anyone else following the "A Million Lives" author convention debacle?

I don't get why people are calling this a Fyre Fest, it's more like that Willy Wonka experience

or DashCon

The Bridgerton Ball except I don't think anyone hired a stripper

Savy even made the joke that while DashCon had a ball pit, Million Lies had one ball

how could the organizer hire anyone? her identity was stolen!

I have, and it is wiiiild

But as someone who staffs an actual con... also worrying how more and more of these vents are going to hurt attendance at actual established cons and such.

They didn't even have a ballpit

ChickletLARP : The thing that's insidious is stuff like Dashcon was too big for its britches and wanted to do a really big con too fast when a lot of cons scale small the first few years to make sure they can handle growth.

These are small

They're sized in a way where it should be reasonably possible to give people a modest sized good time

It means people aren't going to trust even early cons that look scaled at the right place early days

I get that. I guess my worry is more that people who have never attended [Fill in the blank con name] will not know if they can trust how long the web page says they have been running and a lot of new attendance numbers could drop if this becomes more a part of th cultural zeitgeist.

I don't think established cons will have quite such a hard time bc they've built trust

Like the con I work at is probably big enough to be okay for now. We're fairly well known. But a lot of cons got hit hard in 2020 and I know some people who used to staff cons that just... from listening to some of them it sounds like some cons are just hanging on by the skin of their teeth as it is

I hope you are right. I tend to doom spiral >.<

tbh I suspect the established ones are probs suffering more from everyone's economic situations.

Tons of people laid off the economy in shambles, working multiple jobs...

Makes it hard to justify the fun money even for a moderately priced con

Cons aren't as fun if you can't afford to make your cosplay this year, can't afford the even reasonably priced extra events like concerts and parties, and can't afford any swag

Hopefully the economic situation will turn around if we can get the cheeto out of office and at least the trust is still there

With luck it's some temporary hardship. I don't think it'd be a permanent lack of trust.

Yeah, that is also a worry. And how many plane incidents there are, I'm contemplating an 18+ hour train ride each way to get to the con I work rather than flying. And I LOVE flying.

But then there is still the question of if I can even afford to work the con, to your point