Tron Guy at ROFLCon 2012.
The big news out of ROFLCon is that this is the last ROFLCon. So if you want to catch your favorite “Famous on the Internet” stars – Tron Guy, Double Rainbow guy, Antoine Dodson, the Nyancats — you better get over to MIT Building 26 in the next three hours. They’re all here.
According to the ROFLCon III show guide’s surprise ending:
“This is the last ROFL.con. Sort of. It’s been an amazing run — more stupendously successful than we could ever have possibly imagined — but for now we’re putting this trilogy to bed and riding out into the sunset. Our lives are taking us to new and exciting places so ROFLCon is on hiatus until we figure out how to continue doing it great justice.”
Co-founded three years ago by Christina Xu and Tim Hwang, three-year-old event that was meant to showcase Internet memes and phenoms that took the world by storm, including Supercuts, fast, edited video montages that illustrate a theme.
The show drew about 850 people — at least one flew in from Hamburg, Germany — who came for sessions on Life After the Meme, Web comics, Supercuts, Fangirl culture and defending the Internet, the latter an example of how ROFLCon has developed some serious overtones. (Check out Katie Fehrenbacher’s coverage of the Lolitics: Memes and Politics session, for example.)
For ROFLCon, this might be goodbye for now, but given the enthusiasm I saw today — attendees included folks from Microsoft (who came from Redmond, not the local Cambridge office) and Google — and the adoration attendees showered on Double Rainbow guy and Antoine Dodson, something will arise in its place.
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