 So ever since we launched the Nerd & Tie Mega-Blog, a lot of the convention scene stuff that used to show up in this space has kind of... tapered off. Mostly because it's moved over to *that* site.
That said, I know some of you only read my personal blog and don't follow my other site -- so I thought I'd share all the Convention Scene news we've been posting about for the last month.
You know, so you can find out what it is and stuff.
We'll start out with "Awesome Con" stuff. Many of you saw my first post on Awesome Con here on TRHOnline. What you may not have known is that I also posted that same article (minus one line) over at Nerd & Tie. What's more important, is that Pher Sturz (one of my cohorts at Nerd & Tie) also wrote a follow up to that initial story which is definitely worth going through.
I've linked it before, but I figured it was also worth re-mentioning I did a write up on the absolute disaster that was DashCon. If you ever wanted to know how not to run a con, that's the article for you.
Most recently, I also wrote up an article on how Ryan Kopf's AnimeCon.org wrote a weird, overreaching statement to a banned attendee. It's nothing all that alarming, but it is funny as hell. Pretty much what happened was that an AnimeCon.org representative sent a Facebook message full of unenforceable stuff to a guy, and we make fun of it.
That's it.
Finally, I know I talked about this before, but you should really consider supporting the Nezumi Con Indiegogo campaign. They're good people who run a good convention, and they need all the help they can get.
So do it.
Give them money.
I literally gain nothing from this endorsement beyond the ability to go to a really cool convention.
- Traegorn
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So I just got back from my annual sojourn to the Wisconsin Northwoods last night, and I'm not super excited to rejoin the real world today.
Because there was a lake and fresh air.
I already miss the lake and fresh air.
But if you were wondering why my blog didn't update for over a week, that's pretty much it. Believe it or not, when I get to choose between relaxing by the lake and writing about relaxing by the lake, I'll take the actual relaxing.
But I'm back.
Much to my chagrin, I'm back.
But hey, that's life. And there's always next year.
In the meanwhile, here's a selfie with my wife Crysta and the Rhinelander Hodag:
- Traegorn
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So there's been a lot of negative stuff on TRHOnline and Nerd & Tie about rumblings in the convention scene. From the Awesome Con stuff ( Part 1, Part 2) to the DashCon fiasco ( dear lord that mess...), things have probably sounded pretty bleak.
So let's talk about something else instead. Let's talk about a great little convention trying to expand.
Let's talk about Nezumi Con.
Nezumi Con started as a little student run con at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, and I've been going there for the last two years. It may be small, but I've always enjoyed myself.
Well, they're trying to grow, and they need money to do that. So Nezumi Con has launched an Indiegogo campaign.
Their goal is fairly reasonable at $4500, and the campaign will continue until September 5th. With this money they plan on running their standard January one day event - but long term they want to expand to a multiday event.
Look, with all the talk about corporate cons and amateurs making messes of thing, Nezumi Con is an independent, well run convention and they need your support.
So consider donating.
And attending.
And being awesome.
Not enough inspiration? If you help support Nezumi Con 2015, I can pay for a table at Nezumi Con 2015. And then you can go to Nezumi Con 2015. And then you can find a table that looks like this there and buy things from me:
WOULDN'T THAT MAKE YOUR LIFE BETTER? I think it would.
- Traegorn
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 So as many of you know, I primarily do conventions in two areas: Indiana (where I live) and Wisconsin (where I'm from). I've just recently gotten started at expanding into more Indiana events, but it would be an understatement to say I'm highly involved with cons in Wisconsin.
Mostly because I co-founded one of the older, still running ones.
Those of you who have read my blog over the years may have also noted I have a pretty specific philosophy when it comes to how people and organizations in the con scene should interact. I think cons should try to work together cooperatively rather than competitively, as a rising tide can lift all boats if we do it right. I hold everyone to a pretty high standard, and I view what we're doing in building communities amongst those who haven't so easily been accepted in society at large as kind of important. And while I am not wholly against for-profit conventions on any sort of principle, as I believe they can be run right, I also have yet to witness that many situations where for-profit outfits don't come into regions like a bull in a china shop.
I can get a bit preachy, I know.
And Wisconsin has been a nice little refuge, with almost an entirely non-profit, fan run con scene. Even the largest con currently in the area, Anime Milwaukee, is managed with some pretty solid principles. Sure, not everyone is perfect - and conflict happens, but overall stuff has been pretty peaceful.
Cons work together, stay away from each others weekends, and have built a community unlike anywhere else I've been to.
Anyway, all of that should serve as background to how I'm reacting to a very particular email I received yesterday.
An email which has me a bit angry.
Because you know that bull I mentioned earlier? It's just driven a truck through the china shop's front window.
Yesterday I got an email in both my personal trh@trhonline.com inbox as well as the Facebook fanpage for The Chronicles of Crosarth which read as follows:Hi,
My name is Jess [redacted], and I am the Event coordinator for Awesome Con. We are bringing our brand of comic-con to Indianapolis and Milwaukee this fall, and I hope you will join us as an exhibitor, artist or sponsor.
If you haven't heard of us, Awesome Con in Washington, DC is one of the largest cons on the east coast, with over 30,000 people attending our event this year. We are starting new shows in Indianapolis from October 3-5, and Milwaukee from November 21-23. We want to bring something new and exciting to these markets, and our expected attendance for each show is at least 20,000.
There are only a handful of cons in the country that advertise as aggressively as we do. We will be all over TV, radio, print, Facebook, and billboards in those respective cities. We also partner with local PR agencies to make sure the local media knows about us, and if you've seen some of our past coverage, we are very good at getting our shows in the news.
Please let me know if you have any questions that can't be answered by visiting our website http://www.awesome-con.com/. Exhibitor applications can be found for Indianapolis here and Milwaukee here. Thanks, and hope to see you there!
--
Jess [redacted]
Event Coordinator Awesome Conventions
www.awesome-con.com
[redacted]@awesomecons.com Upon seeing how the email version was BCC'd to me, I can only assume that the "Awesome Con" staffer sent this out en masse to people who listed online that they exhibited at cons in either Wisconsin or Indiana (or both in my case). Many of us list our con appearances and dates on our websites, so that's the only reason I can think of that I would have been contacted.
But clearly "Jess" did look closely at any of those listings.
You see, their Milwaukee dates of November 21-23 are literally the exact same dates as Daisho Con in Wisconsin Dells. Daisho Con is Wisconsin's second largest Anime Convention, and just two and a half hours away from Milwaukee. One of my Nerd & Tie co-hosts is a cofounder of that event and it's one of my favorite cons. This organization literally decided to come in and set up their competing event not near, but on the exact same weekend as one of the most beloved cons in the region. A con which for seven years has been on that weekend.
This is just f***ing clown shoes.
They literally are just walking into town and setting themselves up on a long established con's weekend. With no respect for the local fans, my money is that they never even bothered looking to see if another event took place that weekend. Even if they did look, they fundamentally misunderstood the way cons work in Wisconsin. They didn't even spend five minutes scoping the regional scene and finding out how events interacted before charging in.
To put it in more business-like terms: you need to fundamentally understand a market, even if you're looking to disrupt it. Literally picking any other date wouldn't have caused bad will.
Even if the difference was only a week.
Also - seriously, Indianapolis? Does Indianapolis really need another group trying to make a huge scale con? I mean, Gen Con's been there since they left Milwaukee, sure, but just this year we've had two attempts of varying success in the spring (Indianapolis Comic Con, Indy Pop Con). Not to mention Wizard World is coming next year. Only Indy Pop Con is fan run out of those, and can the town really support five large scale cons?
I don't think it can.
And that "at least 20,000" attendees number has to be a joke. Sure, Indianapolis supports Gen Con's almost 50,000 attendees, but Indianapolis Comic Con (which was hyped for quite some time) only did about 15,000 (I say "only did" like that isn't a really impressive number for a first year con... hah). Indy Pop Con had good numbers, but was smaller. I think the estimate I heard for that was 10,000 - but that was just in conversation. What it boils down to though is that there's no way a new Indianapolis con hits 20,000.
I'll eat my hat if it does.
And Milwaukee? Milwaukee is incapable of supporting an event that size. Gen Con literally left Milwaukee because the city couldn't support it - and it only had 23,000 attendees in 2002 (its final year in the Dairy state). There is literally not enough hotel space to support Awesome Con's projected attendance numbers.
But that's what they're telling prospective vendors.
This means one of two things: Either Awesome Con's staff is being dishonest with how many people they think will come, or they're incompetent. Considering how much they're about to offend a lot of fans in Wisconsin, I'm leaning towards the latter.
You see, the problem here is not malice but indifference. The Awesome Con staff didn't bother looking at other events in the region. They didn't bother looking at what a city could support. They just... didn't bother. They run a massively successful East Coast con, and they're under the assumption they can plop it down anywhere and be successful.
Any maybe to a lot of degrees they will be - Awesome Con has more general appeal that Daisho Con, and maybe they can get five digit attendance figures right off the bat. Anime Milwaukee hasn't been able to do that, but they don't have the resources these guys do.
But is it good for the con scene? It depends on your point of view. I will say it will disrupt the idillic little non-profit, cooperative world we've built quite a bit... but it's not like it was ever a true utopia.
It does mean that we need to fight to support the cons that brung us though. I don't know about you, but come that weekend in November, I'll be at Daisho Con.
I hope you're all with me.
(Also, seriously, $200 for a first year con's Artist Alley? F*** that noise...)
We've been contacted by Awesome Con and told that their staffer Jess has been receiving harassing emails regarding this situation. Please stop. That sort of thing helps no one.
- Traegorn
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So I know I used to talk a lot about Heroes of Cosplay a lot in this space, but haven't really spoken on the subject since the beginning of Season 1.5. This is because I moved a lot of that content over to Nerd & Tie's new Mega-Blog. I know not all of you read that though, so I thought I'd gather all of my coverage into one easy to dig through spot.
Fun and exciting.
So here we go - Trae's Heroes of Cosplay megapost of awesome!
Season 1:
Blog Entries - Podcasts -
Season 1.5:
Blog Entries - Podcasts -
So yeah. That's all of it so far.
- Traegorn
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So I mentioned this a little while back, but I'll be at InCONjunction this weekend at the Indianapolis Marriot East in Indianapolis, IN. It's a con I've never done before, so I'm excited about it.
My table location is "Creators' Alley 08." Now while I love knowing my table number ahead of time, they don't actually number the creator's tables on the official map of the exhibit hall. So, I guess I'll just say that I'm somewhere hereish:
It's not that huge a space, and it will be the table that has me behind it. If you still have trouble finding me knowing that, I don't know how else I can help you.
I'm super excited about this show, and I should be behind my table almost the entire time that the exhibit hall is open (I'm not doing any panels at this show). Stop on by if you're there, have a chat, and consider buying a book if you feel like it.
Hopefully it will be a pretty good time.
- Traegorn
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So today is June 25th, the official birthday for TRHOnline. That's right, 18 years ago today I uploaded "Eric's Homepage" (back when I used my first name - wow that was a long time ago) to Members.aol.com and started this bizarre online experiment.
The site had several homes before settling on TRHOnline.com in February of 2000, but it really was the same site.
For those of you who may not remember 1996 all that well, back then we didn't really have social networking sites at all. When people wanted to have a place online to share their dumb ideas and links, we fired up a basic text editor and built something from scratch.
Needless to say, it was pretty much just the nerds doing it back then. So we put really dumb stuff on there too. 
Most of the websites from those days have been long abandoned and no longer exist, but a few of us have stuck around. I moved off the random hosts, started the blogs, and rewrote the whole thing from scratch five or six times... but this site prevailed.
And now its 18 years old.
How weird is it that there are now people who can legally vote younger than my personal website? I mean, just thinking about the age of the internet and how instinctively I still think of this medium as "new," it just kind of blows my mind.
Just three more years until I can buy my website a drink then...
- Traegorn
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So I talked a bit about this last week, but starting THIS week the new Nerd & Tie goes live. For those who didn't listen to the newest episode of the podcast, Nerd & Tie is expanding beyond a fortnightly podcast into a general geek culture website of awesomeness. We're going to be regularly updating with news, reviews and other content.
Because I'm going to be posting Geek and Nerd stuff over there, you'll probably see less of it in my personal blog. Like, when I complain about Heroes of Cosplay, that's probably going to be the place I do it from now on. I'll still have plenty of stuff to write about here (because where else am I going to plug my personal projects and complain about life in general), but that particular part of what I do is moving to Nerd & Tie.
And I think it's for the better.
Anyway, check out my first "article" or something. It involves Nathan Fillion and Guardians of the Galaxy... so it should be an interesting read.
- Traegorn
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 So many of you know I do a fortnightly podcast called Nerd & Tie, but there are some changes coming to it over the next couple of weeks that I'm pretty excited about.
First off, the podcast itself is staying the same. Same hosts, same format, same update schedule. There are no changes to the actual show. On this weekend's episode though we'll be making a pretty cool announcement about the site which I think you guys will love.
But I won't say it until then.
There ARE a couple of things I can talk about now though. First off, you may have noticed the URL for the podcast has changed to www.NerdandTie.com. We've been planning on that move for a while, and we finally took it. We've also added new routes to follow the site on Social media. Besides our Facebook page, we've also added a twitter account for Nerd & Tie as well as a Tumblr blog. You should follow both of those for the latest in Nerd & Tie stuff!
Because it's awesome!
And definitely tune into this weekend's episode on Sunday night to find out the rest.
- Traegorn
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So as many of you know, I primarily do conventions in two areas: Indiana (where I live) and Wisconsin (where I'm from). I've just recently gotten started at expanding into more Indiana events, but it would be an understatement to say I'm highly involved with cons in Wisconsin.
