My god this gives me such a schadenboner. I've been tracking this clusterfuck as it's passed by my dash over the last couple days and it's gotten even crazier.

I'm going to go a complete non sequitur and talk about some occasionally detestable, but importantly competent, people. Penny Arcade, at the first PAX, had no fucking clue what they were doing. They had never run a con, and the only people they contacted for their expertise basically gave them no help whatsoever. The first PAX was, by all reports, very disorganized and had a lot of problems, but they managed to make it work, with competent volunteers and the willingness to nearly kill themselves to make it all happen. PAX is now a massive juggernaut of a convention and probably the most fun you can have as a gamer of any type.

Now, not everybody has a Robert Khoo to get them there, but the "it's a first-year con, you have to expect some bugs" excuse has limits. Every con had a first year. The ones that are still around managed to make it work. This level of failure is exceptional, and I'm genuinely impressed at the number and severity of fuckups.

Of course, I would have started running for the hills at "unofficial Tumblr convention", mostly because I have no faith in the tumblr userbase's ability to do anything with a unified goal.