August 21 2002 RussCon Report

News

ArmadilloCon was enjoyable in its low-key shadow-of-its-former-self kind of way. Jay did not make it to Austin after all. Artist guests Scott Kurtz and Frank Cho were fun, and John Picacio was very friendly and informative on panels; he makes cool assemblage art inspired by Cornell boxes (not to be confused with Tim and Sarah boxes). Whendy and Jennifer organized a writers workshop as usual which had a huge turnout. There was a panel about e-books which left me with the impression e-books are like an Amway pyramid scheme, and the only people who buy e-books are the people who are also trying to sell e-books. Especially after one of the panelists, when pressed, admitted that after selling about 20 novels online over the past 3 or 4 years, she'd actually only made about $150 from it. Do any RussCon readers buy e-books (either pay to download a novel and read it electronically, or pay for print-on-demand?) I can see the latter being more likely. But reading electronically still seems years off to me. Screen resolutions just suck compared to the printed page, especially for art. But maybe that's just me.

Thursday some of us will see the unusual looking movie Baraka at the Paramount. I also recommend Soderbergh's new film Full Frontal if you enjoy experimental/DV/ensemble movies like The Anniversary Party or Time Code (which it reminded me of).

I heard that PJ had problems due to changing services or some such, hence place.org was down for about a week. The RussCon Management apologizes for any frustration you had trying to reach the RussCon website.

Meta Game

Be Just Like Russ

Naturally you want to be just like me. Who wouldn't?! So whoever's ratings are closest to mine for the August 21 RussCon will be the Meta Devil. More formally, I'll compute the sum of the squares of the differences between your log-normalized ratings and mine (for rank rating and win rating). E.g. if my win rating and rank rating are both 0, and yours are 1 and -2, your meta score will be 5. Lowest score wins. I will be sporting and exclude myself from the running to keep things from being rather trivial. Ties broken randomly.

Daniel's meta score is 0.9917; everyone else's is greater than 1 (since their win ratings are more than 1 away from mine). So Daniel is the Meta Devil and will design next week's Meta Game!

New Multiplicative Rank Ratings:    
 2.1203 8.3333 Daniel (4)
 2.0794 8.0000 JeffF (3)
 1.8971 6.6667 William (4)
 1.7918 6.0000 RussW (4)
 1.5041 4.5000 BradS (4)
 1.3863 4.0000 JP (4)
 0.9163 2.5000 Fina (2)
 0.9163 2.5000 Steve (4)
 0.6931 2.0000 Marty (1)
 0.4055 1.5000 BobR (3)
 0.2877 1.3333 Kara (4)
 0.2877 1.3333 Clayton (1)
-0.2877 0.7500 MarkY (3)
-0.2877 0.7500 Whindy (4)
-0.4463 0.6400 MarkH (3)
-0.6931 0.5000 JimG (1)
-0.6931 0.5000 Brady (2)
-0.6931 0.5000 JonathanC (2)
-2.3026 0.1000 Dan (4)
-2.4849 0.0833 Zack (4)
-2.7726 0.0625 Whendy (3)
-3.4657 0.0313 Carly (4)

New Multiplicative Win Ratings:
 3.1781 24.0000 RussW won 2 of 4
 2.2380 9.3750 Daniel won 2 of 4
 1.3863 4.0000 BobR won 1 of 3
 1.3218 3.7500 Fina won 1 of 2
 1.2040 3.3333 MarkY won 1 of 3
 1.0217 2.7778 MarkH won 1 of 3
 0.7985 2.2222 William won 1 of 4
 0.5108 1.6667 Zack won 1 of 4
 0.4055 1.5000 Kara won 1 of 4
 0.2469 1.2800 JeffF won 1 of 3
 0.2469 1.2800 JP won 1 of 4
 0.2356 1.2656 BradS won 1 of 4
-0.0408 0.9600 Whindy won 1 of 4
-0.0408 0.9600 Dan won 1 of 4
-0.1823 0.8333 Clayton won 0 of 1
-0.2231 0.8000 Marty won 0 of 1
-0.2231 0.8000 JimG won 0 of 1
-0.4055 0.6667 Brady won 0 of 2
-0.4463 0.6400 JonathanC won 0 of 2
-0.5878 0.5556 Whendy won 0 of 3
-0.7701 0.4630 Steve won 0 of 4
-1.2685 0.2813 Carly won 0 of 4