I hadn\u2019t heard of Universal FanCon until a couple days ago.<\/p>\r\n
As I understand it, the plan was to create a Kickstarter-funded diversity-focused convention<\/a> in Baltimore, billed as the \u201cFirst multi-fandom Con dedicated to inclusion, highlighting Women, LGBTQ, the Disabled and Persons of Color.\u201d The Kickstarter raised over $50,000 in early 2017, and the con was scheduled to happen next week.<\/p>\r\n But two days ago, the people in charge announced that the con had been postponed to a later, unspecified, date, apparently due to financial issues.<\/p>\r\n The con\u2019s home page<\/a> now provides some info, including an FAQ. Reading between the lines, it sounds to me like what happened was that they planned for a convention with 10,000 attendees, and paid for a big space and a bunch of marketing, and put in some of their own money, but it eventually became clear that they weren\u2019t going to get enough attendees. But I\u2019m not certain of that.<\/p>\r\n Unfortunately, the info page\/FAQ isn\u2019t very forthcoming about various things. A Bleeding Cool article<\/a> quotes tweets pointing out some of the things that remain unclear.<\/p>\r\n Lots of people spent a lot of money on this that they won\u2019t be able to get back. There\u2019s now an online \u201cvirtual artist alley<\/a>\u201d to showcase some of the artists who had planned to have tables at the con, if you want to support their work.<\/p>\r\n There are also various plans for people who can\u2019t get refunds on their travel and hotel plans and who are thus still planning to go to Baltimore next weekend; see the Bleeding Cool article for some notes on that, and here\u2019s Nerds of Color\u2019s page<\/a> about their hope to set something up.<\/p>\r\n Also, Phillycon is providing free Friday tickets and discounted Sunday tickets for Universal FanCon ticketholders.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-updates"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17190"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17191,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17190\/revisions\/17191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}