My First Hallowcon

So I attended HallowCon 2007 this weekend with a few other friends including reprobayt, dragonzord05, trincula, jaguarraven, lucent_alcehmy, and the lovely and talented zorathenne. I was slated to help out behind the bar and I believe dragonzord05, lucent_alchemy and zorathenne were all slated to help out in the Con Suite.

HallowCon is very different than Modern Day DragonCon and much closer to the types of Cons I grew up with in undergrad. like Magnum Opus Con, DragonCon 1-7 and Deep South Con. Very small. I think we had 300 attendees total. The dealers room was practically a strip mall with only about 4 or 5 dealers total. I think I personally owned more comics and sharp-pointy-things than either of the apropos dealers there. There was only 1 panel track and 1 gaming track. There were two movie rooms however and they had some very classic movies appropriate to this years’ theme: Pirates of the Undead.

Good things:

• My overall perception is that its that is a very nice “little” con. Its easy to learn everybody there and be able to put faces with names if you are the type of person that can do that without tons of effort. You can get a chance to spend a lot of time with the panelist without having to fight crowds as well and I was lucky to be able to have a very intellectual conversation with several writers there.
  
  
• The food was incredible. The hotel breakfast was actually palatable. And on the last day of the Con, they kept bringing food out until nearly 11:30am because they knew folks would be getting up later. The lunch and evening meals were good as well. Pork tenderloin, green salad, corn, etc. Real healthy food.
  
  
• Unlimited beverages including alcoholic beverages. Despite the fact that I was serving them, it was still a good thing to not have to worry about where you were going to get your fix :-)
  

There were some downsides:

• 
  Not enough volunteer staff. When a significant chunk of the volunteers were part of the ATL crew and most of us were first-timers, then you know that its bad. I was scheduled to work two back to back 4 hours shifts that spanned from 7pm - 3am behind the bar. Both Friday and Saturday night. That means 8 hours of standing .
  
  
• The panels were a bit too diverse. Not very thematic at all. It was sorta like they got whoever would show up to show up. I dunno.
  
  
• The hotel management were full-tilt total assholes. Anything more I say about this will only get me angrier. Just trust me on this one.
  
  

All in all, it wasn’t too bad. I saw it as work and that is why I’m not disappointed. I suspect that if I had been going to enjoy myself as a participant then I would be very disappointed.