Reasons to be Cool

As part of this year's Guild effort, all members of the Convention were supplied with a number of Tokens of Appreciation (or TOAs) that they could fill out and present to a deserving fellow attendee.

Many big and high-profile cool things happening at the Convention but we wanted to find a way to allow recognition and "rewarding" of the smaller, more personal cool things that are also a big part of what makes Discworld Conventions so much fun - the TOAs were a way of achieving this.

So, if another convention member did something cool that made your day just that little bit more happy, even (especially!) if it was only something simple like making you smile at the right moment or being a creative participant in some event, you could fill in a TOA and let them know one-to-one.

If the receiver was actively participating in the Guilds they could then hand in the TOAs they had collected to the Monks of Cool and earn their Guild a (small) number of points in the Guild competition.

An unexpected advantage of this setup was that with a couple of hundred of TOAs thus ending up in the Monks' Inbox, we were able to get a pretty good idea of the sort of things that people had found worthy of Appreciation.

Here is a small selection of representative TOA quotes:

• "For... dancing the Flamenco"
• "For... an enlightening bathunt"
• "For... doing the Beastiary"
• "For... being blue"
• "For... education on the subject of mathematics"
• "For... babysitting my stuff while I went to get a power cable"
• "For... Orangogram"
• "For... violence and pushing"
• "For... good singing of songs"
• "For... making me laugh so much; loved my 1st con"
• "For... nice dress"
• "For... 'name the dragon'"
• "For... room 3b"
• "For... feeding the queue"
• "For... gallantry in extreme circumstances"
• "For... cursing the ATM"
• "For... wonderful Toast and Jam"
• "For... one of the most vampish costumes I've ever seen"
• "For... bringing me to the DW con again cos it's so much fun"
• "For... walking around with a sack with a foot sticking out"
• "For... serenading me"
• "For... refereeing the live Thud match"
• "For... great singing and oooking"
• "For... anti-Nac Mac Feegle charm"
• "For... blanket for pet snake"
• "For... making an alchemist explode"
• "For... wish stones and helicopter"
• "For... persuasive recruiting"
• "For... tupenny upright"
• "For... sociability & general kindness"
• "For... death by chocolate"
• "For... assassination contract - fulfilled"
• "For... knowing his hymenoptera"
• "For... buying me a drink"
• "For... bananas!"
• "For... double entendre olympics"
• "For... a very exciting massage"
• "For... spontaneous tap dancing"
• "For... trying to fix my camera"
• "For... the funky broom piccie"
• "For... handing out chocolate goodies. yum."