emmagrant01 | DashCon (Reply)

So. Wow.

Surely by now you've heard about the surreal meltdown of the Tumblr con called DashCon in Chicago over the weekend. So I was there, along with many friends, and it was quite an experience.

I was invited to be a special guest over a year ago, and I was really flattered. TBH I might not have attended the con otherwise, because I generally enjoy smaller single-fandom cons more than big, multi-fandom things -- as this one was being marketed to be. I should note at this point that I was never offered any kind of comps. Apparently other special guests were flown out and had their rooms paid for and everything, but I was not offered any of that. I paid my own way -- which is totally fine, I should say. A couple of months ago more friends from threepatch decided to go, and we asked DashCon if TPP could be listed on the special guest page like the Baker Street Babes (and I) were. We were declined, something we were later grateful for.

Anyway, I spent most of Friday hanging out with

drinkingcocoa,

nvgafaeroplanes,

foxestacado, and

meredith_. We went to the BSB's live podcast panel, since I was on it, and had a fantastic time. Lindsey and Liz of the BSBs were fun and very nice to us, and it was a great time. Afterwards, we decided to head back to the room to order room service and drink wine and hang out, as you do. At this point, I still thought it was going to be a huge 10K-person con, and so my plan was to go to the panels me and my friends were on and otherwise hang out.

Sometime during that evening, nvgafaeroplanes happened to check her phone and saw that something was going down. She read aloud the concom's post begging for money to keep the con from being canceled, and all of us immediately thought it was false. Surely 4chan had hacked DashCon's account, because none of it made sense. That's not how cons usually go, right? But after about ten minutes had passed and more and more posts were being made, we started to realize something was going on. So we headed down to the con area to check it out.

When we got down there, it was pretty chaotic. There had been a dance party and panels going on, but con staff had closed it all down and herded everyone into one room to tell them that they had an hour to raise $17,000 or the hotel was canceling the event. Rumors were flying about why, and DashCon's original post (which the hotel asked them to take down overnight) stated that the hotel didn't like the con attendees and that was why they were extorting the extra money. Obviously a bunch of people were calling bullshit on that. They had a contract after all; the simplest explanation was that they hadn't paid what they owed, right?

There were volunteers running around and trying to get people to donate money. One was chattering excitedly at us (talking about people with comped rooms being locked out and people with anxiety issues freaking out and melting down and on and on) and, when she saw one of us had a camera, asked us to video this and post it. We all have a copy of that video and it's probably best if it never sees the light of day. Another volunteer ran over in the middle of the video and started saying that they'd raised $17K, but the hotel had just upped the price to $20K and we needed even more money. I think you can imagine the looks on our faces at this point. And then there was a huge cheer in the ballroom, signalling that it was all over.

I tweeted about it from outside the ballroom.

The fundraising goal was met amazingly quickly and, as the viral video shows, there was great rejoicing. During that "We Are the Champions" moment, I was standing out in the convention center lobby with a bunch of other people who were somewhere between bewildered and horrified at what had just happened. At that point, many of us thought this had been some sort of scam, because again, that's not how cons operate.

The thing that bothers me the most is that the concom made enough money in the year leading up to the con to pay at least one person a salary for her work planning. (I don't have a link RN to prove that, but I had a conversation at 221B Con in April with the person who was getting paid.) Apparently they were hoping to make careers out of planning this and future cons. But this was advertised as a fan-run con, and fan-run cons are not supposed to be events that make money for the organizers. In fact, most fan-run cons make a point of designating a charity that they will give leftover funds to, or put the money in a bank account to use for the next year's event. So they had the money to pay at least one person, but not to pay the hotel?

Anyway, most of the attendees went back to dancing and enjoying themselves, so we headed to the bar to stew over it all. We were joined by some other folks and eventually Liz and Lindsey of the BSBs, who told us about the no-frills red-eye flights the con had purchased to fly them out. At that point, their parts of the con were done and they said they were probably just going to spend the next day in Chicago. They made a post to that effect, which I thought was totally classy and well done.

The rest of Friday night was spent hanging out and ignoring the online wankfest. The next morning at 10:00 am, there was a "panel" in which the concom was going to explain what went wrong. There were two people on this panel and about 20 people in the audience. So clearly, the vast majority of con attendees weren't concerned about finding out what the real story was. They were hanging around the hotel in cosplay, going to panels, and so on. I tweeted from that room:

So what had gone wrong? According to the comcon members speaking, they'd had an oral agreement with the hotel's convention staff to pay what they owed as money rolled in. This seems to imply that they weren't able to pay what they owed upfront and had struck a deal in desperation. They were relying on new registrations to pay the balance they owed. Sometime on Friday afternoon, one of the lead organizers of the con (can't remember her name, sorry) was pulled into a meeting with management staff from the hotel and was told that unless they fulfilled their part of the contract by 10:00 pm, the event would be canceled. They hadn't got this pay-as-you-go agreement in writing, and when the management realized the hotel hadn't been paid (and that the attendance was 15% of what they'd been told to expect), they very reasonably thought they weren't going to get paid. So yeah, they acted well within their rights to threaten to cancel. (The official Con response post is here.)

But of course, the money was raised and the day was saved.

At the end, I asked them if they were aware of the massive wank exploding on Tumblr and how they planned to address it from a PR perspective. The answer was that they hadn't had a chance to talk about that yet (totally reasonsable), but that they already know that they were not coming back to this hotel next year, and in fact, the cool new hotel they'd picked out in Indianapolis was even bigger.

Okay, so. This hotel was way too big for this con. The meeting rooms were cavernous, and there were so many of them. The space was appropriate for a Chicago-wide ComicCon, but there were maybe 1000 people at this con in all. I don't know what they paid for that space, but damn, that was a huge waste of money. And the fact that they still think this is an event they're going to be able to organize again and be taken seriously... well, I'm pessimistic about their chances.

But it got even better!

drinkingcocoa and I were involved with two panels on Saturday, as well as the threepatch meet-up, and we decided to go check out the meetup space where we would be later in the day. This was a truly enormous room set up with round tables and chairs on one side, and on the other was the jumping castle and ball pit we'd been hearing about. It was cheesy, yes, but there were people jumping and laughing in the bouncy house, and others hanging out in the ball pit. They were having fun! It was cute! So I snapped a picture with my phone. And then I thought, "Oh, I know! I'll add a cheesy postcard-like bit of text to this and post it on Tumblr."

Ten minutes later, it had 1000 notes. And then 2000, and 3000. I could continuously click "refresh" on the page and watch the notes go up by 5 every time. And then I started reading the comments on the post.

Yikes. So the thing is, I hadn't meant to make fun of the con. I just wanted to post a silly little picture. But I tagged it "Dashcon" without realizing that people all over the world were watching that tag and waiting for more wank to pop up, and so it went viral. At first, people thought it wasn't even taken at DashCon -- it looked so pathetic that they thought it was a joke. And when I looked at the picture again, I saw what they were seeing out of context, and yeah. Wow. (I showed that picture to my husband when I got home and he cracked up laughing. It really is that ridiculous.)

Sometime that day WtNV canceled and the concom made the infamous (and actually earnest) "We'll give you an extra hour in the ball pit" statement, and then it was well on its way to becoming an internet meme. And it really was hilarious, of course. The fanart! The music video! The promises of future cosplay! We stayed up until 4:00 am, and we laughed until we cried. It was the most ridiculous and beautiful thing. And it was somehow a perfect embodiment of Tumblr, which made it even better!

Saturday night at midnight was when the Sherlock fandom panel was scheduled, and it was fantastic. It was the highlight of the con for me, and one of my favorite con panels ever, perhaps second only to the Lumos Crack Panel of 2006. I handed out porny coloring books at the door (leftover from a fundraiser back in the HP fandom days) and then drinkingcocoa started off the panel by demonstrating how to make chocolate anuses while nvgafaeroplanes passed out samples. It was BRILLIANT. People laughed until they cried. It was the funniest thing I can remember seeing in a long time! We went on to talk about porn and crossovers, and I finally got to tell the story of the origins of Tunalock, which I'd spent a ridiculous amount of time researching earlier that day.

The wankstorm continued online, but weirdly enough, everyone I talked to and saw and hung out with at DashCon was just happy to be there with friends. People had fun despite the snafus. Panels went well despite how they were organized. This is how it is when fans get together, you know? The important thing is that we are there together and having fun.

I don't regret going to DashCon. It was fascinating to be inside of something that was perceived as a massive shitstorm of wank on the outside, because it really, honestly wasn't. There are ridiculous rumors flying around about things that people think went on, like that there was an underaged orgy at the BDSM panel (LOL, no) or that there were needles and bodily fluids in the ball pit (seriously?). It's sad that there are people who stalk the DashCon tag for the sole purpose of looking for posts to mock (for example). Trolling abounds, and anyone who admits that they went and had a good time is opening themselves up to scorn and mockery.

And you know what?