here's your update

What have weeee been up to? Nailed down my Xmas vacation time, hung out last Saturday for a bit at a local literary SF con downtown. We just gossipped for a bit with the Anime North people in their room, the youngest people in the whole convention came in and watched cartoons for a bit, which was nice to see that we had something to offer the teens. On the whole I liked what I saw, which was a small convention full of people going from room party to room party to room party all Saturday night. Been a while since I've been to a show that could get away with something like that. There are benefits to not being something built around young-adult pop culture, I guess.

this week's Stupid Comics is a Stupid Comic about a Japanese man named Ronald Chong, because that's a Japanese name, who had dreams of competing in the "National Bokken Sword Competition" but instead was kidnapped by "S.O.U.R.C.E." and turned into a shiny metal robot named Guillotine, The Robot Ronin.



Found Sound is DEVO music from their soundtrack of the film "Doctor Detroit". I misspell Dan Aykroyd's name pretty thoroughly in my text piece, but the songs are actually kinda entertaining, if very mid-period DEVO. You can see the public perception of the band moving from "weird and disturbing" to "synthy novelty act" halfway through the first song. I can remember seeing the ads for this movie and thinking it was going to be a comedy about a crazy wanna-be super villain or a mad scientist - a movie aimed at 12 year olds, which is what the much more successful GHOSTBUSTERS was - and instead it's about a college professor who masquerades as a super-pimp. Uh, no thanks.



Tonight we are going to drop in to a meeting of the SECRET MASTERS OF FANDOM - no seriously, there is a convention organizers convention with that name that meets to discuss problems of running fan conventions. Since these are mostly literary SF fans who don't believe you can run a fan convention larger than a few thousand people, I'm looking forward to some interesting discussions. From what I'm told today, the talk is all about Worldcon, Worldcon, Worldcon, which I'm sure is of interest to some. Most people who enjoy science fiction in whatever form - fiction, film, TV - will never attend Worldcon and don't know it exists, which to a certain subset of people is not a bug, but a feature. And on the one hand, being exclusive means better room parties, but on the other hand, being exclusive means room parties with the same people year after year.

the problem with problems with Aki-con

So here's what I know: there's an anime con in Seattle named Aki-Con. Their 2012 show had some problems; the Dealer’s Room, Artist Alley, the Haunted House, the arcade, table-top gaming, LARP, and food service were all in the 'Exhibition Hall' which was a parking garage. Literally a multi-deck parking garage, in Seattle, in October, which means it was cold and wet and water was leaking down from the ceiling being caught in little blue buckets and being emptied by embarrassed-looking maintenance workers into 40-gallon garbage cans. There's a full report of the 2012 show here from someone who was in that AA and didn't like it.

So that's bad enough. What's happened since then is their 2013 show, at which one of their DJ guests sexually assaulted a woman. And that's bad enough, but as it happens, this DJ guest had a previous arrest and conviction for sexual assault. And THAT's bad enough, but the convention was informed of this person's history and not only continued to have this person as a guest, but deleted the public post warning them of the situation. The convention's subsequent post-convention responses have been to delete their entire message board and to work a little victim-blaming on their Facebook; not really constructive.

Initially I found out about this through a link to an online petition concerning the situation. This had the initial effect of looking like just more fan complaining. I had to do a little more digging to find the real meat of the case. If you have an issue you want to spread awareness of, online petitions are not the way to go, people.

Anyway, it raises tons of questions about the responsibility of fan conventions, liability issues, and questions about background checks, and it puts it all squarely in the middle of the larger debate happening right now about sexual assault, intimidation, and abuse in the fan community and at conventions. It's sparked some discussion on the ACML, some members of which are actual lawyers. I'm quoting EML here from the list, which is a public archive (so I'm not betraying any secret SMOF secrets here).

1) i am a lawyer.

2) from a legal standpoint, the issue isn't about whether cons should do
background checks. frankly, that is too onerous. the issue is that aki con
had constructive notice that this was a dangerous condition. under CO
premise liability law, the convention, as an assignee of the hotel (or
whatever venue they're in), has a duty of care owed to their licensees
(attendees). one of those duties is if they know of a dangerous condition,
they have a duty to inform any licensee that comes on the property of said
dangerous condition. they breached this duty of care.

3) that this warning that the individual was a convicted child sex offender
was placed in a public forum, managed and maintained by aki con, creates
constructive, if not explicit warning, of a dangerous condition. it does
not matter if aki con's board of directors, or whoever is managing the con,
saw it or not. aki con's agents/representatives (under agency law) saw the
warning, and responded by deleting the entire post. these actions raises
the actions from negligent, or even reckless disregard of their licensees'
safety, to to a willful and wanton disregard to their licensees' safety.
under CO law, you'd be looking at exemplary (punitive) damages for that,
which usually are treble damages, or even more, since this is the case of a
sex offense against a possible (not sure what the girl's age is) minor.

in short, if i was a practicing attorney in WA, i'd take this case in a new
york second. and, frankly, i hope the girl sues the convention into
oblivion. PIERCE THE CORPORATE VEIL!! go after personal assets!!!!

If you're involved with any sort of fan gathering this is important stuff to read and internalize and put into practice. Common sense stuff, really. I used to take a more laissez faire attitude towards this - people should take care of themselves, we're not police or parents, etc. But it's becoming clearer and clearer to me that predators are using our fan conventions as their hunting grounds, that the hard work we put into having fun and enjoying things we like is merely the bait used by abusers and molesters, Ed Kramer.

I can't speak for legal responsibilities or big moral pronouncements. What I do know is that if this happened at a con I worked at, I would be horrified that something I participated in led to this kind of trauma.

I believe -strongly- we need to work hard to make our fan conventions a safe place for everybody to enjoy.