Post by Doug Burbidge
SwanCon 18: many memories, but because it was at the same venue as Swancon 17, some get mixed together in my head. Terry Pratchett and Robert Jordan. (Robert Jordan was free, because his costs were fully paid for by his publisher. Some dispute that at this price, he was value for money.) We fully booked the hotel, and overflowed to a second hotel quite some distance away.
Because a group of us were planning to run a con of our own a couple of years later, some friends and I visited SwanCon 18 committee meetings, to see how it worked. We helped Comrade (aka Peter Cooper), who was the publications committee, put together progress reports and the final program book. (Non-traditional paper sizes! Macintoshes!) One committee meeting, we asked why it was that we hadn’t got the latest progress report in the mail. “Oh,” came the reply, “committee members don’t get PRs mailed, because they can just pick them up in person.”
“Ha, ha,” we said, “Good joke.” But the joke was on us because when we turned up to the convention, our badges had “Committee” written on them. So there’s a life lesson: you can join a con committee just by turning up and doing work.
To the convention, I brought a full-size arcade game cabinet and 20 Quasar packs, plus battery charger and base stations. I was also a go-fer. And Terry Pratchett played Gravity Wars on my Amiga.
The badges, as you can see, were still being put in badge holders. Nice turtle logo in the corner, celebrating, of course, our guest of honour. name in a lovely big bold high-readability font. (You know, I’m starting to think that the landscape-ness of the badge is one factor in the nice large fonts used for names: it gives more space for a name than portrait. Hmm.)