The King of Badges

I've been to a lot of science fiction conventions, gaming conventions, roller coaster conventions, and high tech trade shows, so I've been issued dozens, if not hundreds, of badges. Not only that, I also worked at NASA for many years and needed to wear a badge every day during portions of that time. But none of those were as nice as the one they gave us at the Cannabis Cup.

The key is the lanyard. Most badges are pinback deals that you have to poke holes into your shirt in order to wear. These things are annoying and can easily get snagged on a coat or whatever and pulled off. And few mishaps are as bad for the con-goer as the losing of your badge.

But the lanyard around your neck is nearly impossible to lose. And when you're exploring a strange city in a stoned state of mind, that's important.

The badges were also really nice simply because they allowed us to find each other very easily. This was an odd convention in that it was held in coffeeshops all over town, instead of in one convention center, and the badge therefore allowed you to recognize a fellow foreigner in the same strange set of circumstances as yourself very easily, which made it much easier to strike up a conversation. It was like a giant field trip from a class we were all taking together... only the field trip was held during the first week of school, so we didn't know our classmates yet. The badges allowed us to recognize each other.

Many of the coffeeshops offered "laminates," plastic-coated ads that you could add to your lanyard to show your support for them. These provided a small scavenger huntish game for the judges, seeing how many different ones you could collect.