Monday Morons at conventions

As some of you may know, I recently went out of town the week of spring break. I wanted to rest and spend some time with my husband. I should have been home catching up on housework and doing stuff in the garden, but I decided that other things were more important.

While I was gone, I missed two small sci-fi conventions that were in my area the weekend of the 16th. I wanted to go to both of them, but besides the fact that I also wanted to go out of town and rest, I also did not have a lot of money and did not want to be tempted to buy autographs and such. Most of my friends went to one of them, and they had a blast even if they didn't spend money on autographs and such. Our little group even had a private room, and some of the actors stopped by. Can't get much better than having the actors in your private room.

But I didn't write this post to say I was a moron for not going to the convention. I did not have a perfect week away, but if I hadn't gone I think I would have regretted it. And I did not write this post to call my fellow get-a-lifers morons either.

I wrote this post to complain about the people who organize the conventions.

What were they thinking, organizing two convention on the same weekend?

I personally don't think that there is enough stuff like that to do in the area, and then there are two things the same weekend? You'd think that one of them would here about the other one and reschedule.

Unless maybe one of them did that on purpose.

I don't really think that was the case this time. I think that this is the third year for All-Con, and they are trying to make this an annual thing, and you want to try to have your annual thing on the same weekend every year. I did not go to the first one, but I went last year.

As for the comic con, those happen fairly often, and I think that the guy running that show either picks a day when he can get a good deal at the convention center, or on a day that he thinks he'll get most of the talent he's interested in signing. In my opinion, All-Con was not promoted very well this year, so it is very possible that comic con guy did not even know about the other convention until it was too late.

But in the past, we had a couple of groups doing conventions here, and they would be on the same weekend. It looked like Creation Con was trying to run off Vulkon. Vulkon would plan a convention, and then Creation Con would have something that same weekend, with really cheap tickets. Or Vulkon would plan a convention around a certain actor, and then Creation Con would plan a convention nearby for the month before that, with the same actor.

One time Vulkon planed a convention in Irving around the guy who played Odo (Rene Auberjonois) Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Creation con then hired the same actor to be at one of their conventions the month before in Plano. If everyone already got Rene's autograph in Plano, then they probably wouldn't have any reason to buy tickets to the convention in Irving. Anyway, when the actor found out that Plano and Irving were in the same area, he decided to cancel on the Plano convention. He made the commitment to Vulkon first, and he didn't want to see them get screwed. I think he made the right decision, but it ticked off a lot of people who bought Creation Con tickets, who then couldn't get their money back. The convention in Plano wasn't cancelled, they just got a different actor. I don't even remember who it was, but it was someone who'd already been to that area, and a lot of the people already had that person's autograph.

After a couple of years of this sort of thing going on, Vulkon quit coming to the Dallas-Fort Worth area. And Creation decided that they weren't making enough money here, so they quit doing Star Trek conventions here too. I think that they did a couple of Buffy the Vampire Slayer things, but I didn't go to them. And they did a Stargate thing two years ago, but that is all that they've done in the area for the last ten years or so.

So there was this whole stupid thing of both companies fighting over the area, and then neither one of them wanted to do business here. So we all got screwed.

I really hope that this isn't the same thing all over again.