Steampunk News

Con or Bust!, the fundraiser that helped me get to WisCon34 back in 2010, has now opened for bidding on its various items! I also has an item up for bidding: The Steampowered Globe. If you would like to get a copy of this Singaporean steampunk anthology delivered to you personally from me and donate to a worthy cause at the same time, place a bid!

You can find most general information about Con or Bust at its site but I would like to give my own perspective on why you should bid, or perhaps even donate, to Con or Bust.

I tend to see people ask, “what do we do to help racism go away?” Or “what can we do to encourage POC participation at events?” And sometimes infuriatingly, “yeah we know racism is bad: what are you doing about it?”

Racism being less just insults or individual prejudices and more a system of excluding people of colour from acts of self-empowerment and equal participation, requires a mass action on the parts of many individuals. It requires acknowledgement of exclusion and active movement to address this exclusion. It requires a communal effort of raising ourselves and each other and a pooling of our already-scarce resources.

When I asked for funding to go to WisCon, I indirectly also used that money to fund my trip to Steampunk World’s Fair, 2010, because it was just two weeks before, and I didn’t feel like traveling back into Canada and out again, when I could just stay in the States. After SPWF, I traveled from New Jersey to Wisconsin, and stayed with a friend of my father’s, before checking into the Concourse for WisCon34.

I actually did not honestly expect to get as much money as I did for my trip down: I simply told Kate Nepveu, who runs the show, the breakdown of expected costs for my trip. And somehow, that is what I got. I’ve actually been feeling quite guilty about that since then, because I was expecting maybe half of the amount, or less. “Whatever you can spare,” I told her.

Read more...