From the Doomed Hotel

( Travel Tales on Alaska Airlines )

Last Guest Con is a minor event in the hotel this weekend. It looks like there is a meeting of the local Democratic Party here. (I guess it's the state central committee meeting, based on Googling for it -- the Washington State Democratic Party website is not saying directly if something is happening today that I can determine, but you can figure it out indirectly from statements elsewhere on the site.) It looks more like an SF convention than you might expect. There are people at tables handing out paperwork, people wearing membership badges with strange stickers on them, and party flyers up on the walls. Yes, party flyers. Apparently these events have room parties the same way SF cons do, to promote various people or causes. And here hotels keep trying to tell us that nobody ever does room parties and we SF fans are strange for trying to them. We passed people with carts hauling in cases of beer -- more beer than I normally see at an SF con party.

A somewhat spooky element to me was that one of the stickers people were wearing was to promote the candidacy of Dwight Pelz for state Democratic Party Chairman. It was strange to me to be in a hotel I associate with SF conventions surrounded by people with bold "Pelz for our Party" stickers. I'm sure Bruce would have been amused.

More Notes from Last Guest Con

I spent the afternoon hanging around the con suite here at Last Guest Con, and yes, smoffing. We had a spirited discussion about the difficulties of moving a con from a suburban location to a downtown one, a la OryCon moving from the Columbia River Hotel (which, as I think most of you reading this know, closed) to the downtown Marriott. While Lisa herself said that, given the available properties, she probably would have picked the Marriott as well, she feels that there is insufficient concern being paid to people for whom costs like parking are highly significant. I observed that most of us attending Last Guest Con are almost by definition "die hards" or "If you hold it, we will come," and therefore our own values are probably somewhat different than those people for whom Fandom Is Not A Way Of Life but a casual entertainment.

Another topic was the prospects for a future Seattle Worldcon. I think Seattle should seriously consider bidding, assuming they can work out a facilities agreement with the Convention Center and downtown hotels. (This assumes that the roadblock that scuttled the last Seattle bid has moved on to other job opportunities.) The big challenge -- and this is the same anywhwere these days -- is understanding that it's not a local convention with a committee solely consisting of people who live within easy mutual driving distance of each other. It is somewhat jarring if that's what you're used to doing if your committee consists of people from all over the world whom you only interact with by e-mail, IRC, telephone, etc.

From the schedule, I see that there is a casino scheduled for the late afternoon/early evening. Lisa and I are about to go check it out. Knowing me, there's a non-zero chance that I'll end up dealing a game rather than playing it.