Current location:	Santa Ana CA
Current mood:	chipper
Entry tags:	conventions, ribbons

... I turn to stone. Turn to stone. When you comin' home? I can't go on. The dying embers of ...

Ribbon story part 27. (I'll keep the song going here for a while.)

Last September I talked about Conjecture needing ribbons in a hurry, including some of these. These are official ribbons used by Conjecture or animelosangeles.

• Adult Supervision
• WATCH
• DEALER
• Volunteer
• PROGRAM participant
• SPEAKER

At most of the conventions I attend or participate in, there's a department that has rovers with two-way radios and usually a base station in a central location. This location is often, but not always, called "Con Ops." Often the department is not called "Security" on the grounds that the hotel already has a Security department that's professionally trained and perhaps certified in things. (At a department store that I visited recently, they call the people with the radios and the video cameras "Loss Prevention.")

At a lot of conventions in So. Calif. the department is named "Operations." When I was at Windycon a few years back, they told me their name for it was "Adult Supervision." (They're supervising the other adults.) I thought that sounded like a good idea, so our Operations people at Animé Los Angeles have worn Adult Supervision ribbons for the last three years. (We're going to stop, but that's a different story.)

When Conjecture asked me to help them out last fall, they didn't want that on their rovers' badges: they called the department the "WATCH." So we had a rush order of WATCH ribbons printed up. I've never used "WATCH" myself. But for completeness, I'm including it here.

They also wanted ribbons for their dealers and their volunteers. I had DEALER ribbons on hand, and a very small number of Volunteer ribbons. I was going to reorder more of those, but hadn't done that yet because it was still several months until our convention. Hard luck, but there you go.

It is often the case that I have enough ribbons to outfit an entire convention's staff. Sometimes I even have them with me at other conventions, because I've just grabbed my entire ribbon bin instead of carefully picking out the titles I intend to use at that con. The ribbons stay packed up, of course, although I did make an exception last year at Loscon.

If I'd thought about it I could have offered a "ribbon swap" service at AniZona. If you had an official "AniZona Volunteer" ribbon and were unhappy with how small the printing was, we could have traded like-for-like and you would have had one with the larger letters shown here. Of course, most of the volunteers and members at that convention have considerably younger eyeballs than us in the over-thirty crowd.

I use this sans serif typeface family for almost all of my "official" ribbons, and I don't use it on "silly" ribbons. Eventually we'll use up all of the plain ribbons at Animé Los Angeles and only have official ribbons that look like these.

PROGRAM participant and SPEAKER mean the same thing. Again, different conventions have different names for classes of people. The descriptions "Guest" or "Pro" (or "Industry") are not always clear enough for our purposes. Someone who is there with a free membership because they're going to be on a panel is not a "Guest of Honor" so staying away from the word "Guest" can help make that distinction. And there are more people that appear on program items than just professionals -- knowledgeable fans are an incredible resource and asset to any convention's program, and we try treat everyone who's on the program fairly.

Conjecture wanted SPEAKER, so the fact that I had "PROGRAM participant" ribbons lying around didn't help them anyway. So that was another rush ribbon. Loscon has been using "Speaker" in recent years, but their ribbons all say "Loscon" at the top. (But they're vertical format ribbons. A few seconds with a pair of pinking sheers and a roll of double-sided scrapbook tape would suffice to snip "Loscon" off of the top. We should have thought of that last September....)