relissoawesome:

softowl:

All right, I have received permission to post these pictures.  Thanks to the person at Anime North who sent me these.

This was the booth in question.  As you can see they were selling ugly, poorly made HS bootleg items, plus lots of others (Adventure Time, etc).

Let me be really clear here: I don’t like it when people sell their fanart prints or handmade fan items, but I can understand.  This, however, is an act of pure scumbaggery.

This is apparently the “company” selling these items.  I urge everyone out there not to buy from them at any convention they may attend, and to ask others to do the same.  Don’t support thieves.  

So okay so- I saw a couple of people yesterday walking around with these and when they saw that I was a Homestuck (being in Roxy cosplay and all) and they excitedly showed me their pillows, I sort of just smiled and nodded and asked where thy’d gotten them rather than confronting them about it.

But today I went the Dealer’s Room and found the booth selling them, and got down their name and contact info, which I texted to Colin to forward to Rachel (unable to send it directly; having no internet on my phone what with being in Canada and all).

I then went to the nearest staffer I could and asked who I should talk to to report plagiarism in the Dealer’s Room, and he sent me to another guy (who sent me to another guy, who sent me to another guy, who sent me to another guy- I swear, no one on the fucking Anime North staff knows who the fuck to talk to about anything), who finally got me to the head of the Dealer’s Room.  So I tell him that Cosplay-FTW is selling plagiarized material and he doesn’t even let me finish when he says he already knows that there’s an issue with them, and that other people have already reported them.  He then tells me that someone will talk to them tomorow.

What the fuck??

I realize that there may be outstanding factors which I am not entirely aware of, but this is kind of an issue!!!  I mean, plagiarism is kind of illegal?????

To contrast, someone it seems actually reported me for the two Homestuck prints which I have hanging up, and the Comic Market head came over and talked to me immediately- at which point I pointed out my sign which very clearly reads ‘Homestuck prints are not for sale’ and explained that I have the prints up because I’m proud of the art and want to display it, and occasionally I randomly give them out to cosplayers if I like their costumes.

And see, I honestly don’t mind the fact that the Comic MArket head came over to talk to me- in fact, it makes me happy to see the rules being enforced and an immediate response from the staff.  So why is it so impossible to do this in the Dealer’s Room??

Overall, I’ve quite enjoyed the attendees at Anime North- I’ve met a lot of really cool people and seen a lot of talented cosplayers, but… I’ve been having quite a bit of trouble with the staff.  I’ve been yelled at, misdirected, and just generally treated poorly.  Considering that I am a paying vendor, I sort of.. expect better than this.

Anyhow this somehow turned into a rant about Anime North in general but to sum up the con knows about Cosplay-FTW and their plagiarism and has elected to not take immediate action.

anime north was a HUGE fustercluck in 2004 and i am disappointed to see it happen again :( 

when I signed up for AN2004, i contacted the management about some details on the alley permit to do with clearing customs at the border to man a table. Oh yes, they knew the process, do this and this. I stupidly trusted their information since this was part of the alley process for all Americans, no way they’d fuck up that bad when so many people were involved, right? I booked my bus ticket but ended up going with a group instead.

we followed instructions and they held us up at the border for HOURS. eventually they let us in but we had to file for a bunch of permits and pay like 200 bucks per person just to cross into Canada and run an alley booth.

Turns out alley staff expected us border crossers to LIE about whether we were going to be selling art in Canada.

I would have been stuck there, alone and penniless, had I taken the bus as planned. If I hadn’t decided to catch a ride with some people I’d met at the very nicely staffed Anime Central 2 weeks earlier instead (hi jesse, seebs and rah), I would have been STRANDED at the Canadian border cursing con management. 

that shit never sat right with me and i never trusted staff for anything ever again. these are volunteers who occasionally do a bang-up job and occasionally just… shrug things off and let the vendors tough it out. i have 7 years’ worth of hilarious con management stories—randomly enforced rules, staffers looking the other way on violations, signup drama, permit drama, bootleggers in the alley, and that one time at Sakuracon when the alley head quit without telling anybody she didn’t feel like doing the job, ignored a hundred frantic emails from people all over the country trying to get confirmation that their table would be waiting, and then pulled some “wait where’s your permit what do you mean i told you to mail it in before the con” shit on signup day.

we get fucked around by other con staff (“yes we know your checks are addressed to us but if the alley head doesn’t get back to you we don’t know what to do, we can’t just ask her to get in touch with people if she doesn’t feel like it”) and finally get confirmation that everything is fine. We then commit to a 3000 mile round trip in a station wagon after months management  yanking our cranks, and the cherry on the top of all this bullshit was when I personally witnessed her handing out a table at random to a guy who just walked in.

Another time at Detour we had alley staff kicking people out of the alley an hour before the posted closing time because of a fuckup in scheduling. Setup and breakdown takes TIME if you have displays—we had boxes and boxes of cute little art buttons, but our next-table-neighbors had shelves of etched glassware—and a staff member was standing over them nagging them over and over again to put their shit away while they frantically packed up. Jesse ripped said staff member a new one after one of the girls at the table ended up in tears. 

That was the same con where I eventually had to steal a chair from the cafeteria because the one assigned to me got taken by another studio so their friend could sit with them and staff shrugged off my requests for help.

The next year they assigned all the available tables BEFORE the alley opened up at the scheduled time—but continued advertising the opening date and time on the site so people would be ready to register. Friends and family, I guess.

There are so many more. I learned the hard way that alley/dealer’s room staff may or may not do their jobs like a champ, that there’s no way to get through to the people you need to talk to, that the information they offer is not to be trusted and that there’s no guarantees as to what to do when shit falls apart.

Going from con to con or even from staff member to staff member at any given day, it’s a toss-up whether they’ve even got a clue what their own policies and avenues of enforcement even are. Cons were so amazing when the staff members got right down and committed to do the job, laid down a sane policy for how to handle problems and just generally handled their shit. Of perhaps 30 conventions I sold at, I’d say about 15 of them were of this sort. 

Never again will i trust a volunteer whose track record I don’t know and who is handling my money and making me sign legal forms while they are making up convention policy on the fly. 

I am sad that it has gotten worse and all the problems I witnessed with policy enforcement and communications breakdowns have degraded into a fuckarow that actively threatens small businesses. At least when I was dancing at the whim of whoever grudgingly offered a table, all I had to lose was a weekend’s art sales, $80 bus fare, the con fees and my everlovin’ dignity.

(via softowl)

softowl:

All right, I have received permission to post these pictures.  Thanks to the person at Anime North who sent me these.

This was the booth in question.  As you can see they were selling ugly, poorly made HS bootleg items, plus lots of others (Adventure Time, etc).

Let me be really clear here: I don’t like it when people sell their fanart prints or handmade fan items, but I can understand.  This, however, is an act of pure scumbaggery.

This is apparently the “company” selling these items.  I urge everyone out there not to buy from them at any convention they may attend, and to ask others to do the same.  Don’t support thieves.  

Bootlegging douches. Good to know they are likely to get kicked out of future cons.

I would, however, happily pay money for a fair-trade feferi pillow. The fun decorative kind, not the creepy kind.