So, apparently one of the organizers of Universal Fancon has been doing this kind of thing from Brockway to Ogdenville to North Haverbrook. Sorta reminds me of that mall developer that western NY cities keep paying to half-build them malls.
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Yes, I mentioned it many times.
Yes this is exactly how American cars display what they are. Though as an example from today, a woman comes in and needs a brake light for her '14 Ford F-150 Platinum. After we get the bulb I go out to put it in for her (donāt expect that service all the time but Fords are pretty accessible when it comes to rear bulbs) and see itās a Ford F-250 Super Duty Limited. The bulb fit so I didnāt tell her but it was all extant and available information that she got 90% wrong.
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Luckily for all those involved that the F-250 probably shares a lot of parts commonality with the F-150.
The only reasonable thing I can think of for her mistake is that maybe she also has an F-150 and got the two confused. Otherwiseā¦ total face palm moment.
WHY WONT PEOPLE LEARN
Big Bad Con is run by Sean Nittner. It has been around for years. it is 100% legit. In fact, itās above legit. itās a terrific convention with all kinds of awesome indie RPG action. I would go to it every year if not for the location.
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Note to self: read the Kickstarter link before posting it.
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On one hand, I donāt want to blame the victims for what are mismanaged and/or scam events.
On the other hand, how naive do you have to be to go to an event like this?
I have a lot more sympathy than you.
Kids are kids. When I was 15 I wore my parents down into letting me attend Anime Boston. Not because Iād read up on the con, just because my friends told me it was cool. I donāt see why that couldnāt have been forkknife con.
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That is why
Why do people every year buy the Vii Video Game System (Not A Ripoff) from CVS? Or that shit-ass Nintendo Multicart-on-a-case thing that was everywhere last christmas? If you donāt nkow better, from outside, everything looks good. Once you know cons, you can pick up on the bullshit.
But you knew people who had been and spoke well of it, right? Thatās a pretty reasonable assurance that no one was peeing in the ball pit, so to speak.
That is true, I knew people whoād been and spoke well of it. I was still going sight unseen.
These kids are going to an event that is sight-unseen to literally everyone though. There is no human they can talk to about the event. There is no review. There is no friend, or even friend-of-a-friend, who went at some point.
Thereās nothing.
Every con I went to, I either talked to someone who had been to it previously, or I did some research to see if it was legit. This is even back in the 90s before the Internet was widely used.
The dodgiest thing I ever did was drive to a LAN Party that had no schedule info and very little information around āwhat to bringā or even how much it cost. But it was a couple hours away and didnāt have pre-registration, so worst case I could just bail if it was a fail. Even there, I at least found real photos online of the same event from the previous year.
Unless you have evidence an event has run successfully in the past, itās to be scrutinized carefully.
If itās a first year event, that web site needs to be examined with a fine toothed comb. Sparse on details? Skip it. Stock photos all over? Skip it.
Fyre Festival was such a perfect example. Hype train aside, if you went to the web site, it was clearly fake. It was so fake it set off my āphishing siteā radar.
Iāve gone to some pretty rinky-dink conventions, but all relatively local. Honestly if Iām out a bit of money for a badge, Iāll live. Worst case scenerio Iāll go somewhere else in town. But Iām not spending PAX money on those. If I were doing all of air fair, vacation time, hotel costs, etc it might be worse. Then again, if Iām just spending 4 days in Seattle or LA or something I could find enough to do elsewhere to make my time worth it.
Worst run event Iāve been to wasā¦ still not that crazy bad. It was badly ran, poorly organized, in a dilapidated hotel, but nerdy people showed up. I played games with some people. The people seemed alright. I obviously wasnāt attending weird panels where I was going to be more informed than the experts on stuff.
Or maybe the worst one was my first Gencon in 2003? But the only bad part of that was the āofficial eventā games, whichā¦ suffered for all the reasons those sort of things suck? And they attracted kinda not good people. Lessons learned. A mistake made once. All my games outside of the official events were gold though.