What Exactly Happened at Penguicon?

The Board's latest official statement only conjures up more questions

On June 27, “winner” of the Fan Writer Hugo Award from the forever tainted Chengdu Worldcon Chris Barkley put together a “special report” for (*hurk*) File 770 (*gggrrkk*) titled: “Point and Counterpoint: Two Opinions on Penguicon’s Statement on Safety”. Said report includes a statement republished in its entirety from the Penguigcon Board of Directors that manages to say nothing in almost 600 words while also sounding nearly like an apology for . . . something.

Barkley’s article would then pivot to one Leslie Varney, a literary agent who’s been in the crosshairs of the adroit and very thin Patrick S. Tomlinson for about a year now. The origin of their ongoing (and where wits are concerned, decidedly one-sided) social media feud are gone into in the article, but if you’ve read any of our previous coverage regarding the corpulent crank, you know it takes almost nothing for Tomlinson to make a lifelong enemy of a complete stranger online. What was this all about? A few ideas were being kicked around in the site’s normally active comments section, though the conversation was uncharacteristically closed down after only nine total comments.

Penguicon 2024 would go on to be a dumpster fire of cancelled guests (most notably of which was Tomlinson), their guest of honor dropping out over vague “safety concerns”, and very little clarifying information coming forth from the board. Frankly, to this day, no one knows for sure what confluence of events occurred to have prompted all of this; I’ve reached out to two different con chairs past and present, and unsurprisingly have received no reply. All we have is speculation, and since I love a good murder mystery (let’s face it, the con may be dead after this for reasons beyond Tomlinson), I’ll attempt to piece together a best guess at what I think likely occurred.

I cannot stress this enough, what follows is speculation and solely my own thoughts and opinions on the matter. But by all means feel free to offer your own post mortem in the comments.

Casefile: Penguicon 2024

As con season began shaping up earlier this year, I’d been keeping an eye on social media to see what annual gathering of dysgenic mask-wearing dangerhairs would make the biggest spectacle of themselves (hint: it’s always GenCon.) ConFusion in Michigan offered up a few chuckles, with attendance seeming to hover somewhere in the literal dozens . . .

Dozens!

And why not with such an in-demand panel of spea—

In all seriousness, pray for this person.

Hot on ConFusion’s heels was Penguicon, just weeks later, another long-running Michigan con that banks on the considerable amount of overlap between sci-fi nerds and Linux nerds. Running the weekend of April 26-28, signs of this bunch potentially giving GenCon a run for its wrinkled, sticky money were strong when their schedule posted. It had everything; masking requirements! Vaccination status proofs! Workshops like Polyamorous Parenting, Stop Trying to Get Laid and Prostitute Yourself For Fun and Profit, and Responsible Bottoming! AND their Guest of Honor was a self-proclaimed “shape-shifting drag clown” appropriately named after something artificially colored, cheap and cancerous, Baha Blast.

No doubt there for the Linux crowd.

If you’re wondering what a drag clown has to do with anything regarding science fiction OR Linux, I regret to inform you that your bewilderment is only beginning. For not long after the addition of Mx. Blast was announced, the con began to rapidly fall apart.

Bodies Start To Fall

Two days before the event was set to kick off, con chair . . . Bagel Garrison . . . who claims to be an author despite my not being able to find a single thing they’ve written, announced across multiple platforms and the con site that their husky harlequin made like Walter Breen Sr. should have and pulled out, citing ‘safety concerns’. Mx. Bagel delivered this news, naturally, via some detail-free statement that was as vague as it was needlessly verbose:

Hello, Penguicon.

Guest of Honor, Baha Blast, will no longer be joining us this year.

Why? In all honesty…

First, I completely neglected to follow up on communication that I should not have assumed had been handled. This is something a conchair should always be on top of, especially with Guests of Honor! I was not. They were understandably frustrated.

Second, when they came to me with safety concerns, I first misread the severity of those concerns, and though immediately offering the extra backup they requested, my response came through in a way that did not make them feel that their safety was my priority. I can not blame them in the least for this.

And so, sadly, this is an announcement to say that all of the Drag programming will be cancelled this weekend. I made decisions early on in the process and of which I should have foreseen the consequences, and this is the result.

Please make sure to support your favorite Drag Royalty, and show them all of the love that they clearly deserve. ❤

-Bagel

ConChair, PenguiCon 2024

At almost the same time as this announcement was made, word got around on social media that Tomlinson had not only had his scheduled talk cancelled, he’d been disinvited altogether. The cancellations didn’t stop there, either; all told, there would be eleven events and workshops cancelled for this year’s event compared to two for the previous year. What sparked the wave of subsequent cancellations is anyone’s guess, but, and this is speculation on my part, I’d guess that Tomlinson’s reputation had clearly preceded him, and a lot of attendees were having thoughts similar to Brian Gilgore, a vendor who voiced a reluctance to be wherever Tomlinson was:

courtesy of new.OnAforums.comB

Tomlinson’s histrionics over the past five years have gained him notoriety of all the wrong sorts within writing circles and beyond. Of course, it hasn’t helped that the whole harrowing story of murderous stalker-cultists getting police to point ballistic shields at he and his wife and vandalizing his property becomes a lot less harrowing once his jumbled litter of ever-shifting details comes under the merest bit of scrutiny.

While Tomlinson was given favorable (read: unquestioning) treatment by mainstream truth morgues like NBC Nightly News and Inside Edition, his version of events fared considerably worse once various independent media got a look at them; an article that was supposed to run on Cracked.com was rumored to have gotten pulled once it became obvious Tomlinson had a habit of antagonizing friend and foe alike online. The Blocked and Reported podcast spent two episodes detailing the debacle and didn’t seem to come away with much sympathy for his plight, due mostly to the fact that he’s brought a considerable amount of the drama he’s been facing on himself. Pretend podcast host Javier Leiva spent three episodes covering the Tomlinson saga in detail, but wound up doing an unplanned fourth episode when Tomlinson pleaded with Levia not to interview the very people he’d spent the previous three episodes attacking. This didn’t sit well with Leiva, who then interviewed Dan Mullen, a high profile troll who frequently poked fun at Tomlinson on X and on his own podcast, Nice Podcast, Stupid.

The predictable result? Tomlinson’s trolls wound up coming off looking a lot less like a group of dangerous cybercriminals and more like people on the internet doing things people on the internet do to smug, self-righteous narcissists.

Pat spent Halloween doing this and eating all the trick- or-treaters’ candy.

To date, there hasn’t been a single arrest in five years in relation to anything Tomlinson claimed has happened to him. The alleged author maintains to this day that the Milwaukee PD (who he’s currently suing) will either be closing the net any moment now, or couldn’t find their own asses with a flashlight and a map, depending on what mood he’s in any given day.

Tying things back around to Penguicon, there’s also the matter of Schrödinger’s Bomb Threat. Tomlinson has claimed on numerous occasions that the unstoppable global cabal of invincible cyber terrorists hounding him had called in a fake bomb threat to the 2022 Penguicon, the last one for which he was in attendance. Naturally, he blamed his stalker children. The problem with that narrative? Evidence from the hotel staff themselves indicate it didn’t happen (relevant portion 0:20-2:03, h/t Cryptic Web Chronicles on YouTube):

This seems damning indeed, and it’s not hard to see how Penguicon likely found themselves between a rock and a hard place regarding Tomlinson’s involvement in this year’s gathering. Either the claim about the bomb threat was true (as per Tomlinson), and his presence did pose a legitimate physical threat to the con’s guests, or the claim was false, in which case Tomlinson came off as delusional at best and potentially still inviting third party harassment by proxy to guests at worst. Tomlinson didn’t attend the 2023 con—he claims he was out of the country at the time—but trolls somehow still managed to convince the organizers he’d submitted a panel suggestion on “Alien Crabs and Dragonpox: How STDs are depicted in SFF and why we need more sex-positive representation.” Troll though it was, it still showed con organizers that negative repercussions tied to him could affect the event even if he wasn’t there.

The Final Theory: The Gloves Came Off Too Late

Penguicon may have felt obligated to invite him after the SpaceAIDS embarrassment, so they did, despite the fact that everywhere and everything Tomlinson interacts with brings smoke AND fire AND nuclear radiation. Enough of the attendees knew about Tomlinson’s never-ending and largely self-inflicted travails to start complaining and pulling out rather than have to risk dealing with whatever he might bring to their doorstep (and if they didn’t already know, all the sordid details were just a search away). While most con goers may have taken Tomlinson’s bomb threat claim at face value, both Dave “Ska” Green, who chaired the 2022 con and current chair Bagel Garrison likely talk, and know the ultimate truth behind it. Garrison made the decision to staunch the bleeding once their Drag Clown of Honor noped out, and missile dropkicked Tomlinson off the itinerary, albeit too late.

courtesy of new.onaforums.net

Of course, the con having come and gone isn’t the end of the Board’s troubles. There’s been plenty of grumbling on the Facebook page about how the con was handled and the opaqueness of the board’s communications, along with other details like the ludicrousness of mask mandates in 2024. They’ve seen Leslie Varney’s open letter to the org posted in the convention’s wake, where she asks for clarification of the board’s statement, and details having been referred to as “wicked, moron, mouth breather, evil,” and “imbecile”, by Tomlinson and others, “much to the expressed entertainment of Mr. Tomlinson,” and asking what actions the board would take going forward. Penguicon in turn issued a brief reply that “our dealings with Tomlinson have escalated to the Board level”.

To me, the clues all point to Pat being Pat. And perhaps the only thing Pat generates these days is toxicity and legal debt. He is the embodiment of a corroding force that hollows out all he casts his xanthelasmic gaze towards. Will Penguicon make it for another year? Honestly, I hope so. I’m not done laughing at them.