Nakamacon canceled

[pmart]

From the official website, in case it disappears:

From The Nakamacon Convention Chair: Why The Convention was canceled. Read On.

Firstly, we're not doing this lightly. Keep that in mind. Nakamacon was our baby. We didn't start this convention but we wanted it to live on. Last year, this con was a mess and this year we tried to rebuild it from scratch on six months... notice. I didn't know I would be running it until I showed up for a budget meeting and had it dumped in my arms.

I said 'yes' against my better judgment and we did a hellova job cleaning things up. Nearly every aspect of the con was recovering from the poor planning and misdirection it suffered from last year. This convention became a place to throw our energies during the winter months. It would have been spectacular...but life beyond the convention intervenes.

We've had a list of illnesses and injuries in the last month. I had strep throat which prevented me from conducting the con business over the phone for several days.

Our Artist's Alley coordinator got a job which precludes her having any further involvement or even attending the convention.

The Creative Director's husband spent a week in hospital due to heart complications.

Our advertising exec was in a car accident. His kidney's no longer work properly and his spleen suffered damage. He blacks out a lot.

My Chief of staff is a public employee for Wisconsin with friends in Egypt. If you've followed the union protests or the news, you'd know what she's facing. She had to pull out to defend her job and family.

Our printer has sent us half the fliers we can afford and they are all misprints.

...Our second investor has pulled out completely so funding is gone. I can't run the convention out of my own pocket.

I realize it is three months from the convention. I know we could make it happen but we'd sacrifice a lot of our own lives to make it work. If any one of these things hadn't happened we might still have a Nakamacon. Collectively, they've led to us being so far behind that recovery is unlikely.

Something better may come out of it. We may have another convention in the future. I would certainly like to. We all learned a lot about ourselves and what we're capable of.

To all of you, I am sorry.

This was posted to Nakamacon's LJ by the former webmaster:

By now, most of you have noticed the web-site change to a crudely written text file explaining that NakamaCon has been cancelled for those who are not yet aware; you may visit it by going to http://www.nakamacon.com . The opinions and the statements reflected on the website are that of the convention chairperson alone known as “Chessie Sutherland” and the voices of the predecessors as well as divisions of the other chair persons involved with running the convention were silenced and were not consulted prior to releasing this information.

So who is this "Chessie Sutherland" behind Nakamacon, and what happened to whoever the hell ran it last year?

[katmouse]

The whole plain text web page is kind of weird.  Why take down everything just because the con is canceled? I haven't melded around in making a web page very much, but wouldn't simply updating it been less work than deleting it?

[Whitefang]

Its probably not coming back, hence ripping the site down, seems to me these dudes though it would be all fame and fun and when it wasn't tried to come up with every excuse in the book to just say fuck it.

[ProvincialTwit]

So was this like, a con of any significance?  I'd certainly never heard of it.

Also the 'dramatic' website change-up was probably for maximum attention whoring.

[pmart]

So was this like, a con of any significance?  I'd certainly never heard of it.

Probably not...Wikifur ranks it at #15 in attendance, right below Megaplex, but there were also anime and steampunk tracks to inflate their numbers.  Last year was the first one.

I'm guessing that there's too much competition in the Midwest for Nakamacon to hold its own (it was in Madison).  IndyFurCon also started last summer, which means there's now one convention each in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio.  Who knows, maybe we're finally getting close to finding the upper bound of con attendance.

[ProvincialTwit]

Ah, sounds like it was somebody's attempt at a vanity/popularity con that somehow managed to occur despite all.

Also I think you may be right.  It seems like furry conventions have been popping up like goddamn weeds in the last 5 years or so for some inexplicable reason.  With some research that could make a good article.

[nrr]

Also I think you may be right.  It seems like furry conventions have been popping up like goddamn weeds in the last 5 years or so for some inexplicable reason.  With some research that could make a good article.

What sort of direction would you like to see that article take?  On the surface, I'm conflicted as to whether or not an exposé of new conventions in furry would warrant much in the way of an article here on Viv.  It's a bit like writing about the history of demoparties in the demoscene, except instead of dealing with drunk graphics artists and musicians, you're dealing with deranged people who pretend to be animals on the Internet, dress up in animal costumes, and prance around with sophomoric obsessions over sex, sometimes with creatures not of the same species.

[ProvincialTwit]

I'm thinking more along the lines of a parade of failures.  I know there have been a good number of (primarily vanity/popularity) cons that have come and gone over the last 5-10 years, many of which never actually got off the ground to begin with (like the one meant to replace conifur in washington), or made it a couple years then fizzled out (like a couple of cons in northeast canada).

Since they tend to die with great amounts of drama and butthurt, it could be a very entertaining article.

[katmouse]

I had a bit of insomnia last night and as I lay awake in bed I thought back on this.  If all the things mentioned in the cancellation whine are true, I certainly wouldn't want to get in a plane with the former staff of this convention.  Then again I suspect there is a bit of fiction in the post.

[Conan]

Ah, sounds like it was somebody's attempt at a vanity/popularity con that somehow managed to occur despite all.

I believe this was Jim Groat's vanity con. I know his wife was involved in it and sent out most of the notices on Facebook, and WikiFur says at one point he published attendance numbers on his FA page.

[gnpg]

The whole thing's got me curious about a couple of things. First off, "We didn't start this convention but we wanted it to live on. Last year, this con was a mess ..." - So, was it like a regular first-year-of-con-what-are-we-doing?? not-ready-for-more-people-than-we-expected kind of mess, or was it an unusual, more messy mess due to other, more interesting reasons? Why aren't the people who ran it the first year doing it the second?  Was it a total change of staff or were some people working both years?

What I'm more curious about is who brought the con together in the first place.  It's more typical for furry cons to split off of Science Fiction conventions.  Even the huge, major cons that have side-tracks for anime, RPG, etc. don't usually have a furry track aside from a rare token panel. Nakamacon was an attempt to provide space for furry *and* anime *and* steampunk.  Were the top con organizers primarily furry with anime/steampunk side-interests who wanted to run a multifandom convention, or were the organizers primarily anime/steampunk who made an unusual reach-out to furry?