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Ikasucon - Author's Notes - 2006 One of the best sights in the west end of Cincinnati is the old train station, still standing decades after the trains stopped running, not far from the site of the old Crosley Field. Too bad that trees have grown up to block the view, and you'd barely have a chance to see the station anyway because of the overintense traffic trying to run you down on I-75. That old sight of the train station has been replaced by the newer sight of the brutalist black and grey south extension of Cincinnati's downtown convention center, expanded by tearing down a television station and building another convention hall in its place. That expansion was added after the first Ikasucon was held three years earlier, back when the facility was still named, with civic pride, after polio vaccine inventor Albert Sabin. Then the city took the money from an electric utility and called the place the Cinergy Center, only to have the electric company change hands and re-rename the center after Duke Energy. That renovation left the northwest corner of the convention center used by Ikasucon with oddly-colored walls; yes, the color was accurately reproduced by our camera. We'd be interested to know if the renovation designers consulted any experts on the psychology of color before they chose that hue. In past decades, polio made summer a fearful time for the young people who, free of that fear because of Sabin's vaccine, now go to anime conventions. Because Ikasucon moved from a Clarion hotel in Blue Ash to the downtown center, it was hard to tell whether attendance was up or down. It was definitely the smallest anime convention attended by this site so far in 2006, but not the smallest convention of any type. There probably were more people in the Ikasucon dealers' room than were on hand at any one time for the InConJunction convention we attended one week earlier. InConJunction, which has been around for 25 years, unfortunately was an example of how sci-fi cons are shrinking while anime conventions stay busy. This writer had real-world work on Friday and Saturday nights, and so we missed those parts of the convention, including the Saturday night costume contest. We played the cheap card and stayed in a Red Roof Inn fifteen miles north of downtown, which meant we missed the Sunday fire alarm that cleared out the convention's hotel. Splitting the weekend also meant we missed the opportunity to set up our photo booth, which we'll have to try later this year at another convention. We're planning next to head to Otakon in Baltimore, where we'll repeat our Anime Expo strategy of splitting time between costuming pictures and interview sessions, with any luck. Ikasucon Main Page