Convention Schedule Previous Reports Personality of the Week About this Site Search this Site Racing and More E-Mail the Author

August Convention Weekend Author's Notes 2005 This two-convention, two-city trip came up by accident. We had only two days to spend in Baltimore for Otakon, and those two days conveniently fell in the middle of the four-day Gen Con Game Fair. So we bounced back and forth - buying a four-day Gen Con pass on Wednesday, heading back to the convention center for a short Thursday visit, flying to Maryland for Friday and Saturday at Otakon, and winging back for Gen Con's final day. This must carry some significance: the first costumer we spotted at Gen Con was a blue-wigged Rei Ayanami from Neon Genesis Evangelion. The last one was dressed as Vash the Stampede. At Otakon, around midday on Saturday, the "sold out" sign went up. The convention had planned a 22,000 attendance limit, and around 2,000 walk-up passes were available on the convention weekend. They were gone in a day and a half. 22,000 was the right number. Any more and the Baltimore Convention Center would have been overstuffed. The best example of that came on Saturday afternoon, when a Final Fantasy group gathered for a group picture in the center's northeast lobby. Hundreds of people filled a small area, and when we saw the crush, we got out before someone asked us to leave. Security police were seen afterwards, encouraging people to leave space to move around the escalator that led to the area. For fans, the Baltimore Convention Center seems huge. For convention planners, the center is no better than average-sized. Among major cities on the East Coast, it's one of the smallest centers. considered unsuccessful in Baltimore. Otakon is one of the largest events for the Baltimore center, and you'd think that Otakon's organizers would be able to cut a great deal with any big facility in the area. Our fly-on-the-wall moment came on Friday night, when convention staff talked over how to rearrange the schedule to accommodate Puffy AmiYumi. The Japanese pop duo was delayed in getting to their panel, and other events in the room they used had to be moved. That panel was more of a fan rally than a discussion of the group's music. It would have helped if the fan questioners had been screened to make sure they had brains; one fool asked the singers if they would consider marrying a "skinny white guy." The singers politely replied that they'd "think about it." We got two pleasant, ego-inflating surprises during the weekend. Costumers actually asked us to take their pictures, including one group who wanted us to get a picture of the backs of their costumes. And several people asked us if we were going to have one of our photo-sales setups at Otakon. No, we didn't, because the convention already has their own photo sales room. If our pictures of costume contest winners look strange, that's because it was the best we could do. Our preferred location for costume contests is on the opposite side of the stage from the participants' entry point. This time we were stuck on the same side of the stage where the costumers entered, which led to a lot of pictures of backs as the winners rushed across the stage. A hilarious moment from that contest: some guy with a TV camera was allowed to stand on the stage, almost in our line of sight, and at one point that guy thought it would be fun to get off stage, run around and get pictures of the audience. The stage was about four feet high, and it was too much for camera guy to get back on stage. He had to struggle for about five minutes to wiggle back up. This photographer admits to two cases of interfering with costumers: deliberately steering a Buddy Christ costumer into the middle of a Hellsing group session, where the Christ was immediately surrounded by the Hellsing fans and never seen again; and matching up the Four Horsemen of the Animated Apocalypse - Krypto the Superdog, the robot from Cromartie High School, Bender the Android from Futurama, and Vash the Tentacle. Two bad experiences over the weekend from our cheap motel location in North Linthicum: we got caught in the rain while walking to the light rail station to head downtown, and the cab driver for the trip back couldn't find the motel. If you go to Baltimore, avoid Checker cab and use Associated Cab Service. The most disheartening sight of the weekend was watching lines of fans outside the convention center, stuck in the rain as they waited to register. We would have been furious if that had happened to us, but the rest of the fans seemed to take it in stride, so maybe our attitude has to change. We keep track of conventions to maintain the event schedule page on this site. Most of the work involves checking event sites to learn of dates, locations and guests. One of the mysteries of recent months has been the fate of the Katsucon convention. The event web site was not updated in six months, and for several days the main web site link was replaced with a page that suggested the bill had not been paid for the domain registration. It wasn't until the Otakon weekend that the Katsucon page was changed to list their President's Day dates for 2006 at the Omni Shoreham hotel in Washington, D.C. It's useful to note that in the real world, conventions are planned years in advance. Gen Con already has its dates for 2006 through 2010 listed in their 2005 program, for example. If we're critical of the lack of convention web site updates, it's because this site has proven that it can be done without weeks of delays. It's not just this site, either - we've seen the owner of a motorsports web site sit at a WiFi-connected notebook PC and update his site in real time, adding the results of races as they're completed. Another mystery is the fate of KamikazeCon, held in Houston in late March and attended by this site. The event organizers had confidently announced a second event for late April of 2006...and then a statement appeared on their web site. It said "managerial differences" led to KamikazeCon being placed on "indefinite hiatus." Oh, by the way, the statement also said there were people working on a new convention in Houston with a new name that would be held at the exact same time and location announced for KamikazeCon. We can't tell if someone's playing financial or semantic games, or if this is the anime convention version of creating new versions of the Cleveland Browns or Washington Senators to replace an old franchise that was spirited out of town. We won't hold our breath waiting for this one to make sense. This writer is a little unusual because he doesn't always compare anime convention to each other. He compared them to events such as the Indiana State Fair - whic he attended on the day before Gen Con opened. The old-fashioned, sentimental author likes the fair because it doesn't change much from year to year. The buildings have been in the same place for decades, the race track was in use before there were automobiles, and some families have been displaying animals since the first Roosevelt was president. At the farmers' day parade, the announcer drawled on and on about the tractor rivalry between John Deere and McCormick and Ford and Allis-Chalmers, then he recalled that most of those brands are no longer produced. Head to a 21st-century farm field and the tractors were likely produced in Japan or Korea - just like the animated cartoons watched by farm children. Otakon Main Page