DashCon at 10: I single-handedly destroyed fandom culture?

July 21, 2024 11:26 PM

I was 15. I had been to three conventions. One of them was a rabbit convention.
posted by one for the books (7 comments total)

I've watched Sarah Z's video on DashCon and I'm pretty sure that this young person didn't "single-handedly destroy" anything; teenagers have big dreams and have no idea what's involved in real-life stuff involving adults and contracts and whatnot, and I think that it might have taken maybe five minutes talking to someone with real experience putting together and running a con to help her figure out "OK, not me, not this year." One of the actual adults in charge sticking a paper bag in her hand and telling her to go out and beg for money because she was crying is some galaxy-brain bullshit; that person deserves to be banned from all fandom forever.
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:44 AM on July 22 [7 favorites]

I always felt like DashCon was undeserving of the mockery in the way that, say, Fyre Festival clearly was. Conventions used to be run in charming low-rent ways by fans of sci-fi novels and other things, just booking an off-season section of an airport hotel and inviting authors to attend panels. There was a time before the big-budget merchandising extravaganzas.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 5:05 AM on July 22 [7 favorites]

I sort of feel like Tumblr’s story always ends in DashCon… a Comic Con in 2013
> I'm pretty sure that this young person didn't "single-handedly destroy" anything; teenagers have big dreams
[harvard:] "On May 19, 2013, internet company Yahoo announced it was purchasing the blogging service Tumblr for about $1.1 billion in cash. The acquisition was intended to put a fresh face on the aging Internet company and provide it with a profitable revenue source. But… Yahoo ended up writing off most of Tumblr’s value."
*clicks Read Homestuck*
.
posted by HearHere at 5:16 AM on July 22

rum-soaked space hobo: I always felt like DashCon was undeserving of the mockery in the way that, say, Fyre Festival clearly was.

Yeah, Fyre Festival was a grift; Dashcon was an earnest attempt to run a large event by people who had no idea what they were doing. It was fun to rubberneck in real time but you also felt bad for them.
posted by capricorn at 6:06 AM on July 22 [2 favorites]

Articles like this keep making me glad there was no social media when I was a teen (and barely an internet, even if I did start mushing when I was technically a teenager.) And that my kids are young enough that they have been aware of the downsides and had enough guidance, so far, to stay out of this level of trouble.

I know the subject put up TikTok videos so she started it, but I also feel a bit weird about it getting dragged up again. I am glad the adults on the LLC were also named in the article.
posted by warriorqueen at 6:10 AM on July 22 [2 favorites]

I have a friend who is a SMOF; they’ve done programming at all sorts of SF cons, and, on a number of occasions has been called in to help right the ship on WorldCons that were obviously headed for disaster. Their specialty is sorting out chaotic and half-implemented panel tracks. The usual problem is that the scale is much bigger than anything the organizers have taken on before, small personal differences get magnified, generally the efforts lack people to do everything that needs doing, and loss of one or two people can have cascading effects. From my memories of Sarah Z’s video, almost all of these hit Dashcon, plus it grew much larger than the organizers imagined. Some of those organizers sound like terribly messy (maybe toxic) people, but none of them were 100% of the problem.
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:16 AM on July 22 [1 favorite]

I think also part of the problem is there’s no cheap hotels anymore; so it’s harder to run these things on the shoestring budget people used to.
posted by corb at 7:11 AM on July 22