Don’t forget the sweet teats! 
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… as I understand it, BB got sick of getting sued for using other people’s photos 
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Hilariously disappointing scam experiences for kids followed by legal action and press coverage used to be reserved for Christmas fairs more resembling the first day of the Somme than Lapland - so it’s nice to see some diversification.
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Gotta admit, for AI gibberish it doesn’t sound that different from the kinds of words Roald Dahl might have invented (like “humplecrimp” or “lixivate” or “zoonk” or “snozzwanger”).
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Correction: It’s “Willy’s Chocolate Experience”, no Wonka involved, as the fine print states:
Any resemblance to any character, fictitious or living, is purely coincidental.
This experience is in no way related to the Wonka franchise, which is owned by the Warner Bros. company.
They made certain they got that part right.
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“Catgacating” is totally the perfect name for some dystopian genetic experiment. The true force behind the development of Wonka-Vite, perhaps.
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There’s a Weird Al song for that!
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If only they pitched the right idea to match their budget, like, “The Somme Experience” (a muddy field), or “The Jean-Paul Sartre Experience” (a small, very crowded series of rooms with misleading directions for getting out)?
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At least they didn’t do Peter Pan … yet.
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When I first saw this on Tumblr, my reaction was “What, another Dashcon?” /rimshot
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Commentary from Gaiman…
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What, you mean they weren’t eager to embrace a new Glascgownian 2 weeks on the outs with a particular repressive regime?
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How many hogsheads are there in a cartchy tun ?
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Or “willys chocolate experience” or “Willy Choclate Experience”, depending on which text you read.
Honestly, the website is so bad it feels like one of those scam emails where the English is deliberately poor to weed out brighter people.
Edit: at least the booking page is now a 404 
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Still better than “Experience a Chocolate Willy”.
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It’s the perfect story. You’ve got high expectations versus miserable reality. You’ve got an organiser who – if his reams and reams of apparently AI-generated self-published books are any indication – has a samurai-level expertise when it comes to parting people from their money. You’ve got the fact that he runs a company called House of Illuminati. You’ve got police involvement. You’ve got peripheral figures going viral on TikTok. Best of all, you’ve got a website so lazily constructed that it promises nonsense including “catgacating” and “exarserdray lollipops”. It’s perfect. It’s perfect.
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I’d be curious whether they are somehow sucking money out of even the ones that fail and collapse into recriminations and refunds(maybe by overpaying one or more of the suppliers and having them be the real beneficiary? I’m not a white collar crime expert); or whether they target a relatively low, but not-technically-fraud level of quality; and that doesn’t leave a lot of margin for execution hiccups and we read about the ones where things went unexpectedly poorly; but the money is in the ones that are disappointing but not catastrophic.
Probably some fascinating forensic accounting and/or trawling for reoccurring characters to be done.
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EXACTLY! (And someone else on tumblr also thought the same as me, as they included a picture of the infamous ballpit from Dashcon in the post. 
)
My bet says it’s a grift- hype the event up with flashy machine generated marketing blurbs, charge people a slightly unreasonable amount, but not so much that it’s obvious, cheap out on everything for the actual event (including stiffing the vendors), and pocket all the profit, and vanish before the lawsuits come after you. (especially the ones about not properly licensing the IP, and repeat somewhere else.
a group of friends and I tried to start a convention back in 2011/2012- the idea is we’d bring in several major fandom genres into essentially one big party. We canceled it after about 6 months in from going public to folding up the corporation shell, because the seed month just wasn’t there. We lost around two grand between bank fees and other expenses, most of which were born by two people in the group.
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