Mental Beatdown

DashCon

This isn't a rant so much as it's something that I found extremely funny (something funny enough to spam Zo, @nomdeplumes, about at 12:50 A.M. while she's sleeping like a normal person).

This is old news, too— this happened months ago. But, somehow, NO ONE KNOWS ABOUT IT.

So here we go.

This is DashCon.

DashCon is a THIRD PARTY Tumblr convention (Tumblr refused to have their name attached to something done by first-time organizers). That's right, the Tumblr that tried to ban Father's Day because it "celebrates rape culture" (that's a real thing they did look it up) and also the Tumblr that is home to the (admittedly mildly amusing) snake version of "Take Me to Church." TAKE ME TO SNASHCON (snake DashCon).

Kidding. I'm hilarious.

Anyway, how do you organize ALL OF THESE DIFFERENT TOPICS in one convention? Without offending those who are triggered by the colors red, orange, and blue? Answer: you don't. Not really. There's schedules for DashCon still available on the internet, and they include such panels as:

-Welcome to Night Vale (more on that one later)

-Shipping 101 (HA BECAUSE SHIPPING BECAUSE)

-BDSM 101 (open for all ages! Progressive!)

-The Rise of Deadpool (18+)

-The Sherlock Fandom: What Have We Done?

This goes on for two days. A weekend. Of just random bullshit. Which could be fun, to sit on random panels, for free. I mean, sure, you have to go to Chicago and get a room if you don't already live there, which isn't free, but STILL. YOU GET TO HANG OUT WITH TUMBLR PEOPLE. EEEEEP. THE PEOPLE THERE ARE OVER 9000. AND SO PROGRESSIVE.

Except this was not, in fact, free. Here's what 95% of attendees, panelists, and hotel staff happened:

DashCon set up the first day and did not pay immediately for the convention center. Contractually, the payment needed to be paid on the first day. So, the convention went on throughout the day. It seemed to go fine (although a lot of people said that it was just random bullshit and it wasn't worth going to, even when it was "working.").

But, understandably, the biggest draw to the con was the appearance of the creators of the amazing podcast, Welcome to Night Vale. It is damn good, and the people who work on it are well-known for going out of their way to get to certain cons and being kind to everyone there.

If they get paid. Which they didn't.

According to the Night Vale crew, DashCon insisted they would pay for their hotel and travel costs the day they got there. So, the crew "took time out of [their] busy schedule" to go to a small, out-of-the-way con.

When they got there, they were rejected payment.

There is a video of this on YouTube documenting the whole deal from the attendees' side. DashCon starts ordering pizza an hour and fifteen minutes in to the no-show (the woman yelling to nearly a thousand people "WHERE DO YOU WANT TO ORDER? PIZZA HUT?" gets me every time). People get restless and (understandably) demand their money back. Then this... Woman. God, she's the worst. She comes out and basically starts bullshitting, saying that Night Vale basically just walked and (VERY UNDERSTANDABLY) refused to be paid AFTER the show was over. My assumption is that Night Vale caught on to how damned sketchy the con was being.

But that's not the LEAST of their money problems. Oh, no. This con seems to have an AMAZING way of funneling IN money but somehow "losing" it before being able to funnel it OUT. One of the most telling things that barely anyone noticed was that, upon looking at their old Kickstarter (which I believe is now deleted, but screencaps of this can be found online), they have a special thing called "flexible payment." Which means that, whether the con gets funded or not, the people organizing it get the money. That is BULLSHIT for a con. Sure, for an invention, maybe, to cover Research and Development costs. But for a convention? You don't have ANYTHING for a convention without money. No center, no acts. Maybe some fucking PLANS, but you can't do anything with those plans without MONEY. So if the convention failed, they'd be getting money for saying "...Well, I thought of a Tumblr convention once." Personally, all "flexible funding" is bullshit to me (look at how well Steam's version of flexible funding is working on video games: tons and tons and tons of unfinished, buggy games getting fully funded and the creator gets tons of money for publishing shit), but that's another topic.