Transcription and commentary by Doug Burbidge.
I was leafing through the last progress report before SwanCon 17, and noticed a few things that we don’t do anymore, which I thought were worth memorializing.
Page 3 says:
For the true movie buff, the Anime Matsuri video festival will feature Free Popcorn around the clock. We’ll have a theatre-style warmer and while in the ledger Room you are quite welcome to eat popcorn until you vomit.
Ha ha ha, we only did that once. Popcorn spilled everywhere and got trodden into the carpet… not a good way to keep the venue as a friend. (Though we did go back to the same venue the next year, so they can’t have been that annoyed.)
We’re in the process of making a deal with one or more Pizza Vendors in the General Vicinity of the Convention Centre for guests of the convention to order Pizza at a reasonable discount.
I can’t remember if this was the year that the concom made contact with the pizza store manager to make sure that our order wouldn’t get ignored as fake, and then on the night that manager wasn’t there and hadn’t left instructions, and so the order got ignored. But we did this sort of thing at least once more in a future year (SwanCon 18 and Swancon XXX at least). We don’t do it any more mostly for reasons of scale. But I do have fond memories of the odd pizza banquet.
This also appears to be the year they stopped doing the Official Banquet which had happened at previous SwanCons. Hence the attempt at pizza.
Page 4 has a photocopy of the 298, 300, 302 and 306 bus timetable, and page 5 has a photocopy of a photocopy of the appropriate page from the UBD street directory, with the venue circled. It photocopies really badly.
And page 12 and 13 is a two-page spread devoted to the rules for the Starfleet Battles Tournament. “The time limit for each game will be three hours.” “The following rules will be used”, followed by a quarter of an A4 page of dense text listing names of rules; “The following rules will not be used”, followed by another dense quarter page.
Page 15:
Things to Bring
[…]
Sleeping Bags (while we can’t officially condone it, we have booked out the whole hotel, so if you’re looking for crash space, you’d best bring sleeping gear!
[…]
A tee-shirt (we’ll have instant tee-shirt printing at Registration, plus a few tee-shirts for sale, and we’ll be offering a variety of logos and designs).
And the back cover? Lists all the current members. We don’t do that anymore.