Conquest: Not My Fault
Conquest has seriously pissed me off this year. I've been right on the edge of cancelling my games (which would seem to hardly matter at the moment, as so few people are signed up, but I really don't like the idea of cancelling).
Anybody notice that there was no sign of one of my blurbs on the website until a week after all the others went up? That's the "not my fault" bit. My blurbs were finalised on November 2 (and the tweaks I made then were simply for technical correctness). The blurb for A Little Piece of the Sun was not submitted late.
No blurbs were up until about two weeks ago. Tabletop blurbs went up last weekend. One of my two blurbs went up on Friday, and both of my blurbs were missing relevant information until this afternoon. The convention is less than three weeks away!
I get that shit happens, and I know some bad shit has happened in the lives of certain people involved. Still, if you can't do the job, hand it over to someone who can. If there is no-one who can, admit it and cancel all or part of what you are trying to do. In the process of running a con, there are some things that can be dropped without too bad an effect (charity collection was what I dropped for Arc, after the paperwork from the charity required to do it legally never showed up, and I don't think anyone noticed that we didn't wind up collecting for the Red Cross), but getting complete and correct information about the events out is not one of those things.
Apparently the webmaster has no software that could read one of the files I submitted for a blurb. (It wasn't exactly an obscure format - really, you'd be hard pressed to find a less-obscure format.) Fine, that may produce a slight delay relative to other blurbs, but if you look at this stuff at the point when you should be doing it, there should be plenty of time to round-trip back to me for a version in a different format. And there's no excuse for leaving information off of the blurb you can read.
I really wish I had a game slated for Conquest 2013 in my writing schedule, just so I could tell them they wouldn't be getting it and why, but unfortunately I had already planned not to run anything next year for entirely unrelated reasons.
(Oh, and before anyone tells me, "If you don't like the way they do things, volunteer to do it yourself," I'll point out that I did volunteer to do this work for Conquest, several years running, and was refused. Since then I've been doing it for Arc.)