Folks at work got us out on the patio for a barbecue at lunchtime to tell us about
the Commuter Challenge.
(For some reason, I keep wanting to insert a ‘p’ in “commuter”).
I was torn between feeling guilty and virtuous. I mean, my “commute” is only 5km a day total, and I’d be walking that if
I could. Even if I drive every day, the distance traveled in one year is about as much as one SUV driving coworker who
lives somewhere in the 905 does in two weeks. (I noticed he wasn’t at the barbecue…). But I haven’t been walking
much (due to pain, which I guess is understandable).
Even though I’m fully on board with the principles and goals of the event, it all seems a bit silly to me. I suppose
that’s my non-conformist nature shining through again. This is all stuff I know about, but I guess there are people for
whom “you can bike! or take the bus! It’s better for everybody!” is news.
I do want to start getting out on the bike more. I haven’t done that in ages.
I’m not having a whole lot of luck getting my head back into work stuff. It probably doesn’t help that the people I’m
meant to be working with are still stuck in their own projects. I need people to talk to.
But instead of complaining about work, I think I’ll write up some sort of Anime North
thing.
Last year, John, Bill and I decided that we needed something to do on Saturday afternoon because we usually just ended
up wandering around the dealer’s room spending money and getting annoyed with the kids doing security. So John came up
with the idea of a scavenger hunt, except with cameras so as to
discourage the usual vandalism and destruction inherent in scavenger hunts.
We wanted to start it out small this year with a few teams and lower expectations. And with those, things went
swimmingly and we’re now thinking about ways to grow it next year. I’ve got a few ideas, anyway.
Next year, I think it would be nice to just print out lists for non-participants. I mean, it’s all for fun anyway.
Full contest participation is probably more commitment than a lot of people want, and we don’t have the man-power for
everybody to join in anyway. * The contest doesn’t really scale very well, because there’s a whole lot of downloading
and sifting through photos that needs to be done. In Physical scunts, the participants are restricted by how much
stuff they can carry, so they’ve got to go back to the judges frequently and get things checked off the list. In a
photo scunt, you just leave all the photos on your 2GB card and come back at the end for judging. Which means lots of
tedious work for us. We’ve got to find a way to speed up that process if we’re going to have any hope of increasing
the number of participants. * From my little window on the proceedings, people seem to think in terms of collecting
series and then collecting characters. I think we can work with that. Our list was kind of all over the map, in terms
of what it wanted from people. We can probably be a bit more flexible while still getting people to find the things we
want them to find. I hope, anyway. * When we were tallying up photos, we had people saying “Oh, but I have a much
better photo for [insert anime series]”. But we only count the one, so it doesn’t matter. Personally, I think a
quantitatively cooler photo should count for more points. We can possibly do that with things like modifiers and
combos. Maybe provide hidden combos for more points for things that make sense specific to the series or fan
culture. That way, we could simultaneously simplify the list and make it more interesting. * For example, we had on
our list something like “Sailor Moon Cosplay.” So we accepted only the one Sailor Moon picture. But if someone found
an incredibly adorable little girl in a Moon Princess costume with a plush Luna it would be worth a bit more than your
typical sailor scout. Because we’d have modifiers like “cute” and “little kid” and series-specific modifiers like "
Moon Princess" and “Luna mascot”. Likewise, we’d have modifiers for group sizes and other things. We need to be doing
more to reward awesomeness. * We were assuming people would get on the Internet and look things up, but I don’t think
that happened. The hotel has free wifi. I’d like to find ways to encourage people to do this. 😄 * We seem to have a
bit of overlap with the masquerade ball with regards to required IT resources. Maybe we could work something out
there… Just an idea…
I’ll see if John’s willing to put up the list for people to look at. I think it was a good first stab. Maybe we can get
some feedback…
Anime North is a bit painful this year. I mean literally. My back kinda hurts. I don’t have my recliner to resort to.
I complain, but I actually think things are getting better. I can actually stand and walk around most of the day and end
up tolerating it. More or less.
Anyway…
We spent most of the day sitting in the fountain in the basement of the Toronto Doubletree airport hotel running a photo
scavenger hunt. That actually turned out to be pretty awesome. I don’t think we’ve managed to convey the true spirit of
the photo scavenger hunt concept to our participants, but we’ve got a year to think about it before we try again. They
did an okay job, though. I only fear they didn’t quite grasp how much you could get ahead with a little creativity and
an eye for the less well-traveled paths of fandom. They will learn.
