Press Start

DashCon is proud to announce that our first convention will be held at the Renaissance Schaumburg Convention Center in Schaumburg IL, just outside of Chicago. This gorgeous venue affords us all the space we need to provide you with the best convention experience possible. And it’s only a 20 minute drive from O’Hare International Airport.

But wait! Don’t rush to book a room just yet! We have set up a special group rate if you book through DashCon’s website. The link is below.

Now for the list of goodies that we have been dying to tell you, and some things you may have missed! 

Our date has changed to July 11-13, 2014! This new date is a whole week earlier; less time for you to wait!

The Renaissance Schaumburg Hotel is connected directly to our convention space and, with all the panels and events you’ll want to attend, proximity will be a must! 

Click here to book your room at our reduced, DashCon only price. THIS IS THE ONLY WAY TO GET ROOM BLOCK PRICING 

We’re also unveiling the first draft of our 2014 schedule! This, of course, is tentative but we are rather proud of it!

Badges go on sale today! Pre-registration is strongly encouraged if you want to ensure yourself a spot.

YOU CAN VISIT THIS LINK TO REGISTER FOR THE CONVENTION! 

We’re very proud of our chosen venue and can’t wait to share it with you! To further explore the convention center and hotel in all their glory, you can check it out here! 

Pricing will be as follows: 

Tickets and Badges: 

Weekend Badge ONLY: $65 

Weekend Badge with SPG Ticket: $70

SPG Ticket Alone: $25 

Hotel Block Pricing: 

Single Occupancy: $104 a Night 

Double, Triple, AND Quadruple Occupancy: $119 a Night 

Rest assured, there will be more exciting announcements in the weeks and months to come, so don’t forget to follow us on Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook to keep up to date on the convention’s developments and join in the excitement!

And she looked at me and told me not to fall into the trap of “activist guilt.” I couldn’t remember the exact words, but, it was the first time I’d heard the term and it took a weight off my shoulders.

We do what we can. It’s so much better than giving up entirely or not doing anything at all because we can’t do it perfectly. It doesn’t benefit anyone in the end if we just sit around feeling guilty about every little thing in life. I’d just joined tumblr back then (haha, so like, eight or nine years ago at this point?), I was being exposed to way more than I’d ever been before (I was previously just into feminism and animal rights/wildlife conservation/environmentalism since I was a kid), and it was weighing on me.

As long as humans are humans and living flawed lives, many consumed by greed, there will not be anything in this world untouched by evil.

I usually avoid stuff that says it was made in China or other cheap looking knockoffs, out of fear of them being made in sweatshops (now, I know even a lot of big brands use those…), it’s exhausting. Then, I read something about how people who actually lived and worked in those would still buy this cheap stuff and how this shocked the foreigner reporting on it, but they just looked confused like, it’s what they can afford and them avoiding consuming it isn’t going to change the whole system from the ground-up.

… it went on about how “money talks” and choosing where to put your money still feeds the whole capitalist system and is nearly a way of comforting yourself, but you not buying doesn’t mean everyone else isn’t. What needs to be tackled is at a much higher level than any of us can reach.

Of course, I’d still, given the choice, give my money to companies I agree with and I’ll boycott what I know to support awful stuff, but I also feel no superiority over this and know now it’s not as black and white or easy as I thought it was.

This is the same reason that moral purity “you can’t enjoy [x] because it’s Problematic ™” is such nonsense, because nothing is pure. There’s something bad about everything if you dig deep enough. As long as we lived in flawed human societies we’ve got to make the best of what they offer us. If you have the choice and means, please, do support those who do good, but also, don’t beat yourself up over not living up to an unattainable ideal.

No one can. You’ll just make yourself so miserable, you either burn up and stop fighting entirely or you’ll make yourself a non-productive, depressed heap just out of a bleeding heart left unchecked. You can’t make a change to this world if you refuse to engage in it.

for example, no you don’t owe anyone anything in that if some creep is trying to get with you, you can block him without feeling bad. you don’t owe kindness to people who are transphobic or racist or bigoted.

but, you can’t use this as an excuse to fuck over people who have helped you. “you don’t owe anyone anything” isn’t an excuse to allow yourself to forget compassion and basic empathy, it isn’t an excuse for you to be an asshole just because you find it easier to be one

relationships aren’t transactional in that if your partner does something nice for you, you are indebted to them. they do these things because they love you; it is their choice to express love through these gestures

but they are transactional in that you both actively need to be putting time and care into the relationship. ignoring the dynamic of one person caring too much (and putting in excessive (emotional an literal) work and labor) while the other does nothing isn’t healthy. one person can’t solely take and the other person can’t solely give- that’s dangerous, and you can’t put the bandaid of “this isn’t transactional” over a relationship that is draining you in all capacities

Every night, the cops would attack peaceful protestors after it got dark.  The violence was apparently pointless, was often completely unprovoked and massively disproportionate when provoked, and seemed almost perversely dedicated to eroding any remaining public trust in the police.

Day after day of events like 

- “tear gas is wafting into nearby people’s apartments, it made someone’s baby wake up foaming at the mouth,” or

- “you know how, after people were furious about the tear gas, the mayor and police chief declared the police would not use CS gas for 30 days? well, it’s been less than 48 hours, and they just used CS gas again”

- “out of nowhere, a guy drove madly into the cop/protestor standoff and shot someone, and the protestors did more to stop and apprehend him than the cops” (see also here, etc.)

Events of this kind became almost surreally predictable, not in their details, but in their shape: no matter how badly the police are behaving, they’re going to hit a new low tomorrow.  If they seemed indefensible today, they’ll somehow make themselves into even more clear-cut villains tomorrow.  (Example: the night after the “tear gas ban,” they used OC gas, whereas technically the ban was limited to CS gas – and the night after that, they abandoned all pretenses and used CS gas again.)

No one understood why the cops did what they did.  In press conferences and the like, the mayor and police chief contradicted themselves from day to day and sometimes seemed to be unfamiliar with the basics of the previous night’s news.  The city council was baffled, everyone was baffled – the cops even found an odd, tangential way to piss off the Seattle School District in the process of doing all this other stuff.

When the cops left the precinct two days ago, all of that stopped.  I don’t mean to sound like the protest isn’t important anymore, or something like that, but “a continuous peaceful protest is happening in your area” is … well, a lot more compatible with ordinary life and work than than “you now live in a warzone where the city attacks its citizens every night.”

In South Korea, the military and the police both have been used, since 1945, to put down those protesting their government’s actions, mostly targeted towards leftists and those who wanted USAmerican-installed/backed regimes to be more democratic. Even as recently as 2015, the police fired water cannons with enough force to kill a pro-democracy activist.

In India, the police happily abuses the indigenous people of Kashmir. This has been an issue for forever, but the recent events in Kashmir (Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act of 2019) has magnified the brutality greatly.

In Canada, the police is brutal against the indigenous folks, as well as other people of color. Starlight Tour is just the tip of the iceberg for how the indigenous folks are treated by the police.

In Australia, the indigenous folks are treated much in the same way as Canada, with the police as a state tool for brutalizing and even displacing indigenous folks.

In Chile, during the recent riots over austerity, the police did much of the same things as the USAmerican police: meting out state violence gleefully, faking violence (such as setting their own patrol cars on fire and damaging private properties) and blaming the people for their own violence. This is just the tip of the iceberg also: the violence towards the Chilean people by the police goes very, very deep.

In Sweden, the mounted police trample protestors (much like in Houston, Texas the weekend of May 30th, 2020), not to mention the standard barbarism you see in European nations.

In France, the protests against pushing back retirement ages for a ton of people (including those whose bodies literally cannot take the work past the current age of retirement, like ballet dancers) saw the Police brutalizing the public, intensifying the already massive riots.

This isn’t even getting into the weeds with the Great Britain, Portugal, Spain, and other European countries’ police forces’ barbaric treatment towards those who come from its former imperial/colonial holdings.