Worst Con Story Contest (WCSC)

OtakuForLife · Post by **OtakuForLife** » Thu Nov 27, 2003 8:42 am

Apperantly alot of people didn't like AX02 last year.

Big Big Truck · Post by **Big Big Truck** » Sun Nov 30, 2003 12:54 pm

Never been to an all-around bad con, but A-kon 10 was pretty lame, with the invasion of Klingons, SCA, furries, fratboys, goths, Trekkies, and RenFaire weirdos. Oh, and once you've met Captain Oogie, you're scarred for life. *shudder*
Oh, later we found out and a baby was conceived on the dancefloor, in the middle of the con dance. The lovely couple wore specially altered pants so this could happen. And bragged about it. LAME.

A-kon 12 was pretty cool, though. Good parties.

Farmboybob · Post by **Farmboybob** » Sun Nov 30, 2003 1:59 pm

MinnieMoose wrote:This year's nekocon. It was bad.

Minnie is right. While it wasn't down right disgusting, this years Nekocon was VERY lame. Especially the "big dance" everyone got drunk and passed out in less then 30 min so nothing interesting happened.
And the line for the cosplay was real bad. Me and my pale got in line 2 hours early and still had to wait outside. And it was like 20F and I was wearing a t-shirt and my friend was wearing a short skirt and boy were we cold.

(Why didn't you visit me Minnie? There was plenty of Vodka in my room.)

OtakuForLife · Post by **OtakuForLife** » Sun Nov 30, 2003 3:19 pm

Big Big Truck wrote:Oh, later we found out and a baby was conceived on the dancefloor, in the middle of the con dance. The lovely couple wore specially altered pants so this could happen. And bragged about it. LAME.

Nani?! that's just wrong on so many levels...
Oh, great now I have two rave horror stories to judge

(j/king)

2 days remaining untill me and the other posters decide who wins

Illia Sadri · Post by **Illia Sadri** » Sun Nov 30, 2003 7:23 pm

Kazecon 2003

Well I was staffing that convention whcih just had so many things go wrong.

First of all, the hotel was like a prison maze to get around. The rooms were in terminals that you had to navigate with dreadful brick walls. The hotel staff screwed up everything imaginable including changing the entire dealer room layout and well..... forgetting to set up our STAGE! (however they said the con chair approved the room as is so um... yeah he was an idiot.)

About 300 people showed total. Mostly due to the fact con chair insisted on everything being done at the last minute. So we had next to no publicity and thus nobody cared about coming.

I was shoved with our AMV contest less than 10 days before the con... well this was encoding 23 videos from various file formats as the other guy kinda did not know certain things on encoding like how some formats simply are a pain to handle. This was fine and all except our mail in submissions were in suburban Chicago and I lived near Madison WI. Last staff meeting a week before the con I get our final videos and well.... my car decided to more or less blow up. So I was stranded in Chicago for three of these days. My encodes was finally finished 45 minutes before the contest started and I needed to make the ballots. lol I love amv's but goodness that killed me.

Dealers room was quickly addressed with the problem of bootlegs.... lots of them. Our contract did state this and well.... there were varying amounts of clarity. Lots of hassle with this. We lost a couple dealers, one on the first day and another after Saturday. Most of the dealers made next to nothing as everyone was savign up for Anime Reactor, another Chciago con taking place two weeks after. (the con chair for our con WANTED to compete with them) As a result much of the spending was by staffers sadly.

Let's see...... masquerade started late as is common.... yet for an interesting reason. Vice con chair, who well..... he was about to get lynched as he spent most the con threatening to yank peoples' badges, one of which for our reg head gettign sick and sleeping for much of Friday afternoon. He and the masquerade head got into it and he screamed at her in front of the audience and she ran out..... and she had all the information.

Let's see.... intermission of masquerade was supposed to be the winners of the amv contest. I was supposed to do that and I was told everything was set up. Turns out vice con chair decided this was not important as nobody cares about amv's (only the second largest event for a con.... but whatever) and moves everything and makes it difficult. Well, it is about to be public masquerade feud number two so I call him outside into a nearly empty hallway. I complain about how basically he screwed up majorly. He goes on and on about how I had done nothing (fact was only a couple of departmetn heads ever me the vice con chair all of ONCE at a meeting and well.... he was nto involved in much if any of the planning) and thus threatens my badge. I start walking away, he yanks my badge from me, ripping my shirt. I snap back to grab it back and well I get a fist to the face.... not a whole lot more to say on that.

Let's see then that night we lost a good portion of our staff for varying reasons, myself included. We lost almost all of our security and reg staff as it was handled by this one anime club and they had an indicent with one girl getting incredibly drunk to the point we had to call an ambulance. Combine that with the other nonsense mentioned above and they felt they had to leave. It was entirely understandable. A few others here and there also kinda were not with the con staff.

Oh and despite me not being on staff... my computer was still in fucking live events for the rest of the con as was some TV's and VCR and other nonsense.

Oh and our con booklet...... well...... I think a 4th grader could have done better. Admitedly it was handled at the last minute liek everything else, but it is so bad the pages were not in order in places and other places just the layout was hideous.

I laugh about all of it now..... and while a lot of the con attendees had fun.... it was quite possibly the most disorganized.... cracked up con experience ever.

Castor Troy · Post by **Castor Troy** » Sun Nov 30, 2003 8:10 pm

Which Akon was it when the lights went out in the dealers room?

Org Profile · Post by **Otohiko** » Sun Nov 30, 2003 10:55 pm

I met Propyro at that tiny con in Toronto exactly 3 weeks ago.

Laugh.

Vale · Post by **Vale** » Sun Nov 30, 2003 11:34 pm

Illia Sadri wrote:Kazecon 2003

Well I was staffing that convention whcih just had so many things go wrong.

First of all, the hotel was like a prison maze to get around. The rooms were in terminals that you had to navigate with dreadful brick walls. The hotel staff screwed up everything imaginable including changing the entire dealer room layout and well..... forgetting to set up our STAGE! (however they said the con chair approved the room as is so um... yeah he was an idiot.)

About 300 people showed total. Mostly due to the fact con chair insisted on everything being done at the last minute. So we had next to no publicity and thus nobody cared about coming.

I was shoved with our AMV contest less than 10 days before the con... well this was encoding 23 videos from various file formats as the other guy kinda did not know certain things on encoding like how some formats simply are a pain to handle. This was fine and all except our mail in submissions were in suburban Chicago and I lived near Madison WI. Last staff meeting a week before the con I get our final videos and well.... my car decided to more or less blow up. So I was stranded in Chicago for three of these days. My encodes was finally finished 45 minutes before the contest started and I needed to make the ballots. lol I love amv's but goodness that killed me.

Dealers room was quickly addressed with the problem of bootlegs.... lots of them. Our contract did state this and well.... there were varying amounts of clarity. Lots of hassle with this. We lost a couple dealers, one on the first day and another after Saturday. Most of the dealers made next to nothing as everyone was savign up for Anime Reactor, another Chciago con taking place two weeks after. (the con chair for our con WANTED to compete with them) As a result much of the spending was by staffers sadly.

Let's see...... masquerade started late as is common.... yet for an interesting reason. Vice con chair, who well..... he was about to get lynched as he spent most the con threatening to yank peoples' badges, one of which for our reg head gettign sick and sleeping for much of Friday afternoon. He and the masquerade head got into it and he screamed at her in front of the audience and she ran out..... and she had all the information.

Let's see.... intermission of masquerade was supposed to be the winners of the amv contest. I was supposed to do that and I was told everything was set up. Turns out vice con chair decided this was not important as nobody cares about amv's (only the second largest event for a con.... but whatever) and moves everything and makes it difficult. Well, it is about to be public masquerade feud number two so I call him outside into a nearly empty hallway. I complain about how basically he screwed up majorly. He goes on and on about how I had done nothing (fact was only a couple of departmetn heads ever me the vice con chair all of ONCE at a meeting and well.... he was nto involved in much if any of the planning) and thus threatens my badge. I start walking away, he yanks my badge from me, ripping my shirt. I snap back to grab it back and well I get a fist to the face.... not a whole lot more to say on that.

Let's see then that night we lost a good portion of our staff for varying reasons, myself included. We lost almost all of our security and reg staff as it was handled by this one anime club and they had an indicent with one girl getting incredibly drunk to the point we had to call an ambulance. Combine that with the other nonsense mentioned above and they felt they had to leave. It was entirely understandable. A few others here and there also kinda were not with the con staff.

Oh and despite me not being on staff... my computer was still in fucking live events for the rest of the con as was some TV's and VCR and other nonsense.

Oh and our con booklet...... well...... I think a 4th grader could have done better. Admitedly it was handled at the last minute liek everything else, but it is so bad the pages were not in order in places and other places just the layout was hideous.

I laugh about all of it now..... and while a lot of the con attendees had fun.... it was quite possibly the most disorganized.... cracked up con experience ever.

Yeah, I was there. Will was going to wreck Jeff or whatever his name is brother. The near rioting was kind of fun though. Also sleeping in an abandoned pannel room was cool. The best part of Kazecon was stray radio hijacking a pannel to do stuff. They gave away ramen.

Illia Sadri · Post by **Illia Sadri** » Mon Dec 01, 2003 3:00 am

Vale wrote:Yeah, I was there. Will was going to wreck Jeff or whatever his name is brother. The near rioting was kind of fun though. Also sleeping in an abandoned pannel room was cool. The best part of Kazecon was stray radio hijacking a pannel to do stuff. They gave away ramen.

Oh that was part of the fun.

We had nobody to run our j-rock panel so sure enough I find some cosplayers for it and ask if they felt like doing it.... they basically grabbed a laptop (my stereo was already being used for open mic in another panel room) and basically spent a few hours showing random videos and music with people drifting in and out the entire time. Which was great as J-rock panels are usually so horribly awkward.

Another fun one was the Sunday panel I was supposed to do on bad bad fanfiction. Well...... after about 20 minutes it was dragged into a what the heck happened the night before and con staff politics. People wanted to know what the hell had happened.

Oh and when the cosplay almost was not happening thanks to vice con chair.... our shonen vs. shoujo panel (which three departmetn heads were running) almost turned into a '"let's get down there and fix this nonsense." We went to appologize to the 6 or so people in attendance and well...... we had last moment volunteers willing to help us out. And this was normal con goers. So while not bad there....... it was interesting to say the least.

In regard to the con chair's brother...... a lot of people wanted to wreck him. Namely.... most of the staff. This is why 17 year olds should not be doing such a thing.

But um... yeah those things mentioned there..... that was the HIGHLIGHTS of the con.

OtakuForLife · Post by **OtakuForLife** » Mon Dec 01, 2003 8:34 am

Well, that was detailed, staff issue/ disorganization story.
For the record, I remember Kazecon I sent 3 vids there

Sorry, I couldn't attend cause I live in RI .