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Project: A-Kon - Author's Notes - 2005 Notes began at a damp Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport: How dedicated are Texans to their pickup trucks and SUV's? On the Sunday morning ride from the Adam's Mark to the airport, the shuttle van passed a Dodge dealership, its lot packed with nothing but Ram pickups. Across the expressway was a Chevrolet store stocked with Silverados. Next door was a Mitsubishi dealership that displayed a SUV suspended in mid-air from a crane, and a little down the road was a Ford store where the Focuses were overwhelmed by F150's. But wait, there's more: a mile down the highway from dealer row were ambulances and fire trucks with brightly flashing lights. Amidst the emergency equipment was a wrecked vehicle - a maroon SUV laying on its side. The only way to escape that Texan truck culture was to journey into the anime convention subculture offered at Project: A-Kon. This site has complained about the way convention staff handle their jobs, so it's only right to mention when those volunteers do something right. A-Kon's people swiftly reacted to trouble and minimized the damage from what could have been a big problem on Friday night. During the ZZ concert, the band members tossed large plastic balls into the crowd. The ballroom holding the concert had a fairly low ceiling, and one of the band members launched his ball on a trajectory that clipped a glass chandelier. A couple of glass fixtures were dislodged by the toss and fell, hitting and cutting some front row fans. As soon as the convention's concert security volunteers saw what happened, they flocked to the injured fans as if with a single mind, surrounding them and isolating them from the rest of the crowd. Chairs that formed a barrier from the front of the stage were moved, and the convention's medical volunteers rushed in to help the people who were hurt, getting them out of the ballroom so they could receive the proper treatment. What was impressive about the reaction was that it was so quick, so secure and professional, with no shouting, screaming or confusion. The people who handled that situation clearly knew what they were doing and did not panic. Watching them was like seeing paid firefighters or EMT's in action. And the only clue that most fans got as to what had happened was when they needed to move back between concerts so the hotel's maintenance staff could clean up the front-row mess. For the concert's nightcap, the performance by two members of Dream, a fan could be spotted in the front row, his head bandaged from the cuts he had suffered; we swear he was smiling, despite what had happened. The odd circumstance that happened on the convention's Saturday was in mid-afternoon when the dealers' room was closed. We were told it was for a "safety-related question." One version of the story we heard was that a fire marshal saw the Saturday crowd in the room and decided the room wasn't properly laid out, and the room had to be closed so changes could be made. The room was set up with dealers in the center of a ballroom and more tables around the periphery of the room, and we'll guess that the fire marshal saw that some tables were too close to or in front of some of the doorways leading from the room. The fire marshal may have reasoned that posed a risk if things went wrong, the crowd needed to exit in a hurry and found potential emergency exits were restricted. As far was we can tell, there was no talk of major limits on the number of people in that room, as happens at some conventions where one person gets in for every one who leaves. If the fire marshal gave A-Kon extra attention, it was because of the number of people expected to attend - a minimum of 10,000 for the three-day weekend, compared with maybe 1,500-2,000 in 1998, the first time this site traveled to the Dallas-area event. At one point on Friday it just seemed like there were as many people in the at-con registration line as were on hand for the 1998 convention. There's still enough room for the convention to use for another year or two the downtown combination of the Adam's Mark and the convention center across the street. In 2004, this writer complained about the elevators in the Adam's Mark, but there seemed to be fewer problems in 2005. Maybe this writer got unlucky one year earlier, or maybe being placed in the hotel's north tower placed us in a spot with less elevator traffic. The convention had planned to regulate elevator access during peak traffic periods. In 2005, the foot traffic choke points were the conference center's escalators, which worked for most of the weekend but were stuffed to capacity; more like an airport at rush hour than an anime convention. Years ago, it was fashionable among some anime fans to complain that A-Kon was a thinly disguised ran fair or sci-fi show. Those days - if they ever existed - are long gone, as the flood of young anime fans that make anime conventions lively have made A-Kon their own. The arrival of a big Bleach cosplay group, just like the one that appeared one week earlier at Fanime Con, showed that these events are national shows as much as they're regional events. At least the weather was decent with temperatures in the 80's, downright mild by Dallas standards. Things warmed up on the convention Sunday; a line of storms was blown through by a warm front that increased temperatures to the 90's on A-Kon's final day. We're back on our pattern of annual camera purchases, spurred by the untimely passing of our workhorse Canon D30 digital SLR. That three-year-old camera, which already had two shutter replacements and was overdue for a third, stopped working with an ominous error message in the middle of the Fanime Con costume contest. we got through the rest of that show with our hall cosplay Fuji S7000, but we needed to replace the Canon on short notice. The decision was to get a Canon Digital Rebel SLR, a higher-resolution design that costs less with a lens in 2005 than did the lensless D30 in 2002 - and the D-30 was sold at a discontinued discount price. The Digital Rebel doesn't have the D30's picture storage buffer and can take bursts of only four frames at a time, but otherwise it's superior to the older design. With a Tamron 70-300mm lens, the new camera did a great job of getting images from the costume contest. We settled for the original Digital Rebel instead of the newer Rebel XT because the original camera cost less, and because it used the same memory cards and batteries as the D30. Buying the Rebel XT would have carried a hidden extra cost to buy two additional batteries to be sure of getting through the weekend. Also, a salesman said the original Rebel was more durable than the newer model, and sure enough, at A-Kon we bumped into an owner of the new model who said he's already had to send it to the repair shop. Project: A-Kon Main Page