When it comes to conventions, it's very rare that I ever talk about another convention on something other than the Free Fur All franchise. There was one point in time that I talked about SodaCityFurCon but the information was so scarce that the post was deleted shortly after. Plus, it was just long messages back and forth from the organizers. As new conventions have been popping up or upcoming within several years, I thought I would do a scavenger hunt looking for the ones that failed or deemed to be a failure. Well, today we are going to talk about Harvest Moon Howl Fest; a convention that was supposed to start in October but was cancelled due to numerous amounts of issues behind the scenes.
I'm going to keep the history for this one brief because the information on this con is scarce. The presence of this con began in September of 2019 with the start of their Twitter account but nothing came from this until three to four years later. Harvest Moon Howl Fest came into being in 2022 and was set to begin in the fall of 2022 but for whatever reason, it was pushed back to this year for October of 2023.
The Major Failure:
Nasfk Predatory Behavior / Maul Apparel Scam / Cancellation:
There's quite a bit to go through so let's just start out with the first one and that being the scams. Originally, there was a company called Mauls Apparel which was supposed to sell high quality shirts and act as a vendor for Harvest Moon Howl Fest (or HMHF as an acronym). Turns out that the owner of Mauls Apparel had stolen the money without given any customer what they paid for. Even with the shirts experiencing fraying, the owner took over $20k of people's funds for the shirts and less than 10% of the sales went to HMHF. A report to the Attorney General of Ohio was filed for fraudulent practices against Maul's Apparel as well as the $5,000 donated to the convention. When people called him out on Twitter, he would block them and would brag about another business on his personal account. The guy runs a Twitter account called PlayTymeCo. Not only that this guy's a douche for taking other people's money, but he also has a diaper fetish.
Just when you thought things couldn't get even more disgusting, well it's about to get worse from here on out. Around the time when the drama regarding the shirts were coming out, one of the Executive Staffers called Nasir (Nasfk) who worked for HMHF was called out for sexual allegations. Many of the victims came out to express their experiences with Nasir. What it all came down to was 19 page google docs document of the victim's statements and experiences they had with Nasir. Not only that he's doing predatory behavior, but he's also not even admitting fault after when he faced the open consequences and downplaying everything as if nothing ever happened. Out of the victims' statements (plus @crepusculecat who reported on him), I counted at least 9 people within the document and there's probably even more who spoke out. After the drama unfolded, a user who goes by Chise (the only chairman of HMHF) on Twitter wrote a tweet stating that they had removed him and is no longer has any further association with the convention.
Now this happened roughly two to three years ago before HMHF ever became a thing. What about the things that were happening in the recent years? Well, way back on Halloween 2022, they responded to a comment about mask and vaccines. I get that some people want to stay safe but that has been three years ago and a lot of them had dropped the mandates. We haven't been hearing about the other variants but anyways, there had been a large gap from March of 2023 to June of 2023 (3-month gap). On June 9 after exposures of the members took place, Howl Fest was cancelled 4 months before it ever started. They released a statement regarding the cancellation due to not going as plan and claiming that they didn't have access to the financials. This seems very off because it's the simplest thing to get a hold of. Plus, everything else was being exposed by other people. It's also strange that the organizers are ran by a couple of users. I will continue to update this if anything new comes to the surface.
No comments:
Post a Comment