actually have a talk for once, so went to the SCaLE 21x website to submit in the CFP.

Oops, gotta create an account first. OK. Wow, that's a fair amount of profile info, but ok, let's add all that. Link to create password, ok done. Now how to submit?

Scroll down several pages on the notification email to find the link to submit a talk. Click link, start copying in my talk summary into the short abstract - oops, 44 characters too long. OK, deleted last sentence. Long abstract *and* a short one? I only have one, surely the long one is optional ... nope. Won't submit without both a short and a long. OK, let's just duplicate and move on.

Upload slide deck ... oops, PowerPoint not accepted. *sigh* OK, export as PDF. Upload again ... denied. *TWO MEGABYTE* file size limit for a talk deck. In 2023. Guys, nobody is uploading over a modem anymore, and if you are using any kind of graphics at all (which, y'know, people kind of like having something to look at during a half hour talk) 2MB is an egregiously small upper bound.

So yeah ... after investing about half an hour in this, I finally gave up because it's not worth trying to reformat everything to fit a 2001-era file size limit along with all the other hoops.

I can only imagine how unwelcoming this would be to people who are newbies to the speaking circuit and have limited confidence in themselves and their topic.