by Rachel Watmore

To be or not to be? That, poor Yorick, is the question about GeekCon. The best parts of GeekCon involved the Skepbabes and our adoring fans all hanging out and getting drunk together, while fighting for social justice.

Another good part was our table, full of interesting skeptical trinkets like BurlyGimmicks, t-shirts and other high-quality merchandise.

Now for the bad part. We were told that apparently our table is against the rules that apparently state: “34B section 2 Part IV: A New Hope iii): You can’t just sell any old rubbish. This isn’t a goddamn flea market. Souvenirs only or GTFO.”

I tried to explain that since we didn’t read the rule, then it doesn’t really exist. Furthermore, it doesn’t really fit with our intentions, so it isn’t a very good rule and should be deleted. While they agreed that these are excellent points, they were powerless to overrule their misogynistic boss and so we’d have to remove everything that we hadn’t made ourselves and sell the BurlyGimmicks only. That’s fine – BurlyGimmicks are priceless artifacts and would make us a fortune (while also fighting for social justice).

Later on, a man came over. [Name redacted – turns out it wasn’t the guy I announced on Twitter it was who has now unfortunately been lynched. Sorry about that, although I didn’t do anything wrong. He should apologize to me, in fact.]

He told us that even the BurlyGimmicks were non-grata as they didn’t have the Skepbabe logo on them. Serves us right for not putting garish branding on our highly-scientific and highly-skeptical priceless artifacts, eh? If you can’t otherwise tell, I’m being sarcastic.

How stupid/misogynistic. So the rule has gone from “no tacky rubbish” to “no tacky rubbish without a logo”. I complained, to which the man replied “I’ll ask my boss about it, but you do not want that to happen”.

WTF?! Death threats?!! Is his boss Godzilla or something, come to rape us? Is that it? We should be raped? Or we’re too ugly to be raped? That seems to be what he’s saying. That we ought to be raped to death by Godzilla.

At this point, I decided to leave, but the man kept harassing us, telling us that we can’t sell our BurlyGimmicks. BurlyEmma booked a new flight, but I had to give a talk about how Game of Thrones is misogynistic, just like every other TV show. The place was utterly filled; packed with avid, engaged fans, who flocked from all over the world just to see me and learn about how Game of Thrones is misogynistic, just like every other TV show. They loved the talk, which incidentally was the best thing at GeekCon by a long, long way.

Now I’m in my hotel room, wondering why I should bother. What’s the point in being here if we can’t make money by selling things we found lying about, or things we found lying about made into BurlyGimmicks? I had to pay my own way there, as if I’m not the Rachel Watmore but rather I’m a mere conference goer – a pleb – a prole.

This is just not on – I’m so oppressed having to supply my jet-setting with money from writing a blog a week. You’d think they could pay me to go, or at least allow me to break all of the rules. Don’t they know who I am?

In conclusion, everything good at GeekCon is null and void because of how I was treated. All because one man went on a power trip and tried to make us obey the “rules”. I’ll tell you who else had “rules”. That’s right. Hitler.