JULY 17, 2024 – NASFIC MINUS ONE
Well, here we are in Buffalo, nine hours travel to get here. Checked into the hotel, napped for an hour. Travel always takes it out of me.
Then I wandered around outside the hotel, to get a grasp of the Convention geography. Then headed outside to experience downtown Buffalo and get my 11,000 steps in.
It was an odd experience – the downtown was empty on a late Wednesday afternoon. I barely saw anyone. Buffalo is about 300,000. The Buffalo-Niagara Metropolitan area is about 1.2 million. So about the size of Winnipeg. But the streets were shockingly vacant. It was peculiar. As it turned out, through the whole of my trip to Buffalo, whenever I went out, wherever I went, even looking out through the hotel windows, the downtown was always remarkably empty. There were people and cars now and then, but nowhere near what you’d expect for an urban downtown.
I had mixed impressions. There’s a lot of grand ambitious buildings, mostly early 20th century from the looks. From the era when steel frame construction was coming in, but the look and feel of the previous eras when all you had to work with was stone and beams is apparent. You can spot the difference, the old ‘stone and beam’ buildings have arches everywhere in door and window frames to redistribute weight. Steel buildings don’t need that, the steel carries the weight, so square windows, everything is a bit more blocky.
And big. Some seriously colossal buildings for the era. There were limits to how big you could go with nothing but stone, but with steel frames, you could go big. So a lot of the downtown buildings are imposing, there’s a lot of old fashioned grandeur to admire.
The downside of course, is that if all these old fashioned buildings are still standing, Buffalo hasn’t been doing well economically. Typically a thriving city is always tearing down and rebuilding, there are construction cranes, the old is plowed under to make way for the new. It looks like Buffalo’s boom may became to an end in the 40s or 50s. I think that the late 20th century / early 21st hasn’t been kind.
Alongside that, I noted a lot of signs of decay. Cracked decaying sidewalks, stores closed, poorly maintained smaller buildings, peeling paint around the convention center and shabby patch jobs. Overall, impressions of dignity and faded grandeur, a prosperous merchant still in the game, but with patches on the expensive clothes purchased in better times.
But they haven’t given up – this may be the typical urban core decay afflicting many American cities. They’ve got a streetcar running down main street, and a truly astonishing number of restaurants.
I found a monument to President McKinley – apparently he was assassinated here on September 6, 1901, at the Pan-American Exhibition in the Temple of Music (don’t you love the way they named things back then!). Reminded me of the recent attempted Assassination of Trump by some young Republican radical.
I sought out a convenience store and stocked up on bottled water. Call me paranoid, but I don’t trust the tap water in American cities. So instead, I drink lots of soft drinks, and that’s not healthy. So I’m trying to change it up, before all these conventions push me to 300 pounds.
As to the convention, I’ve been seeing people around the hotel. Early arrivers like myself. Haven’t really talked to people much though – some combination of exhaustion and unfamiliarity. Parties are on the 15th and 16th floor. I did go up there, last night, but chickened out. That’s okay.
Registration starts at noon Thursday, activities around three or four.
I’ve got eleven spots, including a reading through the convention. Moderating three panels. My first items up will be:
* The Rise of AI in Writing, at 5:00 pm. panelist
* Science Fiction in 60s Comics, at 7:00 pm. panelist
I’m prepared for everything. Maybe not as thoroughly as usual. I’m a prep-monster. I’ve gone into panels with an inch thick sheaf of notes. Not enough time and too many subjects for my usual.
But I’m confident.
Hopefully, this will go well, and I’ll activate my charming, outgoing self and wow everyone.
Finally, looking forward to meeting a friend, Chris Nigro, who I’ve known online for some fifteen or twenty years.
In a little while, the games begin. Showtime.