2023 Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo Panel (XNDUIW Simon)

The Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo Panel was a panel that was presented during the convention itself, created solely by XNDUIW Simon. Development on the panel started in August 2021, and involves coding and programming knowledge.

Planning
The planning of the panel began on June 2022, prior to a dramatic incident that resulted in the catastrophic destruction of certain records within the XNDUIW community because of suspected vandals and trolls, alongside a police report filed by Behfar Lotfizadeh for harassment, which further tarnished XNDUIW Simon's reputation a significant bit. During this time, the XNDUIW Game API was brought from theory into reality thanks to years of proposals, especially with the upgrade to the newer ACS 2.0.0 kit as a result. Supposedly, XNDUIW Simon began beta testing the API throughout mid-to-late 2022, and submitted it in November of that year, as the proposals were a significant success. The "Default Rig Testing Place 2" place was an experimental place where people could be able to playtest the API early, with many of the playtesters being freelance contractors themselves.

Since the people who were playtesters were purely freelance contractors however, they had to pay extra for special things within the XNDUIW community on some other hand, in terms of planning, as testing continued on for months, and this resulted in a sequel to the older XNDUIW PvP map, called "XNDUIW PvP II", which was more polished and even more developed. As the subsequent pieces of code were far more polished than when it was started. Though panel development continued throughout 2022 and well into 2023, it was apparent that panel development was confirmed from then and there.

Preparations
Initial planning to Otafest proved to be a complete failure as XNDUIW Simon would actually ignore the deadline at first and spam the convention's discord, which culminated in an incident around June 2022, though development on the panel continued as intended throughout the rest of 2022, which meant that XNDUIW Simon could no longer be allowed to attend Otafest since he was now banned from attending any future events related to Otafest because he was messing around with people. Some more resourceful people encouraged Simon to learn from his mistakes, so focus shifted towards the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo soon afterwards.

What was especially concerning was that panel applications for both CCEE and Otafest began in November, yet the harassment previously done to TETR.IO bled into Otafest, causing annoyance and irritation towards the rest of the Otafest staff, resulting in a cease and desist letter filed by Behfar himself. This was confirmed by Simon himself on Twitter during one of MapleMoriko's livestreams. According to the responding officer, Simon was doing more than just advertising, in fact, it was outright spam, with excessive messages directed to Otafest with Simon's full legal name and the names of his virtual characters (alts) as well, which could've risked having him jailed for real, but fortunately, family members came together to stop this. Meanwhile, ZenUsha did not condone spamming people's chats as a form of advertising, as it created quite the ruckus it seemed to be. Simon would end up being banned from Otafest permanently as a consequence of this.

Simon was often impatient, and would check up on the website, waiting for panel applications to appear, but eventually, the time was right, it was until November when the panel application was submitted to Comic Con. The preparations took at least nine months to create from scratch, and the article abounded about the lines itself.

Final plans
When the April 1st, 2023 deadline approached, initial thoughts on resuming tower making were abundant, but due to excessive toxicity and lack of morale resulted in the JToH tower being somewhat delayed, or outright cancelled, but drama rose again on February 2021 after past legal problems were widely shared on Minitubia, which alienated many of Simon's supporters even further, hence his shattered reputation. At this time, lines for the panel were written and posted on Wattpad, written about coding and some parts of the panel were planned months in advance prior to the event, as one slip of the tongue or a mishap would result in the panel failing as evenly intended. Profanity in general was not permitted during the panel itself, though the panel is expected to last at least 45 minutes, the lines are only take up a quarter of the length for the panel itself, as some parts of the panel involve typing code live during the event, or playtesting features by the host, the plans continued throughout the year with some problems along the way. These problems were rectified by newly installed administrators within XNDUIW, but were pretty much solved to some extent, not all the way through.

Despite troubling drama, the development of the panel continued on as expected, despite Simon himself being banned from at least five different servers, and the subsequent destruction of records after the standalone XNDUIW Wiki was forced to move to Wikidot, the panel was going on as planned after months of development and a lot of effort going into the panel itself.

Presentation
Like with the convention scene in Calgary, since XNDUIW Simon was, and still is a frequent aficionado of the Roblox platform, he would already be sticking out like a sore thumb, as many people who regularly attend those conventions were either not interested, or never heard of Roblox before, and this is apparent out of Otafest and CCEE together, so naturally, the convention may give a higher priority towards the newcomers beforehand. It was eventually settled by peers associated with XNDUIW itself.

The length of the panel was initially set to six hours, which would make it too boring, and excessive, so it was shortened to at least 45 minutes in accordance to Simon's own cousin. As expected, the presentation may talk about Roblox, and might involve a Q&A to some extent, but otherwise the panel could be an interesting look around within Roblox and such games in general. Communication about the panel was encouraged between real humans within the official XNDUIW discord (which required an invitation to join), and certain forms of social media as well. As with any other event though, there were drawbacks, since there wasn't a guarantee if the panel was even going to be hosted at all, as expected with the problematic behavior within the JToH community stigmatizing Simon for his actions, declaring him "generally creepy", which ultimately tarnished his reputation further.

From the local community
Reviews of the panel by the local community within Calgary somewhat paints a different picture for the panel itself, especially when the panel was considered at least within Calgary city limits too. What's surprising is that a small subset of Calgary's population, primarily adolescents and young children do play Roblox, while Simon is already a legal adult, which does sparks some concerns leading behind all these fake accusations and phony police reports too, not only that, there were hardly any dedicated discords within Calgary involving the event itself.

Alongside the sheer number of people who are within Calgary who are affiliated with XNDUIW in some way, the local community does respect Simon with a little grain of salt, with a few users, including Lacus78 having Simon blocked for harassment, as the same way that the Otafest incident happened simultaneously, but personal reviews of the panel within the local community are somewhat mixed, as advertising continues for the interests of the community too.

From the JToH community
Simon, known on Roblox as CBE_Simon, has mostly been alienated from the rest of the JToH community, mainly due to the possible incident involving PsychoticMute as well. This is apparent with former associates like Ganaupinha and Darkhalisc who no longer work with XNDUIW, especially with lasting trauma caused by a slew of problematic behavior over the span of the 2020's in general after the COVID-19 pandemic, with people calling him a rapist and other horrible names, which such allegations were deemed to be false. Not only the false accusations lead to the collapse of a few friendships that Simon was involved in, it also lead to a drop in morale, leading to a drop in his YouTube view count, and stigmatizing Simon for the rest of his life, with these rumors also bleeding into other communities as well, resulting in permanent bans from several communities, to which, some of them were rather toxic.

Alongside the persistent legal issues brought on by suspected trolls that were taken from Minitubia which ruined opportunities a bit further, false accusations continued to cause a whole host of problems, which had a negative impact on his career. It was confirmed that Simon became a freelance obbyist after said incident soon afterwards.

Advertising
The methods of advertising the panel included more questionable means, such as spamming people's chats or instant messages on social media, to spamming discord servers with the same link over and over again, which is pretty much annoying, alongside handing out papers to strangers, which these people did not know how it all worked or operated, as Simon was more of a technological genius, and was far more smart than these complete strangers could've been.

A more appropriate form of advertising for the panel included hosting an event on the XNDUIW Discord server for all these people to follow or read, or just uploading the ad on Roblox itself, preferably ads supported by Roblox moderators, as the panel was approved by Roblox moderators themselves. On the other hand, as Simon is not a staff member of Roblox, he'll have to confirm that he's just a big fan of the Roblox platform, and it's going to be featured in the panel itself.

Event overview
After the event began on April 27th, 2023, the panel was rejected by FAN EXPO staff despite months of work being put into it. The event was initially scheduled to open at 12:00 PM MDT, but technical problems delayed the opening time by at least thirty minutes, but eventually, CBE_Simon managed to gain entry into the event after a complicated accessibility process anyway, considering that the event went on as expected, although with certain amounts of confusion, as according to the staff who worked there all by themselves.

The event was fairly empty as CBE_Simon went there rather early, and it was quite uneventful, with a lack of interesting opportunities during the panel itself. The panel was submitted to the event on November 2022, but the sheer quantity of applications proved to be a problem at the end, as there were limited spots for panels specifically anyway, and there was competition between various content creators for spots as well, extending to CBE_Simon himself, alongside various backers and sponsors simultaneously.

Celebrity encounters
CBE_Simon showed Sarah Natochenny his Desert Eagle reload animation, and she was personally impressed by it, as she is the voice actor for Ash Ketchum after Season 9 when the two met. However, Pokemon do not transfer over into Roblox as such anyway, but showcases of the same animation came back with rather positive results at the BMO center during the event. Other celebrities in the event gave positive opinions about the animations themselves, not to mention, how much CBE_Simon had improved over the course of a year of animation.

The meetings with the celebrities were quick, and worked in CBE_Simon's favor, as multiple celebrities wished him good luck with his Roblox work as well.