When everyone seems to see the car crash coming, but the gobshite holding the wheel. I mentioned Otakucon a few months ago. Well, it's supposedly running right now.
What is is, really, is a demonstration of how not to run a con and pretty much every single way it is possible to fail at holding an event. It's a full-blown plane-crash of fail. But it has given us the LIST.
How to make a convention Fail, in 25 easy steps.
#1: Freehose your con's webshite on a server that serves up shitty abnoxious popup ads with a malware side-dish.
#2: Pick a name for the Con that ensures you'll be well down the google rankings, below the last crowd to infringe on Otakon's trademark
#3: Run it the fuck out of your own pocket 'Like one of the Big Boys'
#4: Turn it into a temple of your own Ego.
#5: Advertise a whole load of events that you never really had an intention of having, or advertise as coming, people you made contact with who dind't immediately say 'no'
#6: Threaten anyone who wonders how you plan to pay for it with a lawsuit for 'deformation'. Mispel defamation repeatedly.
#7: Threaten to sue 4chan.
#8: Promise to pay for it 'like the big boys', and make the guests 'take a cut on their appearance fees'
#9: Announce a venue you haven't actually booked.
#10: Not realise you haven't actually booked the venue, until 6 weeks beforehand. When it's been booked by someone else.
#11: Move to a hotel in the middle of the worst traffic snarl in Ireland. And wait weeks to update the website to tell anyone.
#12: Be so sceevy that the guests who do agree to come ask for appearrance fees up front.
#13: Still manage to loose one guest with about 4 weeks to go. Apparently, by 'negotiating for a better rate'
#14: Try to let this quietly slip by unnoticed by announcing it on Twitter during the middle of the largest con of the year, when they hope nobody will be looking.
#15: Hold your con in the 4 weeks between the largest con of the year and Christmas.
#16: Loose another guest by bollicking up the Airline reservation.
#17: Give the one guest who does show up exactly one event.
#18: Promise to announce a timetable 'tomorrow', 2 weeks before the event.
#19: Finally Announcing it 4 days before the con. Listing events for people no-longer coming.
#20: 3 hours of Cards against humanity 'tournament'. 3 hours of Flux. As an advertised 'event'.
#21: Geek Eire (A crappy Bootleg of Geek Ireland so bad, they consider 'Cowboy Bebob' an obscure anime)
#22: Get in such a childish strop over a comparison to DashCon, that you actually buy a ballpit and advertise it as an event
#23: No Ballpit in the timetable. After being promised. Other advertised 'big ticket' events missing too.
#24: A grand total of 35 people managed to pre-register. Most not even for the weekend.
#25: Get repeatedly told by multiple independant sources that your security officer is a a bit of a known cunt, with a history of harrasing con attendees, and decide to stand by him instead.
So, it seems, if you want to run a succesful event, take a look at what this gobaloon did and then do the exact opposite on every point. I do feel bad for the guest and traders, who're showing up solely to demonstrate they're reliable people, if at all.
And we do have succesful cons. Eirtakon has just surpassed it's tenth year - even if that was somewhat of a melancholy experience for me in a strange way. And Kaizoku con next February hitting the difficult second year promises to be interesting. (Even if some of us are packing so much Whiskey and Scotch into the RX8 that it'll be more a private whsikey festival, with some anime events, than a convention). There's a couple of others, and the odd failure to launch, but none that have managed quite this level of failure.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
What is is, really, is a demonstration of how not to run a con and pretty much every single way it is possible to fail at holding an event. It's a full-blown plane-crash of fail. But it has given us the LIST.
How to make a convention Fail, in 25 easy steps.
#1: Freehose your con's webshite on a server that serves up shitty abnoxious popup ads with a malware side-dish.
#2: Pick a name for the Con that ensures you'll be well down the google rankings, below the last crowd to infringe on Otakon's trademark
#3: Run it the fuck out of your own pocket 'Like one of the Big Boys'
#4: Turn it into a temple of your own Ego.
#5: Advertise a whole load of events that you never really had an intention of having, or advertise as coming, people you made contact with who dind't immediately say 'no'
#6: Threaten anyone who wonders how you plan to pay for it with a lawsuit for 'deformation'. Mispel defamation repeatedly.
#7: Threaten to sue 4chan.
#8: Promise to pay for it 'like the big boys', and make the guests 'take a cut on their appearance fees'
#9: Announce a venue you haven't actually booked.
#10: Not realise you haven't actually booked the venue, until 6 weeks beforehand. When it's been booked by someone else.
#11: Move to a hotel in the middle of the worst traffic snarl in Ireland. And wait weeks to update the website to tell anyone.
#12: Be so sceevy that the guests who do agree to come ask for appearrance fees up front.
#13: Still manage to loose one guest with about 4 weeks to go. Apparently, by 'negotiating for a better rate'
#14: Try to let this quietly slip by unnoticed by announcing it on Twitter during the middle of the largest con of the year, when they hope nobody will be looking.
#15: Hold your con in the 4 weeks between the largest con of the year and Christmas.
#16: Loose another guest by bollicking up the Airline reservation.
#17: Give the one guest who does show up exactly one event.
#18: Promise to announce a timetable 'tomorrow', 2 weeks before the event.
#19: Finally Announcing it 4 days before the con. Listing events for people no-longer coming.
#20: 3 hours of Cards against humanity 'tournament'. 3 hours of Flux. As an advertised 'event'.
#21: Geek Eire (A crappy Bootleg of Geek Ireland so bad, they consider 'Cowboy Bebob' an obscure anime)
#22: Get in such a childish strop over a comparison to DashCon, that you actually buy a ballpit and advertise it as an event
#23: No Ballpit in the timetable. After being promised. Other advertised 'big ticket' events missing too.
#24: A grand total of 35 people managed to pre-register. Most not even for the weekend.
#25: Get repeatedly told by multiple independant sources that your security officer is a a bit of a known cunt, with a history of harrasing con attendees, and decide to stand by him instead.
So, it seems, if you want to run a succesful event, take a look at what this gobaloon did and then do the exact opposite on every point. I do feel bad for the guest and traders, who're showing up solely to demonstrate they're reliable people, if at all.
And we do have succesful cons. Eirtakon has just surpassed it's tenth year - even if that was somewhat of a melancholy experience for me in a strange way. And Kaizoku con next February hitting the difficult second year promises to be interesting. (Even if some of us are packing so much Whiskey and Scotch into the RX8 that it'll be more a private whsikey festival, with some anime events, than a convention). There's a couple of others, and the odd failure to launch, but none that have managed quite this level of failure.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
