So, after a long, drawn-out battle and discussion with the owners over the last week or so, Moomia’s has officially dinged us down hard and all our alternative suggestions to work it out: the afterparty will be 21+. We’re stuck too because there’s no other venues open at this point.

This sucks so hard and we feel like asshats. Particularly because the 18+ crowd is internets too.

But – if you want parties and shenanigans and are in town early, ROFLThing’s got something cooked up for you.

On, uh, the New York City subway system. With people.

Friday night. 10:30 PM. Union Square, near the statue of Ol’ George Washington.

We’ll be there. You should be too.

It’s not too late to get tickets to ROFLThing, we’re giving to charity — check this out. 

An anonymous copyright owner lays claim on Crank Dat ROFLCon! Soulja Boy, you didn’t back down from Ice-T. Don’t let these clowns play you!

Our general strategy with the ROFLThings this summer has been: throw many schemes and plans against the wall, and see what sticks. This has led to some real developing wins, but also some softer spots on the map. So, today, with great sadness, we’re kicking out Chicago ROFLThing from this summer’s schedule and pushing it later this year/next year. We’re sure we’ll be back to the Windy City though, those UChicago kids are too good to pass up for this sort of thing.

BUT places that are sticking quite nicely. San Francisco is starting to pull in the confirms (reg will be opening up next week), Seattle is about to announce its big event (just tidying up the details), and NYC has got a killer crew starting to work on it (it’ll probably be our latest event in the summer/early fall). More news as it comes in over the weekend…

(photo by remisser, CC BY SA)

Some of you who attended the final session of ROFLCon may remember the trolling (thanks Zotnix!) we got in our comment thread (not unexpected — what kind of internet culture conference would we be without it?) and the IRL flame war (like, punches) that ensued.

This “real” comment thread with the Anons may interest you.

[Videos of the referenced Anon panel here]

Many of you have e-mailed the ROFLCon team or mentioned that you wanted to come on our registration page. In the hopes that we could get in as many people as possible (one of the big reasons why we moved this whole operation to MIT in the first place), we’ve been actively putting people on a waitlist. We’re finally firming up our attendee numbers this weekend, and will be sending out yea or nays today. It possible we’ll be missing a few names due to some data loss, so if you don’t hear back — it’ll be safe to assume that we weren’t able to swing some spaces.

This is our first year, but us ROFLCon peeps are actively considering setting up events like this in the future, so if you’re interested in knowing what we’ll be up to next, shoot us an e-mail with “Update List” in the subject heading to roflcon AT gmail.com and we’ll subscribe you to our low-traffic e-mail update hotline.

Thanks,

Tim

Many of you have been asking about hotels, and a bunch of people on the ROFLCon team been frantically trying to work out some sort of arrangement before the conference goes down, but I’ve come to the conclusion that, frankly, Cambridge really kind of sux.

Originally, we were thinking about just cutting a deal with the hotel that we’re putting guests into so that all you attendees could nail some semidecent housing at a good price. Unfortunately, it’s been kind of a perfect storm: it’s not only MIT Parents Weekend, but Harvard’s Pre-Frosh Weekend as well (so crazy parent quotient is up up up). So, the best we can do is ~$200+ a night (sadface) at the Kendall Marriot. If you are interested (bully for you), drop us a line at tim@roflcon.org.

If not, options:

1) Post that you want/are willing to house people here. Hope that the magic of crowdsourcing gets you through.

2) Couchsurfing.com: A kind of awesome project where you find people who’re willing to house you for free for good company/conversation. Membership is kind of involved though.

3) Cheap Hotels: Not too familiar with the Kendall Square area in terms of cheap hotels (post if you’ve got any ideas), but if you’re willing to commute a bit, there’s a Holiday Inn Express nearby, and a series of semicheap bed-and-breakfast type places over in Harvard Square.