3 ms·

I like your style. We should start StateFairCon someday

• kragen 5y ago
  Ooh, that's an excellent point! State fairs never cost US$600 per person, even when you include all the funnel cakes and donut-bun hamburger sandwiches bought from the concessionnaires. Typical admission prices in the US are maybe US$20 per day? But they have plenty of space, lots of conference rooms, bathroom facilities, handicapped accessibility, folding chairs, and so on. I bet you could hold an academic conference at a state fair fairgrounds for under US$100 a person. But I've never heard of a sci-fi con doing this, so maybe there's a fatal flaw in this idea I'm not seeing.
  • CiPHPerCoder 5y ago
    Academic conferences are usually "comfortable" environments with plenty of air conditioning. It might undermine the prestige a bit if we did that. Or maybe it'd have a different charm than the norm.
    • kragen 5y ago
      It might be worth it if people could present their research without having to fork over US$600 or US$6000 to register for the conference. Air quality is worth a lot, though. I recall falling asleep from too many people crowded into a room at the physics department when they announced they'd discovered the top quark. Fairgrounds in lots of places do have air conditioning. We held CodeCon in a nightclub --- during the day, when it would normally just be closed. This caused problems for aaronsw, because legally they couldn't let him in, and he didn't want to accept special treatment unavailable to other people his age, so he just didn't attend. Len got pretty mad at me when I took Aaron's side.