The first day of SFeraKon, one would think, is when the organizing team is most crazy. Nope. But the day does start for them a lot earlier than it does for all the members who start coming in larger number around 18:00.
One of the SFeraKon tradition is to look for volunteers outside of fandom, among the newbies. This year we’ve had record interest in volunteering at SFeraKon which in practical terms meant that registration was ready and sorted hours ahead of time.
Programming started with the presenetation of TranSFerzala, a stamp collecting activity for fans going to Croatian conventions that offer free membership to all the numerous Croatian SF conventions in 2016. At the same time, the Croatian translation of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman was presented, the cosplay got going, as well as the vendor hall.
For the first time in Croatian fandom, we introduced ribbons. For now, most of the squee over them comes from all the people who’ve attended Worldcon but it is catching on. We made a special ribbon for the oldest members of Croatian fandom, the people who created SFera and SFeraKon. We call them the SFeroSaurs, so that’s what their ribbons say. Those who’ve been coming to SFeraKon get to wear s SFeraKon Veteran ribbon. As we are celebrating 150 years of Alice in wonderland, 50 year of Dune and have Sir Terry Pratchett and Leonard Nimoy as Ghosts of Honour we also made ribbons to celebrate them.
I got caught up with some old friends, gave Kate Elliott her grand tour of the convention and helped present the SFera programme – SFerin scenaristicki inkubator. It’s a scriptwriting workshop Irena Krcelic held in 2014 and 2015 in which two scripts have been developed that have won the support of the Croatian Audiovisual Centre.
And I went home waay to early.
