Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/07/11/it-is-the-10th-anniversary-of-dashcon.html
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If life gives you liminals, make liminalade.
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See you all in the ballpit.
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…can’t even wrap mind around a convention for a blog - so a ballpit could well amount to a ‘natural’ extension. Where’s BoingBoingCon being held? Tell us it’s in Maestro Beschizza’s most liminal of all basement ballpits
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… a convention for a blogging platform
As it turns out, a venue whose participants are united mostly by their skill at generating large amounts of text, about very little, every day, may be full of bullshit artists
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Ah, DashCon, or “how to not run a convention”.
Back in 2011-ish, me and a number of my friends tried to spin up a convention aimed at ALL fandoms- a chimera of fandoms, one might say.
We got as far as booking (but not paying for) the convention facility and had sold probably ten tickets when we ran out of money, because the major source of the money (in the form of the vendor room spaces) never materialized. Personally, I lost about $1200 on the entire venture, between paying back some seed money that was loaned to us, the web site hosting, etc. Shutting it down was a hard decision, but one that had to be done. Thankfully, since we did everything in the name of a company, we were able to get out from under it by just dissolving the company.
(that, and 2011/2012 was just a bad time in general to try and start a brand new convention, even if the people running it were experienced conrunners.)
Most of the people in that group have all sworn off running conventions unless they are getting paid for it at this point- that’s how bad a taste it left in our mouths.
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From Stop leaving your sex toys in hotels - #13 by beschizza
At the north end of the Las Vegas strip, one steps out of the taxi to a cluttered and disjointed replica of another world, a Palazzo of cement etched with remarkable precision into a facsimile of old Europe. Even the space between street and entrance is labyrinthine, a disorienting landscape designed for cars and very specific lines of sight. One finds the porté-cochere eventually and steps through the crowd of tourists into the hotel’s lobby, whose ennoblement seems inversely proportional to its gradiose scale. From here one proceeds down vast hallways, as massive as anything this side of Byzantium and decorated at even greater expense.
Then there is the cavernous, maddening casino. Beyond this, deeper into the bowels of this place, there is a mall, as enormous and gilded as any on earth. Past this there are banqueting places and ballrooms, each half the size of a football pitch, and here the tourists are gone, and you are in the calmer, more Ballardian world of conferencing support, of abandoned projectors and a million neatly-stacked chairs and acrylic carpet that will feed postaocyalptic bacteria for millenia.
Then there are the endless mazes of hallways, the stairs down. Then the pine-scented yet dusty places where the hotel and casino staff work the unseen magic that makes the complex run. In the distance, the sound of a truly magnificent catering operation, clattering and murmuring away. Down another level, in an elevator large enough to accommodate a small helicopter, one is in a suddenly bustling place full of security guards and mysterious laborers. I am not supposed to be here and am challenged.
“Oh, next level down,” he checks my credentials. “I’ll escort you.”
And even there the place is massive, though the lights are slightly dimmer and the walls and fittings reduced to standard business America, 40 feet beneath the glamor and garishness of the hotel proper.
My destination is a walk around inexplicable corners, in quiet silence. A certain electrical gloom sets in. This is a place into which few go. We are met by a handsome, graying man. Three piece suit. C-Suite.
“Glad to see you found your way down here. We had someone meeting you but you musta walked right past them.” From the voice you know it’s Davison. “Glad to see you ran into Scott here.”
Scott nods at Davison and heads back toward the elevator. Davison smiles and beckons me into the room beyond.
I already know what it is. The scent of silicone and phalates reaches beyond the door. It’s what I’m here to deal with.
The legendary ball pit of the Venetian
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some interesting folks appear to think “superliminal” is a potential synonym for “superluminal”:
Tachyons are a type of hypothetical particle, meaning its existence remains a matter of speculation. The tachyon is also proposed to be superliminal, meaning it always travels faster than light. A hypothetical, superliminal particle
so not only quite transitionally disorientating but also damn fast …ballpit
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