Convergence

alt.gothic Convergence is the annual party which was originally put on by the denizens of alt.gothic and has since grown to include members of the myriad Gothic/Industrial online and social media groups it spawned. Hundreds of net.goths from around the globe squish into a single city for a weekend of IRL socializing, booze, musical events and sweet debauchery.

It started out in 1994 when the regular posters on alt.gothic decided that meeting up was a good idea.

Since then, every year a bunch of people from different cities put together bids to host the thing (I pity the fool...). The bids are then voted on, and the winner gets the job of doing all the work so that the rest of us can have fun (some people have a strange definition of 'win')

Some of the old bids have survived.

Some of the attendees put pictures on the internet. Take a look.

The official drink is a Better Martini. Just in case you were wondering.

Communication about convergence officially happens on this Wiki, alt.gothic, the Afterglow mailing list, the Convergence Facebook group, the Convergence LiveJournal Community, it rough order of officialness. During the event, and for a small window around it, ConvergTwit twitter account is used for communication of changes in locations and schedules, calls for public aid, ad hoc events, etc.

Future Convergence

The Convergence XXVI vote was won by the Kentucky bid [1].

The event is being postponed until the pandemic is under control because we are sensible people.

Updates will posted on here, alt.gothic, on the book of face, and other places.

Usenet - why do we still use it?

Usenet is old, unloved and barely used. Nearly all the net.goths have moved on to newer, shiny places like FB, LJ, Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr, Myspace, etc., etc. so you may want to know why we insist on keeping the alt.gothic Usenet group as the official home of C*.

There are four major reasons:

1. History. That's where we started, it's our home. In these days of constant change a bit of continuity is a good thing.
2. Usenet is a distributed network, not a proprietary website. It can't disappear overnight. The corporation that owns it can't delete the group or prevent people from accessing it.
3. You don't have to give a corporation private information to access it.
4. Peter H. Coffin doesn't have to run a Forum on this website for us to hold the discussions on.

LiveJournal

the [Convergence Livejournal group was very popular in it's time. here is a PDF of it as of 2022-04-30.

Previous Convergences

• Convergence XXV - Boston, MA
• Convergence XXIV - Detroit, MI
• Convergence XXIII - Dallas, TX
• Convergence XXII - New Orleans, LA
• Convergence XXI - Hollywood, CA
• Convergence XX - Chicago, IL
• Convergence XIX - Austin, TX
• Convergence XVIII - Buffalo, NY
• Convergence XVII - Cozumel, Mexico
• Convergence XVI - Park City, UT
• Convergence XV - Long Beach, CA
• Convergence XIV - Ybor City (Tampa), FL
• Convergence XIII - Portland, OR
• Convergence XII - New Orleans, LA
• Convergence XI - San Diego, CA
• Convergence X - Chicago, IL
• Convergence IX - Las Vegas, NV
• Convergence VIII - Montreal, QC
• Convergence VII - New York City, NY
• Convergence VI - Seattle, WA
• Convergence V - New Orleans, LA
• Convergence IV - Toronto, ON
• Convergence III - San Francisco, CA
• Convergence II - Boston, MA
• Convergence I - Chicago, IL

Other Convergi

Convergence has been used as a name for a few other gatherings

• CONvergence SF Con. A yearly SF convention in Bloomington, MN
• HGA Convergence A biennial international conference sponsored by the Handweavers Guild of America

Links

Siobhan had a reasonable summary of many Convergences on her website. But then A Bad Thing happened, and all the data was lost forever.