Skecon 2018 – Je suis baguette

Hello geeks!

I'm back home from my last con for the year and it was Skecon, which I've been loyally attending since the start in 2012. The quality has declined over the years (2013-2015 being the best years, imo) but it's still a comfy little fun hang-with-friends con that I want to keep supporting. 

Since 2016 I've been a con worker and I continued in that line this year too, especially as there was a screaming lack of workers this year and I felt like I couldn't just watch and do nothing.

Let's get to the summary!

Skecon entrance.

Skecon was held on 2-4 November, the first weekend of the month, just like past years. It was in the campus area again and I personally think it's a pretty okay building and all but yeah, Folkparken was better. xD Mainly because of beautiful nearby photography spots for cosplayers.

The days before the con my Facebook feed was bombarded with Skecon and Skecon people desperately looking for more con workers. As I've been part of the work force since 2016 it was an easy choice and made even easier because I traveled alone this year and thus didn't have to plan around others. I'll admit that I'm kicking myself now afterwards that I didn't ask Sacchan's little brother Joni if he was interested – turned out I met him the day after the con, during school lunch, and he said that he was bored the whole weekend and would have gone with me in a flash if he had known. ;_; I can't deny that my experience was flattened from not having any company for a majority of the time – I didn't even run into any friends! D: I regret hard not remembering to ask Joni...

Friday 

I took the bus down to Skellefteå on Friday morning. I arrived 12:15 in Skellefteå and my team leader came to pick me up. Speaking of which, this year I worked in the "teknik" group, which I guess one could translate as technology – or more exactly, working at the video game room in particular. I'm not the most tech savvy guy out there but as it was video games I didn't feel too misplaced as I've been a gamer all my life. Why I ended up in this group was because it had the most urgent need for more workers.

Skecon 2018 ticket. Pretty stylish!

I got my con band and worker t-shirt (which, for some reason, only were available in L and XL) and then we plugged in all the game consoles, screens and such. Skecon officially opened 15:00 and the con felt very similar to the two last years in both atmosphere and where things were. My first working shift was to run from 23-03 so I had the whole day to explore the con!

Con worker t-shirt. Glad it was black this year as
light colors make me feel a bit uncomfortable.

One of the first things I did was to go get something to eat from the worker's green room. This was where the first issue popped up – there was no micro. Now this wouldn't have been a problem but it was a problem because all con workers got one warm meal a day, which was pre-cooked thai wok stored in a refrigerated counter. See the problem? No one wants to eat cold wok. ^^" I soon learned that Skecon had its own micro but that the Skecon organizers had forgotten it at home and it wasn't exactly close. So I was running back and forth and bothering the non-con cafeteria lady if they had a micro and I felt like she probably thought that I was annoying and so my anxiety kicked in hard and I just sat and waited for someone else to solve the micro mess. It took pretty long but we finally, somehow, got to borrow the cafeteria kitchen's micro (even though it seemed impossible when I asked) until the following morning. Skecon's own micro appeared on Saturday.

Hidden little green room on the second floor.

It's honestly no big deal but I had a bit of a "wut" reaction when I noticed that of all the wok foods probably little over half were vegetarian options. I was one of the first to eat a warm meal and from just eyeballing the food boxes it seemed like most were veggies and the lesser half were beef with maybe five chickens thrown in. Now I'm not picking on vegetarian/vegan foods or anything (I eat vegetarian options at school myself about once every week) but it felt a little disproportional as meat-eaters are still the general majority. :S Mad respects to those who can and choose to go green, I wish I could but meat is too good to give up completely lol.  If many workers had informed about special food requirements it makes sense though, can't know!
I'll admit that the veggies with noodles was the best wok box – the rice ones were too bland and tasteless (too much rice and not enough of the rest, noodles had some hotness to them). 

Major bonus points though for actually having proper cooked food and not just pan pizzas, instant noodles or some such! That's one step forward that I haven't experienced at another con yet. Just wish there would have been soy sauce, sweet chili sauce or something to add more taste and make the wok less dry.

Skecon entrance and info desk. (the info worker hid under the desk xD)

I don't remember in detail what I did before my first work shift started. I do know that I spent like 80% of my Skecon time (at the con building) in the video game room as it felt like it was so quiet everywhere else. Maybe it's just me having bad timing but whenever I went downstairs it was always really empty, just a few scattered congoers in some corner or such – even the merchandise hall was quiet the times I went there. It could be that whenever I was roaming the con then everyone else was participating in some programs or activities lol, who knows?

A part of the video game room.

Working at the video game room was fun and relaxing – game sounds everywhere and the occasional amusing rage guy. There were a lot of consoles for being a small con (I think there was about 10, ranging from Super Nintendo to PS4 and there were some that weren't plugged as we had more consoles than available screens) and there was something to play for everyone. It was highly amusing to watch this group of loud but hilarious guys swear by this one Hello Kitty Super Nintendo game (Japanese only), saying it was the best game in the room – it looked like some kind of cutesy Pong type of 2-player versus game and didn't seem like anything particular on first glance. But my lord, the amount of sudden rage and laughter, "FAN JAG GJORDE SJÄLVMÅL!!" and screams that this game generated was probably the best part of the con. xD

Upstairs crafting area before the video game "room".

Long paper roll that anyone could doodle on. Con memories.

As I had a late shift I of course got really tired halfway through, mainly because I've been sleep-deprived for quite some time now. I forced myself to play some Monster Hunter World (on a new save file) during the quiet moments to not accidentally fall asleep. Do you know that feeling when you're playing on autopilot and momentarily dozing off at the same time and then catch yourself falling asleep and so you twitch back to life, continue playing for a few mins until you drift away again and so on? :'D That was me the last 2 hours. 

The clock eventually struck 03:00 and I was like ohmyglerb I'm gonna fall asleep standing. I did not expect that I'd be so tired as I'm often a night person. Thankfully I got a ride to the sleeping accommodation.

Entrance to the sleeping accommodation. (a school building)

I had previously left my luggage there and reserved a spot near the sockets, of course. So it was easy to just sneak in and go to bed. Oh and speaking of which, when I packed for the con at home I had some trouble figuring out what I could be bothered to drag with me to sleep on; I felt like a matress was way too cumbersome because of its size (and my air matress has a hole) and so I looked around my living room and had a genius moment – why not take the bean bag? :'D It's super lightweight, takes little space (as it's so worn and thus squishy) and I can shape it around my body so it's comfy to lie on. Best idea ever.

My ghetto bean bag setup... which was awesome, btw.

I'm never gonna bother with matresses again. xD This was so fucking convenient and surprisingly comfortable, haha. And yeah, I totally slept with a bathrobe on top of my pyjamas as it's typically cold to sleep in a classroom during winter time. I'm glad I brought it with me... and wool socks. But I forgot my fucking toothbrush and toothpaste, classic.

Saturday

I fell asleep fast and it was horrible to try to get up when my alarm rang. I had no morning shift, thankfully, but I was the person responsible for holding the Pokémon Go Gengar day event and so I had to wake up early-ish anyway. Now I'm an active PoGo player and as the 3-hour Gengar event happened to be on Skecon's Saturday I didn't want to miss it. But of course it's hard to play such an event in a city that you're not super familiar with and, most of all, don't have any connection to the local player community. So yeah, my one chance to get any Gengar raids done was to gather a PoGo raid group from Skecon and then walk around centrum and hope we bump into others along the way.

I was the organizer for an activity, woop de doop. :D

I expected more people to show up but it was literally just me and two others. I wasn't sure if we'd even be enough but luckily we got one more player once we headed to the sleeping accommodation (first gym there). It was a lot of fun to raid and even though we were short on people at the end, and thus couldn't raid the last hour, I'd still consider it a success! Too bad for us we realized about halfway that we had started from the "wrong direction", which meant that once we reached centrum we were often walking to the opposite direction of the random players that we bumped into, which made getting enough people for the later raids hard as everyone we met had already done the gyms that we were heading for. :/ Ended up helping an elderly couple and some young kids on our last Gengars as they had problems beating it – the couple was so cute as they said that they were actually playing for their kids who couldn't play themselves. #parentinggoals

The campus had several geeky/artsy statues all over the place. Pretty sure
it's part of the building and not Skecon but still... that Mr Bean. :D

Once the Gengar day was done me and the guy who stayed the whole time (the other person left after using up all free passes) headed back to the con building. I think this was when I took the majority of the photos that you see on this summary as it was light outside and yeah, pretty much my only free time to get good photos. ^^" Oh and yeah, I'm pretty sure that I missed the budo display because it was during the Gengar hours. *sadface*

Skecon view towards the cafeteria. This is what you saw once you
had passed the glass corridor "Gabriels gränd".

Being alone at the con without my travel company or any friends felt a bit like something was missing. :( I still had my fun times but yeah, something just wasn't there and I never really got that con feeling that you get when you share experiences with people you care about. Now I was alone during Närcon this year as well but Närcon is infinitely bigger than Skecon so it's a lot easier to pass time there and they are very different in terms of atmosphere. I know for sure that next year I don't want to go alone because Skecon primarily feels like a hang-with-friends type of con and without friends I mostly just aimlessly wandered around on my free time, whenever I wasn't entertaining myself playing video games, that is.

Entrance to the Dealer's Hall.

I assume people wonder by now what the feck is up with the title of this summary so I'll clear that one up for you now – you see, in the green room we had the thai woks and.. a small mountain of freshly baked baguettes. You also need to know that I've played MH4U for thousands of hours and French players using the Insect Glaive are the most infamous player type in the game, mainly for having a rumor/stereotype of being bad at playing and mounting the monster (which is the Glaive's specialty), in particular. When you play online you have pre-set text messages that inform the others in your hunting party during the quest if you do specific actions and yeah, the default text for French players for mounting is "Je suis monté!" – and it's like the biggest, most atrocious meme in the whole game. No one takes it seriously. There's a well-known joke drawing circulating on the internet of a French hunter with the moustache, beret on his head and the Insect Glaive shaped like a baguette stick instead of blades and I just can't. xD Baguettes are ruined for me because of this meme connection, lmao. I've never eaten so many baguettes in 3 days, tbh. I love baguettes so I don't mind. :DD

The Dealer's Hall was located in the same place as previous years, behind the staircase up to the second floor. It's a bit hidden if you ask me but I can't think of many other options where you could place the vendors. Most vendors I'm pretty sure were the same ones from previous years and even same placement on the items so yeah, as soon as I entered it felt like I had already seen everything, lol.

Second-hand video games.

Fantasy statues and stuff. Pretty neat.

Obligatory pocky and ramune booth.

Artist's Alley was almost non-existent and even more hidden than the merchandise sellers. I feel sorry for the artists as I honestly wouldn't even had noticed Vera Kroese's booth if I hadn't turned around as it was placed on the opposite side of the vendors and in such an awkward angle that it was pretty easy to miss.

VerasArtsyStuffs table with perler art.

I ended up killing some time chatting with Vera and I'm glad that I did. She was super friendly and even did a custom perler magnet to me of Suicune's box sprite from the Pokémon games! Sadly I heard from her that she won't return to Skecon as she said that it's not worth it because the table price was way too expensive (400 SEK) considering how hard it was to make sales because of the bad position and thus lack of visitors – she would have been on minus if she hadn't had one customer doing a big order. She barely made up for the table's cost and said that she sold a lot better at Nordsken, which had Artist's Alley tables for the same price and a lot more buyers. I recommended her to check out Närcon and also helped place another custom Pokémon order for my childhood friend.
I can't deny that Artist's Alley had a really bad placement (especially when compared to the steep price of a table) and together we thought that it would have been a lot better if they had been placed in the corridor where a lot of people passed by, especially as there were only two AA tables so they would easily have fit. Vera said that most people just went to the Dealer's Hall once or twice and if they didn't buy anything that time then you were sure they wouldn't return.

Upstairs. Legend's shop and board games area visible.

Legend mainly sold TCG and board game/DnD related stuff...

... and some occasional Pokémon and Nintendo merch.

What was previously the craft corner was now Legend's board games area. I heard from the vendor that board games were really popular this year! There was also some kind of "learn to play Pokémon TCG" activity and I suspect it was held here as well as I saw some people playing cards on one of the tables. This area was basically the geek corner and made me regret a little not bringing my own cards with me, haha.

TCG and board games area. Geeks galore.

Board games were popular this year!

My Saturday work shift was from 16:00 to 20:00. What you need to know is that the Super Smash Bros. (Wii U) tournament was to start on 19:00 and because me and another guy had our shifts overlap on this hour we had to run the competition. Now this sudden responsibility that I had not planned around made me shit a paralyzed brick or three, mainly because I'm horrible at leading any kind of activity on which you need to talk to an audience and appear as if you know what you're doing. xD Also, our team leader basically just told us that "it's your tournament because it's on your work hours so do with it as you like", which kinda just made me panic more as I'm not invested into tournament play rules and had to speed-read on the SSB wiki to have some kind of idea what rules were common etc. Now I'm thankfully familiar with the SSB series (played a lot of SSBM back in the good old days) so it wasn't completely unknown territory to me but yeah, I had massive anxiety as I felt like I couldn't run such a popular tournament properly with all the tension, commentary and applauses that make it entertaining for the audience. ;_;
My facial memory is horrible too so I had to awkwardly ask after each fight who played what character as I couldn't see which competitor picked which character from where I was standing. Thankfully I think that I managed to make my social awkwardness somehow turn into a running joke and it was thus kinda saved from being a hot mess. x) It was entertaining to watch the tournament though and I hope that the participants enjoyed themselves too. Just please don't put me as the main holder on like the most popular tournament next time as I think I mentally shat myself and felt like I didn't do it justice; I struggled hard to get anything out of my mouth aside from voicing the next fighters and it was mightly embarrassing in my head. ^^"

Super Smash tournament final rounds. (the guy in yellow won 1st place)

One thing that I noticed early on was that there seemed to be no guest of honor. Skecon has been a forerunner on its earlier years (first real Vocaloid concert in Sweden and Akeboshi mainly) and now has silently dropped off the charts and turned into this humble and comfy chill con in Västerbotten. My wild guess is budget issues and while a lack of a notable guest doesn't affect me all that much I think it might explain why I get the impression that Skecon is slowly getting smaller – you need to do game-changing stuff and bring in the big names to pull in new visitors and keep some of the old ones who "grow bored".
Now I did hear from an organizer that on an earlier year it was a bit of a "disappointment" as more people were interested in the con's usual activities than going to see Dunderpatrullen that were a previous guest of honor. Now I'm not blaming Skecon at all, just thinking out loud, but there was a period, and still is, when Dunderpatrullen was the guest of several cons (Närcon and Nerdcon comes to mind) and thus it had probably already lost some of its exclusivity impact and started tasting wood to some. Like I don't even personally care about any Youtube celebrities but even I've felt the "Dunderpatrullen, again?" lately. :S I kinda hope that Skecon would bring Akeboshi back again, that was amazing and then he could resign the official Skecon micro as the signature is starting to wear off. xD

There was an origami workshop held by two Japanese ladies. Probably
the closest to a guest of honor you could get this year.

Origami table. You could also do your own candy sushi here.

On Saturday night I was sure that I wanted to go sleep early, to catch up on my missed sleep hours – and I also had my last work shift 7:00 on Sunday so yeah, early morning ahead. I think the clock was about nine something when I started walking towards the sleeping accommodation, expecting there to be a guy there who would open the door for me as I had seen on the mornings. But there was none.
I spent some time beating the nearby gym in PoGo before I eventually realized that no one would come and so I messaged my team leader about the locked sleeping accommodation. I found it hella weird that it was locked during what would be a reasonable and kinda normal sleeping time for many, especially those con workers with early morning shifts like me. Not gonna lie, I was starting to get annoyed as this was already a problem last year and it had obviously not been fixed.
Soon enough my team leader called back and explained the situation – seemingly there was some kind of issue that if Securitas would happen to inspect the building (it was a school) while there was someone inside, without Skecon's own security guard being there too, then Skecon would get in trouble. The reason it was like this was because of the aforementioned massive lack of work force for the con and thus there was no way to list people as "sovsalsvakter" (sleeping accommodation guards) as they were needed in other fields. Now this made sense and my team leader even agreed that it was something that should be fixed next year as, at the very least, con workers should have the right to go to sleep whenever they needed because of work shifts. Preferably congoers too as not everyone wants or even can stay up until the option to go to sleep with the "sovsalståg" (lit. sleeping hall train, basically a guided walk to the place with a keyholder) started on 23:00. I feel like that's a really late time.

After waiting outside for almost one hour in total (since I went out, that is) I finally got inside and could go sleep.

Sunday

I woke up around six on the morning. Everyone else in the con worker room were sleeping. I tried to be as quiet as possible and figured that I'd just leave my stuff and pick them up after the con as I didn't want to make noise.
My last shift was from 7:00 to 11:00 and it was a slow day. I think that a majority of all visitors didn't even return for the last day as downstairs seemed really dead too when I took a walk around. It was so quiet that the video game room barely had any visitors at all and so I just peeked when this other worker watched the Castlevania animated series and I played some SSB and PoGo to pass time. I need to check out the Castlevania series too as it seemed really cool!
Before long Skecon had officially ended and so we started to put all stuff back to how it was before the con, moving chairs and tables and so on.
My buss left from Skellefteå on 15:20 and I got a ride there from some other Skecon worker, whom I helped put the classrooms in the sleeping accommodation back in order.

~~~~~

 And that's about it regarding Skecon this year. I hope that my summary doesn't sound overly negative as that's totally not intended. x) Skecon is this slow-paced small con that has a generous selection of activities for its size (karaoke, fun games, craft rooms and workshops, video game tournaments etc) and it's really beginner-friendly. There are hiccups and things to be improved but overall it's a solid con, albeit the tickets are a bit too expensive on 300 SEK imo. I enjoy myself the most being a part of the work force and I'll continue supporting Skecon in the future, especially as the people behind Skecon are what makes the con go from average to great. There is this cozy feeling of unity and there's no pressure or drama and that's so relaxing in itself; this small bubble of acceptance and familiarity that I've built up over the years. The organizers genuinely care and try their best to make it work too, despite limits that are out of their control – like the lack of workers this time.

Psst, Skecon, if you read this: give me a laptop, wifi and sweets to munch on and I'll easily take the task of sitting and letting people into the sleeping dorms next year. ;) I've literally heard previous workers call it torture but just having entertainment and not too many hours at a time would fix the "torture aspect" in a heartbeat!

Thanks Skecon for having me and thanks to you for reading! ♥

~ Shiro Samurai out.