An Interview With The Creator of Dashcon
"When I was younger, I was like, 'I want to be a meme one day.'"
Hi all, and welcome to Big Little Moments! Sorry I was out last week! ✨things✨ continue to happen in my life, often against my will, and sometimes the blog skips a week. We move on. I’m so excited for this one though. This week, I talked to a LITERAL legend of the Internet, Lochlan O’Neil.
In 2014, at 17 years old, Lochlan (Nessie to her friends) and a small crew of actual adults tried and gloriously failed to run a conference for Tumblr users in Schaumburg, Illinois. The events of this conference were spread far and wide across the Internet, birthing some of the most iconic memes to ever come out of Tumblr. It was Fyre Fest before Fyre Fest.
I won’t go into all the history of Tumblr, or the play-by-play of Dashcon. If you want, this article does a decent job explaining, and popular YouTubers Internet Historian and Sarah Z have both done breakdowns, though Lochlan has expressed issues with both. You can also check out Lochlan’s own response on her YouTube channel.
I spoke with Lochlan via Zoom, and portions of the interview have been edited, or cut, for readability and flow. Also, I’ve removed some portions to retain her privacy.
Lochlan now works as a full-time costumer at a theme park, and keeps a pet raccoon which she posts videos of on TikTok for viral fame. Lochlan was ready and willing to share her experience with Dashcon - she’s done it a fair bit at this point. Though it was a failure, Dashcon didn’t dissuade her from fandom culture for a second. I appreciate how earnestly she loves the things she loves, and how she pursues her interests so diligently. She constantly threw out curveballs like mice genetics forums and spending time in South Africa, but I tried to stay focused on Dashcon as much as possible. She is open and friendly, without a hidden agenda, and I really enjoyed our chat!
Also, quickly, some terms:
Dashcon: Tumblr’s main page was called the DASHboard, CONvention
“The Ball Pit”: One of the promised events at Dashcon was a massive ball pit that could fit grown adults. The final result is pictured above. When the con started to implode financially, donors were offered an additional hour in the ball pit as an incentive. There were rumors someone peed in the ball pit - those are false.
Fandom: The collective of fans and fan-made works dedicated to a certain piece of media they love.
SuperWhoLock: A mega-popular fandom dedicated to the trifecta of TV shows Supernatural, Doctor Who, and Sherlock. Very popular around 2014.
Homestuck: It’s like a webcomic. If you don’t know what Homestuck is, what’s it like in the outside world? How does it feel to have the sun on your skin? Does it hurt?
CS: So, I wanted to start on fandom culture and how it came to be. I don't know if you identify with that term.
LO: No, I absolutely do. Yeah, I certainly did. Back then, I think I was 15 when I started on Tumblr, and my blog started out as a mouse genetics blog because my friend was super into it. She was like, “you can make an account, and you can post photos and blog all the things that you love.” And I was like, “I love mouse genetics now. I'm going to make a mouse genetics damn blog and everybody will love it.” And no, nobody loved it. A few weeks later, I had just really gotten into anime and SuperWhoLock and Homestuck. All of that at once, and all of the the fan girl identity just overcame me, and I'm thankful for it. But it was a lot.
CS: Yeah, it was. It was a very, like, powerful subculture at the time. It felt like there was a lot of content being made, just so much energy behind it.
LO: Yeah, I remember this meme - if you like, see somebody from Tumblr in real life and you want to find out if they have a Tumblr, you were supposed to say “I like your shoelaces,” and they were supposed to say “thanks, I stole them from the president.” You have to remember I was like 15 at the time. Yeah, I would like imagine scenarios with me being in Starbucks and people complimenting my shoe laces. Like, “I hope this happens today!” Oh my God. And I never did.
CS: Oh god, do you remember they had the same thing on Reddit? “The narwhal bacons at midnight.” Just as embarrassing.
LO: So I wasn't really deep on the internet… okay, this is going to sound weird. So I was on the internet, but the part of the internet I was on, I was on livestock forums. I was really big into it for my age. I somehow got made like a moderator of an adult livestock forum and then they found out they're like, “Oh, you're like a literal child who's been contributing a lot of scientific research.” I was like, “Yeah.”
CS: Oh my God, how did you get involved in that?
LO: I've just always been super duper into animals, like chickens and rabbits and goats, and doing 4-H club. So I was writing like care manuals. I was writing, you know, color genetics, how to do Punnett squares and stuff, how to do nutrition. And that's kind of where I got my start on the internet. I would go to like, fairs and rabbit conventions, livestock shows. So I took my love of that and kind of just converted it to fandom stuff.
CS: That explains so much, because it's like what kind of 15 year old thinks that they can put a whole conference together? You seem to be the kind of person where you love something and you just go all the way into something. I feel like there's this DIY sensibility, especially to fandom culture.
LO: Yeah, I think that it really is it, if I set my mind to something, I'm going to make it happen. Is it going to be good? We don't know. But it will. It will happen. I remember, last year, I had professors because I went to school in South Africa and they were like, “you're not going to get a raccoon and work at a theme park. That's crazy. You need to set realistic goals.” I'm like, but these are my goals. And now, you know, I have a raccoon in that bedroom and we're going to the theme park. I was just so excited about fandom stuff, and I was just feeling lost without all of the livestock, and I really did think that this was something that I would be able to do. I was very smart. But no amount of intelligence can make up for a lack of experience.
CS: Seriously. You know, digging through and learning about the stuff about Dashcon, it just seems like it was just a lot of people who really, really wanted something to happen. And you're just going to keep pushing through, even if you don't have the experience, even if you didn't have the full backing, it was a “We're going to figure it out” type of mentality.
LO: Oh, absolutely. I think I was 15 when I started at 17, when the con actually happened. The youngest of the adults was 20 at the time.
CS: Do you want to set the record straight on anything, or are there any widely held misconceptions about Dashcon that you'd like to address?
LO: No money was actually stolen. There were like, loans to be paid. It was horrifically mismanaged. Yeah. And that's it. I think the Internet Historian was like, “Oh, they made a deal with the hotel. They didn't have to pay the entirety of rent.” And that's true. But the rest of the money that was raised really did go back to paying the hotel, because it's not just the event space. It's these room blocks. It's the rooms that were booked out for Welcome To Nightvale, Gingerhazing, the staff members, the volunteers who all got locked out of their rooms.
It just really frustrates me that there are people who so strongly believe someone stole money. I've only had one person and this was recently who was like, physically there, tell me that I'm a thief and a scammer, but it's like, okay, if this was true, right, if you stole the money, this was very well documented. This has become a meme. This is a Wikipedia page. Wouldn't I have faced some sort of repercussions legally if I stole twenty thousand dollars? There's no way I could have gotten away with it. But people just want somebody to hate.
CS: First off, there are a lot easier ways to steal seventeen thousand dollars. I'm sure if you actually intended to steal money from people, you would have found a much smarter way to go about it. You mentioned the Internet Historian video, which, I just watched it again and wow, it sucks. It’s this alt righty anti-woke-ish thing. That kind of video was really popular at the time, too.
LO: I thought it was very funny when I first saw it, then when I re-watched it recently, it's like some of this seems a little anti-Semitic. Yeah. I, I don't know. The whole thing just kind of frustrates me, and I have people who still think that I like trapped hundreds of people in a room and locked the door, like I lured them in there. I'm not some kind of evil mastermind. I was a 17 year old in gray face paint. I don't have siren powers to lure people into a room.
CS: And for the record, that was a Feferi cosplay, right? (If you don’t know what this means, congratulations, you’re cool. Go away.)
LO: I was dressed as Vriska, who maybe was not the best character to be doing that. She's known for being a horrific murderer and all around bad person. Which I am not.
CS: I hope at some point we all have a reckoning with Dashcon, because I feel like it's actually not that deep. Running a con is expensive and hard to plan. Seventeen thousand dollars is really not that much money.
LO: I know cons too. I've been to big cons like Denver Comic Con. I've been to smaller cons than Dashcon. Sure, I'd never been in cons where they asked people in a ballroom to put money in a paper bag, but for the actual con portion, like the panels and the vendor hall, the events, I've been to way worse.
CS: Any stories about something worse than what happened in Dashon?
LO: I wouldn't even say it's worse or awful. Local cons are small and there's nothing to do, like you go in and there may be like 10 vendors. Panels are all run by teenagers because most cons are, right? People complain about Dashcon like, “Oh, Dascon had teenagers on staff.” Have these people ever been to a con? Have they ever been to a panel? There are teenagers running Homestuck panels, but there are just like twenty 13 year olds on a stage.
CS: Yeah, they're DIY. It's small. And that's like what fandom culture is all about, right? It's not for the outsiders. It is for the people who are in it. It is for the people who love the thing, and you're going to build something collectively, even if it's small, even if it's not the next Comic-Con or whatever.
LO: Exactly. And I think a lot of people who know about Dashcon seem to respond in the context of like Comic-Con or anime expo, something big with a hundred thousand people. The cons that I grew up with were very small, like two 300 people. The real charm in it is getting to meet new people. You may have not seen your friends for several months, or years, and you get together and dress up and just be weird. That's the fun of it, and I don't think people understand that.
CS: I appreciate hearing that. So, we talked a lot about this “before time,” before Dashcon, you know, the SuperWhoLock and Homestuck. There was this energy that all of these fandoms had. Did you notice any kind of changes afterward?
LO: I don't think I noticed anything right away. But I think I was also very caught up with myself and dealing with, like, death threats. And then I went to BronyCon like a week after, Oh my God, then I started college like two weeks after that. And I was just in my own bubble. But when I came out of it, I did notice something changed. I don't know how to explain it. It was odd, but there suddenly wasn't so much Doctor Who, Sherlock, Supernatural. There were no more of these posts that were like, “What if we had Tumblr Island?” “What if we had a Tumblr school?” “What if we had a Tumblr convention?”
Over the years is when I really started noticing the change, like two or three years later. When any time somebody brought up like, “I would love to do a Tumblr meetup,” people would always jump on it. Like, “No, we know what happened.”
And then, you know, the further you go, I think Tumblr had the porn ban and then suddenly everybody just kind of left. And it was weird to see things compared to Dashcon, and it still is.
I had to explain what Dashcon was the other day for Tumblr people, too. They are too young to even remember Dashcon. But there are still people who really do remember clearly.
CS: That's so interesting. It was like, outsiders had a convenient excuse to talk shit on Tumblr people, right? It was an easy way to turn them into a punching bag, and then all of a sudden everybody had this thing they could point to. It was almost like a public shaming or something.
LO: Yeah, it was. It was very much like, “Oh look, Tumblr, people can't do anything.” This is what they got. It's very odd for me. There are still so many people who actively think that I'm lying about being part of it. Oh, I see. I see. They're like, You weren't really there or you're making this up. I'm like, Why would I use that?
CS: Well, I believe you very much. But people have lied about some weird stuff. You have been on Tumblr. You remember the bones drama?
LO: I have pictures of my dogs from when I got home him with a ball pit like blown up on a TV and him like zooming in and circling me on Ms. Pain. I 100 percent was. There are photos of me there.
And then people are like, “Well, why do you still talk about this?” And I think my original YouTube video was like, I'm the kind of person who likes to know the answers to everything. And I assume that everybody else wants to know the answers too.
And I'm going to be honest, I found that Tik Tok is good for making money. It doesn't make a whole lot of money, but I live in an area where the price of food and produce is super high. And so caring for a raccoon that has a diet about 50 percent produce is expensive. So if I can, you know, embarrass myself just a little bit and, it helps because other people get to laugh. So that's cool. That's great. And then I get like, five dollars, that is awesome. That is a bag of grapes. That is a bag of apples, and I'm willing to do that for my beautiful child.
CS: That's amazing. Well, I was going to ask you if anything good came out of Dashcon and it seems like it's gotten your raccoon a lot of grapes.
LO: So it has. I also got to graduate high school early. I got really good letters of recommendation that got me into colleges. I've been invited to like guests at conventions because of Dashcon. I went to one recently, and it was really fun. So I have gotten opportunities, and I love memes. When I was younger, I was like, “I want to be a meme one day.”
CS: And a finger on the monkey’s paw curls.
LO: So, you know, it wasn't all bad. It was deeply traumatic for a bit, but I learned to laugh at it. And I think before then I was like, very serious about people laughing at my embarrassment. And I think that I needed to learn how to laugh at myself. And I did. And now I'm so much happier.
CS: That's great. And you know, to your credit, I think the picture of the ball pit is one of the most iconic images that has been made in the 21st century. There's just such an emotion behind it. It's really special.
LO: (laughing, hysterically, because Cole is funny and also really hot) It's something I have in my spare bathroom, actually. It's just filled with ball pit balls for my raccoon.
CS: It doesn’t re-traumatize, you?
LO: No, it's for the child, all her bed stuff is in there, and she can just go swimming in the ball pit and have all kind of enrichment.
CS: That's amazing. That's wonderful.
After that, Lochlan introduced me to her raccoon on Zoom, then we said goodbye.
Thanks for reading Bit Little Moments! Let me know what you thought about the interview format!
You can find Lochlan’s website here, her Instagram here, and her TikTok here. You can find my stuff here!
Also - no post next week. I’m deep in holiday stuff! See y’all in the new year.