Complete Event Schedule For DexCon 21 This Week

Description: Logo for DEXCON 21

It's been a little quiet on The Code lately, and that's because I've been hard at work with Kitsune Entertainment to bring interactive improvisational gaming to Dexcon 21 at the Morristown Hyatt Regency & Conference Center in Morristown, New Jersey from the 5th to the 8th! I'm taking it easy today (though if you see me wandering around, please say hello!), and will be helping run the following events this weekend:

Friday, July 6th 2PM - 4PM:
The Purgatory Saloon; "Oreo Madness" by Kitsune Entertainment.

From the minds that brought you the Adventures of Dr. Dolotts comes a new LARP series. Welcome to the Purgatory Saloon! I'm the proprietor, Mr. White. We have an interesting predicament going on at the Purgatory. It would seem that we are under siege by Oreo cookies. They just keep popping up all over the place with no end to their invasion in sight. How are we going to solve this little dilemma? Help! Please? Players will create a Purgatory Saloon customer who happens to be present at the time of the incident in question, and then role play that character in a bar-type scenario. This is a pure role play event with no combat whatsoever.

Friday, July 6th 4PM - 6PM:
The Purgatory Saloon; "A Lean Lunchtime with a Two Drink Minimum" by Kitsune Entertainment.

We're open at all hours of the day, much to the chagrin of our staff. Today's tale comes in the form of what happens at the Purgatory during that little thing called Lunchtime. Now, as we aren't known for our food, just our ambiance, it begs the question of why people are even here at all. Well, we'll both find that out together, won't we? Players will create a Purgatory Saloon customer who happens to be present at the time of the incident in question, and then role play that character in a bar-type scenario. This is a pure role play event with no combat whatsoever.

Friday, July 6th 6PM - 8PM:
The Purgatory Saloon; "Regular's Night" by Kitsune Entertainment.

The Proprietor, Mr. White, is hard at work keeping the Saloon's wild assortment of regulars entertained with a night just for them. Those regulars are from all walks of life, temporal eras, and even planets in the galaxy. What will happen? Even Mr. White doesn't know. What he does know is that once you become a regular, you won't ever want to leave. For this LARP, players will invent one of the Purgatory's regulars and then role play the character in a bar-type setting. This is a pure role play event with no combat whatsoever.

Friday, July 6th 10PM - Midnight:

The Purgatory Saloon; "A Cold Night for the Newbies" by Kitsune Entertainment.

You're a new face here. Here at the Purgatory, we like new faces. New faces keep us in business. Now, I know that what you're thinking. You have no clue how you got here tonight, as this place was not your intended destination. Honestly, I don't know how you got here either. But the Purgatory does. It always knows. Eventually, as the night wears on, you'll find out as well. It may shock you. It may surprise you. But I can guarantee it will change your life. Come on in, sit down and have a drink, and tell us all your story. For this LARP, players will invent one of the Purgatory's new customers and then role play the character in a bar-type setting. This is a pure role play event with no combat whatsoever.

Saturday, July 7th 2PM - 4PM:
Clue, the LARP; "The Great Cheesecake Mystery" by Kitsune Entertainment.

Celebrity Cooking Host, Mr. John Boddy, is about to host an episode of his famous televised cooking competition, "Mr. Boddy's Cutthroat Kitchen". He's assembled an interesting assortment of individuals for the event. A single slice of his world-famous cheesecake. A slice this size has been known to fetch thousands of dollars. However, that prized slice has gone missing! What happened to it? Whodunit? The classic characters of Clue are coming together where murder is the order of the day. Yes, there will be cheesecake. All character slots are completely filled. You may sign up for this event as an Alternate in case of a no-show.

Saturday, July 7th 4PM - 6PM:Clue, the LARP; "The Boddy Mansion Murders" by Kitsune Entertainment.

Mrs. Jane Meadow-Brook, the head of Meadow-Brook Tours, is taking people on a tour of some of the United States' most infamously haunted locations. The latest destination is Boddy Mansion, where it is said that the spirit of the often murdered John Boddy uncomfortably rests. What will happen on this tour? Will the tourists be confronted by the restless spirit of John Boddy? If so, will the tourists add to Boddy Mansion's legacy of death? The classic characters of Clue are coming together where murder is the order of the day. This LARP will take place in a dimly lit environment.

Comic Con In Abandoned Mall Store A Hot Topic With Fans

Fandom Fest, a long-running comic and toy collector fan expo in Kentucky, seemed like is was off to a rocky start when it announced a change of venue a few weeks before the convention date. Soon after, sixteen of the previously announced celebrity guests canceled their appearances. Part of the reason? The new venue was an abandoned Macy's at a local mall. Writing for Comics Beat, Heidi McDonald is your tour guide to the train wreck. For example, celebrities complained of promised airfare and hotel fees not being paid. Fans seeking autographs of the 16 celebrities that had now cancelled were denied refunds. A fire marshall showed up at the venue and, citing safety concerns, only let the 30,000 fans in 1,700 people at a time.

So what did Myra Daniels, the convention co-organizer have to say in her defense? She did release a statement.

It's a doozy.

“I am not going to say that everything I have done… that I have no made mistakes. Absolutely I have made mistakes. Has there been a time maybe flights weren’t done on time that they had wanted? Maybe they said they wanted them by 30, 40, 50 days out and they weren’t done at that exact time. But did they have flights? Did they have hotels? Yes they did,” Daniels said.
When asked if she felt bad about the fans who were left without any celebrities that they wanted to see she said, “”No, I don’t feel bad about that, we’ve done nothing to rip anybody off. They knew that when they signed up. They even had to click a box saying I understand this.”

The entire report is by turns fascinating, frustrating and horrifying, and you can read the whole account here.

Announcing BLERD CITY Con

Via Black Girl Nerds, the following awesome announcement:

WHAT:
The first annual BLERD CITY Con will hit New York City’s historic neighborhood and Silicon Valley East, DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass.) Saturday, July 29 and Sunday, July 30, 2017.

BLERD CITY’s mission is to provide the Black community with substantial connections to talented and cutting-edge professionals in the craft of positive image making. BLERD CITY comes from Black + Nerd = Blerd, a conference dedicated to showcasing the complexity and multi-dimension of NERDiness through Art, Science, Film, Literature, and Technology.  The conference includes panels, workshops, film screenings, and a marketplace. The BLERD CITY marketplace will feature a mixture of curated gaming and comic books, and a children’s area for science and technology exploration.

BLERD CITY panels and workshops announced so far include: Women In Comics, Martial Arts and the Urban Landscape, Afropast and Afrofuture, Cosplay Interaction, SciFi/Fantasy/Horror Film Screenings, an L.A. Banks Tribute and more. Guests announced include:Tim Fielder, graphic artist, cartoonist, and animator, Afrofuturism The Next Generation; Nicole Franklin, CBS Sunday Morning Daytime Entertainment Emmy® Award winning editor, filmmaker, and co-producer and co-moderator of the weekly Monday night Twitter series #BlerdDating, Warrington Hudlin, and Regine Sawyer.

WHERE:

The Dumbo Spot, 160 Water Street​
Green Desk, 155 Water Street
Creative Chaos, 28 Jay Street
Automatic Studios, 52 Bridge Street
Brooklyn Bridge Park’s Empire Fulton Ferry (Near Main Street)

Visit the official website for more information about BLERD CITY or to register for the convention.

Record of Fansub Wars: 90s Anime Beef That Shaped North America Fandom

Description: A cardboard box filled with home-made
copies of VHS tapes and fansubs of Dragon Ball Z.

Anime fans these days have tons of ways to get subtitled anime: buying DVDs, subscribing to the Crunchyroll streaming service, hunting through torrent sites, or poking through illegal streaming site hubs. But back in the early 90s, there was only one way for fans to get their hands on anime that hadn't yet been translated and released in North America: fansub groups distributing episodes of anime on VHS tapes.

The way most fansub groups worked was like this: First the group would watch an untranslated episode recorded from Japan, jot down translations, and using a TV-to-computer signal splitter, sync the subtitles to the feed and create a master tape. The group would then make copies of the master by using VCRs that would allow you to play one tape and copy it to a blank tape. These first generation copy owners would get requests from other distributors and end users, asking for up to three copies at a time and including both return postage and video tapes (or the price of tapes). MOst VHS tapes could fit about three or four episodes. So if there was fan demand for something like Fushigi Yuugi-- a 52 episode series-- the entire series run would require 13 VHS tapes. And if your fansub group was the only group translating a series... and you decided to just stop, well... that's were things get interesting. Writing for Vice's Motherboard section, Marc Shaw goes behind the scenes to talk about how a turf war in the '90s over fansubs would go on to shape the Ottowa anime scene:

[Ottowa's Anime Appreciation Society] which would host 20-30 person meetups in a community centre in suburban Ottawa—began watching Fushigi Yûgi, which ran from 1995 to 1996 in Japan... aimed at a teenage female audience, it was considered unlikely to succeed in North America so it wasn't initially planned for release here. 
[A] popular fansub group at the time, Tomodachi, [released] subtitles were the preferred way of watching Fushigi Yûgi because of the special care they took in their translations. 

But in early 1997, a competing group, Central Anime, allegedly made copies of Tomodachi's subs and released them under their own name. This was seen as bad form and a sort of dishonour among thieves. Tomodachi retaliated by refusing to release the show's final 20 episodes, which they had already finished subtitling, to anyone. Even though Tomodachi subs were much preferred, the club would have done anything to finish the series.

Now, I was just starting to become active in the nascent anime fandom in North America in the late 90s, and this refusal was a super big deal. Thanks to Google, we have an archive of what newsgroups of time thought of the Tomadachi debacle.

In addition to fansub demand being cited as on of the reasons Fushigi Yugi was released in North America, it was also the genesis of Ottowa's large anime enthusiast community and conventions.

The AAS put together Konan Koku- a fan gathering devoted to watching the remaining 20 episodes of Fushigi Yugi over one weekend (Konan Koku is taken from the county of the same name in FY). Along with a convention that same year in nearby Toronto, Konan Koku kickstarted the region's anime convention scene. As Shaw notes:

The Ottawa-Gatineau region now boasts its own bi-annual convention, G-Anime, the roots of which can be traced all the way back to the various anime clubs of the nineties. Anime fans of today have the scrappy warriors and fansubs of the nineties to thank.

I do want to take issue with one characterization in the article though: Central Anime was not a tape distributor. What CA was big on was sharing their translated scripts for free so that other interested fans could distribute. Tomodachi didn't want go that route, thus the argument. So Central Anime transcribed the translation, and released the script. I still think that copying Tomodachi's work thus far without permission was a jerk move, but so was Tomodachi trying to act like a de-facto distributor. Man, there's a sentence I never thought I'd being writing almost 20 years later.

Bizzarre True Crime: Embezzlement, Fraud, and Collectible Comics

Description: A copy of "All Star Comics
#3" encased in a protective sealed cover.

It all started with the comic book pictured at left, as The Verge reports:

Published in 1940, it’s a milestone in what’s known as the Golden Age of comic books: the debut of the first bonafide superhero team, the Justice Society of America. There’s hardly a plot, only a meeting of some of DC’s biggest stars... So when an All Star Comics #3 surfaced at Heritage Auctions’ first big sale of 2012, collectors took notice. The copy was off-white, its condition ranked at 8.5 out of 10 by the Certified Guaranty Company. CGC knew of only two higher-ranked All Star #3’s in the world, one of which (a 9.6) had sold for $126,500 back in 2002. The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide — the bible on such matters — estimated an 8.5 copy to be worth somewhere between $36,500 and $70,750. 

But someone bidding at the Heritage auction was willing to pay significantly more. The comic had been low-balled at first, going for $49,293.75 during the auction itself. But after the official bidding closed, private offers flooded in: $65,000, then $75,000. In the end, it sold for $200,000, putting it in the same class as a record-breaking debut Spider-Man that had sold a few years earlier.

At first blush, it just looks like maybe it was someone who really, REALLY wanted that issue? Or maybe it was a new-money collector who didn't really have a handle on how bidding wars worked and had more money than sense. The truth was even wilder: it was part of a scheme to hide 9 million dollars a lawyer had embezzled from the company he was director of legal counsel. The Verge has the whole sordid story in full.

GenCon & Gaming's Race Problem

Image courtesy GenCon LLC

GenCon 2014 officially starts today. It's a four day convention that draws over 40,000 attendees to a celebration of gaming, from tabletop games, miniatures, war gaming, board games, collectible card gaming and the like. This year will be its 47th year of operation, making GenCon the longest running convention of its kind (Friend of the blog, Drew of Drew's Robots will be there showing off his walker robot throughout the convention, btw).

However, for all of its long and storied history, there is little doubt that its demographic makeup hasn't changed as drastically as it could have. As A.A. George writes, in "Gaming’s Race Problem: GenCon and Beyond" for Tor.com:

As a lifelong gamer, I am excited to go to GenCon. 

As an ethnic minority, I am apprehensive about going to GenCon. 

For all that GenCon offers, it lacks in minority gamers. Last year was my first GenCon, and as I explored the convention, I saw almost no one who looked like me. By far, the most visible minorities at GenCon were the hired convention hall facilities staff who were setting up, serving, and cleaning up garbage for the predominantly white convention-goers... 

... GenCon is emblematic of this problem. Of the twenty-seven Guests of Honor (in various categories), only two are people of color. The judges of the prestigious ENnie Awards for role-playing, hosted at GenCon, have been almost exclusively white since its inception. The same is true for the nominees and winners of the Diana Jones Awards. There may be more efforts to include people of color in gaming artwork, but where are the real life people of color on the grand stage of gaming? 

Furthermore, GenCon is disturbingly tolerant of deeply offensive material. Shoshana Kessock wrote about her experiences with Nazi cosplay and paraphernalia at Gencon shortly after returning from GenCon 2013, and I had similar encounters... GenCon has weakly worded policies to prevent these horrific violations, but it has failed to enforce its own rules.

There are lots of well-meaning gamers that say that race isn't a factor in what they choose to play or who they choose to play with. I've even heard a number of gamers insights that they don't even see color, just a gamer. A.A. George responds:

I’ve been told time and again by gamers, “I don’t see race” as if they were doing me a kindness. This is not enlightenment or progressiveness. It is ignorance. If you do not see race, you do not see me. You do not see my identity, my ethnicity, my history, my people. What you are telling me, when you say “I do not see race,” is that you see everything as the normal default of society: white. In the absence of race and ethnicity, it is only the majority that remains. I am erased.

He does have suggestions, however, on what allies, advocates and those that want to make gaming an open, inclusive and more accepting and diverse:

• Listen. The Gaming as Other series is a great place to start. There are a handful of panels at Cons on the topic and I’ll be sitting on two of them at GenCon: “Why is Inclusivity Such a Scary Word?” and “Gaming As Other.” 
• Keep engaging, listening and supporting. We notice your support and it gives us the strength to keep going. 
• Hire more people of color and give them agency, visibility, power, responsibility, and credit in a wide variety of meaningful and important areas in your organization. Do not simply hire a token minority. Do not use people of color as a form of marketing. 
• Reach out to minority groups and invite them personally to conventions. Your neighbors, your co-workers, the people at your church, all of them. 
• Offer and play games that are actively and intentionally more inclusive.

These are all excellent starting points. I'd also encourage you to read the entire post of George's, because he addresses how fantasy gaming both helped and hindered acceptance his own identity.

Mile High Comics Ending Booth At SDCC? Why It Might Be A Good Thing.

Inage courtesy of Bleeding Cool

In the latest Mile High Comics newsletter, founder and president Chuck Rozanski said that SDCC operated at a net loss compared to other conventions, and that although he wishes it were different, it looks like he'd be ending his four decades of attending San Deigo Comic Con. What does it all boil down to? Exclusives are killing his business there. Read on for the full text of the newsletter:

I am turning 60 years old next March. I mention that major turning point in my life only because the last time that I did not attend a San Diego Comic-Con, I was 17 years old, and still in high school. Since I graduated, for all 42 years of my adult life, I have committed the heart of each of my summers to my personal obsession with experiencing the joys of the San Diego Comic-Con. I even passed this personal passion on my part on to my four daughters, all of whom spent their entire childhoods delightedly roaming the halls of the various incarnations of this great comics convention. 

Sadly, that entire blessed reality may need to end after this year’s show closes tomorrow evening. I have not yet found the courage to reach my final decision, but my best estimate is that, at our current rate of sales, we will suffer a loss of $10,000 at this year’s show. As much as I like being a part of this wonderful gathering, I simply do not have the money to be able to pay $10,000 out of my own pocket for the privilege of providing the fans here with comic books. After 42 consecutive years in a row, it may finally (at long last…) be time for me to bid San Diego good-bye, forever.Before I go further, I would encourage those of you who have not yet read my newsletter from yesterday to first read my analysis of some of the seismic changes that have contributed to our loss. The one factor that I would ask that you especially note when you read my first essay is the fact that our entire 7-booth display that we are operating at this year’s San Diego convention was first premiered six weeks ago, at the Denver Comic-Con. Despite our having about 20,000 fewer comics available in Denver, and that convention being only three days long (with half the number of attendees as San Diego…), our sales per hour in Denver were double (!) what they are here. That made all the difference, as we turned a reasonable profit in Denver, as opposed to a massive loss in San Diego. 

So how could an extremely successful back issue comics booth in Denver become so stunningly unsuccessful in San Diego? Because in Denver we were not being utterly crushed by the very publishers whose goods we sell on a daily basis. In a nutshell, the comics publishers with booths at the San Diego convention have so cleverly exploited the greed and avarice of comics fans through limited edition publications that are only available through their own booths, that there is no longer enough disposable income left in the room to sustain us. A sad state of affairs, but also completely true. 

To illustrate my point, I had the leader of one of the major comics publishing houses stop by our booth on the way out the door last evening. This man has been our friend and ally for decades. He was absolutely ebullient yesterday evening in describing the amazing success that they were experiencing in their booth as a result of selling vast quantities of exclusive variants. I felt more than a little embarrassment and shame when I had to rain on his parade, by pointing out to him that the collective effect of his actions (combined with the other publishers and manufacturers at the show…) was devastating our sales. My response was not at all what he expected to hear. But as the validity of what I was expressing became clear, I could see awareness dawning in his eyes.All of the above having been said, my publisher friend is an extremely astute man, so he quickly understood the unintended consequences of his actions. Given that he was only seeking to cover his own costs of exhibiting in this dreadfully expensive venue, however, he could muster no material reply to my pain. In many regards, that was the most depressing aspect of this entire fiasco. Being obviated by lifelong friends is particularly galling, especially when we it is clear that we are nothing more than collateral damage, in a battle being waged by giants.

So where does this leave us? As much as I hate to admit this, it now seems obvious to me now that we finally have to end a lifetime of exhibiting at San Diego, and instead seek out relatively popular comics conventions in other cities. Especially conventions where our publisher friends choose to not exhibit. Doesn’t that thought just drip with irony? Comics publishers have evolved to become toxic to their own retailers. Who would ever have thought that would happen? Even with all my many years of experience, I simply cannot believe that our world has now been so perverted by the mania for exclusive variants, that comics retailers can now only survive in the absence of the very publishers we support. No matter how you look at it, this is a profoundly sad day.

Mile High Comics is a legendary comic book dealer and warehouse in Denver, Colorado, and if you grew up reading comics in the 70s or 80s, the company's advertising in the middle or back pages of Marvel or DC books were ubiquitous. The company and its SDCC booth were featured in the Mogran Suprlock SDCC documentary "Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope". While they have suffered losses here and there over the past two decades as the industry landscape has shifted (and in some cases, contracted), they've endured for decades. And although Rozanski rails against booth exclusive comics, Mile High Comics have offered a number of limited Mile High Comics exclusive variants themselves.

So what gives? With SDCC more popular than ever, are exclusive variants to blame for the company's crushing losses? The Comic Book Bin's Dan Horn doesn't think so. Here's what the Mile High Comics booth at SDCC looked like to him:

It was a mess. There was Chuck, complaining to a solitary customer about losing money hand over fist and blaming it on the con exclusives, while the exclusives Mile High were selling were pretty difficult to see or to find. This year they didn't bring any trades either. There also weren't any big ticket items like we saw the year that Spurlock made his film. I browsed the back issues for books to fill out my collection, but I was appalled by most of the prices: $6 for a comic book issue I could probably find at my LCS for fifty cents... The Mile High Comics booth was nearly empty all weekend while other booths with half-priced trades and comics marked-down below cover-price were incessantly swarmed with ravenous comics readers. These people weren't mobbing these booths for exclusives, as Chuck posited. They were just looking for something good and affordable to read. Many of these bustling booths didn't even have exclusives. It wasn't until Sunday, the final day of the con, that Chuck put out a sale sign, and guess what--business started booming for him as well. But it was too little, too late.

And while Rozanski has talked about leaving SDCC for good before, this time it may stick. What did Horn think?

Part of me thinks, "Good riddance. That's a huge booth that's going to open up and maybe Dynamite Entertainment or Valiant will finally have a place to make their own in the exhibit hall. Or maybe a comics megastore like Mile High but with fair prices will move in. This could be a really great thing."

What do you think, dear readers?

You left me outside and now you want in

Blogger yeloson talks about some of his personal frustrations regarding fandom and racial cluelessness. An excerpt:

A few years back, I went to GenCon, the largest tabletop roleplaying convention in the US. I arrived excited and eager to play, and a little sad my friends whom I had attended ComiCon weren't with me. I had just gotten out of the registration line and saw a person dressed up in blackface as a drow/dark elf. I flashed back just about 4 days before when a friend of mine had to leave ComiCon, completely shaking with hurt because someone thought it would be cool to get in blackface to dress up as Storm from the X-men.

The day before I flew back, I saw a newspaper headline, "Blacks are leaving Indianapolis, feel unwelcome". I wonder why?

I began to start looking hard at my hobby. Everything from artwork to social circles and the behaviors around it. I tried to start up conversations. Conversations with people who were intelligent, who I knew personally, who had no problem analyzing social behavior and how it affected play (after all, a roleplaying game is nothing but a group socially deciding imaginary stuff...).

But those conversations failed.

At first I thought I wasn't approaching it correctly, I tried different tacks, from talking about the raw representation of the artwork, to the historical issues of blackface, to, well... everything.

But see, my mistake wasn't that I was talking to intelligent, well read people - it was that I was continuing to mistake ignorance on the part of intelligent, well read people as unintentional. I was giving benefit of the doubt to the people who had the least excuse to be ignorant of both history and media. It wasn't not knowing, it was choosing not to know.

Instead of turning their minds to a legitimate question, "Hey, how did I NOT notice that all the bad guys are dark, or that the language used around orcs = the language used on native populations, or that even POC heroes are dehumanized with glowing eyes etc.?", instead the response was "You're crazy/reading too much into it/it's just a game/why do you care/you should find another hobby!"

That's right. "If you don't like it here, you can leave." And then they turn around and ask why there's so few POC in their hobby or their numbers are shrinking. (I went to GenCon SoCal that year, and all I saw were asian and hispanic kids playing Yu-Gi-Oh. I guess people of color aren't into geek stuff, right?)

But my story is not unique.

Read the whole post here.