mom i can't go to school today, it's everytime we touch day

Eleanor of Aquitaine & Eleanor of England & Blanche of Castile

One of the most important documents in recent chinese history: Lesbian kiss at Tiananmen, 2006.

So as I’m sure some of you saw, I attended Dashcon for the whole time. I was exhibiting there as a vendor, and so I’m going to keep this as unbiased-ish as I can but I’m gonna poke fun at some things because some of it was just so ridiculous. 

First off. Blanket statement time. Every single person who worked Dashcon that I personally interacted with was really nice. Like, exceedingly so. They all wanted to be there, they all had a blast, they were all super nice to everyone and anyone.

That being said, we applied for a table at Dashcon probably a month or so before the event, maybe more. Heard nothing, so we assumed nope, we didn’t get in. At that point, we had been booking other cons and were spread pretty thin. So, by the time RTX rolls around, it’s halfway through and we get an email from the admins saying CONGRATS, YOU GOT IN. Excitement did not happen, mostly on our part because we had to figure out how the hell to make this work. There were some snafus on the part of UPS with things (whole pallets of product) being lost so finding out we had to scrape and scrounge to get more stuff was a real, “aw shit” moment. 

Either way, I volunteered as tribute; Dashcon was expecting a pretty decently big crowd and it seemed like it could be worth some decent money. 

So day 1 rolls around. I have issues regarding everything but the con, but fuck it, that doesn’t really apply. Instead, I show up around 10 AM and wow, the place is nice. Crystal chandeliers sorta nice. Kind of reminded me of dragon*con a bit but then you get to the tables and they’re just sorta draped in sheets and stuff. No convention management was used during this convention - which, hey, first time con, that makes sense. Hopefully something’ll change about that because as a vendor on short notice (being told a week before the con that we got in) your options for what to do and where to stay are sorta limited if you don’t want to eat the charges of hotels charging you to ship shit to them. 

Relevant text:

ANYWAY, I’m at the Hyatt and the hotel is like 2.1 miles away, so whatever, I drive over there with a ton of boxes. Go to park, find entrance and go to the nice lady who is helping check people in but lol they don’t have any information about me being there, nor do they have my badges. AWESOME. Not her fault, she was super nice, so she asks to see the proof of me being a vendor there and tl;dr after a half hour I finally get my badges and shit and can finally get into the exhibit hall. 

Get into the hall and I ask another girl where my table is because I have no service in there. Girl says she doesn’t know, has to ask another girl who works there. Other girl searches and tries to figure out what’s going on because I have 2 tables but they’re only showing 1? I’m not really sure what ever happened to that other table at some point but they got me settled with 2 tables nearly a half hour later. By this time the loadout is nearly finished because it’s like 3-4 hours before the con opens (TERRIBLE IDEA WHY) and so I’m hauling ass to try and get set up in time.  Another thing to note is in the agreement we signed, we were to be given 4 badges, not the 2 I was given. It wasn’t an issue until it was an issue, and then the two (very nice) people I attempted to contact to get the additional 2 badges were unable to help. 

Get everything set up, finally, and the con opens. Only thing is, the hours I was given in the agreement:

Don’t match the hours that I was given on the badges. The hours on the badges were ridiculous, going until 8 PM on Friday, 8PM on Saturday and the same on Sunday. As a single person manning a booth the above hours weren’t too bad. But the con officially opened (if I recall correctly) at 1PMish which is when the vendors were supposed to poke around and chat with people as opposed to have the center open? (Can any vendors confirm my memory here?) 

Now in terms of numbers, this is what we packed for/planned for:

Not sure of full numbers yet but it doesn’t feel like there were that many people there, not really. I’ve seen a ton of numbers tossed out and none of them really seem to match.  So I had to send home a fair bit of stuff, which sucks.

Now we get to the fun part. I’ve been to cons before. I love the whole culture of conventions, but goddamn there were some crazies. Posted from my twitter:

I spend the day texting my boss, who takes my complaining like a champ. Texts include things like, “lmfao let me die,” and “so many broke kids here with their moms :(”

- Side note, man I got some dirty fucking looks from some mothers whose kids wanted some badges or other items. SORRY YOUR KID HAS GOOD TASTE. 

I make friends with the people behind me and we order food and split it. Everyone who has a booth is pretty fucking rad. Then, one of my neighbors says, “Oh hey, tumblr prom is tonight, let’s do that." 

SURE WHY NOT. 

Thus begins the liveblog of tumblr prom. It goes exactly how you’d expect.  Here’s my summary if you haven’t seen it yet. 

Texts to boss include:

- "I’m watching the equivalent of 14 year olds grinding on each other :(”

- “I had a guy legit call me m'lady at this con of all places”

and, boss: “why are you at tumblr prom” to which I responded, “I didn’t go to the panel about knotting." 

- "There is a middle age man taking pics of the girls dancing”

So the night ends with the day having been ~~~saved~~~. I chat with a few people and am ultimately unimpressed with people shoving their money at this with no way to believe anything. I talk to a few of the admins on stage and no one has their stories straight in terms of admins. I hear the total is 56k from one person, 17k from another, and then I hear that it’s actually 20k. Misinformation is a pain in the ass but we get through the night and start Saturday. 

Saturday is ridiculous hours and it’s hard to sell anything when there’s no one there for the first 3 hours because everyone is still sleeping, but whatever. Dealer room hours aren’t the worst thing ever. 

A girl comes around and introduces herself as the head…something? I’m not sure if it’s the dealer room head person or what but she’s basically the vendor’s POC. Very nice girl, I give her one of the extra pastries I have. The other girl who I met on day 1 ended up resigning, I guess. Fantastic.  I don’t think anyone who signed up for this knew what they were signing up for. 

We get told that if we donated money last night, they are taking names down somewhere to try and pay those people back. I’m assuming that this was due to door sales? Not entirely sure by this point. 

I post this, 

There are also some pics from dashcon-

I have to resist making another 17k joke h–

Nope. not resisting. Highlighted is me. So some posts from twitter summarize this:

 Anyway so we get to this next part:it’s dead in the vendor hall until a wave of upset people sweep through. Why?

Nightvale got cancelled. This results in:

Con dies at 6:30ish so I ask bossman to be able to leave and get dinner. Go and get dinner and we decide to come back. That’s when we see the empty hall. 

We walk in (a friend and I) to go and hang out with people and everyone there is legitimately 15/16. Relevant twitter posts:

So we hang out with these awesome teenagers (how the fuck were you guys seriously that young :() and then we exchange tumblrs. I feel horrendous because my blog is a whole lot of stuff I don’t expect people I’ve met IRL to see, so I’ll deal with that shame later.

We play heads up on my phone for a while: video. I apparently make a horrified face at a Steve Irwin joke. 

I go home after a long day and wake up for today. Some relevant tweets:

Overall a lot of cool people but my god there were some crazies there. I had people who were messing up the tshirts just…because…? I had people who drooled (yes) on one of my tshirts and had to pack it up. I had someone try to pocket some badges. I had someone ask me if I could just give them something for free because they wanted an item but still had to eat.

it was so ridiculous. 

Some other fun things to note:

- Some of con staff didn’t…know what events were going on or where they were.

- I asked for a copy of the events going on and was told there were too many errors so I had to look online.

- Typos. Typos as far as the eye can see in all of the programming. I want this to be more professional next year because it was kind of terrible, some of the typos. 

- There was a ballpit but by the time I got there Saturday night with my friend, it had deflated. That was in the huge empty room. 

- Crying people tally (not related to saving dashcon, but actually related to WTTNV closing or whatever else): 14. Tried to offer tissues or pat backs but my god so many crying girls. 

- Number of times I heard some sort of stereotypical tumblr thing: too many. Fun exchanges like, “I fucking hate all cishet men,” or “There are too many white cis het men here,” or “when people misgender me I want to stab them!”

- I was asked 13 times over the weekend if I preferred female pronouns. Which, while nice, people were walking on egg shells and I got pulled aside at one point by someone who said I shouldn’t refer to them as “dude/man.” The context of this was, “oh dude did you want your receipt?" 

I ended up liveblogging the whole tumblr thing where the admins answered Q&A and to be fair, they handled it as best as they could at that specific moment, but wow. This was just such a mess all around. 

Tl;dr: I had a great time but not for the right reasons. Had I not found most of this terrifyingly hilarious, I would have probably taken my boss’ offer and just left like 4-6 other vendors did, 2 days early. So many people left early from the vendor’s room and there were empty tables and just. ugh.  That being said - first time convention and there’s a lot that you can’t know in advance, but I think that they have a lot of issues that they need to get worked out, by pulling in people who’ve done conventions before. 

Have some other fun reads. Hopefully I didn’t duplicate them. 

My twitter: here.

Here. 

Video. 

Here.

Here.

Here. 

Here.

Here.

Here.

Now, it’s 7 PM and I have a horrific headache so I’m gonna pass out and then find a place to eat dinner. Have fun, guys. 

me and the boys have a couple of chains wrapped around the sword in the stone hooked up to mikes toyota tundra gonna pull that fucker out like a tooth.

Me and the boys misunderstood the arcane nature of the stone and now the Toyota is king of England