Tuesday, June 12, 2012

The Ghosts of Otiscon

Now, I've been spending my evenings clearing out the basement room to turn into a new guest room, and that means I'm pulling out ancient boxes that I haven't touched since we lived in Lake Geneva, WI well over a decade ago. And in the process I found a box of print-outs to be made into buttons for Otiscon.

Otiscon was a gathering of friends hosted by our next-door neighbor and TSR Editor Stephen Schend (Yeah, Steven lived next door. Lake Geneva is a small town). It was called Otiscon because, well, that's a story for Stephen to tell, since he's now a respectable father and such a story would never die on the 'net. Suffice to say he had a convention and I had an Apple Mac and a primitive scanner and a button-making machine, and we kept saying stupid things over the course of the weekend, so we made buttons.

The buttons themselves have art which is not noted here (because I would have to scan them in AGAIN), but I can provide the text from those immortal buttons.

These, the, were the slogans from Otiscon 5

TWAINOAD! (Tightly wound and in need of a drink)
"Are We In An Ingmar Bergman Flick?"
Elder-Spawn-Free since 1992!
Shine On, You Crazy Diamond
Begins where your imagination ends and stops shortly before the police arrive
The Quick and the Drunk
Debauchery from Dawn 'til Dusk
Home of the Fighting Couch Potatoes
Last Bastion of the Fashion-Unconscious
Good Beer, Bad Attitudes
When Titans Slouch
It just keeps getting stranger ....
Where Life Goes Straight to Video
The Stuckeys of the Information Highway
and
Otiscon Five (Last Warning).

More later (and yeah, people are going to wonder what ELSE I have down there).