was accustomed to Unix. Besides a few, the most recent books were published in the 80’s in the major book display, and the toys around it were when Star Wars first hit theaters. The displays, and ideas were entirely about thoughts from that era.

The people complaining about it weren’t much younger either. The entire thing was from middle aged folks and older yelling at each other. It was sad, and difficult to watch.

BTW, the amount of people that showed up at the 200 person feast was 5. I had a dinner ready to go at home, and was sort of bewildered by what all went on that day.

Between this, and the Gamergate issues, I ended up not wanting to talk about what I saw or heard. In fact, I was sort of scared. These were people that honestly felt they were doing the right thing by destroying each other. There is a joke that Academia is full of fights because none of it matters.

I am writing about all of this now, because the Hugos just had their big nominations. No one seems to care who was nominated, and the big winner seems to be Space Raptor Butt Invasion. Last year, the majority of outsiders tried to be strong, but still show pride in the show. Because of how badly it went last year, the people who just want it to burn have taken charge.

Even going into some of the things I realized sort of scares me. I don’t want that horribleness to hit me, especially by people who I honestly thought were nice and sweet. Add on to that a ton of responsibilities, and horrors and I just stopped wanting to write. My sister had brain surgery around the same time.

There is another award show called Dragon awards, and they do have a larger amount of people arriving for it. The politics aren’t as involved, and I sort of want to see what else will be done. As for me, I’m starting to want to write about it, simply because I don’t think anyone will attack me about something from a year ago.