Mini-con report/Minicon report

[mrissa]

I am terrible at the kind of con reports that are the next best thing to being there, but I did have lots of nice moments at Minicon. There were a couple of really quite good room parties (including one that actually was worth being squeezed in like sardines-first time in my con-going experience that that’s ever been worth it, and I’ve been to a

Comments

[whswhs]

Back when I ran convention programming, I used to come up with a new topics list for panels every year, emphasizing things relevant to the GoHs and things that were current in publishing, film and television, science, and other programming areas. Now I show up for other people's brainstorming sessions for panel ideas. I always felt that if I offered the same panel two years in a row I wasn't doing my job. . . .

[mrissa]

I generally agree with you, but there are some people who are looking for repetition out of a sense of comfort or tradition, and there are some audiences that are perpetually new to particular topics. I still think that the best way to go is to put new twists on things, but I came out of the panel item less down on repetition than I might otherwise have been.

[whswhs]

On another line of thought, your comment about convention size makes me think of when chorale and I attended ConFrancisco, which was our first Worldcon. There were about 3,000 people there, I think. But we had attended the San Diego Comic-Con (before it became Comic-Con International; back in the days when it was a tiny even of 30,000 or so) a few weeks before. So when we walked in and looked around, one of the first things I said was, "Wow, what a nice little relaxacon!"

[rubel]

I don’t really enjoy panels that purport to be recommendation panels and devolve into nerd plumage displays, so the Anime and Manga for SFF Fans panel Alec was on was not really my jam.

I feel the exact same way about it and I was moderating! But then that's probably the best task to be performing under those circumstances. I was happily informed that for people who do enjoy recommendation panels, it went very well.

[mrissa]

Yeah, the difference between "not my jam" and "terrible and worthless" is really important for everyone to keep in mind basically at all times.