The 2nd Quadrennial HRSFANS reunion will be occurring March 16-18, 2012, at Harvard, alongside the 12th annual Vericon. This is an occasion to reconnect with old friends and make new ones, to reminiscent about the past and to plan for the future–and to attend a convention featuring open gaming and open anime, alumni-written LARPs and a HRSFA-written MST3K, a masquerade ball, a charity auction, and guests including Lev Grossman, R.L. Stein, and Guest of Honor Vernor Vinge. We’ll be adding information as it comes in on the HRSFANS wiki–you can check there to stay up-to-date on all the details.

Who’s Invited?

Members of HRSFANS and former members of HRSFA are invited. Guests are also welcome, provided a member assumes responsibility for their conduct and their enjoyment of the event.

All attendees are requested to register for the reunion. Anyone attending the Saturday dinner must indicate so on their registration and pay the additional cost.

Current members of HRSFA are welcome to stop by and say hi! Since we expect members of HRSFA will want to spend very little time at the reunion instead of Vericon, current student members of HRSFA are not required to register for the reunion unless they plan on seriously raiding our snack stash. So as not to draw people away from Vericon, we’d like to discourage undergraduates from attending the Saturday dinner.

Reunion Schedule

The reunion will host “Alumni Central”, a space in Boylston Hall where Alumni can meet up throughout the weekend. Alumni Central will be stocked with snacks and low-key reunion activities. In addition, we’re planning the following events:

• Friday night late: relax and hang out after the con in the Quincy Qube
• Breakfast with the Board on Saturday morning: Let us know what’s on your mind, and brainstorm with us about plans for the future!
• Saturday night Dinner: a sit-down dinner in Kirkland House
• Saturday night “Classy Soiree” after the masquerade ball: party in the Lowell Senior Common Room–snacks, booze, and the alumni edition of non-constitutional elections.
• Activity for alumni and their children TBA: If you’d like to be part of that discussion, contact Rose Martin, or email contact at hrsfans dot org.

Registration

You can register for the Reunion here.

You can register for Vericon here.

Accommodations

There are, of course, a variety of accommodations options in Harvard Square. Some of these are described below. We’ll add information as we continue researching options, and if you know of a good option we’ve missed, feel free to let us know and we’ll add that.

Short-Term Apartment Rental

We believe that the most cost-effective (though not necessarily the least labor intensive) commercial accommodation strategy is to pool with a small group of people and rent an apartment for the weekend. There are a variety of such listings here, which can often offer accommodations for 4 people at $50/person/night (give or take), in addition to common space and kitchens (for people who like that sort of thing). In order to get the best search results, I recommend the search terms “Harvard Square Cambridge MA” and guests “1″.

Some Examples

• http://www.airbnb.com/rooms/281552
• http://www.airbnb.com/rooms/96788
• http://www.airbnb.com/rooms/143117
• http://www.airbnb.com/rooms/269845
• http://www.airbnb.com/rooms/218557
• http://www.airbnb.com/rooms/286472
• http://www.airbnb.com/rooms/318369

Considerations

• In most of these cases, the budget-conscious strategy is to sleep two people in each bedroom and also some people on living room couches. Since living room couches are less private, it’s recommended that people sleeping on couches pay less per night than people with private rooms.
• In some cases, the price of the accommodation is fixed, regardless of how many people are staying there. In other cases, the owner will specify an additional charge per person over some number. You can get an idea about this from the page, but it’s always worth checking with the landlord explicitly, since the answer will often be different. In either case, you can make a calculation about privacy vs. cost-cutting when you decide how many people you’d like to recruit to share a space.
• Some of the spaces advertised on airbnb.com are actually private rooms in the landlord’s apartment or house. This may require less coordination with other reunion goers, and it may again be less expensive, in exchange for less privacy and less social common space available.
• Keep an eye on cleaning fees. Note that these rentals usually require security deposits.
• Questions or concerns about this approach to accommodations? Contact Elisabeth Cohen, or email us at contact at hrsfans dot org.

Hotels and B&Bs

For those who find the “rent an apartment” plan daunting, renting a hotel is of course easier. The Harvard Square Hotel is unfortunately closed for repairs during Vericon this year. Other options include:

• The Sheraton Commander
• The Inn at Harvard
• A Friendly Inn
• Irving House
• Harding House

Coordinating Roommates

Looking for someone to fill out your room in an apartment or hotel? You can post what you’re looking for here (this will involve signing onto the HRSFANS wiki, which takes about 30 seconds if you’ve never done it before).

Other Local Information

Vericon maintains information about parking, local eateries, game stores, and hotels here

Reunion Costs

The full reunion registration (including the Saturday night sit-down dinner in Kirkland) costs $60. Registration without the dinner costs $20, and registration by-the-day costs $10/day.

Financial Assistance

If you’d like to attend the reunion, we’d like you to be able to attend without cost as an impediment. The registration form includes the option to request financial assistance. If you would like to contribute to financial assistance in order to help other HRSFANs attend the reunion, that option is also available during registration. In either case, you’ll be contacted by a member of the reunion staff to discuss specifics. We will treat both financial aid requests and offers as confidential (“double-blind”)

This isn’t particularly timely, I realize, but I thought others might be interested to know about it regardless. While news of Dan’s death did percolate through the alumni community, I at least had not heard any specifics in connection with it. The linked page includes a very nice section about Dan.

The lectures themselves are apparently designed to inform a general audience about higher mathematics, and are held annually at the University of Arizona (Dan was studying Algebraic Geometry at the UA math department at the time of his death). The next one will apparently be held this fall, and information about it can be found here.

If you’d like to post often enough that this sounds like a hassle, email Emily and she’ll set you up with an account of your own.

In anticipation of vericon TWELVE, in 2012, which is TWELVE months from now, I wrote a song: The Twelve Days of VeriCon:

On the twelfth day of Vericon my hrsfa gave to me…
Twelve	Friends a greeting
Eleven	Creatures Tapping
Ten	Boards of Gaming
Nine	Authors Signing
Eight	Alums Carousing
Seven	Movie mockers
Six	Larps late-running
Five	Viral Memes
Four	Cosplay teams
Three	Common rooms
Two	Burdicks runs
One	And a ConChair in a Tizzy

Hey all,

I’ve just finished making something I really want to show you all.

Since leaving college, I’ve missed HRSFA-Social pretty hard. It was just totally great when you were feeling bored to be able to send one email and summon a bunch of people to come hang out while not feeling like you were spamming the entire world with your lack of cool. In this spirit, I present:

http://www.borednow.biz

Named after everyone’s favorite Vamp Willow utterance, BoredNow is a cross between a realtime HRSFA-Social and the WoW dungeon finder — it’s an attempt to solve the ludicrious problem that it’s easier to organize a group of your friends to do something in a video game than it is in real life. I’m hoping that fellow HRSFANS at Vericon will find it useful for organizing pickup games and going out to eat and maybe for some things I haven’t thought of yet.

Right now, I have a realtime chat feature working along with the ability to join a pickup group and a randomized activity picker that will choose a game for you based on the number of people in your group and the amount of time you all have available. There’s much more to come, but I wanted to see if anybody liked the idea in general before building things that nobody wants.

I’m trying to spend the time between now and Friday developing a mobile website in addition to the desktop one (and maybe just one more feature), along with making sure that my server doesn’t fall over. If you’d like to help me out, I’d love it if:

1) You just came by the site. I’m new at this whole webhosting thing and for various reasons I’m running on a server I configured myself. I’d love to get some load so I can fix anything I can pre-Vericon.

2) You added some more activity ideas. Right now I have about six games in the database, which is essentially enough to make sure that the feature works but nothing more. I have a submission form up for anything you suggest, and after you do I’ll give the additions a cursory review and toss them right in the mix.

3) You told me what you think. Is this the worst idea ever ever ever? Please let me know before I waste any more time! Bug reports, feature requests, love notes, hate notes, whatever. There’s a comment form up (and you all have my email) so it’s easy to inform me about the depths of your fury.

4) Last, of course, I’m pretty much trundling around boston until vericon with nothing to do but work on this. I’m up for anything people want to do as long as I can stay within wifi range in case the server blows up. You know how to get in contact

So thanks for listening, sorry for the spam, and I’m looking forward to seeing what you all think.

The hub of his online activities is a website called The Tolkien Professor, which includes the aforementioned podcast lectures, links to both primary sources and criticism, and information about skype-in office hours.

Aside from the content of his work, Corey Olsen’s career trajectory strikes me as interesting in several respects. It reflects a more-or-less successful bid to make a career of studying genre literature in the academy. It reflects what I view as a commendable effort to reach out of the academy and engage a popular audience with academic research–I would love to see this happen more often, and to be rewarded rather than (at best) tolerated. Finally, of course, it raises the question of college classes being made available free and online–a trend which is extremely exciting, but which is not uncomplicated by questions about the future of academic institutions in a world where higher education costs are skyrocketing. Are universities going to go the way of the newspaper? How should we feel about that if they do?

This Hong Kong architect has packed twenty four rooms into his tiny but very versatile apartment, through the magic of movable walls and fold-out facilities.  Apparently, this is environmentally friendly in addition to being awesomely futuristic.