Miscon 2025

Miscon has always been one of our favorite conventions. I mean, we dedicated a book to it, for crying out loud. So it should come as no shock that Miscon 2025 was once again an incredible experience.

Or should it?

You see, Miscon did something new this year. Most…no. All conventions we’ve been to previously have taken place in a hotel. That’s sort of the whole thing. There’s a hotel, the hotel rents rooms to a con, the con happens in the hotel.

Miscon did not have a hotel this year, and it’s not going to next. Instead, Miscon chose to operate out of the Missoula Fairgrounds.

Now, understand something. One of the reasons we love Miscon is entirely selfish. The old merchant’s room used to sit within the center of an atrium. To get from point A to point B in the convention, you had to walk through the merchant stalls. To say this increased both foot traffic and sales is an understatement. We knew, going in, we were losing that. And we dreaded it.

The number of things that could have gone wrong with this move were myriad. And many things did. When half your attendees are camping in the Fairground parking lot and the entire time the con is going on it’s fifty degrees, raining, with a constant wind there’s a sort of shared misery. I ended up referring to it as “nerdstock” due to the fact that the entire camping area turned into one large mud pit.

Shared misery does one of two things. It either fractures people, or it brings them together. And this being Miscon, it brought them together.

I’ve said it before–Miscon has its own sort of energy. It’s not like the Pacific Northwest, where doing something nerdy is as easy as walking down the block. Where we live, people trot out their nerd cred to strangers in a Starbucks in order to impress each other. Not so Montana. So many of these nerds only have these four days to let their freak flags fly, and they are damned well going to make the most of it.

So what if the weather is miserable? Miscon isn’t an event–it’s an adventure. We all know that the hero must overcome adversity if he is to triumph, and at Miscon we all get to be that hero. So people piled into tents even as the wind threatened to tear the flimsy walls down around them, because together we were all on a quest.

And we succeeded. We found what we sought–a land where, for four magical days, we could be ourselves. Where we could love what we love unconditionally. Where a ten-year old strapped with cardboard is a knight, where superheroes walked among us, and where an old, fat man like myself isn’t just using a cane to walk–he’s a wizard carrying his focus.

Were there problems? Yes. Were there areas that could be improved? Of course. Such is to be expected when a convention makes such a major change. But the heart and soul of Miscon has never been its venue. It has been the sheer, rampant, unleashed joy in the hearts of its attendees. And I am happy to report that has not changed at all.