(03-30-2023, 03:48 PM)Bob Schroeck Wrote: I-Con at Stony Brook? Peg and I did that a lot in the 90s, repping for Steve Jackson Games and running GURPS as MIBs. We probably crossed paths at least once.
The last con Peg and I attended was Philcon, circa 2018 or so. It used to be one of the biggest cons on the East Coast with hours and hours of quality programming. We attended every year like clockwork, even regularly planned on doing some of our Christmas shopping in its dealer room (back in the day when it was held in mid-November). But sometime in the early 2000s, after they hosted the 2000 Worldcon (as "The Millennium Philcon"), the concom decided they wanted to make it a smaller, more intimate, "literary-only" con instead of the sprawling multimedia delight it used to be. It's utter crap now, with almost nothing to offer.
So yeah, we know the same feeling.
Just for the record, the Millennium Philcon was in 2001, the real start of the millennium. Also, it had a lot of its membership cannibalized by Dragoncon which was the same weekend.
I would add that I think that Philcon's decline started with the closure of the Adam's Mark hotel and the move to New Jersey (Cherry Hill? I think it ended up in Cherry Hill).