habemus condominium, et cetera

Important news first: we have a place to live. We're moving out to New Westminster, two towns over. The new place is thirty-one floors up and directly on top of the Skytrain station. It's a little less nice than the current apartment but only a little: electric stove & fireplace instead of gas, no awesome superfast internet, office space will be awkward to figure out. It's got a decent-sized balcony, which is nice, and a view of the Fraser river (and, on clear days, Mt Baker) instead of Stanley Park / North Shore, which is a slight negative. Most importantly it's saving us a grand a month in rent.

In retrospect I'm a little bit sad to be living *directly* on top of the Skytrain; I would have enjoyed a short walk home after events. More importantly, I don't know what living in New West as opposed to downtown will feel like. Most of the people I want to see are out there, but most of the stuff I want to do (shows, the independent/artsy movie theatres, Stanley Park) are towards downtown. Will try it for a year or so, see how it goes. I expect we'll be fine out there.

Lease starts in August so we have a full month of paying double rent (boo) and getting the move sorted out (yay).

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Over the weekend my aunt Susan came up from Atlanta to visit. Rather, she came up from Seattle since she was already visiting out there, but close enough. She got roped into games on Satyrday, which she seemed to like pretty well, and then dragged out to Chinatown and Granville Island on Sunday.

I like Susan pretty well. She's... I was going to say 'prickly' but that's not exactly right. I don't know how to describe her. I think it's to do with having lived with a bit of loneliness for so long that you get almost but not completely used to it. Or I might be projecting.

Regardless, we had a really good time. We (well, she) found a store in Chinatown that I've walked past dozens of times and never stopped in, that's full of fascinating stuff. I'd call it a junk shop except that they know what they've got and want real money for it. Example: an old laboratory glass bottle of HCl, where the label is made of raised glass letters on the bottle itself (awesome!), for $35 (yow!). And we poked in shops and galleries and wandered all over the place, and talked about all manner of things, and avoided roasting in the heat.

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We'd made plans to go camping this weekend, but the combination of "fire ban" due to weeks of heat and drought, plus "rain saturday through monday" made that look like a less good idea. Stupid weather. Instead, tomorrow we're going off to what appears to be a live-action version of Myst. Will report back.

wiscon, i am disappoint

At Wiscon last year (2013), Elise Matthesen filed a harassment report against Jim Frenkel, a senior editor at Tor Books.

This official report seems to have triggered a whole slew of additional (mostly unofficial) reports, enough that the end result was for Frenkel and Tor Books to part ways.

Frenkel returned to WisCon this year (2014), and much hubbub was raised. In the process of the hubbub, it came out that the Wiscon concom had 1) "lost" a report of harassment by another individual, and 2) spread false information about Elise's harassment report.

To their credit, Wiscon, having exhausted all other options, started doing what looked like it might be the right thing: they formed a committee to look into l'affaire Frenkel.

The committee released its report today. (Linking to James Nicoll rather than directly to the report as there's some good discussion and interesting backstory in his comments. Summary: Frenkel is definitely banned from Wiscon 2015, and *maybe* for up to three years after.)

This... would seem to be insufficient, and a privileging of the rights of the accused over those of the harassed. It's like, to paraphrase someone (vschanoes?) in James's comments earlier, they saw the Readercon debacle, and rather than saying "oh, we should do something to make sure that doesn't happen here!" said "thank god we're awesome enough that that will never happen here!"

A number of people have already declared their intention to not return to Wiscon next year. Elise, I believe, is going to Balticon instead.

Well. Balticon is certainly more convenient if I'm already in the DC area in May. And it has the likely advantage of sorcyress, as well as members of my former writing group. And next year is a long way off.

I don't know what I'm doing. But... I didn't expect to say that. I didn't expect to ever say "I don't know if I'll make Wiscon this year."

Grr.