No deposit no return?

My mom’s parents used to live about a mile outside of Gimli. As kids, for extra money, we used to fish bottles out of the ditches for refunds. Back in the day, there used to be a lot of beer bottles and even some pop bottles. This was before plastic pop bottles became popular and beer was still mostly sold in stubby bottles instead of cans.

Early spring, after the snow thawed, was a great time to walk up the side of the road, cleaning out the bottles from the ditch with a fishing net. Even at the penny a bottle (and a nickel for pop bottles!), we were able to get several dollars worth for a few hours of work. This was quickly turned into comic books at the local Robinsons.

As we got older, cans became common for pop and beer and the amount of bottles in the ditches made it less worthwhile. Plus the amount of bottles had declined sharply. Sad for us but probably safer for the roads.

Steve’s state of the union

Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson Games (SJ Games) has been posting an annual report online since 2004. The 2008 versions can be found at http://www.sjgames.com/general/stakeholders/

We like Steve. Every time we’ve met him, he’s always come across as busy, but genuinely likeable. We’ve liked his games since we came across them – Ogre, Car Wars, Illuminati, Killer, Dino Hunt, and even Undead, Raid on Iran, One Page Bulge.

We used to like his magazine, Pyramid, when it was still a print copy before it became electronic only. It used to have a State of the Industry in it that was a good view of what was going on in the pre-Wizards/TSR/Hasbro FASA/WizKids days.

Oscars / Jumper

We usually get together with the movie group for the Oscars and watch the ceremony. This year, due to the writer’s strike, it was a bit montage-heavy as they had prepared a bunch of montages in case the actors didn’t attend. Every year we have our picks of who will win. Since I tend to vote with my heart instead of trying to guess how the academy will vote, I don’t often win. This year, I came in fourth in our group with 9 correct out of 24 categories. For our group, that was close – the winner only had 13 correct this year.
Normally we try to see a bunch of the nominated films. This year we hadn’t seen many of them. The only ones we had seen were Happy Feet, POTC3, Enchanted, and Transformers – none of which were in the major categories.

That said, we did see Jumper last night. It was pretty good – a nice fluff teen action film but there wasn’t really much behind it. The cast was solid – Hayden Christiansen, Samuel Jackson, Rachel Bilson, Jamie Bell, AnnaSophia Robb, and Diane Lane but the story was pretty weak. The action held up though – a fun watch but not really much to it. AnnaSophia continues to provide a strong performance and it was nice to see Jamie Bell again. We remember him as Billy Elliot and he pretty much steals this film.

When Heath Leger died, we were wondering which actor would be able to step into his roles. Either Hayden or Jamie should be able to do that handily. We were also thinking Shia Leboeuf could handle it.

nonprofit / not-for-profit / no profit

Some people tout the fact that they are a nonprofit organization. Some even bandy around the term casually. This was something that we had looked at seriously when setting up Wincon.

Nonprofit is an actual legally defined term. As an actual nonprofit organization, you have to file a special tax return and hold annual meetings. You are still allowed to absorb a shockingly large amount of the monies collected for charity and use them for operational costs. The key point of the nonprofit is that the regular members aren’t expected or even allowed to share profits.

Some people call themselves or their organizations not-for-profit in thinking that they are avoiding all this hassle. They really aren’t. Besides, as a business, no matter how touchy-feely it sounds to not strive to make a profit, I’d rather a business makes a profit to ensure it still being around. See notes for nonprofit above for the operating costs.

Wincon was always set up a regular business. We ended up giving a large amount of our proceeds to charity (I’ll explain the hassles of that soon) and we ultimately operated at a slight profit for the original investors. The organizers and committee never drew a salary. We were able to give out some prizes and gift certificates to our volunteers but not nearly what we considered enough considering how helpful many of them were.
In our dreams, we hoped the convention would make a ton of proceeds so that we could afford to bring in phenomenal guests and give away massive prizes of value and super-coolness. This would further increase the memberships to staggering numbers. With the convention growing to the size of a GenCon North, we could make it our sole work and rake in the dividends. That didn’t quite happen.

convention people counting

I've had someone mention that it's hard to count members in a space of a certain size. Counting crowds in a park or a beach, or an area where they can come and go freely and they don't have to pay or check in can be tricky. Counting people in a confined space, like a convention, is pretty simple, if you control the entrances or have competent registration people.

You should be getting everyone to fill out a small form to register – in counting these registrations, you have your numbers. This also gives you a database for contacting people for future events. This seems to take a bit of time at the tables when it’s busy, but a quick form can be processed quite simply with name and address. You can then count the forms and get your total of individual attendees. With Wincon, were had super-competent in charge of registration and were able to get super accurate numbers.

Failing that, you count the number of badges or wristbands used. This is less accurate as replacements and errors can skew the number slightly. There should be some way of tracking who is eligible to go into your convention and both of these have to be bought by the case anyways.

You can also count the number of people going in and out. This can be tricky as you are bound to miss a few in crowded periods. As well, it is a lot harder to avoid recounting the same people as they leave and re-enter.

This again comes down to the reasons why you are keeping track of your numbers. See my other rant on how conventions count memberships.

GenCon Update

It sounds like GenCon LLC filed Chapter 11 due to the temp agency costs from Celebrations IV.
It looks like GenCon is being sued by Lucas for costs and auction proceeds. GenCon is saying they are keeping money that Lucas didn't pay for booth costs - to the tune of about 80,000.
http://theforce.net/celebration/story/Lucasfilm_Sues_Gen_Con_112361.asp

Geez. There's no good winner here. Can't we all get along?

Bridge to Terabithia / Spiderwick Chronicles

We finally saw this film over the weekend. I had never read the book. I believe my mom had first recommended it to me back in the 80s when the first movie adaptation had been done. The book itself first came out in the late 70s. The grandkids had gone to see the new one in the theatre with their grandfather but we hadn’t seen it. I remember the kids chanting “free to pee” for months afterward.
The movie was very nicely done, we’ll probably end up picking it up. We knew what Leslie’s fate was but it still caught us a bit when it happened. The actress playing her, AnnaSophia Robb, also played Violet Beauregard in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. She will be someone to watch in later years. She has quite the impact on the screen – very reminiscent of a young Winona Ryder or Christina Ricci. She can also be seen in Jumper or in the new remake of Escape to Witch Mountain.

We also took the kids to see the Spiderwick Chronicles this week. I hadn’t read these books either but Shan had read the first book and was looking forward to it. It sounds the like movie covers the whole book series. The books are very small - only a shade more than 100 pages each.
It was another fun one although it may be a bit scary for some kids. Ours were fine with it. The movie deals more with the goblins than the fairies, I’m not sure how it compares to the books. The family was nicely done and the boy playing the twins was very impressive. It was neat to see the various fencing swords being used. It’s definitely another one for the to-buy list. D3 picked up the first book yesterday and is almost through it. Now he wants a fieldguide.