Matt Conn

Hey Gaymers!

Hope you all are having a nerdy and wonderful holiday season. Hopefully you’ve gotten the chance to catch up on some of the games you’ve been backlogged on (Dark Souls!), gotten the good ending in hard games (Dishonored!), and wasted many an hour on trivial design choices (Oh Tiny Tower!).

In the past week, the GaymerCon team has been hard at work stuffing packages filled with presents for you! Bitroms, Stickers, Gift Bags, and Tepig Clothing Packs, oh my!

Some important things to note:

– The stickers and the bitroms are coming seperately. If you get one and don’t get the other, give it another day or so. They should come together but we had a fan report getting the stickers yesterday and her bitrom today.

– We will be sending badge redemption codes in the next week over email to the email that you used when you filled out your survey. Once you get your code, you’ll need to redeem your code (with your name and info so we can give you your badge in person at the con!) on gaymercon.org

– If you got a kickstarter package that got you a lunch or breakfast super pack, we will be emailing you separately in the coming months to let you know how it will work. If you paid over $100, you will get one breakfast ticket for you plus a number of guests equal to the amount of badges you bought. If you got the special Boss of Honor Lunch, only you (no +1s) will be allowed to this event. It’s special :3.

– If you get your bitrom, and love it, please tweet your thanks to @ogeeku for making them! If you have any issues with the bitrom at all, please direct your anger to @ogeeku for making them 😉 – if there’s any damage done with shipping, we’ll happily work with you to get you a new one, but keep in mind that all bitroms are lovingly made individually and are each handmade replicas, so they each look, feel, and smell a little different. The backs of each bitrom have been sanded down for extra smoothness, so please don’t worry if it has a slightly different texture. BONUS FUN TIME GAME: We included some gold bitroms with 5 of the just over 300 bitrom packages that went out – will you get a golden ticket? Gold bitroms can weather ANY economy

– We will be announcing our guests of honor and GaymerConcert guests soon on GaymerCon.org and on our socials first, so follow us on @gaymercon and stuff!

AND MOST IMPORTANTLY INTRODUCING GAYMERCONNECT.COM

May we direct your gaymer eyes to GaymerConnect.Com. Newly launched just yesterday, you can now live the gaymercon experience 24/7/365, like Sega Channel! (remember that hot mess?)

On GaymerConnect you can list all your gamertags, find other gaymers based on their location or common games that you both play (pulled in from Facebook if you want!), discuss specific games, join LGBTQ guilds, find local Gaymer groups like the amazing Houston Gaymers for example (Hi Eric!), choose a character, give it stats, and gain XP as you jump around GaymerConnect.

Check it out and please let us @gaymercon know what you think! Follow some other gaymers, add some games, and when you get your badge code, your character will get some XP for registering! You can also upvote/downvote panels too! Fun!!

Please keep in mind that alllllll this was made with minimal budget and done with the help of MANY people donating their time and love, so although its very ambitious, there’s bound to be bugs and parts of the site that aren’t perfect, but I’m damn impressed with what we were able to put out in just the last few months. If you think GaymerConnect is awesome, please tweet to @agius and tell him how awesome he is. He stayed up many a night making a complex Gaymer social network and he deserves some flirts. :3

Go get your profile now at gaymerconnect.com and tweet us a link to your profile so we can follow you 🙂

Happy holidays ya’ll. Be safe and around loved ones, and let’s appreciate how much LGBT progress we’ve gotten a chance to see in the last couple of years *sniff*

Love,

The GaymerCon Crew

The GaymerCon Team is proud to announce that Team GaymerCon is partnering with Extra Life 2012  to raise money for local children’s hospitals! If you don’t know about Extra Life..check it out. It’s cool stuff and it’s for a really great cause – helping sick kids get an extra life!

From the Extra Life website: For the last four years, thousands of gamers have joined together annually to play for 24 hours for Extra Life — a gaming marathon in support of Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals®. Gamers rally friends and family members to sponsor their play. The funds they raise go to help save and improve the lives of kids at the CMN Hospital in their community. Since 2008, our incredible players have raised more than 2 million dollars, and this year, on October 20th, 2012 we believe they will outdo themselves yet again.

And we at GaymerCon hate to disappoint! That’s why we’re planning to have a big gaming bash in San Francisco for 24 hours straight, livestreaming it on the webs and raising money for a good cause. Once we have the livestreaming link, we’ll update this post and send it out on our socials.

Here’s the deets:

WHEN:  WHENEVER. You can game whenever you want for 24 hours. The Team GaymerCon party’s going to be October 20, 2012, starting at 8am going into 8 am on August 21st.

WHERE:  ANYWHERE. Literally. If you want to game while planking (is that still a thing?), more power to you. We’ll announce where we plan to hold our bash as soon as we can.

GAME/PLATFORM:  ANYTHING. Any games on any platforms. Because #EverybodyGames

HOW IT WORKS:  Like most marathon fundraisers, you ask your friends and family to sponsor your efforts.  They can make a per-hour, monthly, or one-time pledge.  Every bit helps. Then you do your part to game like you’ve never gamed before.

WHO IT BENEFITS:  Participants select the children’s hospital they want to play for during registration.  In the US and Canada there are more than 170 CMN Hospitals to choose from.  Players may also choose to play for hospitals in the UK and Australia, though gamers from anywhere are free, and encouraged, to join in.

So come join or donate to Team GaymerCon, and we look forward to seeing you on October 20th!

Create Your Own Video Wearing Purple for a chance to win a signed XBox 360s, Boomphones, and more! 

Growing up isn’t easy. Young people today have to deal with many challenges and obstacles on their way to adulthood. Bullying shouldn’t have to be one of them. Harassment for the sake of someone’s gender identity or sexuality is something many of us have lived through and that young people today still experience. It is something that costs the lives of young people to suicide or violence even in these times when things are getting better.  Young people can learn from the example of adults and their peers and sometimes all it takes is showing a little support.

That’s why in participation with GLAAD, GaymerCon’s site and staff will “go purple” on October 19th. We will be joining the millions of Americans across the country wearing purple on Spirit Day to raise awareness and show our support for LGBT youth.

Click here to take the pledge and go purple with us on October 19th!

But not only that! Being queers and geeks, this matter hits us pretty close to heart as many of us grew up knowing or even being victims of bullying. Because of this, GaymerCon is going to be holding a contest to see who can make the best video raising awareness and showing your colors for Spirit Day. Tell us about being a LGBTQ or allied youth in high school or college and how you’ve experienced or dealt with bullying, or maybe how things have gotten better since becoming an adult. Two first prizes! One for GaymerCon staff vote and one for the video with the most upvotes on YouTube – each gets a 250GB Xbox 360 signed by the Xbox Live staff, as well as a Coin Entered pass to GaymerCon. We also have Boomphones (Headphones that are also boomboxes – say WHAT!) and passes to GaymerCon for lucky winners! Submissions end 10/12, so get to it!

Click here to watch the video for the GaymerCon “Go Purple for Spirit Day”  video and rules!

We are very pleased and excited to announce that GaymerCon has its first official publisher support. Electronic Arts, who are not only a huge force in video games, but also one of the most progressive companies in the games and tech industry, will have a significant presence at GaymerCon.

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Full press release after the break!

Read more

Hey Gaymers,

As you may be aware, events have transpired in the last 48 hours that directly and indirectly affect GaymerCon and our community that we would like to address.

Here are the facts, as we are aware: Over the weekend the Reddit sub-group r/Gaymers received a cease-and-desist letter from Chris Vizzini of Gaymer.org over the trademark of the term “gaymer.” We received no such letter, and there was a brief question whether we were involved in any way with the cease-and-desist because of an article and tweet by Gaymer.org in favor of us. We assure you we were not involved, a fact later confirmed by Mr. Vizzini, who has also removed his article about us.

We personally have never had an interaction with the site. Our only engagement was back in early 2012 when we had registered GaymerCon with the state. We saw that Gaymer.org had registered the trademark for use but we took note of the phrasing of Mr. Vizzini’s quote about this issue from 2007:

“…My intention with registering the TM was to protect my self from misdirected traffic. .com, .org, .bunghole, whatever. And to protect yourself from that, you’d have to register each domain seperately. And at 1200 bux a pop, that was not feasable, so I had to register gaymer the word.

 

Im not trying to swipe anything from anyone. Just protect something I’ve put countless hours and thousands of dollars into developing. So I appreciate your uninformed petition against the trademark. What is wrong with people?

 

If someone wants to make panty hose and call it Gaymer, i dont give a shit. I just dont want ppl swiping what I have an interest in, and thats this site and all the members.”
Based on this statement, and specific instances of the term “gaymer,” which we can personally recall dating back far before any knowledge of Gaymer.org came to our attention, we believed that we could use the name GaymerCon to accuratly reflect the community that we were trying to build.

While we understand Mr. Vizzini’s desire to protect his trademark and not lose it to generic usage, we feel strongly that “gaymer” is a generic term. Even if it had not been used before 2001 (it had), we feel that it’s so commonly used by the gay geek community, (including not just Reddit and Gaymer.org, but also GayGamer.net, Facebook Groups, and even reality shows) that it is unfair to have that term coined and locked down to ONE community.

LGBTQ or ally, we are all trying to bring the cause that r/Gaymers has helped champion to the larger public and show the gay geeks of the world that there IS a safe space for them and that there IS a community for them. We respect, love, and cherish the r/Gaymers community, as well as all the gaymer and gay geek communities across the world.

We understand the legal challenges potentially at issue, but we feel that “gaymer” is a widely used, generic term and that what affects our brothers, sisters, and allies at Reddit affects us as well. We are in full support of our communities, and wish to lend our support however we can.

Moving forward, if r/Gaymers is forced to change its name, such a result could set in motion a mass rippling effect with various legal implications  affecting all commnuities of gaymers everywhere.  Although Mr. Vizzini’s trademark does not cover public conventions like ours, we understand the issues r/Gaymers and Toronto Gaymers are now facing, and support the need to keep the term gaymers synonymous with gay geeks and available for use by all.
We’re confident that this matter can be resolved in a way that benefits the entire community. The original intention of this trademark was to protect the community, and its imperative that we all reach a common ground and not splinter ourselves with infighting.

We love gaymers.

We are gaymers.

We support and stand by our fellow communities.

Thank you for reading this and your continued support of GaymerCon and our cause.

– The GaymerCon Team

Last night, at 8:53 PM PST, the GaymerCon Kickstarter Boss Battle came to an end. After 30 days of non stop fighting – including a dangerous mini boss who cast curse on us – we managed to rally the forces and slay the Kickstarter Boss. We gained a ton of XP (and by XP we mean new friends...1,531 of them!), but we also found a ton of Gil! In fact, 91,389 pieces! :O

We are thrilled, honored, amazed, and humbled by the response. We got covered by Forbes, Huffington Post, BBC, Game Politics, and IGN, and got support from amazing groups like Penny Arcade, Mega64, Xbox LIVE, the voices of GLaDOS and the Sniper, and Zach Weiner.

We crushed nearly all of our stretch goals, unlocking a GaymerConcert, Gaymer Brunch (for $100+ pledgers), and the Gaymer Celebrity Boss of Honor! In the coming month, as we book our venue, we are closing deals with some bands and one -really- big celebrity that, once that happens, we are very excited to announce.

The one goal that we didn’t hit was $100K for GaymerConnect – but we still are going to go for it! Honestly, that number was a bit of an arbitrary goal – we wanted to do something like GaymerConnect anyways, but the extra funds that we raised can go into getting design, front-end, and back-end developer help. If you’re an engineer or developer and would like to help out, please drop Andrew (our Tech Director) an email at [email protected]. We’re excited to make this a reality – but please keep in mind that making what we want to do is a lot of work and time, so it may be a short while before it’s up to full speed, but we’ll keep you in the loop on our progress!

Wow. We have over 1,200 attendees for GaymerCon and its 11 months out. The next things that you’ll hear from us in the next month or so are:

– What Venue we have locked down

– What hotels we are working with

– Launching GaymerCon 2.0 with Panel Picker, Forums and more!

– When we’re going to open up badges again for sale (depending on the size of the venue)

– Our Celebrity Boss of Honor as well as Minibosses of Honor to join Zach Weiner, Mike Fass (Zangief – Street Fighter: The Later Years), and Jon Brence 

– Our Musicial Guests to help accompany EZKL and Aethernaut

We are thrilled to have the opportunity to make GaymerCon not just a reality, but something truly special. We look forward to hearing your thoughts, ideas, cosplay ideas, panel suggestions, and seeing your purty faces in SF next year. Stay tuned to this blog, gaymercon.org, and our FB and Twitter for more updates!

You are amazing. We’re showing the world that #everyonegames. GAYMERS UNITE!!!!!!!!

SHAMZWOW. What a crazy ride! Just after we posted our last update, we zoooomed past $60,000 and now have unlocked our Boss of Honor. You have helped us level up and we can’t thank you enough. Just please don’t hit B while we’re evolving!

We can’t announce who it is just yet, but the person that we’re in the final stages of confirming is someone that a lot of you have asked for. We’re very hopeful that it’ll come through. We also have some really cool bands lined up. As we get final bookings, we’ll be sure to let you know, even if it’s after the end of the Kickstarter.

In the meantime, we have just 7 days left until the end of the Kickstarter. We’re really excited to announce our Final Boss Stretch Goal that has been a dream of ours to begin working on; with the additional funding, we’ll be able to make it an amazing reality.

We want to build an app – web first, then mobile, called GaymerConnect. The idea? That you can easily go in and find other Gaymers to play your favorite games with. Playing Call of Duty? Here are all the Queer Clans. Looking for someone to fight against in Street Fighter 4? Here are 20 awesome geeks to play against.

The best (and most relevant) part: we can coordinate GaymerConnect with GaymerCon itself, setting up an easy and instant way for you to connect online with all the awesome people you meet at the con. Plus badges, because every app has that shit these days!

We’ve begun working up some mockups of how this would look, but with this additional funding, we’d be able to hire designers and front end engineers to make this a reality.

A very awesome Gaymer hanging out with Kratos at Bent-Con (WHICH YOU SHOULD REGISTER FOR! seriously)

Even if we don’t hit $100,000, we would love to give it a try. We feel extra confident that we can do something amazing with the extra funds to help connect Gaymers outside of GaymerCon.

Let us know what you think – right now this is something our Tech Director (Andrew) has been hoping to build for a while now and we want to hear from you – is this something you’d be into? Would you like to be able to connect with other Gaymers and LGBTQ-friendly guilds?

We are so happy to have hit all of our initial stretch goals and are psyched for this final stretch. Please don’t hesitate to drop us a line through our contact form on our site if you have questions, would like to reach one of us for an interview or sponsorship info, or if you just want to say hi!

Don’t forget to like us on Facebook for continued updates and fun stuff!
– Andrew, Kayce, Matt & Jack

PS: We just brought on a Volunteer Director and Programming Coordinator so we’re really excited to begin moving forward on getting panels and fun stuff booked. 😀