You may have noticed that I haven’t been talking about anime cons much these days, and you might wonder how many I’ve gone to lately. Or in general. Or not. If you don’t finish reading this, that’s okay; I don’t blame you. We’re all busy people these days, we all have a lot of things fighting for our time, and we all have better things to do than read what some weirdo on the internet has to say. (You might even have this bookmarked for the purpose of inducing sleep. That’s cool too.) I’m doing this because I need to, for myself.

This won’t be completely linear; there will be tangents that sprout at odd times and odd angles. And I am going to go on at length about things that could just as easily be summed up in a sentence or two. (Or “rambling”, as the ignorant masses would blandly put it. But hey, this is my venue, and I’m the one paying for this site to exist, so I think it’s fair.) It’s a chaotic pile of thoughts and memories and sentimentality that have been rattling around in my brain for too long, and the best way to get them out is to dump them all on paper or into a big text file or something. At the least, get them on the other side of my eyes. That’s how catharsis works sometimes.

Is 20 years long enough to be nostalgic and sentimental about something? I think so.

At the time of posting this (September 18 2020), I was 45 years old. I’ve been plugging away at this for a few years, long before the whole COVID thing flipped the world upside-down. Every time I’d get close to thinking it was ready to go live for the public to read, I’d think of something else I wanted to add or expand on or change around, and well, it became this long-winded monster. This originated as navel-gazing as to the nature of burnout and why I don’t go to as many conventions as I used to, then it turned into waxing nostalgic about why I went to them in the first place, and why I kept going. That then looped back into convention burnout. Eventually I decided that it was time to put it up before something else happens and I’d spend who knows how much longer gnawing on it. If I wait for it to be perfect or I try to include everything, I’ll die of old age first. It’s as good as done, the meat & potatoes are served, but every now and then I come back and tape another detail or tidbit to it, maybe fix a typo or two. Now’s as good a time as any for this, I guess.

I’ve decided to avoid name-dropping in this. It’s less about protecting privacy (though I’m sure some of you appreciate that) and more about if I name one person, then it becomes naming twenty people, then it becomes hundreds with someone invariably left out and this gets even longer and further delayed. So it’s easier if everyone stays anonymous. I left the bits about AnimeUSA in since that was semi-relevant. Not like anyone would become famous from this anyway. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter: You know who you are.

It’s solemnly fitting that I would finally get around to posting it on the weekend of what would have been AnimeUSA 2020, and amidst the dawning reality that it’ll be well into 2021 at the earliest and most optimistic (2022 being more realistic) before we have conventions again. Some of them won’t come back. For those that do, the landscape is going to be very different, almost alien. The era of conventions with 20k-30k attendees is pretty much over, at least for a few years. My prediction? 5k, at most. Badges for them are going to be a lot more expensive.

(Update: Otakon held their 2021 event and went well over 20k in attendance. I’m actually glad to be wrong in my prediction.)

Alright, let’s get on with it.

In 2019, I went to a total of three (3) conventions. More than two, less than four, whole numbers only with no decimals or fractions. A very certain, specific, definite, unambiguous, absolute, and non-negotiable three that leaves no room for misinterpretation, exceptions, or doubt. That kind of three. And I commuted to all three of them. 2017 and 2018 each saw only 3 conventions as well. 2020 was going to be a continuation of this, but due to the COVID-19 outbreak, both Otakon and AnimeUSA (and everyone else for that matter) announced they had to cancel for 2020. I would have liked to have gone to them and I definitely would have in better times. So, it looks like Katsucon will be the only one in 2020 for me.

That’s quite the departure from my previously more hectic schedule. From 1999 to 2013, I was attending no less than 6 conventions a year, with 8 or 9 being more common. For many of them, I would go for the whole weekend, and stay in a hotel room. I never did hit 10 per year and in retrospect, maybe that’s for the best. For dealers, that’s nothing; they lose count less than halfway through the year. For someone like me who goes as a regular attendee most of the time, that’s a lot. That went on for a long time, too. This resulted in a grand total of somewhere around 130, give or take a couple, spread across 25 years. The combination of factors that led to me going to so many conventions is fairly simple and happened relatively quickly. What led to me cutting back on them is more complex and drawn out. The more I think about it, inevitable as well.

Cue up “Glory Days” by Bruce Springsteen and strap on the nostalgia goggles!

That level of activity was enabled by a few things. The most obvious is the North East has a large population of anime fans and a large number of anime cons of varying sizes, many of them close to each other both geographically and chronologically. It wasn’t always like that, especially back in the mid-1990s when I first started attending conventions. They were a lot smaller and fewer in number than they are now. Initially, Otakon and Katsucon in particular were pretty much the only real option for anime cons for a couple years around here. They were originally a lot further away than they are now. Going to Otakon in 1995 (my first anime convention) meant running the gauntlet to State College and hoping I didn’t get killed in the Lewistown Narrows. Going to Katsucon in 1996 and 97 meant driving all the way down to Virginia Beach which sounded nice except it was still winter which is probably how they were able to afford the convention space. Going to them now requires only slightly more driving than what I do to get to work.

Hey that’s not fun at all!

FunFact: The Lewistown Narrows was the less threatening name of a stretch of US-322 near Lewistown PA. The locals called it “Death Alley” for good reason and erected a makeshift billboard with the ominous message “If you want to visit Happy Valley, you need to go through Death Alley”. What made it dangerous was it started as freeway on each end then would get squeezed into a 2-lane road, downhill, and then it was a 6-mile frogmarch between the Juniata River and Shade Mountain, with no place to pass or pull over. When Penn State had a home game, the traffic jams through there were as bad as what DC or Baltimore could dish out. Accidents were common. For a while it was considered one of the most dangerous sections of road in the US, and there were multiple other stretches like that along that road, until the state had enough of that nonsense and rebuilt that mess as proper freeway. Anyway.

Anime conventions instantly proved to be both fun and enlightening, and my friends and I were hooked. Before long, both Otakon and Katsucon grew enough that the only viable option for them was to move to cities with larger venues. Otakon was the first to move closer; in 1996 they moved to the Baltimore area for their Hunt Valley years. Katsucon followed suit in 1998 by settling down in the DC area. Within a couple years, more anime cons started sprouting up in earnest. There were enough people to say “hey we can do that too” or “we can do that better” and they would gather enough friends and cobble together enough resources to start another convention. And that would inspire yet more people to start their own. The calendar filled quickly. Before long, I was going to cons that were only a week apart from each other. Not all the time, but that did happen more than once.

Remember when Otakon and Katsucon (and many other cons for that matter) could fit into a single hotel and had free onsite parking? I sure do! Good times.

Anime cons were also starting to appear in places I would have not expected an anime con to be held, such as college campuses, and even high schools. (The high school one impressed me because not only were they able to convince the faculty to let it happen on school property, it was fairly competent.) Many of these newly-minted conventions were small, or at least they started out small. The small ones were easy. All I needed to do was put on some clothes and show up with just enough money to buy a badge and I was all set for a day of entertainment. Sometimes for the full weekend cons I would need just enough money to cover crash space for a night or two, a bit more to buy stuff in the dealers room. The low-effort ones were plentiful. Within a period of four years, I went from going to my first anime convention to attending half a dozen per year.

Back during this time, anime clubs were the primary venue of being the social center of fandom, where anime fans in a given area could interact with each other in person on a regular basis and watch some anime. I went to a few different clubs, some of them college-based, others run privately in either rented space or someone’s home. Initially, I went to them for the advertised purpose of watching anime. Most of the time, these clubs were good at that. I got into a lot of good shows that way, shows that would have otherwise slipped under my radar.

“Hey everyone I found a tape of something called Legend of Lemnear for us to watch”

When someone we knew happened across some new and rare anime (it was all new and rare back then), we naturally gravitated together to watch it, either as an official club meeting or a bunch of friends hanging out one odd evening. It didn’t have to be GOOD anime; it just had to be new and different. In fact, the anime itself could have been hot garbage as it sometimes was, but we would remember it fondly because of who we were with (or we just didn’t know better). Other times, we watched anime that was legitimately good, and we enjoyed it as such. We wanted our friends to enjoy it too, as we knew they would. We shared the anime and the experience of watching it. By that point, the anime and club meetings were secondary, a shared interest as a catalyst. It was at those club meetings where connections were made, friendships were forged, ideas were shared, shenanigans happened, and schemes were hatched.

Anime clubs and conventions were deeply intertwined. Some anime clubs were unofficial meta-meetings for convention staff; others were where some conventions were directly born. Other anime clubs had the idea of organizing a large enough group together to attend conventions, because that’s the only way many of them would have been able to go. I joined in on this a few times for a few cons that I wouldn’t have gone to otherwise.

Plot twist: I didn’t start going to anime clubs until after I started going to anime cons, but not long after, by maybe a year. A story for another day.

Having a reliable car is a big help. I was limited in my earliest years by a cantankerous 300ZX that I bought at a yard sale at a yard sale price and definitely got what I paid for. Just driving it to work was becoming too much to ask of it. I also had a Subaru that I genuinely liked, but that had some serious problems of its own after living a hard life in my inexperienced care. In 1998, they were replaced full-time by Ai, an Integra that was much newer (at the time) and has since taken me to the moon and back, and later on assisted by a pair of RSX’s. So yeah, having a good car definitely helped to expand my range and made it possible to also attend some of the more distant events, such as AWA, Animazement, even a Project A-kon, 1400 miles away.

That bit about the car is important. I’ve always had some wanderlust, and I’ve always been up for going on road trips of some sort, any sort. There’s a convention several hundred miles away? Sure, I’ll go. It gave me the prime opportunity to visit new places. Sometimes the prospect of an anime convention was enough to put the total justification over the top, to make it worthwhile. It was fun, at first. As I would eventually find out, that would start to work against me.

To put it in perspective, until I started going to conventions, I had only been to 6 states, including my home state. For the North East, 6 states isn’t much. Conventions quickly added another 10 to that count, and dedicated road trips more than doubled that total. (I am now 3 weeks of road trips away from having been to all of the Lower 48 states.)

What was also a big help in going to a lot of cons was obviously my own youth. My energy levels were a lot higher back then. When I started going to anime cons at all, I was a strapping young man, all of 20 years old. Technically no longer a teenager, yet still indistinguishable from one. (I even celebrated my 21st birthday at an anime con.) When the wave of busy years arrived, I was still in my 20s and early 30s. There was a lot more I was able to do physically. There were things I could tolerate and endure, things I could get away with doing to myself without ill effect.

Another factor is that I used to be on staff for AnimeUSA. At the time I joined, it was a very small event. (Officially, attendance for their second year was about 200, but I regard any figure over 100 as a dodgy guess at best, and blatant exaggeration at worst.) There weren’t many others on staff in the first place. In those early years, staff meetings were small enough that they were usually held at a suspiciously-empty Wendy’s or in someone’s living room. Aside from a few core regulars and stalwarts, the turnover rate was high enough that I quickly rose through the ranks almost entirely through attrition. I had become one of the core regulars in a matter of months. The bar for joining staff was a low one at the time. We weren’t picky about who or where back then and couldn’t afford to be. They were fun times anyway, maybe because of the “this con shouldn’t have survived but it somehow did” vibe. We were defying the odds and the general consensus of the rest of the convention community. Haters were gonna hate so we were going to try anyway and we had fun doing it.

It wasn’t long before AnimeUSA grew enough that it could be taken seriously enough by other conventions to do badge comps and table swaps for cross-promotion. Since I got pretty far up on the totem pole, including being one of the original members of the Board of Directors, table swaps enabled me to get into a few conventions for free, as long as I spent some amount of time at the table, answering questions and encouraging people to attend AnimeUSA. Many times, if AnimeUSA had a presence at other cons, I’d spend some time working at the table anyway, even if I bought my own badge. I didn’t have to, that was my choice. There was a sense of glory to it.

As a result, all of those factors ended up enabling me to go to a lot of conventions I wouldn’t have considered as a possibility before. It became reasonable (to me, at the time) to drive hundreds of miles to a con because I knew there was a free badge waiting for me and I knew both my car and I had the stamina for it.

The first few years I was on staff were great. I went to the first couple AnimeUSAs, 1999 and 2000, as an attendee and had a wonderful time. It bordered on a religious experience, and I wanted to share that with others. I joined staff a few weeks after the 2000 event. I felt staffing was one of the most effective ways to pay that forward. I enjoyed staffing despite it being an unpaid position. I did it because I wanted to help the convention continue and grow. I wanted each one to be a success, bigger and better than the one before. I wanted people to have fun and have their own fond memories of it all. I wanted to contribute something. I wanted to be part of something special and I felt like I was. Each passing minute brought new wonders and surprises, and we couldn’t wait to see what the next one would be. Each passing minute was more ephemeral and fleeting than the one before it: Friday lasted forever; Sunday came and went in the blink of an eye. Spontaneity was everywhere. Things happened purely for the sake of happening. It was magical. There was a certain omnipresent energy, formed when everyone brought their own and shared it with everyone else, and that was the only place it could happen. There was a party going on, everyone was invited, and I wanted to help make it happen. I felt like a rock star. Everyone felt like rock stars and we all partied like them in our own ways. That’s what I wanted and that’s what I got. That was the deal. Would the convention have survived anyway had I not joined at all? Certainly. I like to think I helped.

Party’s over

Times change, and not even rock stars can keep the rock star lifestyle going forever. The party has to end eventually. Burnout started its long process. In the second half of my staffing tenure, I felt like I was getting in my own way. I was feeling like a lot of things were being done for me and the few things left I did do were increasingly irrelevant, bordering on counter-productive. There was a lot of unpaid work that was amounting to nothing more than just that: Unpaid work, the worst kind of work. Going to the meetings was increasingly becoming a chore, and they were increasingly less fruitful. The sense of futility increased each year. In retrospect, I should have stepped down much earlier than when I did, yet I kept hanging on. I thought maybe I was just hitting a slump, the next year would be better, and I would eventually find my groove again. Nope, the writing was on the wall: The rock star years weren’t coming back.

In a busy year, with up to 9 conventions, and regular staff meetings, it seemed like I didn’t have any weekends left for other activities. Going to a staff meeting meant an average of a 90 minute drive each way (about 100 minutes if my friends drove; 80 minutes if I drove), plus however long the meeting itself went for. There was generally at least one staff meeting per month, and those became more frequent as the con itself approached. Sometimes board meetings were tacked on at the end, sometimes they were held on their own. Whether I went to a staff or board meeting for only a couple hours or all day, or to a local con for only a day, there went the whole day and it frequently precluded other possible uses for the rest of that weekend. Yeah, I know that’s how volunteering goes, and I know what I said only a couple paragraphs ago, but there were a lot of weekends that I won’t get back.

I was also burning through a lot of vacation time to go to conventions. It seemed that no matter how much vacation time I had, and it wasn’t much to begin with, there was never really enough to do anything for something other than anime cons. When I finally started keeping better tabs on my vacation usage, I saw that I used 66 hours of vacation time for anime cons in 2011. It sunk in that I could have gone on a proper vacation with that much. That was over a week of time. For that matter, with another few hours and a well-timed holiday, that was TWO weeks. I’m not getting that back.

Expenses had some bearing on this as well. It’s not the biggest factor; it’s just ‘a’ factor. It used to be that cons were cheap. The smaller ones still are, I guess. Or at least cheaper than they are now. Maybe even the big ones can still be cheap, for the resourceful and frugal types. Depending on which convention and where, they can get expensive. A lot of them in a short span can also get expensive. Put a bunch of big and expensive conventions in a row, and that’s a lot of money. How many times have I looked at the total of how much I spent to attend a con, and wondered what else I could have done with that money? That money is not coming back.

But those aren’t the biggest reasons I cut back on conventions. Those are mere details. The biggest reason is next.

The Challenges, and the Other Things

A nugget of wisdom came to me by way of a fanzine a long time ago. Remember fanzines? No? Okay then, here’s a quick history lesson. Fanzines were a thing at conventions back in the ’90s and early ’00s. They were fun little paper booklets either handed out for free or for a stupid low token price like $1 and they were typically available only at conventions. The production quality was all over the place. There were a few that were professionally printed at a press, while many others looked like they were slammed out of a copier at the last minute, but that’s neither here nor there right now. Regardless of the quality, they all had their own charm. I’d pick them up every chance I’d get. These fanzines were known for having fun little articles written by people who didn’t give a damn. If a reader didn’t like what was written, too bad.

“This site hosted by Geocities is best viewed in Netscape Navigator 3.1.4159b at 490×380 resolution.”

Usually they were only in printed form so for anyone who missed out on one, it was gone. There was rarely a website associated with them, and when there was, it was usually on some garbage-quality free hosting service, or hidden on some poorly-configured semi-private server, and either one meant it was knocked offline most of the time due to stupid crap that wouldn’t happen in this day and age. The URL was usually long and convoluted enough that if mistyped, would summon actual demons who would set your computer on fire*, the site would be updated maybe once a year**, the page format often looked fine only to the author and in one specific version of one specific browser in one specific configuration*** but was absolute chaos to most visitors, too many of them thought that dark text on a dark background was a great idea, and half of the links within the page didn’t work anyway. Oh, and almost everyone was still on dial-up back then so when a page had a bunch of animated gifs and MIDI files embedded in it, you had to wait for all of that to load too (and would sometimes make you want to set your computer on fire). Hence, the fanzine in printed form was the better option. Nowadays thanks to omnipresent social networks and similar platforms, everyone can have the same dynamic high-level presence on the internet where we can all scream endlessly into the void, slack-jawed and drooling, with our eyes rolled back in our heads, where we can pretend our 2 cents is worth much more than a dollar, so fanzines in paper form became a relic of those bygone years.

*In fairness, mistyping a URL by one letter these days can summon a different kind of demon that will also set your computer on fire.
**Oops I resemble that. Pot, meet kettle.
***The front page of this site was designed to work in anything from the past 25 years. No guarantee on the fancier parts of it though.

Wait, did I just describe what most anime fandom sites were like in the mid to late 90s? I did?

Anyway. There was one from long ago (kinda forgot which one), about 20 years ago I would dare say, that had an article that said something along the lines of “if you can think of something else you’d rather do than being at an anime convention, do that instead”. That stuck with me in the back of my mind ever since. It stuck with me because right away I knew it in my heart to be good solid advice, and because I knew the author was involved with running an anime con (AWA, if my brainmeats have that sorted right; apologies if it’s not). Those were the words of someone who had seen the dark side of going to too many conventions and for the wrong reasons. There was a sense of gravity to this simple message that I had to acknowledge. The author was calling attention to a challenge that would inevitably need to be answered to. I was put on notice that someday I’d have Other Things that I’d want to do or need to do. If I were foolish enough to ignore that challenge, it would be at my own peril. To say heeding that advice may have saved my life would be a stretch, but it definitely made it easier in the long run.

For years it was an easy challenge to meet. Lacking those Other Things, I really was content to go to as many conventions as I could. I looked forward to them. They were big fun anime-themed parties that went all weekend long. It was a good place to meet friends in person who I’d never have a chance to see otherwise, as well as make new friends, and create memories with existing friends. And if there were Other Things that needed done, they were small and few enough that I could push them off until the weekend was over and not have a raging dumpster fire to greet me when I returned home.

That would change. Over the years, my list of Other Things started to grow in number and importance. Bills needed paid, odd things needed done either around home or otherwise, and so on. These were things that would guarantee a raging dumpster fire if I let them go. Or sometimes I was just not feeling up for going to a con. I started to re-visit that challenge more often, apply it to more conventions, and saw many of them couldn’t stand up to it anymore.

Sometimes, the Other Things were something I would have found to be more enjoyable. There have been times when I was at a convention, or a staff meeting, thinking “I’d rather be on the Skyline Drive” or “I’d rather be making something out of Lego” or “I should have slept in today”. And so on. I was discovering that there was life outside of anime conventions. It was obvious to everyone else, and they certainly tried to tell me that. I knew that, I understood it; I just had to experience it to accept it. That’s the only way it was going to stick.

Another challenge I found was this: “Would it be more or less stressful than being at work?” For attendees, conventions are supposed to be fun at the bare minimum. If it’s not fun, something’s wrong. If it was going to be more stressful than being at the bill-paying job, then maybe I need to take a step back. I was noticing that for some cons, I was busting my ass to get there, busting my ass all weekend, and busting my ass to get home, lather rinse repeat. The small cons I used to casually show up at on a whim would get larger and more complex. They’d move to bigger venues, they’d get more expensive, they would get overcrowded, rooms and parking were harder to find, lines would get longer, and so on. They were requiring more work, planning, stress, and effort to attend. I’d get home late on Sunday, be tired as hell, and feel despair in knowing that I’d have work the next day, and I usually couldn’t take that Monday off for recovery because I had already used most of my vacation time for anime cons. Yet, I could take some perverse comfort in knowing that being at work would be more relaxing, hazardous environment and all. I knew that couldn’t continue.

Survivor: Anime Con edition

Eventually, I started to prune the schedule, an effort that itself gradually took place over the course of several years. I stopped going to Anime Weekend Atlanta because I figured out long ago that I only really went to that one as justification for a road trip, and I don’t need much of a reason for that in the first place. In fact, these days I much prefer the road trip to be on its own, without a defined destination. It’s kinda hard to take my time and stop and see things when I’m focusing on trying to get to a convention. My experience with AWA, while enjoyable, is it’s first and foremost a party con, with convention programming seemingly an afterthought or drenched in someone else’s nostalgia, so anyone who didn’t have a bunch of friends to hang out with was going to be bored. (I’ll cut them a break on that; we all have our own nostalgia to marinate in and that’s what I’m doing here.) That logic also applied to more than a few others. Ohayocon was dropped because getting to that involves a drive that takes 8 hours in good weather, and good weather in January is rare. Animazement was left behind in favor of Balticon, which was on the same weekend and much closer (30 minutes vs 6 hours). That too was eventually dropped when they moved to Inner Harbor and I couldn’t justify putting in the extra effort required to attend, however trivial it may have been in comparison. And so on.

I should point out now that most if not all conventions these days are becoming party-cons, more for socializing than the events themselves, but I mentioned AWA purely because it’s the most distant con I attended on a semi-regular basis. Being 700 miles away meant it was low-hanging fruit when it was time to take some off the schedule. I’m sure if I lived local to that one, I’d be there faithfully every year, and something in DC/Baltimore would get cut instead.

Nostalgic diversion: AWA ’98 was all the fun one can expect when a bunch of dudes with a conversion van go to an anime convention. It was a party all the way there, a party all weekend, and a party all the way back. Of the AWA events I attended, that was easily my favorite. Again, it was fun when I had a squad to run with.

Sometimes, the schedule did its own pruning. AnimeEast never saw its third year after the atomic train wreck that was its second year. (Okay, so that one was all the way back in 1995, in my first year of con-going, but I’ll never forget how much of a mess it was. Also if it were still a thing, I would have probably kept going to it anyway.) Tigercon (in Towson, MD) was a college-based event that threw in the towel because of logistical reasons. In 2016 I tried going to MagFest and couldn’t even get a parking spot, because National Harbor was built in an area where mass transit is only a concept. After almost an hour of sharking around for a parking space, I gave up and didn’t feel bad about it. Even if I did manage to find a place to park, I couldn’t have gotten a badge because they oversold their registration. Other events moved to a new location or a new date or both and I couldn’t be bothered to chase after them. Sometimes they would just fall on the same weekend and I had to make a choice. Some were always meant to be one-time things for me, where I would make plans to attend just one of them (such as Anime Expo, Anime North). I could say I went, I saw, I got the t-shirt, and that was good enough for me.

Staffing had to go. In early 2011, I stepped down from the AnimeUSA Board of Directors as a way of inching towards the exit. Later that year at the convention itself, it took a department head to re-add me to the staff list at the last minute, and that’s when I knew this convention cowboy was on his last staffing rodeo. If I hadn’t been put back on the staff rolls at that time, I would have been fine with buying my own badge for a change. I can say my staffing ended on a high note. My last time staffing was fun. I was working with people who liked what they were doing and were good at it. Either way, I finally stopped ignoring that writing on the wall that was there for years. The convention was long past the point of needing me for any reason. Several months later, I formally resigned from staffing altogether. I went to one last meeting, announced I was completely out, parting ways on good terms, no hard feelings, and walked away a free man. That was the exit I was looking for. It was time. It was long past time. It was something I should have done years before.

Setting limits

Over the years I learned I also had to set rules for myself. I needed minimum standards to be in place if I wanted any chance at enjoying a convention. In 2005, after arriving at AWA without prior arrangement of lodging and finding out no one had any crash space (absolutely my fault), I made a rule that whatever con I go to, I had to make sure I had a room ahead of time. Someone else or I could make the reservation, and it didn’t need to be at the convention hotel, but I needed to ensure I had a place to sleep. If no one invited me, and I couldn’t get a room, it had better be within commuting distance. If I couldn’t get a room or commute, I wasn’t going. It only took me two times to learn that lesson, which was two times too many. I thought I learned that at AnimeCentral in 2000 but apparently I needed a refresher.

“How was your weekend?” “Of the four nights I was away from home, I slept in my car for three of them.”

At some point in 2011, after having slept on the floor one too many times, I updated that rule, making it stricter: Having a room was no longer enough by itself, I now required a bed. I’m okay with sharing a bed with men or women (or both if there’s enough bed), but I need to sleep in a bed. If someone else has a hangup about that and won’t share the only bed, then I guess I can’t stay in that room. Otherwise, I’d commute. If I couldn’t get a bed or commute, then I wouldn’t go. Sleeping on the floor for 2 or 3 nights then facing a 4+ hour drive home is something I can do without. I like driving. But not like that. How many times have I thought “this is a nice hotel room, and I’m sure the beds are nice, too bad about this carpet though”? I can’t do that anymore. I’ve used an air mattress and sleeping bag in the past which is better than nothing, but that relies on there being enough floor space for it, setting it up, taking it to and from the con, and hoping it doesn’t leak mid-weekend again. It’s another hassle. I then started to find that the only real way I could guarantee having a bed was if I reserved my own room. And I had to be a bit pickier about how many other people were in the room and who they were. Four is about the most I can deal with anymore, and there had better be a good reason for that many. After 2009, I was also more wary of rooming with people I never met before, but that just might be my own introvert tendencies (and increasing financial stability) deciding that. These self-imposed logistical limitations made a few cons drop off my calendar.

If there was someone who really did set up a charcoal grill in their hotel room, I would not be surprised.

These were effectively becoming indoor camping trips. The event could be in a luxury 5-star resort hotel and people are still bringing in and using air mattresses, sleeping bags, coolers full of food, cooking items, tents, and continue the time-honored tradition of using the coffee maker to make hot water for their ramen. I ain’t gonna lie, I’m guilty of that. I’ve brought a rice cooker, I know people who brought a toaster oven and microwave, and I’m sure that someone would have tried to sneak in a charcoal grill if given half a chance. At some point, I had to ask myself: Why? If I’m already spending a significant amount of money just to be at the con, why not plunk down a few more dollars and get some decent meals from restaurants, and leave all that extra stuff at home? Granted, if I was still living paycheck-to-paycheck on a shoestring budget, maybe I would still be doing things like that. Or not. What I found was cost-wise, it didn’t make enough of a difference to be worth doing, and by the time it would make a difference, then I probably shouldn’t be at an anime con at all. Do I still take a few energy bars along? Yes. Do I take 3 days worth of full meals? No. There’s a difference.

Don’t mess with anyone (or anything) who eats off the floor or out of the trash. They have nothing to hide, nothing to fear, and nothing to lose.

Back when some of my friends and I started going to cons, one of them said that he’d disown anyone if he found out they were eating leftovers out of the room service trays that were left out on the hallway floor. What saddens me about that is, it’s the sort of thing where he had to say that because he probably saw it happen. He probably watched a grown adult cast away their pride and dignity, to find new depths to personal standards of what is edible, shamefully crawling down the hallway from one tray to another, trying to harvest cold and soggy leftover fries marinated in rancid room-temperature ketchup, dessicated pizza crusts with bite marks along their entire length, chicken bones shorn of all edible flesh, and half-eaten cheeseburger buns embedded with wilted lettuce and shriveled tomato. Just to save a few bucks, so they can better afford to be at that convention. I can proudly and honestly say I’ve never done that.

You might be saying, “Hold on, a minute ago you were complaining about how these were getting expensive, then you’re complaining about the methods to make them cheap? You’re just being grouchy!” Yeah well, the thing is, I’m getting older, and while I’m still relatively healthy, I have to accept I’m not the indestructible 20-something I used to be half a lifetime ago. Many of the methods and tricks to making cons affordable and viable, as well as fun, are off-limits to me anymore. It was great, when I was much younger. Add 20 years and there’s a whole different set of rules.

For the record: During much of 2001, I was unemployed and still managed to go to 5 conventions using various tricks and general stinginess. But! I was still in my 20s when I could do that. I could not use most of those tricks now.

Another rule I had to make for myself and stick to was this: If the biggest (or only) reason I go to a con is to enable someone else to go, then I really don’t have to go and probably shouldn’t, because ultimately, it’s not my problem if someone else can’t fend off reality long enough to attend by their own steam. That was another one that took me way longer to learn than it should have. I made something of an exception to this when it came to staffing, but I was doing that of my own free will, so that’s beside the point.

Reductions appeared in other ways. I still go to Otakon, but I commute to that now. I just get on the Metro instead of waiting for the seconds-long window of opportunity for a hotel room and fighting my way through DC traffic. Same goes for AnimeUSA. Sometimes I go to Katsucon for the whole weekend, sometimes just for Saturday. Sometimes I’ll use vacation time for Katsu’s Friday, sometimes I don’t. That doesn’t guarantee I’ll be there on Friday.

Most of the conventions I used to attend regularly were no longer able to meet the new challenges and rules. If going to a convention required too much unnecessary work for what I was getting? BZZT, the trapdoor opens. If it looked like it was going to be more of a pain in the ass to go to than I felt like dealing with? Sorry, I have important business to take care of at the beach, and/or an appointment with sleep. Would it be so crowded that trying to get into any of the events would be an exercise in futility? Gonna scratch that one off the calendar. If all I was going to do was defuse someone’s dramabombs? NO. Am I going to be driving through a blizzard or hurricane either to or from the convention? I don’t need to go. If the only reason for me being there was to subsidize someone’s good time? Nope, can’t help you there. Are there Other Things that need done? Something’s gotta give. Is there a potential dumpster fire smoldering that will burst into flames if I ignore it? Not on my watch. Will I be relegated to floor patrol when I want to sleep? Hard pass. If I feel like I’m coming down with something or just not feeling well? Obviously I’m staying home.

This is really nothing against any of the conventions mentioned or the people attending them. Some of them are going to be better than others. What’s important is, what makes a convention great or not to someone depends equally on the event itself and what the attendee in question does with it. One factor can make up for the other, or cancel each other out, or amplify the other. What matters is whether you get what you want out of it. I’ve found I often had a better time when I didn’t rely entirely on how well the convention was run or what was offered. The convention provided the framework and it was up to me to fill in the rest.

The conventions that are still on my schedule are Katsucon, Otakon, and AnimeUSA (at least in more normal times). I still have fun at those, that’s what counts. Since I quit staffing AnimeUSA on good terms, I get an Alumni badge. Katsucon is good for a day or two; once every few years I’ll go the full weekend. I did the full weekend for Otakon, complete with a hotel room, as recently as 2017, but in 2018 I figured that if I can commute to AnimeUSA and Katsucon, then I could do that for Otakon as well. End result is that I saved a few hundred bucks and I didn’t have to worry about scrambling when the room block opened. And in commuting, I also took the Metro, which meant not worrying about finding a parking space in the middle of DC.

Many of the cons in 2020 have been canceled because of COVID-19, something outside of everyone’s control and is easily the biggest Other Thing that anime fandom as a whole ever encountered that kept them from going to cons. When Otakon comes back around in 2021, I’ll go to that. I already pre-registered for what would have been 2020, and I opted to have that automatically applied to next year instead of the refund. AnimeUSA in 2021 is still an option too, if that’s still going to happen. (Update: AnimeUSA 2021 was also canceled, mostly due to the official closure of the hotel. 2022 is back on the schedule.) I knew I’d eventually have to do some more cutting back on conventions. I just didn’t want it to happen like this. Not like this.

Not just me

Was it fun to have a group to run with at cons? Absolutely. Naturally that wasn’t going to last forever. It’s not really possible now. It wasn’t just me this was happening to. Many, no, most, no, ALL of my friends either cut back drastically or fundamentally changed how they go to cons or stopped going entirely for various reasons. They came up with their own challenges and yardsticks to measure a convention’s worth, to help them decide. They set their own standards and limits, made their own rules. They also had their own self-generating lists of Other Things that grew at a rate faster than they could keep up with. They may have had to fight a dumpster fire or two or twenty when they got back home and decided they would never let that happen again. So while many of my current friends don’t go to cons anymore because in many cases they just can’t or won’t for whatever reason, their place is filled in and then some by much younger fans. That’s why convention attendance has generally gone up since I started, while the number of people I know at them has dropped.

Sometimes Nothing is a valid Other Thing in its own right.

There are some of my friends who decided to stop going to conventions because of the costs or increasing size of the crowds and the changing demographic, or the convention simply didn’t have anything of interest for them, or what have you, but we all know, it boils down to those Other Things that really did it in for them. (Sometimes it doesn’t take much for the Other Things to tip the scales out of a convention’s favor.) After all, one of the tricks to making it through adulthood is to take on as little unnecessary work as possible, so we can focus on the work that is legitimately important. And there’s plenty of that already. There’s no need to take on more.

There are some unfortunate cases where they don’t feel safe at them anymore. I don’t blame them for bailing out. Nobody should be forced into a position where they have to worry about their safety at an anime con. I can’t say I’ve had the same experiences, being a large male. While I could include stories and anecdotes about that, those are someone else’s stories and not mine to tell.

We became senpai and didn’t even notice.

Perhaps the decrease in the older demographic could be seen as a maturity thing, but not in the way many people think. It has nothing to do with “people over a certain age shouldn’t be going to anime conventions”, because honestly, I think that attitude is terrible to the point of being offensive. No, the maturity is when someone who normally goes to conventions starts skipping them because they really have more important things to do, and they know they need to focus on those instead. They know they need to get something done, and that particular weekend is the only time they can do that. They know that if it’s ignored, there’s going to be a raging dumpster fire to contend with. I’m still able to go to cons at all, because I have my life managed well enough. I keep up on the list of Other Things, making sure it doesn’t get out of hand. Deciding whether or not to go to cons isn’t a problem for me. If I want to attend a con and I’m able to, I’ll go. If I know I can’t, then I won’t. That’s how priorities work.

While at various conventions recently, multiple people remarked that “we’re getting older but the crowd isn’t”. It doesn’t matter that they didn’t all say that verbatim; the intent of the message itself was identical, with the choice and placement of words being superficially different. The majority of the attendees present now are about 20 years younger than me. (Many of them hadn’t been born yet when I started going to conventions.) This new blood hasn’t been through so many life events yet. They have the disposable time that my friends and I used to have. They don’t have so many Other Things competing for their time, so they and their entire squad can show up, each and every time. They can do this because they still have their lives ahead of them. They have not yet reached that tipping point where the Other Things are enough to stop them from attending.

Meanwhile, most of my friends are no longer there because they’ve all upped and moved to distant lands and taken on lifestyles no one expected. Many of them started their own families and that’s what their life is now. They’re happy with that and I’m happy for them. Some of them simply drifted apart and they don’t want the reminders. Some of them just plain fell off the face of the earth. Some live on only in memory. Now I can hear at any given moment someone saying “just make new friends”. Easier said than done, I’m afraid. Making friends with people in my age group is a bit tough as it is because I’ve become a borderline-feral introvert who forgot about the concept of social skills, but not impossible. Unfortunately, there aren’t as many people in my age group at cons anymore. Making friends with people half my age? Forget it. If I try to associate with anyone else outside of my shrinking demographic, it gets real awkward real fast and I just end up looking and feeling like a lost puppy. Or worse. Another issue is that these days, it’s not rejection that stops us; what gives us pause is the very real chance of stepping on a landmine in the form of a conspiracy theorist weirdo wearing several tinfoil hats at once, and they latch onto anyone who says “hello”. Let’s be real, nobody wants to let THAT into their lives. So much for making friends at conventions any more.

Many young fans who have recently started attending conventions are at an age where they can reasonably live long enough to see a time when Cowboy Bebop technically takes place in the past.

Just to make this known, that is NOT the new crowd’s fault. It’s no one’s fault. None of it is. I don’t hold it against younger generations because there’s nothing about it to hold against them. The younger generations didn’t make us get older; we did that on our own. Younger anime fans didn’t crash our convention party. We gleefully told them where the party was, and formally invited them to it. We made no secret of how much fun we were having so of course they would show up with their friends. It’s nobody’s lawn to yell at them to get off of. It never was. On the contrary, I welcome them. I don’t find it boring or irritating to hear them talk about how much fun they’re having at what may very well be their first convention. I enjoy hearing that, because it reminds me of how much fun my first one was. I get to enjoy that feeling of discovery all over again. Their enthusiasm brightens my weekend. It’s a good vibe. It’s healthy too. Anime cons need the constant influx of fresh faces to keep going. If anime cons relied exclusively on old-timers and con veterans, the cons and anime fandom as a whole would have dried up long ago. Without the new crowds and their numbers, what would be left of anime fandom would still be waiting 5 years for shows to be released in the US and then pay $50 for two episodes of it. The older generations of fans may have blazed the trails of fandom, making it possible. It’s the younger generations who turned those trails into paved roads, making it easier.

Plot twist: Balticon is mainly a sci-fi event, and the main demographic there is significantly older. To many of them, I’m the younger one. I could probably go to that one again and blend in more.

Another age-related difference that’s starting to appear is when I am with friends in my (shrinking) age group, it’ll get to around 8 or 9 in the evening and we’ll mutually decide that it’s a good time to call it a night. Back in the day, when we were all much younger? We’d roll on to the wee hours of the night, almost to the break of dawn. I still kind of do, but I’m naturally a night owl, and I’m aware that most of my friends aren’t, so when they want to go to bed early, I understand. What does this have to do with anime cons? A lot, because most of these events run until at least 1 or 2AM. Some conventions still run 24 hours, making it non-stop from Friday morning until Sunday afternoon. (Otakon ’95 in particular ran non-stop from Friday to Monday, as it was on Labor Day weekend that year.) When you’re in your teens or early 20s, non-stop cons are great because sleep is optional and you can run on 2 hours of sleep for the whole weekend. When you get to your 30s, sleep is now required and gets elevated to a much higher priority, and there better be a good reason to stay up late. When you’re past 40, you make no compromise on getting sleep and you resent anything that dares to encroach on it. Anything or anyone who does make you stay up late is asking for a fight. The result there is anything on the schedule later than 10PM is effectively lost to older attendees.

Some people fare better than others when it comes to physical exertion and energy levels going into their 40s. In general, we all start slowing down. The changes are gradual, almost imperceptible. Joints start aching, various body parts stop cooperating, muscles get tired sooner. We’re less likely to do things like walking a lot, or waiting in line for hours, and so on. I’m hard-pressed to think of an event these days that I can justify spending 3 hours of being in line for. Most of us staring down at middle-age would much rather go get something to eat. Or take a nap. If the hotel elevators are packed solid, climbing up the 12 flights of stairs to get to our room is a viable option when we’re younger; I know I made use of that option. These days, I’ll wait for the next one. The stamina isn’t there like it used to be.

The “good old days”, as we saw them through rose-colored glasses.

We remember how much fun we had at something like OshiriCon ’97 when about 8 of us would pile into one slightly funky hotel room and got almost 4 hours of sleep between the lot of us all weekend. For a couple days, we lived entirely on Mountain Dew, Pocky, cold pizza, ramen, granola bars, whole cases of Woodchuck, and cheap sold-by-the-gallon vodka. We watched anime we never heard of late into the night. We lined up early for the big events we really wanted to see and struck up conversations with fellow attendees while we waited. We went to and had fun at room parties hosted by complete strangers, after following tenuous leads posted on the temporary bulletin board found at almost every con. We kicked each other’s ass in the video game room by mashing buttons to games never officially ported to the US. We dressed up in homemade outfits of our favorite characters at the time, goofing off in-character and out. We learned new things at the panels and workshops. We loaded up on anime stuff of questionable origin solely because “it looked cool and it was there”. We shook our booty at the rave, swinging around glow sticks and usually succeeding in not smacking ourselves in the junk with them. On the way home on Sunday, we descended like a swarm of hungry locusts on a cheap-for-a-reason buffet.

We spent the entire weekend in motion, running non-stop from one event to another and another, chasing the action, becoming the action itself. No matter how many friends we came to the convention with, we usually ended up with more when it was over. No matter how introverted we were, that mutual interest in anime and being at the convention blessed us with that extra bravery and confidence to start conversations with complete strangers, an outright superpower we could only barely imagine having outside of a convention. It seemed like we knew everyone there and we all looked forward to seeing each other at OppaiCon or PettanKon in a month or two to do it all again. For each convention that came up on the calendar, we were stoked for it with every fiber of our being.

Maybe you did all of that, maybe some of it, maybe you enjoyed it in an entirely different way. That’s fine. Either way, we rocked out, we partied hard, we had fun. We looked for the heart of Saturday night and we found it with ease, for we were part of it all along. The entire weekend of a convention existed for the sake of that glory. We lived in the moment, and for the moment. Then we were able to go back to normal life on Monday morning and suffer nothing for it. We felt like we were unstoppable. We were all convinced we could do that forever. I know I certainly was.

We look back fondly at that time, but we know that’s never happening again. Those days are long gone. Our own youth is no longer there to protect or support us. We know if we tried any of that now, assuming the opportunity was there, we’d pay dearly for it in countless unpleasant ways. We know that we would be guaranteed a swift and severe punishment for tempting fate with that dangerous and obscene hubris. We would start feeling that wrath before the weekend was over. It would take weeks to recover and go back to something resembling normal. The consequences that we know of are already more than enough to stop us. We know there would be more beyond that, and that fills us with existential dread. We’d rather not even think about those what-ifs. And if anyone suggests this to any of the same friends we ran with back then, they might scream a bit as they recoil in horror. They know as well there would be hell to pay. You know you are not the same person as back then, and your friends aren’t either. None of us are. We learned, sometimes the hard way, our invincibility license wasn’t merely revoked; it was never valid in the first place.

As we get older, life either catches up to us or we’re trying to catch up to life, and in doing so it takes us in our own weird directions to weird places we never could have imagined, with weirder places yet to come. Life puts us in weird orbits, far away from where we thought we’d be at this point in our lifetimes. Life throws those Other Things at us with ever-intensifying speed and complexity whether we like it or not, for better or worse. Maybe we plan for those Other Things, where we set goals and pursue dreams, where skipping some anime cons here and there is a small price to pay, a means to an end. Maybe they’re emergencies that blindside us when we least expect it and all we can do after is pick up the pieces, where missing out on some anime cons is suddenly the least of our worries. Maybe they’re surprise gifts and blessings that make our lives complete and just like that, we don’t need conventions anymore. Sometimes they’re major life-events with a clearly defined before and after. Sometimes they’re a string of small and unrelated events that gradually build up enough to permanently alter the course of our lives. Sometimes by the hands of the fates, sometimes by our own hands. From fun little diversions, sweet surprises, and chance encounters to trivial annoyances and small problems, from shining once-in-a-lifetime opportunities that are everything we wanted to life-or-death battles that need fought with everything we have, from euphoric to tragic and everywhere in between and then some, we don’t know what these Other Things will be until they happen, and they all have one thing in common: They change us and our perception of what’s important.

Well, how about the events at conventions? Okay then.

Let’s start with the video rooms.
I have to admit, there’s not as much demand for them like there used to be. When I first started going to cons back in 1995, video rooms were much more relevant. There was a lot less anime available in the US, and what little we had was harder to obtain, legal and otherwise. The internet as we know it was kinda there but it was very slow and rough, and the best we could hope for from it were leads on where to find anime. We had to hunt for it. We had to track its footprints, smell the wind for its scent, listen for its calls, set traps for it, and so on. When we found anime, we had to wrestle it to the ground and subdue it before we could bring it back to the village. We had to travel long distances, we had to know where to look, who to talk to, and what to say. We had to trade and barter for it. We had to network with people (which wasn’t a bad thing and is much of the foundation of modern fandom). If we were lucky, our prize was some fuzzy barely-watchable VHS tapes of shows that aired 5 to 10 years earlier, recorded directly from Japanese TV (complete with commercials) and then the tapes somehow found their way to the US, either sent directly to fans or an independent grocery store that catered to Japanese expatriates. Or we’d find some hole-in-the-wall anime store that had tapes for the “bargain” price of $30+ for 2 episodes. Or maybe we had a mall within a reasonable distance that had a Suncoast store that was worth a damn. Or if we were really lucky and had the right connections, we had that really well-heeled friend who had LaserDiscs of rare anime and a fancy S-VHS VCR, another friend who had a computer with a Genlock card, and another friend who knew enough Japanese to not need subtitles. Any combination of those was a blessing; a gift from the heavens. Within days we watched everything we found and we were hungry for more. And we watched it regardless of the quality because that’s what we had, and what we had was as good as it was going to get.

In this anime desert hellscape, video rooms at anime cons were an oasis. They were the crown jewel of a convention’s schedule. They were the heart of a convention, the reason for its existence. When anime conventions rolled around on the calendar, we got excited. We looked forward to watching anime at them, because they would have the more obscure stuff that was much more difficult (or outright impossible) for the rest of us mortal fans to access. We didn’t know what was going to be on the schedule until we arrived and had it in our hands. There was honestly nothing quite like arriving at a convention on Friday afternoon or so, and wasting no time in pulling out that freshly printed schedule to see what was being offered. That lone piece of paper was often filled with titles we never heard of, or titles that we heard just enough about to pique our interest and we didn’t know what we were in for until we got in the video room and the lights were off. Or shows we already knew about and really wanted to watch but we had no other means of seeing it. The video rooms were treasure vaults like that. Or swampy pits, like when Otakon ’97 had a no-break marathon room that ran overnight and there were people dead-set on not missing a single minute of “Fushigi Yuugi”, start to finish, all 52 episodes. There’s a reason why they did those non-stop marathons only that one year. Boy howdy that was some funk.

Nostalgic diversion: At Animazement in 2002, I looked at the schedule and saw they were showing the whole first season of Mahoromatic, 12 episodes in one go, starting Friday night at midnight. I think I was vaguely aware of the title at the time, so I remember thinking, “I’ll go and watch an episode or two” and that turned into “well, I’m over halfway through, might as well finish it here” which turned into me stumbling back to my room at 5AM with the ending theme song “Mahoro de Mambo” haunting my ears. The soundtrack with that song was mercifully available in the dealers room the next day and was the first thing I bought that weekend. And really, this wasn’t the first or last time that happened. I found a lot of great anime this way. (See also: “Combustible Campus Guardress” and “Butt-Attack Punisher Girl”)

Now, I could go into the whole sub-vs-dub war that was raging on and the associated casualties, how copying a tape of anime had to be done in real time (2 hours of anime took 2 hours to copy, per tape), how making VHS fansubs required computers with funky Genlock cards and were a big pain in the ass in general, and the many other weak points of VHS, but that’s getting away from the point of this. I’ve already wandered off on tangents too many times in this. I’ll just say that the only thing I miss about fansub tapes from those days and VHS in general is the camaraderie that came with discovering and sharing something rare. Getting anime on VHS was always going to be better than nothing at all, just not by much, compared to more contemporary methods of distribution. Because of this, as long as VHS was in power, video rooms at anime cons were a major attraction.

And then DVD arrived.

DVD was more egalitarian than the VHS third-world-dictatorship; it ended the “sub-vs-dub” argument that plagued anime fandom throughout the 1990s by putting both audio tracks on the same disc, instantly accessible with the press of a button. The armistice and peace treaty were signed and both sides largely got what they wanted, and more. Every now and then there would be some grumbling from one side or the other but the war was over. The peace dividends quickly started rolling in. The space savings alone were astonishing to everyone. Instead of an entire shelf being taken up by part of a series on tape with half in English and another half in Japanese, it could be condensed down to a few inches of linear shelf space of discs that had both in one product. Suddenly, there was a lot less risk and a lot more reward for a store to carry anime. DVD also had much higher picture quality than VHS, and was much more economical to produce. In a few years, DVD recorders that worked like VCRs appeared, which completely sealed VHS’ fate.

DVD also toppled the LaserDisc Illuminati in short order. The video quality was as good as LD at a much lower price, and improved as companies learned more about encoding, compression, and authoring. The hard limit of 2 hours of content (1 hour per side) was shattered. The discs were smaller, lighter, and much more physically robust. The hardware to play them on was more accessible too. It was easy to install a DVD drive into a computer, effectively turning that into a player. If you had a PlayStation 2? You also had a DVD player. One neat tidbit about LD is that it did have the ability to have two audio tracks and subtitles via the closed-captioning prior to DVD. It was also technically possible to do that with VHS, but that required high-end VCRs and some re-recording voodoo performed by robed and hooded mystics in candle-lit basements. DVD is what gave multiple audio tracks to the masses. LD didn’t stand a chance in the long run.

Hipster alert! I have a small collection of LaserDiscs and a working player. LD is like the classic car of video formats: It was the best format available to consumers back in its heyday, it’s pretty to look at, it makes for a unique conversation topic, and the extras that came with some of the larger box sets were impressive. It’s also not for everyone. They require more careful handling, working players can be a bit difficult to find (and parts for them are unobtanium), some of the discs aged better than others, they have a hard limit of 2 hours of content (and that’s if it’s at CLV and uses both sides), and a shelf full of LDs can get HEAVY. For mainstream use and consumption, DVD & BD are inherently better in every way. LD is a novelty now. If you grew up in the DVD era, LD is a curiosity, and if you’re old enough to remember LD, it’s for nostalgia. Anyway.

Like big expensive sad-flavored Pringles

There was that one year I drove to Project A-kon, and bought a couple import LDs, only to find out that they didn’t take well to being in my car for a couple days of driving back from Texas in early June. Rendered unplayable, the warpage was visible and painful to look at. They were of titles I eventually replaced with DVD anyway, but having that happen still sucked.

As DVD continued to mercilessly drive VHS to the brink of extinction, the US studios were becoming busier and licensing more and more titles. Availability was increasing at an exponential pace. This started to affect the video rooms at conventions. More of them started showing anime right off the same DVD we could buy in the dealers room. Sometimes, if the convention was big and significant enough, they would get a preview copy to show. I also noticed that many of the titles that were rare and obscure back in the mid-90s were now on the shelf with price tags. These price tags were also a lot less than they were during the VHS days. This happened relatively early, as well. For example, the price on a set of DVDs of “Record of Lodoss War” was only a THIRD of the price of the VHS set. (This is one of the reasons I don’t really complain about Aniplex pricing. Again, a topic for another day.) When I saw that price difference at the start of 2000, I knew it was time to get into buying a DVD player.

While DVD and its successor BD were legitimately better than VHS in just about every way, there was still a monarchy, and there were still seemingly arbitrary rules, such as with the whole region coding thing. And we all still had to wait a good while from the time it aired in Japan to when it got to the US. Even then, there was now more than enough of a supply to keep most people happy. And video rooms kept their relevancy by showcasing an anime. If it was good, people could buy it in the dealers room at the convention that same weekend. If it was bad, then they saved a few bucks. Video rooms were safe for the time being.

I shouted out “Who closed the Suncoast Stores” when after all it was you and me

But technology wasn’t done yet. Almost on a daily basis, computers got more powerful, and connection speeds got faster. The barriers that prevented fans in the US from tapping directly into the anime supply straight from Japan were flattened like an anthill under a steamroller. If DVD/BD was egalitarian-monarchy, then the digisubs downloaded from the internet were anarcho-communist insurgents. (“Information needs to be free!” was a common battle cry.) Fansubbers went digital, and turned a raw video into a subtitled one in much less time than the VHS days. Instead of months to years of waiting, the lead time turned into days, then hours. Price? There was no direct price for the end-user. There was no generation loss either: A copy of a copy 10x down was no worse than a copy directly of the original. Everyone had access to the same thing as everyone else. Suddenly all we needed was a half-decent computer, and all we had to do was a few mouse clicks, and we had the anime of choice in the time it took to have lunch. Convention video rooms became less relevant for it. Why alter our schedule to watch a few episodes of an anime when the whole series was sitting on a hard drive, ready to be watched in the comfort of ones’ own home, at a time of our choosing? They tried though. There were still plenty of people in the mid 2000s who didn’t quite have that half-decent computer or broadband.

The industry used this technology and their own resources to fight back, and with some success. We now have streaming services that show anime at the same time it airs in Japan. Many of the old fansub groups have long since called it quits. Few if any still go through the trouble of translating and timing anime and then only for really old or obscure titles. For the stuff that’s being streamed, why bother? That said, anything downloadable of streamed anime, is merely a rip.

Why yes, I do have Legend of Lemnear on DVD, why do you ask?

Back in the 90s we were lucky to find 1 or 2 whole series all at once, everything else was found an episode or two at a time. Now, it’s measured in the dozens, every season, every year. The quantity of what’s available has increased by several orders of magnitude. And that’s become retroactive. There are a lot of shows that I remember having a hell of a time finding anything of pre-2000, but now, all of a sudden, I have access to all 70-some episodes of an anime that aired over 20 years ago. On top of that it’s in overall better quality than when it was originally translated through 5 languages then drunk-subbed onto tapes at EP speed. Or I can buy the whole series in one DVD/BD set. Or both. Between what I have on physical media and what’s available on streaming, I have enough anime to watch nonstop for years. YEARS. That doesn’t include the downloaded stuff that fell through the licensing cracks. There is more anime available than what I can physically and humanly watch.

Improvements in the technology of televisions also played a part. They’ve followed the same path as computers and DVD/BD players, getting much better and yet costing so much less. If I went back in time to the mid-90s, and told someone that I could get a 43” TV for only $300, they’d think it was stolen or broken or both. If I told them it also weighed less than 20lbs and I could hang it on the wall, they’d call me a liar. The prices are still dropping: If I said the same thing to someone 5 years in the future, they’d laugh and say I paid far too much.

Why sit in a video room for a few episodes when the full series was available on demand, supplied by the anime companies themselves? Why endure an uncomfortably hard and small convention center chair in a freezing or sweltering or stuffy meeting room when we can watch the same thing in a big comfy recliner or sofa in our living room, with the food and drink of our choice within reach? Why juggle schedules and wait for something to start when we can watch it at our own pace? Why hope our attention span or alertness (or bladder) holds out for the duration when we can just hit the Pause button as we need to? Why try to look around the heads of the people in front of us to see the screen when there’s nothing between us and our TV at home? Between cheap-but-big TVs, inexpensive BD players, and cheap-but-powerful computers, having our own personal theater is nowhere near as rare as it used to be. These days, even a computer isn’t necessary; we can have anime streamed directly to our phones. We don’t even have to get out of bed to watch anime.

When we saw the Easter Island Moai heads “EMOTION” logo, we all knew we were in for quality entertainment.

What did we lose from this? The camaraderie, I guess. When we would fill up that video room, taking up every seat, however many of us there were, we were all there for the same reason. We may or may not have known who was sitting beside us, but we knew what everyone was there for. When it was over, we all had that same experience in common. In gaining (relatively) luxurious comfort, we left that camaraderie behind. Whether that exchange was worth it is entirely up to each person.

Video rooms finally succumbed to the combination of friendly fire from streaming services and advances in home theater technology. While at AnimeUSA some time ago, I decided to check out some of the anime being shown. What I did watch was still airing in Japan at the time. Had it been 20 years earlier, that one trait by itself would have meant the room would be filled beyond capacity, and the line to get in would have formed hours earlier. But instead, there were maybe four people in the video room, including myself.

Slight tangent: Anime clubs also took a hit from this, as well as being a victim of the Other Things associated with adulthood. As we all moved to different places and took different schedules, it became harder and harder to come together as a group, eventually becoming all but impossible. The proliferation of anime in a digitized form made it that much more directly accessible, and then it was easier for us to just watch whatever we felt like on our own terms and at our own pace. Once upon a time, it was almost criminal to watch good anime by ourselves; it meant we weren’t sharing. Now, we don’t have much of a choice. If we wait for the gang to get together to watch something, we’ll be waiting forever.

One thing that some convention video rooms still have going for them are fan parodies. For me, those were always a highlight. Sadly, many conventions don’t show them anymore. Or the ones that they do show, are often found on YouTube. Most of them. The earliest ones I know of could not be shown at a convention anymore, or even remade. Technically they could but the rising threshold of what’s socially acceptable prevents that. (If a convention tried showing the mid-90s “Ranma 1/3” fan parody these days, a lot of people would raise a stink; there might also be lawsuits. Also the creator of AMV Hell has publicly disavowed AMV Hell 0 and /0.)

The silver lining of this advancement is anime became that much more accessible to the general public. Gone are the days when most people could go about their daily lives without ever knowing what anime was. Now, anyone who spends 15 minutes on the internet is going to become aware of anime whether they like it or not. A lot of those people are going to become curious enough about it to actually watch some, to see what the fuss is about. And many of them will find something that they’ll like. It’ll be easy for them to find too. The vast majority of people in North America are now able to go from never having heard of a series to marathoning it in a matter of a few curiosity-induced mouse clicks. Then they watch another series, then another. Then they learn about conventions. That’s where a lot of new fans and con-goers are coming from these days. Like I said before, this influx of new blood is a good thing.

So, it remains to be seen what will happen to video rooms at future conventions. Maybe they’ll shrink the rooms to something with a large TV and a dozen seats, maybe they’re already as small as they can get. Maybe some cons will do without them altogether.

How about panels?
They used to be more relevant to me. Trends in fandom have changed and diverged from my own interests over the years. The panels now are geared for attendees much younger than me. Remember when Homestuck was a thing at cons? The vast majority of the fans of that were in their teens and 20s, while the older crowd didn’t want anything to do with it. There are a few other panels that can still get my interest, such as the industry panels, or the ones that do cater to people in my age range (“old fart” panels). There aren’t many of those these days.

Industry panels in particular meant more back then, because there were anime cons before there was internet (usable in its current form). If you wanted the big scoop on which companies were going to bring over which titles, or what was going to air next in Japan, you almost had to be at the convention and sit in on an industry panel. Otherwise, you had to wait for that news to filter down, however long it would take. These days, we can see what’s cooking just by checking various news sites and social media. A few minutes of skimming those sites and we’ve seen everything we need to for the day.

Anime music video contests; are those still any good?
Damned if I know, I gave up on that scene long ago. Here’s why. Early on, Otakon had gotten large enough that they were getting more AMV submissions than they could filter on their own. So around 2001 or so, give or take a year, their solution was to call for some volunteers from anime clubs in the Baltimore/DC area, put them in a lecture hall on a college campus, and pre-screen the AMVs a month or two before the con. I found the chance to watch Otakon’s AMVs before everyone else too tempting to resist.

I had no idea what I was really getting into.

There were multiple sessions due to the sheer number of submissions. Each session took up most of a day in order to weed through an astonishing number of AMVs. The total running time of all the AMVs submitted was almost as long as the total time of the convention itself. (I should also add that at this point in time, AMV submissions were done entirely by VHS tape.) Some of them were good, many of them average, a lot of them kinda bad, and a few were so genuinely awful that we cut them short in seconds. (I want to say there may have been one that was so bad the tape was ejected and immediately thrown in the trash. This has not been confirmed.) There were more than a few made by people who couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to the posted rules for submission; those were instantly disqualified. Any glaring technical flaws such as low video quality? Too many videos that used the same music and/or anime? Gone. We ran out of patience quickly. For every one AMV that did get shown at Otakon, there were about 10 that didn’t make it (probably more). It wasn’t “so many wonderful AMVs, which shall we choose” but more like “maybe if we’re lucky the next one will be almost watchable”. By the end of each session, it was like Statler & Waldorf guest-starring on MST3K.

(We also had no patience for arrogance. There was one AMV submission that was accompanied by the comment “you may as well give me the award now; I know I’ve already won”. That one was cut from the contest, just because of that comment. That comment might have even been made in jest and we didn’t care anymore. It wasn’t a great AMV, but it wasn’t bad either. If not for that comment, it would have made it to the contest.)

I did that for a couple years, then I had to stop. I didn’t go to all of the sessions and I’m glad I didn’t. I couldn’t keep torturing myself with poorly made AMVs any longer. I was done with AMVs after that. Any inspiration or motivation I had for making my own was gone. These days if I want to see some of the better AMVs, I can usually find them on YouTube or Nicovideo. For the throw-away ideas and jokes that would be terrible for a full-length video, AMV Hell and its variants did the job.

What about musical guests and concerts?
I’ll admit, there have been conventions I went to for the sole purpose of a concert (the KOTOKO concert at Anime North is a fond memory; otherwise there was no reason for me to go). And there were other cons I was attending anyway, and the concert was a nice addition. There are limits to this, because as the years went on, the musical guests changed, and so did their genre. Everything started leaning towards J-rock. If that’s what draws people to cons? That’s great. There are plenty of people who like J-rock; I’m just not one of them. It wouldn’t be honest or proper for me to say “J-rock sucks” because to me, music is an expression of emotions and memories, and nobody gets to decide someone else’s emotions. It’s just that J-rock represents a set of emotions and memories and overall aesthetic I simply can’t relate to.

One thing I noticed in the mid-00s, there was an “it’s all about the band” mentality that took root at various cons. Resources were being diverted to the musical act, often to the detriment of other con functions. I understand if that’s where the attendance draw is, but it starts to get a bit difficult to get excited about a convention that’s centered almost entirely around a band I’m not really interested in. At the same time, when Anime Oasis announced they had Nanahira as a guest, I was seriously looking at the logistics of going to Idaho, either driving or flying. But 2020 being what it is, made it all a moot point.

When a convention does have a concert these days of a singer I’m interested in, there’s invariably a fight to get in. Or I’d have to sit in line for hours. Or I need to buy separate tickets, and by the time I find out about the concert or commit to going to the convention, it’s already too late to buy them because of a deadline or they’re sold out. Or there’s a catastrophic deal-breaking scheduling conflict. Or all of the above.

What about the guests?
See above about the concerts; there’s a lot of overlap. They used to be accessible, but not so much anymore.

Cosplay and cosplay events?
I’m burned out from that in a couple ways. Before anime cons were “it’s all about the band”, they were “it’s all about the cosplay” that had the same damn effect. The cosplay events started to run longer and longer and needed more and more resources. More than once, almost everything else was shut down for the cosplay that couldn’t hold all the people who would have gone to other events. This resulted in the few remaining events getting dangerously overcrowded, and left a lot of people with absolutely nothing con-related to do. (AWA ’99 comes to mind here. I think I ended up going back to the room to watch a movie. To their credit, they implemented various new rules and reforms to prevent that from happening again.)

I used to take my camcorder to anime cons to video tape cosplays. It was easy at first. At Otakon ’99, a staffer saw me with my camcorder, pulled me out of the main line and guided me to the photo pit so I’d have a better view. That was fun. For a few of the early AnimeUSAs, I did it in an official capacity, complete with preferred seating. It wasn’t a waste of time, as I met a few friends this way. As years went on, it got harder and harder to do this, until it just wasn’t worth the bother. I also figured out that outside of a few close friends, there was practically no interest in any copies. Eventually I just left the camcorder at home; one less thing to drag along.

For a while I also went to the cosplay photoshoots to take pictures, because I had better luck finding some of the subjects I was interested in that way, instead of by chance in the hallway. They also have a more controlled environment, had lighting that was at least half-decent, were easy to find, and yet also out of everyone’s way. As time went on, I lost interest in that as well. I started seeing that everyone including myself was taking the same pictures of the same people wearing the same outfits, doing the same poses, in the same places, one year to the next. I also asked myself, “What was I going to do with all these pictures anyway, and would anyone even look at them”. Meanwhile, there are professional photographers who are able to take far better pictures, with far better skills and equipment, and their works eventually end up on their Facebook or Instagram for the world to see. I figured out I don’t need to be That Guy. Being That Guy doesn’t pay my bills. I ended up leaving my main camera at home. If I see something really interesting, the camera in my cell phone is good enough.

I never got into doing cosplay directly. I didn’t know of any characters I could go as, and making the outfits themselves was outside of my skill-set. The real icing on the cake, what scared me off entirely from it, was watching my cosplayer friends pack like they were going on an expedition to the South Pole when they would go to conventions for the weekend. It didn’t take long for me to decide “no, I don’t need to go there”. And I’ve met a few who could trash a hotel room like any coked-up ’70s psychedelic rock band. (Meanwhile, I have a coworker who can live out of a backpack for a week while visiting multiple countries.) As much as I love my friends who do cosplay, their path is not for me to go down.

Speaking of cosplay, maid cafes seem to be a thing at conventions now, what do you think of those?
They’re fun. I went to a few back when conventions started doing them. Eventually the hours were getting more limited, they required reservations, so that removed any chance of just showing up at them, especially at cons where I wasn’t really planning to attend until the last minute. I will say this to their benefit: Speaking as someone who’s been to Japan and has been to some of the maid cafes in Akihabara, the maid cafes at anime cons are arguably better. The food is better, and the decor doesn’t have that vibe of an old diner that’s been struggling to stay open after Flying J opened up at the same exit off the Interstate.

Didn’t anime cons used to have room parties?
Yes, they did. Nowadays hotels don’t have whole floors or a block of rooms set aside for room parties at anime cons anymore. I miss that. These days when someone does try to throw a party, it tends to get shut down by the hotel before long. Maybe if they didn’t skimp on the sound-deadening during renovation. Seems to be common in hotels these days. One time I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express and I could hear traffic from I-81, so I can only imagine that a bunch of rowdy anime fans in a room would be heard loud and clear by everyone on the whole floor.

Another factor seems to be that most of the people who threw parties all those years ago also either stopped going to conventions or can’t be arsed to stay up late enough to host them.

Dance or rave?
Nah, I’m not into that. I don’t have the moves for it so I don’t have much to say about it.

Video game room?
Those are still fun. I try to check that out, especially any of the arcade games that get brought in. As for the fighting games that require hyper-fast reflexes, I’m afraid my hands no longer have what it takes.

How about convention-specific merchandise?
Oh, such as the T-shirts? In my early years, I made it a point to get a T-shirt from as many conventions as I could. In fact, that was one of my first staff duties for AnimeUSA. I’d get the artwork, get quotes, then coordinate with the printers. Then when the shirts were ready, I hauled them all down to Virginia to the next staff meeting. I can say that all of the shirts for AnimeUSA 2000 and 2001 were in the back of my car at one point. In boxes, of course.

I used to proudly wear T-shirts that advertised various anime and conventions, almost everywhere I went. I’d wear them to work too. Although it was fine at my first job, it wasn’t as okay at my second (current) job. It wasn’t a question of whether it was socially acceptable or not, or due to any kind of dress code, it was just the nature of what I work with meant the shirts themselves were at risk of getting damaged or destroyed. These days I wear plain pocket T-shirts to work, on the logic that if they do get damaged somehow, I’m out a generic shirt I can replace for $5 instead of a rare convention shirt where only 150 were made.

Somewhere around 2008 or 2009 or so, I stopped buying convention shirts. I wasn’t wearing them in general as much, and I certainly wasn’t wearing them to work, and they weren’t going to be of much use hanging in my closet or folded up in a drawer. I still have the ones I did buy, though. Some of them are in much better shape than others. There may have been a few anime shirts I did get rid of, because they were just too worn out or too small. Like when Nicovideo did an advertising push in the US sometime ago and they were giving away shirts left and right, but they were all “Large” sized. My problem was that was way too small for me. They should have made at least a few in Super Gaijin Tri-Axle Extra Large.

When I was getting shirts for AnimeUSA, I had to constantly push back at anyone who balked at the extra cost associated with the larger sizes. “Why do we need anything bigger than Large?”, asked the fellow staffers who weighed 70-80lbs less than me. No, you see, there are large anime fans too. Or I’d get a line like “We have XL-sized but they’re cut large.” No, they won’t stay that way for long; they will shrink. I have a few XL shirts and learned that unless I lose a third of my body weight, I’m never fitting in XL shirts again. Long ago I stopped pretending that I could fit in anything smaller than a 2XL.

How about the dealers’ room? That’s always a classic, right?
Yes it is. In fact, it’s where I spend a lot of time when I’m at cons. I still buy things. I still like getting anime on DVD or BD. Call me old-fashioned if you want. I like having physical copies because streams end, and torrents lose seeds. And I still buy printed manga. It’s a lot easier for me and my eyes to read a manga (or anything, really) in physical form than on a computer. I still like buying figures and such in person.

The other reason I still go to cons for the dealers’ room is the few people I still hang out with at cons work in there as dealers, and working is almost the only reason they still go to most cons. We know each other well enough that I don’t feel out of place with them. There are a few non-dealer friends who still show up at cons, but they typically have their own thing going on so my direct contact with them is usually measured in minutes.

There’s also the art show and artists’ alley; how are those?
To me, computers and the internet really put the radish to the art show. Twenty years ago, fan art was drawn by hand. Now everyone uses drawing tablets and software, and then they post it all on various places on the internet. Which is not a bad thing. That means more people are drawing stuff.

The artists’ alley is still somewhat interesting to me. Most of the time, I’ll find something in there, and if I go to a con without going in to the artists’ alley, I feel like I’m missing out on something. It’s also fun to get commissions done on the spot, especially if I’m there the whole weekend. I can stroll up to an artist, and if they have some slots open that weekend, I’ll give them a hare-brained idea that I want to see happen, plop down some money, and pick it up the next day.

Are conventions getting too crowded?
Depends on who you ask and which cons they’re talking about. Personally, the idea of a lot of people at a convention as a factor by itself doesn’t bother me. It’s when enough people prevent me from getting into events I was looking forward to; now that bothers me. It’s not the crowd; it’s the competition. Naturally, some conventions have the capacity to handle this better than others. I’d much rather be at a con that has 30k attendees and enough going on for all of them to do something than be at one with 5k that’s so packed I can’t do anything except leave. Then there are the conventions that don’t have large crowds in the first place. That said, I’d also rather go to a convention with hardly anyone there than be at one that has lines to get into anything and everything. Don’t get me started on what it’s like to stand in line for several hours for an event only to find I didn’t make it past the cutoff. A lot of con-goers have had that happen, and they remember that. When that happens more and more at the same convention, they tend to express their displeasure by not going anymore.

There has been a recent trend of new conventions being announced and then getting canceled a week before they’re scheduled to happen.
Yeah, I noticed that too. The scam-cons seem to come and go in waves. There will be a year with events like that, a year without, then it starts up again. I’ll offer up this advice. If a new convention seems to be promising a lot in its first year, making all kinds of pie-in-the-sky claims, something’s wrong. The classic warning of “if it’s too good to be true” applies. Red flags to look out for are announcing big-name guests and a lot of them (especially if the guests in question were unaware of this), forcing confirmed guests to pay their own way to the con under the pretense that they’ll be reimbursed, bragging about expecting high attendance numbers, short notice (less than a year from announcement to planned dates), tiered memberships or packages that start expensive and get exponentially more expensive with each level and are somehow the only way of getting into events, weird rules and terms that don’t make sense and are unique only to that particular convention, nobody will answer questions, and if you try doing any digging on who’s running it, the people in charge are either known to be associated with past frauds or they’re hiding behind some shadowy company that’s never had anything to do with fan cons before. Any other extravagant claims should be eyed warily, especially if they’re shortly after the initial announcement of the con itself.

Some of the things in that list such as big-name “unicorn” guests and high attendance expectations are reasonable if announced by a long-established event known for bringing over big guests and having a lot of people, but are suspicious if announced by a first-year. If a first-year show does all of those things? Stay the hell away from it and anyone running it. I am quite curious to learn about any conventions who really did that and turned out to be legitimate.

Side note: I do understand and appreciate the purpose of an LLC (Limited Liability Corporation). It’s to shield the people running the con from being personally liable in case the con loses a ton of money and can’t pay its debts. Just about every established con does that. I’ve seen what happens when a con ends in the red without an LLC in place and it’s scary. However! With established cons, there is at least some transparency.

Also, by the time a guest is announced at a legitimate convention that has their ducks in a row, everything is taken care of. The contracts are signed, the terms are agreed on, the hotel room is reserved, all travel is paid for by the con and/or major sponsors, and so on. Ideally, not a dime comes out of the guests’ pockets. The guests are given at least that much respect.

Suppose I have my choice between two theoretical conventions, both in their inaugural year. First up is BamBoozleCon that appeared out of nowhere less than 6 months ago to announce it’ll be held at the biggest convention center in the North East. Fresh out of the gate, they say they’re going to have the entire cast of (insert current popular title here), pre-registering involves invoking a false sense of urgency to make a deposit of $500 to reserve a chance of attending because they’re expecting at least 100k, you’re not buying a badge or membership but instead you’re buying an “experience”, it’s run by some fly-by-night organization that formed last week, and trying to get ahold of anyone for any information is both an elaborate shell game and a rabbit hole that leads to scary places. If there is a point of contact, they answer all questions with variants of “I’ll get back to you on that”. Of course they never do.

I ain’t gonna lie, PotatoCon sounds like it could actually be a lot of fun with the right conditions.

The other option is PotatoCon, to be held at a worn-out Days Inn. The semi-official anime club from the local community college has been planning this event since early last year. They haven’t announced any guests because they don’t quite have the budget or connections for that yet. Forty bucks will get you a badge that’s good all weekend. They will be ecstatic if they can get as many as 250 attendees to show up. If you ask them any questions, they’re not afraid to answer them and might talk your ears off in the process. If you have experience with being on staff of a convention? They’ll be asking for all kinds of advice. They might even ask you to join.

If I had to choose, I’d go to PotatoCon. PotatoCon will have some rough spots, they will make mistakes ranging from subtle to glaring, the program guide will have blank spaces, but it has the makings of being a real event that sticks around in the long run. They don’t make pretentious claims. The people running it are fans who want to run a convention for the fun of it. I’d give them a day of my time and the benefit of the doubt.

“BamBoozleCon regretfully announces that extenuating circumstances have forced us to suddenly cancel BamBoozleCon next week. We are as shocked and saddened as you are about this. We are working with our payment processor on how to avoid- I mean, handle refunds. To make up for it, and to show appreciation for the patience from all of our suckers- I mean, members, the few remaining tickets to Megumi Hayashibara’s exclusive panel are now 50% off at the non-refundable price of only $1000! This generous offer is good for today only, so hurry before they sell out!”

Meanwhile, BamBoozleCon will relentlessly build up hype right up to the moment they suddenly announce its cancellation. It’ll happen to be exactly a week before the convention was supposed to take place. The lone public figurehead associated with the event will only come out of hiding long enough to claim to be the biggest victim before scrubbing their own fake identity and their Team Rocket “company” from existence, putting the final touch on putting the con in convention. Then they stay low for about a year or two before resurfacing in a different part of the country under a whole new set of names to do their Team Rocket shenanigans all over again. If by some miracle the event does take place, as it sometimes does, it’ll live up to nobody’s expectations. It’ll be enough of an unmitigated disaster, a thoroughly abject failure, that everyone there will wish it got canceled.

It’s almost always a week before the con when the cancellation is announced. That’s the point when they’ve gotten all of the registrations they’re going to get, all of the vendors have bought tables, and so on. Any money that went into buying registrations, special event tickets, and so on, was immediately and regularly shuffled out of their PayPal, into multiple bank accounts, then wired to some off-shore account. Want a refund? Too bad. Reimbursement for travel? Forget it. Nobody gets refunds from BamBoozleCon. That money’s gone. Now I know that there are some cons that got canceled due to ineptitude or simple bad luck. Some of them have tried to do the right thing and refunded everyone they could. When too many people don’t get their money back, then it’s a scam. That’s how scams work.

Something else to remember is that people have conventions they attend regularly. They’re familiar with them. They know what to expect going in. They know which end is up. They know who they’re going to see there. For many attendees, the resources are already allocated for their favorite cons. Registration is already paid for, hotel rooms already booked, time off from work already requested, budgets already set. They’ve already made travel plans and so have any friends who are also going to be there. They’re ready to go to attend their 8th OshiriCon in a row. They’re not going to drop those plans for a new unknown that appeared overnight. Just because 25k-30k reliably show up at an established giant doesn’t mean the same number (or even a tenth of it) will show up at a brand new one in the same area. Some people will defect to the new con, and there will be people who attend both, but not enough to matter. Any new con these days has to prove that they have the chops to put on a show that’s worth a damn and succeed on their own merits. That means starting at the bottom. So any con-runner who claims they’re going to hit crazy attendance figures and make a ton of money in their first year is either running a scam, or they’re delusional and they have no idea what they’re doing. Or both. Either way, go ahead and take a look at all the cons that either lasted only one year or were canceled, look at what they were promising ahead of time, and you’ll see a pattern.

Still thinking about PotatoCon. And Hellshake Yano.

Ultimately, almost all of the cons that have been around for decades and grew large started off like PotatoCon. Now I’ve heard the legends about how Anime Boston’s attendance hit over 4k in their first year, but that’s the exception. That was going to happen because at the time, the Boston area had a lot of anime fans with no local convention of their own. They were overdue for one.

Disclaimer: At the time of this posting, there are no events using the names OshiriCon, OppaiCon, PettanKon, PotatoCon, or BamBoozleCon, at least none that I know of. There are no insinuations regarding future events that may take those names. Also, anything that was supposed to have their first con in 2020 or 2021 gets a mulligan as far as I’m concerned.

Where are we at today?

Despite the rise of the internet, bringing with it the ability to watch anime at our absolute and uncompromising convenience, and to buy items from anywhere in the world and have them shipped to our homes at any time, why do people still go to conventions? Easy: Direct socializing. There’s only so much that social networks can do. Eventually, there needs to be face-time. Except for the extreme shut-in hermits that would prefer to never see another human being again, most people want some direct interaction. Even an introvert like myself looks forward to the clinking of glasses at a dinner with those I haven’t seen for too long.

Anime conventions, and fandom conventions in general, continue to be big parties. It’s a chance for younger fans to get away for a weekend to nerd out. They would pool their money for the hotel room, drive a few hours, and their reward is a big nerdy anime party for a couple days.

For older fans, cons have also become common ground for the friends who can’t otherwise get their schedules to line up anymore. It’s a good way to set aside whole days, to make the extra travel worth it, to meet partway for the friends we used to see all the time but now maybe once a year, if that. For those of us who got flung out to the weird orbits in life, it’s a reliable reference point on the map, an anchor. Nowhere near as many of us come together like we used to, but enough of us do to make it worthwhile. We eventually accept and come to terms with the fact that our lives will diverge to a point where we won’t see some of our friends in person ever again. Until then, we know we have that one convention, the one we know about when and where it is, how to get there, what to expect. We know how to follow that beacon.

Anime clubs in particular have seen better days. I’ve seen a few fade out and fall off. Many of the college-based clubs are still going, but I stopped going to those. I was starting to feel out of place in a room of people less than half my age, and the campus is their turf. The privately-run clubs often ran into a different problem: Not enough influx of new members. Some of them bowed out gracefully by announcing a final meeting, others fizzled out by not bothering to schedule the next one.

Alright, time to wrap this up, for real now

In the past few years, I’ve let an untold number of conventions slip by, many of them within my reach. Sometimes I had forgotten there was a convention going on that weekend, other times I intentionally did something else with my weekend. Instead of blowing my weekends at a con with no one I knew or no interesting events I could get into, I’d either get much-needed things done around the house, or just plain me-time. Or a combination. Or curiously enough, watch some anime.

Another dividend from skipping anime cons is that I have more vacation time available. In the past few years, I used maybe a day or two for conventions per year, and that was it. I ended up with enough vacation time in 2017 that I could finally go to Japan. In fact, the amount I used for going to Japan was a little less than what I used in 2011 for conventions. Funny how that works.

I don’t necessarily regret going to all those conventions. (Well, okay, there were a few I should have skipped or at least scaled back on.) I made a lot of friends because of them, most of the friendships turned out to be life-long, and that came with a lot of good memories and experiences. I still manage to have fun at the ones I do attend. I’m not against the idea of revisiting some of the cons I’ve dropped from my schedule; that’s not permanent. Maybe someday I’ll be able to go to 9 conventions or more in one year (only as an attendee; I’m not doing staffing anymore and I’m not quitting my current job to work in the dealers’ room), revisiting some I used to go to, checking out new ones, or maybe someday I’ll stop going altogether. I don’t know. That’s up to life to decide, and so far, life hasn’t told me a damn thing about its plans for me.

Is it possible to go back to the “good old days”? If we try, will we like what we find? Will we find anything at all? Will we relive our old memories just as vividly as when we first experienced them? Will we recapture that magic? Will we find fresh new memories with familiar friends? Or merely find old ghosts, reminders of what was, hints of what could have been, shadows of what will never be again? Would we even find the ghosts themselves? Should we try? Is it worth it? Nah. If we keep looking, all we’ll find is that we become the ghosts. Personally, I think the past needs to stay in the past, where it belongs.

I hope the new and younger generations of con-going anime fans look for and find their own heart of Saturday night while they’re still able to, before the Other Things catch up to them. They’re just as entitled to make their own memories in their own way as fans from my generation did.

So, if someone asks me if I want to go to yet another convention, and I decline, there is a reason for this. I’ll just be up in my own little orbit, taking care of things that I’ve neglected for too long. This includes taking care of me. In the meantime, whatever cons you go to, I hope they’re fun. Just don’t wreck yourself in the process.

See y’all in 2021. Hopefully.