I Am Not Bidding

[kevin_standlee]

And remember, as an ex-Worldcon chair, I have an permanently-paid-up Get Out of Conrunning Free card. Therefore, I can muse about such things and the $20 bills y'all toss at me as bid-starters bounce off me like I was rubber.

After reading this post, it occurs to me that a Westercon at John Ascuaga's Nugget could do worse than to use a steampunk-style mascot named "Sparks Nevada."

The real challenge with a Westercon in the Reno area is that I have yet to find a hotel that is right-sized the way the Sacramento Hilton is. Although I've heard some (sometimes justified) complaints and lukewarm reviews of Westercon 66, overall I think the fact that we "owned the hotel" and had slightly too little room meant that the social aspect of the convention was much better than facilities that have dozens of rooms, thereby allowing Programming to Never Say No, resulting in 27 program tracks, each of which has five people on a head table and two in the audience.

(It is possible that if WC66 had had 50-in-60-minute panels (instead of 60-in-75), they could have put in a few more slots; however, there still would have been a lot of saying No. I like those fifteen-minute breaks myself, and I was impressed at how many panels really did stick to 60 minutes instead of trying to use 80, the way so many 50-in-60s try to make 70-minute panels and don't get out of the way at 50 minutes.)

The Reno/Sparks-area hotels I've reviewed so far (I can't go into a hotel without sizing it up for conventions) are all too large. We could make something happen in them, but the 800 people we expect for a Westercon could easily vanish like a drop of ink in a barrel of water at most facilities. The reason Westercon 66 worked as well as it did was that nearly everyone in the building was One of Us. That doesn't work when there are thousands of other people there while your 800 people are struggling to find each other.

Comments

[bovil.livejournal.com]

Haven't the foggiest. I don't think it's likely, though. It's been decades since there have been conventions other than gaming, comic and anime conventions (almost exclusively of the "game/comic/anime shop runs it" variety). Most of our sort of conrunner types from Sac work on bay area conventions.

[hazelchaz]

That's disheartening, I'm also disappointed that the Kintoki-Con people didn't come out to network at Westercon.

[bovil.livejournal.com]

You know as well as I do that there's a big chunk of Anime fandom and conrunning that just doesn't want to cross over...

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

I've run head-first into the fact that my local costuming groups will not show up to the local anime conventions, despite the fact that many individual members will attend as anime fans with no visible costuming-group affiliation. There are costumes three to the inch at the average anime con, so maybe it would be a good place to recruit people interested in costuming? Nope...

[hazelchaz]

I managed to convince some of Costumer's Guild West to run our Costume Repair Station at Animé Los Angeles. They get to work on their own projects when it's slow, and a parade of costumers visit them all day. They put out some CGW brochures, and count it as part of their Outreach efforts.

[delosharriman]

Being told "you're not welcome, you're not Our Kind Of Fan" often enough will have that effect.

It's less severe where I am than most places. For one thing, there's a lot of crossover from the local SF conrunners to the anime cons, particularly A-Kon, which has a respectable-sized SF convention (including writer's track) buried in it. And still, the smaller of the two main anime cons here is scheduled against Lone Star Con, & from what I can tell, neither group of organizers thinks that's a big deal.

I am, to put it mildly, concerned, & not just because this means that I have to skip that anime con again this year. Denvention was convenient for me, because I could do both!